Secrets of the Tycoon's Bride (12 page)

“Don't stop. Please don't stop.”

“You're so damn tight. Were you—”

“No. But it's been a while. This is…good.”

The devilish glint returned to his eyes but didn't completely erase the hint of concern. He gently stroked the back of his knuckles across her cheek. “Only good?”

She pressed her heels into the mattress and arched her hips to take him deeper. Pure hunger wiped the smile from his face.

“Really good.
Great.
Adam. I. Can't. Wait. Please.”

She didn't have to repeat her request a third time. He withdrew and thrust again and again, suffusing her with a heat that intensified with each powerful surge. With his hands, mouth and body, touching, tasting, thrusting, he rushed her into the fastest and most consuming orgasm of her life. It ripped through her like a tornado, leaving her weak and clinging, winded and shattered. But he wasn't finished. Adam coaxed her into a second and a third before he joined her, his groan echoing through the bedroom.

And then his weight settled over her, his damp skin fusing to hers. Decimated, she held him close, smoothed his tangled hair, stroked his slick back and tried to catch her breath.

Wow.
Her teenage affairs had not prepared her for that.

He pulled away and lay beside her, and a hollow feeling opened in her belly, slowing her racing heart.

She wasn't just a little in love.

She'd fallen totally and completely for Adam Garrison.

A man who defined temporary relationships.

She hadn't broken the vow she'd made to save herself for the love of her life. But she'd chosen a man who couldn't love her back.

“How long?” Adam asked Lauryn.

She paused midtap and twisted on her knees in her corner of the empty closet. “How long what?”

“How long since you've had sex?”

Her breath caught and she bit her lip. Pink stained her cheeks. “About two hours.”

He shot her a don't-mess-with-me look. She'd been experienced, a sorceress at driving him out of his mind with desire. But tight. Almost virginal tight. The contradiction had nagged Adam in the hours since they'd torched the sheets and steamed the shower stall and then made love again on the bedroom floor. The rug burn on his knees stung like a bitch. But it was worth it. He hoped Lauryn felt the same about the abrasions on her butt.

Damned rug. He'd throw it out and get something softer.

“Nine years,” she finally admitted with obvious reluctance.

His mouth dropped open in shock and then he whistled. “No wonder you were convinced you could hold out.” A feeling of smugness swelled his chest and a smile tugged his lips. “But that was before you kissed me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don't let your success go to your head.”

“My head's not what you're wearing out, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart?
He didn't know where the endearment had come from. He never called women by pet names.

He resumed tapping on floorboards, shifted to the next quadrant and started his systematic search again. Five minutes later a board gave beneath his hand. He rapped again and heard a distinctive hollow sound. He pressed the end of the board and the opposite end popped up. “Bingo.”

“You found it?” Lauryn scrambled over and watched wide-eyed as Adam pried the six-inch-by-two-foot board out of the back corner to reveal the compartment below.

The crazy story was true. He'd only half believed Lauryn when she'd told him.

A dozen leather-bound books the size of paperback novels rested atop a blue lining—a silk scarf, maybe. There were other items in the space. Envelopes, bound together with a yellowed ribbon. A small, carved wooden box and a few trinkets.

He looked at Lauryn. With her hands clasped in front of her chest, she stared at the booty as if hypnotized but made no move to pick up any of the items.

“You okay?”

She blinked. Looked at him. Inhaled raggedly. “I had almost given up on finding them.”

After fruitlessly searching three closets with her today so had he.

“I-I'm a little afraid to read them.”

And then he got it. “You're worried you might not like what Adrianna has to say.”

“Yes. Does that sound stupid?” Her worried expression snagged something in his chest.

“No. I want to know why my father passed me over, but I'm not sure I would have liked his answer. He wasn't known for pulling his punches.”

Sympathy softened her eyes.

Adam reached over the compartment and covered Lauryn's linked hands, sharing a connection he'd never felt with his siblings or any one else. He wasn't the touchy-feely type, and while he'd rather run from the emotional upheaval he expected would follow their discovery, he suspected she might need his support over the next few hours.

