Marino also arranged for a medic to stop by and tend to Connor's hand, removing the stitches that had been broken during the fight with Adam and replacing them with fresh and considerably more professional ones.
When the police were done with them, she still had to call her mother to explain what had happened before she heard it on the news or read the morning headlines. Her mother had dozens of questions, about Toby, about her, about what was going to happen next. Gaby filled her in as best she could, promised to call her as soon as she learned anything more and reassured her over and over that they really were okay.
And they were. Thanks to Connor.
It was very late, after she'd answered all the questions and reassured everyone who needed reassuring and had rocked Toby to sleep, that Gaby remembered Connor had said he had something important he wanted to ask her.
They were standing in the kitchen. She had just poured two glasses of wine. She turned, curious, and found him watching her with such blatant hunger she was rendered speechless. And breathless. And boneless, too, or so it seemed as, without thinking, she found herself floating into his arms, melting into him, going all heat and liquid under the quick, fiery possession of his mouth.
He kissed her long and hard and deep, the rough thrusts of his tongue foretelling a possession of the most fundamental sort.
Gaby's pulse skittered and raced in anticipation. Even through her clothes her skin felt singed everywhere that he touched her, her throat, her breasts, the backs of her thighs.
When he lifted his head, his eyes were bright with desire.
“Please,” he murmured, kissing her face, the side of her neck. “Please.”
“Oh, yes,” Gaby gasped as his teeth found the tip of her earlobe.
“Now?” he asked.
“Yes, oh, yes.”
He lifted his head again, smiling now, excited and impatient. “Where?”
Gaby took his hand and led him upstairs to her bedroom and inside. She locked the door behind him.
They tore at each other's clothes, leaving them scattered as they made their way across the room. When they were both naked, Connor lifted her, kissed her and placed her in the center of the big bed. The feel of the silk coverlet against her back was nowhere near as arousing to her senses as the feel of his skin against hers, his knee nudging hers apart, his tongue everywhere.
With his mouth and his teeth and the clever touch of his strong hands, he drove her steadily higher. She was racing, rising, falling, moving out of herself and into a realm where he was master and she was happy to be tamed.
There would be other times for them, many other times; she knew that now with a calming certainty. Slower, lazier times when she would be master and he would be tamed. There would be endless, sinuous nights when the passion between them would build stroke by stroke, layer by layer. But not tonight. Tonight she wanted only this, the fast, molten ride he was taking her on, his mouth streaking over her body, claiming her, sending her soaring.
He shifted her under him, gripping her hips, bringing her up off the mattress as he brought his body down and into hers. Hot, mindless pleasure jackknifed through her. Excitement hummed inside her everywhere.
His hips rocked against hers, ruthlessly, relentlessly, driving him deeper and deeper into her as he drove her higher and higher with pleasure.
Gaby welcomed him, urging him on with her hands and her soft cries until the tiny ripples began their dance deep inside her. They rushed through her as her mouth opened on a soft, silent scream, and she pulled him closer, impossibly closer, and felt him begin to shudder, too, felt everything that was happening inside her echoing inside him as they raced over the edge together.
Gaby closed her eyes. Opened them. Felt him still pulsing inside her, echoing the rhythm of her heart, which was beating in perfect time with his. She was home.
She smiled against his chest, pressing a kiss to his imperfect flesh and touching him there with her tongue, tasting salt and man. He sighed, a sound of satisfaction, of passions faced and desires met.
He lifted his head and took her face between his rough palms. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, Gaby, and you have to believe me because I've never said those words to a woman before and I don't know how to convince you they're true.”
“You don't have to convince me,” she said, her hands moving over his damp back, coasting over scar and muscle and bone, glorying in all of it, in all of him. “I believe you. And I love you. And I need you, Connor.”
“You're mine,” he said, his rough tone full of wonder.
“Yes. Forever.” She lifted her head to kiss his lips and added, “On two conditions.”
Connor's eyes went black. “What conditions?”
“First that you never ever walk out and leave me tied up again.”
His smile came slowly and was edged with relief. “I think I can agree to that. What's number two?”
“That you ask me the important question you wanted to ask me.”
“Oh. That.” His eyes crinkled at the corners, his smile sheepish. “It may be a bit anticlimactic under the present circumstances.” He moved his hips against her provocatively.
Gaby reciprocated and made his breath catch low in his throat. “Try me.”
“I wanted to ask you what a big jerk like me has to do to get a second chance with woman like you?”
Gaby touched his cheek, her eyes filled with love for him. “You just did it,” she told him softly.
