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“It’s no business of theirs—”
“I’d lose all respect for myself!”
For answer, he touched her hair. Pulling out the pins that held her hair in a tight bun, he let it tumble down her shoulders. “So beautiful,” he whispered, moving his fingers through the long chestnut waves. He looked into her eyes. “Why don’t you ever let it down?”
Her hair? Or her guard?
His fingers felt so deliciously light moving through her hair. She held her breath. Her scalp tingled as he stroked whisper-light touches against her earlobes and neck then cradled the back of her head in both of his hands. He looked down at her.
“You work miracles.” He looked around the newly remodeled bedroom with wonder. “No one could ever feel anything for you…but respect.”
She exhaled. His words were balm to her.
But she knew how the world truly worked. Her spine snapped straight.
“Reputations are destroyed by affairs like this. No one would ever hire me for a respectable job again.”
“Why would you ever leave me?” He lifted a dark eyebrow. “No woman ever wants to leave.”
He spoke the words as a joke, but Louisa knew they were true. She also knew that she couldn’t possibly remain his housekeeper as his discarded mistress. That she’d already given him her body once was bad enough—it had forced her to flee to Istanbul.
She was still able to work for him, barely. But she did have some pride. If she gave herself to him completely, if she admitted that she was in love with him, she knew she’d never recover from his scorn. She’d never survive loving him, working for him—and seeing him move on to another woman.
Especially if she was pregnant…
I’m not pregnant, she repeated to herself, but the words had become hollow and metallic. She gritted her teeth. All right, fine. She would take the test. Tonight. As soon as she was alone. Then she would know for sure that she had nothing to fear. Or else she’d have some shocking news for Rafael Cruz—the heartless, ruthless, charming playboy—and she’d have to tell him she was going to make him a father against his will.
He would never forgive her. He would never believe something had gone wrong with the Pill, that her cycle must have been thrown off by those two days of bad flu she’d had a week or two before their affair. She’d given him her word of honor she couldn’t get pregnant. He’d be furious. He’d think she’d lied.
Or worse: that she’d gotten pregnant on purpose to trap him. Louisa had overheard more than one of his cast-off mistresses plotting cold-bloodedly to get pregnant in a stupid, selfish attempt to marry him. He’d evaded their plots easily. So how would he feel being unintentionally trapped by his own housekeeper?
“You’re shivering,” Rafael murmured. He pulled her closer into his arms. “Are you cold?”
Unable to answer, she shook her head.
He stroked her cheek.
“Let me warm you,” he whispered.
His head lowered toward hers.
“No!” She pushed away from Rafael with strength she hadn’t known she had. From across the room, they stared at each other, not touching, in the shadows. The only sound was the ragged pant of her breath. She turned away.
“I need you, Louisa,” he said behind her. “Don’t go.”
Not turning around, she closed her eyes. “You don’t need me,” she replied hoarsely. “There are women aplenty to fill your bed. You have your pick of them. You don’t need me.”
“I found him,” she heard Rafael say behind her. “My father.”
She froze in the doorway. With a gasp, she whirled around.
Across the large bedroom, Rafael stood like a statue chiseled in ice. His handsome face was stark and strange, half-illuminated by the window’s slanted beam of moonlight.
“You found your father?” she choked out, clasping her hands. “Oh, Rafael, I’m so glad! You’ve been looking for him for so long!”
“Yes.”
His voice was harsh and jagged as a rusty knife. Louisa frowned at him in bewilderment. Why did he not look pleased? Why did he still look so frozen and strange?
Rafael had been looking for his father for twenty years, ever since the Argentinian man who’d raised him had revealed on his deathbed that Rafael wasn’t truly his son. His stepfather had told him before he’d died that, the week before he’d married her, Rafael’s mother had returned from Istanbul—pregnant.
“Is your father here?” Louisa breathed. “In Istanbul? Have you talked to him?”
“His name was Uzay Çelik,” Rafael cut her off. He looked toward the window. “And he died two days ago.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, her heart in her throat. Against her will, she walked back across the bedroom toward him as he stared into the flickering lights across the dark waters of the Bosphorus. “Your investigators found him too late.”
Slowly he turned to her.
“They never found him at all. My mother is the one who finally told me. After twenty years of silence, she overnighted a letter to Paris that I received this morning. After he was dead.”
The hurt in his voice, the pain like a boy’s, caught at her throat. And Louisa could hold herself back no longer. Reaching out, she placed her hand on his back, rubbing his tight muscles and his strong, powerful, hunched shoulders. “Why did she wait so long to tell you?”
He gave a harsh laugh. “To hurt me, I suppose,” he said. “She doesn’t know that it’s impossible. I’ll never be hurt again—not by her or anyone.”
The bleakness of his tone belied his words.
“But surely,” Louisa persisted, “your mother loves you—”
His lip curled. “She sent me a letter and a package that arrived in Paris today.” He held up a gold signet ring. “She’d saved it for thirty-seven years, since before I was born. Now she sends it to me. Now, when it’s too late.”
Louisa’s heart turned over in her chest at the pain in his handsome face. She knew what finding his real father had meant to Rafael.
“I barely made it to the funeral. There were only five mourners, and they seemed to have shown up with the thought of asking surviving family members for money. Debts are all my father left behind. No wife. No other children. No friends. Just debts.”
“I’m so sorry,” Louisa whispered, desperate to take the pain out of his eyes, feeling helpless. “I’ll contact your guests and tell them the birthday di
His gaze became hard. “Why?”
“Because, because,” she stammered, “you’re in mourning.”
He shook his head. “The di
“Are you sure? You don’t have to do this.”
He didn’t answer. Instead he looked around the beautiful room. He gave a low laugh. “I bought this palace for my father, for when I found him. Now all I have left—” his hand tightened into a fist around the gold ring hanging on a chain “—is this.”
She pressed her hand against his rough cheek, looking up into his face. “If only there was something I could do, if only—”
“There is.”
And he kissed her.
His lips were fierce, demanding. She could not stop him or pull away; all she could do was surrender to his strength, and the force of her own desire.
His hands moved over her clothes in the soft circle of pale golden light amid the shadows. He stroked her arms, her belly. Pulling off her woolen blazer and dropping it gently to the floor, he cupped her breasts through her thin cotton shirt. She gasped. Then, with a soft moan, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer.
He pushed her back against the bed, still kissing her. He moved with increasing urgency, pulling up her blouse, reaching beneath her silk bra to caress her breasts. Her nipples hardened to small pebbles beneath his muscular fingers as she held him close, aching for his touch. But it wasn’t enough…wasn’t nearly enough!
With sudden impatience, he pulled open the blouse in a single swift movement, popping the buttons. He ripped her flimsy silk bra in half easily, pushing the cups apart and lowering his head to suckle her.