“Want privacy?”

“No!” she answered quickly. Too quickly. And then she shook her head and squared her shoulders. “I'm sorry. That was silly. If you'll help me carry all this to the bedroom then you can go to work. You could still get there before Estate opens tonight. I'll be fine. Honest.”

He couldn't deny the relief surging through him and yet there was also an odd reluctance to leave her. “You bet.”

Using the blue fabric as a catchall, he gathered the corners and then lifted and stood. Lauryn's gasp stopped him. She reached into the hole and picked up one remaining object. A piece of paper.

She scanned the page. “It's my birth certificate. My original one.”

The turbulent tangle of emotions in her eyes made him want to do something. He wasn't sure what. Hold her? Surely not. “Let's get this to the bedroom.”

He waited while she shakily rose to her feet and then followed her out of the room, down the hall and into their suite where he deposited the stash on the small table set in the bow of the window. He studied her pale face, the birth certificate trembling in her hands and decided to get out before he did something sappy like take her into his arms.

Sex was one thing. Getting emotionally embroiled in her affairs was another. “You're sure you don't need me to stay?”

“No. Saturday's Estate's busiest night. And I—I should probably do this alone.”

Vulnerable. That's it. Lauryn looked vulnerable—not an adjective he'd ever attached to her before. She was a lot of things—capable, intelligent, composed, beautiful and sexy as hell—but never vulnerable.

He brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “You have my cell number. Call if you need me.”

Adam walked away.

But it wasn't nearly as easy as it should have been.

“You're still awake,” Adam said.

Startled, Lauryn looked at him and then checked the clock. Six in the morning already. She'd read through the night. Eight hours. She closed the diary she'd been rereading for the third time—the one detailing her mother's pregnancy and Lauryn's birth.

“She wanted me.” Her voice sounded hoarse from the emotion dammed in her throat. She swiped at her dry and scratchy cried-out eyes.

Adam approached slowly. “You doubted that?”

“Of course I doubted that. She gave me away and never tried to contact me even though she knew exactly where I was.” And Lauryn had thought so much worse—that she'd been a baby even a mother couldn't love. “But she kept me for two weeks. She tried to be my mother.”

Lauryn tapped the stack of diaries. “I don't understand some of the medical terminology in these, but Adrianna had a heart condition. The doctors and her family told her to abort me because it wasn't safe for her to carry a baby to term. She refused and ran away. No one in Miami knows about me because she never told anyone that she'd had a baby and given it up for adoption. Her family thought she'd gone away to have the abortion.”

Searching her face, Adam knelt beside her putting his face on level with hers. “This is good?”

She sensed his wariness. Did he expect her to fall apart all over him? Admittedly she'd had a few rocky moments as she read the diaries and her father's letters to Adrianna, but those were private. She wouldn't inflict that on him.

A smile tickled her lips. “Yes. This is good. I have my answers, the ones I craved, and I have you to thank for that.”

“No thanks necessary.”

She couldn't help touching him. Cradling his face in her hand, Lauryn dragged her fingertips over the beard stubble shadowing his jaw line. His lips were soft against the pad of her thumb, and despite her roller-coaster night desire tightened her middle.

“Adrianna died at thirty-six. I'm ten years from that age. I needed to know if there were health time bombs in my DNA that my regular physicals hadn't picked up. But what she had wasn't hereditary. She contracted an infection in her early teens that weakened her heart muscle. She claims her parents smothered her from then on, never letting her live like a normal woman.

“And then she met my father in Fort Lauderdale while he was on leave. He was the first man who didn't treat her like she was damaged goods because he didn't know. She fell in love with the dashing air force pilot that week even though she knew they had no future. Besides the class differences, my father had already been reassigned to California and was leaving within the month.

“When she discovered she was pregnant eight weeks later she saw having me as her one chance to do what normal women do and she decided not to have the abortion. But the pregnancy weakened her heart, and she was afraid she wouldn't be strong enough to raise a child
if
she survived the delivery. She contacted my father when she was seven months along.” Lauryn's throat closed up. Her mother had risked dying to have her.

“I read what he wrote her, Adam. When my father found out about me he proposed, but Adrianna turned him down. There were hints to that in her letters to him when she said she couldn't do as he asked or that he shouldn't try to turn a vacation romance into something it was never meant to be. But I didn't know he'd proposed.

“He wanted me. When Adrianna realized she wasn't strong enough for shared custody they made the arrangements for the adoption. And my father found the perfect solution in Susan, his best friend's pregnant widow.

“After turning me over to my father Adrianna moved back here and had very little life outside these walls. It's kind of sad.” Lauryn's voice broke the last word into two syllables.

Adam rose, pulling her into his arms and holding her tight.

She rested her head over his heart, taking strength from the strong, steady beat. Being with him like this felt right. It was as if she'd found her past and her future right here in this house with him. She tipped back her head and met his gaze and realized she had more than DNA in common with her birthmother.

Like Adrianna, Lauryn had fallen for a man with whom she had no future, and like her birthmother, Lauryn intended to make the most of her time with him.

And then she'd let him go. Even if it ripped out her heart.

L
auryn smelled coffee and her lagging energy revived.

She turned in her office chair and spotted her husband with a to-go cup in one hand and a bag bearing the same familiar logo in the other and a mischievous glint in his eyes. That glint did crazy things to her pulse.

She held up a finger and pointed to her telephone headset.

Adam entered her office and hitched his hip on the corner of her desk.

Almost every day since she'd started working at Estate she'd ducked out around three to get coffee from a nearby shop, but today her assistant had discovered a discrepancy in a delivery that she hadn't been able to unravel. Lauryn had taken over and was still tied to her desk trying to fix it.

“So you'll deliver the missing items first thing in the morning? We must have them the day after tomorrow for the Thanksgiving Day event.” She waited for confirmation and then finished the call. Removing the headset, she smiled at Adam, who extended the cup.

“Thanks.” She gratefully sipped the chocolate coffee brew. Perfect. Had he known what she always ordered? Or had the barista told him?

He set the bag on her blotter. “Did you know your favorite coffee shop sells five brands of condoms along with the coffee, protein shakes and croissants?”

“I can't say I ever noticed that.” But South Beach shops had their idiosyncrasies, so it didn't surprise her.

“You can ask me to bring you coffee anytime, along with anything else the store sells.” He added a wink that made her stomach somersault. If this was the way he charmed his women, then it was no wonder “legions” fell at his feet.

He opened the bag to reveal the contents. “Which is your favorite brand?”

Her body caught fire. “Whichever one you're wearing.”

“Good answer, wife.” He came behind her desk, cradled her face and stroked a thumb over her lips. Her internal muscles clenched and her toes curled. The sex between them had been amazing, and while she should be sated since she'd left his bed mere hours ago, her hormones seemed to be set on simmer whenever Adam was around.

He never missed an opportunity to touch her. To the employees streaming past her open door as the day shift left and the evening crew arrived, he no doubt looked the picture of a devoted, concerned husband. Sometimes he even fooled her.

“You look like you could use a siesta. Want to go home for a couple of hours before returning tonight?” His velvety tone implied resting wasn't the only thing on the agenda. Her skin tingled in anticipation.

She was tired, but happier than she'd ever been. Since they'd first made love three days ago Adam had abandoned the sofa bed in the sitting room. Loving him and then falling asleep in his arms was far better than any fantasy she could have dreamed up.

Oh sure, she knew there was a good chance there would be a train wreck around the bend with her name on it, but she'd face losing Adam when—
if—
the time came. In the meantime, she'd try to show him why they should renegotiate the two-year clause in their marriage contract.

She covered his hand on her cheek with hers and turned her lips into his palm.

“Get a room,” Ricco, Estate's booking agent, called from the open doorway with a wide grin. The staff surprisingly had accepted the marriage without incident. If there'd been any snide comments, Lauryn hadn't heard them. “Lauryn, I have the estimates you wanted.”

Adam shifted his hand to Lauryn's nape, clearly marking his territory the way he did each night at Estate, when they went out to eat or at the Garrison Sunday dinners. She knew the gesture was merely for show, but deep in her heart she wished it were more.

Lauryn took the paper Ricco offered with an unsteady hand. When—
if—
her marriage to Adam ended she'd have to leave Estate, and she dreaded that. She liked her coworkers, liked her job and even liked South Beach's quirky atmosphere, but there was no way she could survive hearing the rumors about Adam's latest conquests or seeing the pictures in the gossip columns—pictures that now featured her.

The media blitz Adam had predicted before they'd married had hit. Lauryn braced herself each morning before she opened the paper. She'd found her own face in the society pages several times in the past twelve days since Brandon had issued the press release.

Adam stood. “She'll have to get back to you on those tomorrow, Ricco. We're heading out for a few hours, but we'll be back tonight before the doors open.”

His dictatorial tone allowed no room for comment. Funny, but Lauryn's hackles didn't even twitch even though she had a mountain of work waiting on her desk.

“Not a problem.” Ricco waved and left them.

Adam extended his hand. “Let's go home, wife.”

She grabbed her purse and accompanied Adam outside. He helped her into his car and then scanned the grounds surrounding the club before turning back to her. “The barista said a guy was asking for you at the coffee shop today. Any clue who that might be?”

Her heart jolted, but she dismissed the momentary alarm. “It's probably just another reporter.”

Who else could it be?

“You've become a creature of habit, babe.”

The voice from her past brought Lauryn to a dead stop as she approached the coffee shop counter. Her stomach pitched. She spun toward the man lowering the newspaper that had been hiding his face.

Tommy.

Ice crackled through her veins.

He sat by a window with a clear view of Estate's employee entrance. Her ex still looked like a biker bad boy from his long brown hair to his Fu Manchu beard and ragged jeans. He tilted back in his chair with a sneer on his face that she'd once found fascinating. Not anymore.

Why had she ever found him attractive?

Because everything about him from his tattoos to his ponytail made your father crazy.

She'd been an idiot to think rebelling would win her parents' respect, and convincing herself she'd been in love with Tommy had been the height of stupidity.

“Never expected you to turn out so much like your old man. How is the Sergeant?”

“Dead,” she replied coldly. “Why are you here?”

“'Cuz we have unfinished business.”

“Wrong. What we had was over a long time ago—the day you asked me to be your drug mule,” Lauryn whispered and glanced at the curious barista three yards away who stood goggle-eyed with Lauryn's drink already prepared in her hand. She hoped Jan hadn't overheard.

“Thanks, Jan.” Lauryn quickly paid for the beverage and then she turned and left the coffee shop without looking back. Whatever Tommy wanted he wouldn't leave until he got it. She heard his boots on the sidewalk behind her as she quickly walked a couple of blocks without stopping until she reached the Ocean Drive beachfront park. She hoped there were no reporters in the vicinity.

“What? You don't want to talk in front of your friends?”

She pitched the drink in a trash can. There was no way she could put anything in her stomach and keep it down. She glared at Tommy. “What do you want?”

His brown eyes raked Lauryn from head to toe. “I see you've married yourself a millionaire. The expensive duds look good on you. A little boring, but not too bad.”

She folded her arms and said nothing.

“Too bad that marriage ain't legit.”

How could he know about her marriage contract with Adam? “What are you talking about?”

“Our annulment wasn't legal.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs and her stomach dropped to her sandals. “Of course it was.”

“That means your marriage to moneybags isn't, either.” He tapped the breast pocket of his leather jacket. “Got proof the annulment wasn't signed, sealed and delivered. Your daddy forgot to dot all his i's and cross all his t's.”

“He didn't forget.”
He wouldn't. He couldn't.
Her father was—had been—anal to the core. He'd never slip up on something as important as separating his daughter from the man he called a thug. Turns out he'd been right about Tommy.

“You sure about that, babe? Because I'm willing to show what I got to the press. They think you're so goddamned perfect. But they don't know you like I do. Bet that new husband of yours doesn't, either.”

Panic seized her. She fought to conceal it. Tommy, she'd learned the hard way, fed on out-of-control emotions. In fact, hindsight told her he'd often incited them—the way he had when he'd convinced her she deserved to go to Tijuana for spring break.

“You're bluffing.”

“You willing to gamble on that?”

Lauryn's father had handled everything from the moment he'd picked her up in Mexico. She'd been eighteen, scared out of her mind and more than willing to let Rodney Lowes take control. The only part Lauryn had played was to pee in a cup for a drug test and sign where he'd told her on the annulment petition. There'd been a seemingly endless pile of documents.

All she had to do was get her copy of the annulment decree from her father's papers. But his papers were in a safety-deposit box in California, and her mother, the one with the key to that box, was away on a cruise until Tuesday. Susan couldn't retrieve and fax what Lauryn needed.

“Let me see your proof.”

He pulled out what looked like an official document, but held it out of reach. “Uh, uh, uh. No touching. I'm not having you run off with it.”

“What's wrong with it? It looks fine.”

“Besides the missing official raised seal that means the clerk or notary or whoever never sealed the deal? There's this.” He shifted his thumb to reveal a faded red “DENIED” stamp.

Her world stopped. Could the officials refuse to grant an annulment? Her father would have told her. He would have helped her get a divorce. Wouldn't he?

“We're still married, babe.”

Tommy had to be scamming her.
He had to be.
But she had no way of proving him wrong right here, right now. Even if she could get her mother to call the bank and authorize them to open the safety-deposit box for Lauryn, tomorrow was Thanksgiving Day. Getting a last-minute flight to California would be impossible, and she couldn't exactly request the Garrison's corporate jet service or ask Adam to fly her if she wanted to keep Tommy's threat and her shameful past a secret.

“You know this is bullshit, Tommy. What do you want?” She fought a grimace at her choice of words.
Trashy mouth. Trashy morals.
How many times had her father said those words during her teens? Back then he'd been right and she'd cursed just because she knew how much he hated to hear a woman swear.

Apparently Tommy had resurrected one of her bad habits.

Tommy rocked back on his booted heels and slipped the papers back into his inside jacket pocket. “A little green could make this go away.”

“That's extortion.”

“I call it insuring your future happiness.”

She scanned the park. As usual there were uniformed police officers within shouting distance. “I could call one of those cops over here and report you.”

“Go for it. But then the paper would get wind of your bigamist marriage.”

Her knees weakened.
Bigamy.
True or untrue, even a hint of this would destroy Adam's credibility and his bid for the council nomination. She cared too much about him to let that happen. And cared too much for him to let him find out what a selfish, irresponsible imbecile she'd once been.

He'd said more than once that he wanted a conservative, proper wife. And she'd been about as far from that as you could get. Telling him the truth meant losing his respect and any chance of convincing him to try to make this marriage permanent.

He'd despise her. Maybe as much as she despised herself.

And then a niggling doubt made Lauryn's back itch. She couldn't remember ever seeing the final annulment decree.

Maybe Tommy wasn't bluffing.

Resignation settled on her shoulders as heavily as Atlas's globe.

She needed time. Time to prove Tommy's accusations were untrue. And she'd have to buy it. “I don't have a lot of cash.”

“C'mon, babe, he's a Garrison. One of Miami's most eligible bachelors according to the Internet.”

“Former bachelors.”

He dipped his head to indicate his pocket. “Is he?”

Despite Adam's plan to pay for Lauryn's makeover, Lauryn had used her own money for the clothes, makeup and hairdresser believing it would give her the freedom to back out of the marriage right up until the last minute if she wanted. All she had liquid was the first monthly marriage payment.

“What'll it take to shut you up? Five thousand?”

“Babe, I wasn't born yesterday. Give me a hundred grand.”