Connor gave her a bewildered look that melted her heart all over again.
“You asked me,” she explained, reaching for him. “That's all you ever had to do. Just ask.”
Epilogue
I
t was a perfect day for a wedding.
The wind-driven rain had forced Gaby and her sister to wait inside the damp vestibule of the church for the start of the processional. Gaby considered it a blessing that it was rain and not snow, since this was being touted as the coldest November on record. In the shoes she was wearing, she'd rather dodge puddles than snowdrifts any day.
They had arrived at the church behind schedule after the limo driver took a wrong turn. Then, at the last minute Lisa realized she was still holding the rings and had to hurry down the side aisle to give them to the best man, leaving Gaby alone with her thoughts.
She was thinking that Toby better hold on tight to those rings until the moment came for him to hand them over to Connor. And that he better not fiddle so much with his bow tie that it came loose during the ceremony. He was taking his best-man responsibilities very seriously and was a little nervous.
The organ sounded the first dramatic introductory notes.
Hurry, Lisa, she thought, please hurry.
She ran her fingers through the front of her hair, worn loose beneath the short lace veil that matched her simple ivory wool suit and took a step forward to look for Lisa. She was on her way back down the aisle. She broke into a broad smile as she arrived, slightly breathless, in the church entry.
“Ready?” she asked Gaby.
“Absolutely,” Gaby replied. She gave her sister a quick hug, followed by a wave of her arm. “After you.”
Lisa preceded her into the church.
Gaby paused in the archway, as they had rehearsed, and saw the gathering of family and friends stand and turn to look at her. Her own gaze moved past them, drawn to the little boy and the man who stood side by side before the altar at the other end of that long row of flower-trimmed pews, both of them looking at her and smiling. Her son and the man she loved.
Her whole world was waiting for her.
She took a deep breath, her heart racing with excitement, feeling happier and surer and more eager than she ever hoped to feel again, feeling like exactly what she was . . . the luckiest woman in the world.
Outside, the wind howled and the lights overhead flickered, threatening the second power failure of the morning. It didn't matter. There would still be candles. And Connor.
Yes, Gaby thought as her eyes met his and she started down the aisle, a perfect day for a wedding.
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The first book in the exciting new Fortune's Children series is
HIRED HUSBAND
by
New York Times
bestselling writer
Rebecca Brandewyne
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Beginning in July 1996
Only from Silhouette Books
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Here's an exciting sneak preview. . . .
Minneapolis
,
Minnesota
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A
s Caroline Fortune wheeled her dark blue Volvo into the underground parking lot of the towering, glass-and-steel structure that housed the global headquarters of Fortune Cosmetics, she glanced anxiously at her gold Piaget wristwatch. An accident on the snowy freeway had caused rush-hour traffic to be a nightmare this morning. As a result, she was running late for her 9:00 a.m. meetingâand if there was one thing her grandmother, Kate Winfield Fortune, simply couldn't abide, it was slack, unprofessional behavior on the job. And lateness was the sign of a sloppy, disorganized schedule.
Involuntarily, Caroline shuddered at the thought of her grandmother's infamous wrath being unleashed upon her. The stern rebuke would be precise, apropos, scathing and delivered with coolly raised, condemnatory eyebrows and in icy tones of haughty grandeur that had in the past reduced many an executiveâeven the male onesâat Fortune Cosmetics not only to obsequious apologies, but even to tears. Caroline had seen it happen on more than one occasion, although, much to her gratitude and relief, she herself was seldom a target of her grandmother's anger. And she wouldn't be this morning, either, not if she could help it. That would be a disastrous way to start out the new year.
Grabbing her Louis Vuitton tote bag and her black leather portfolio from the front passenger seat, Caroline stepped gracefully from the Volvo and slammed the door. The heels of her Maud Frizon pumps clicked briskly on the concrete floor as she hurried toward the bank of elevators that would take her up into the skyscraper owned by her family. As the elevator doors slid open, she rushed down the long, plushly carpeted corridors of one of the hushed upper floors toward the conference room.
By now Caroline had her portfolio open and was leafing through it as she hastened along, reviewing her notes she had prepared for her presentation. So she didn't see Dr. Nicolai Valkov until she literally ran right into him. Like her, he had his head bent over his own portfolio, not watching where he was going. As the two of them collided, both their portfolios and the papers inside went flying. At the unexpected impact, Caroline lost her balance, stumbled, and would have fallen had not Nick's strong, sure hands abruptly shot out, grabbing hold of her and pulling her to him to steady her. She gasped, startled and stricken, as she came up hard against his broad chest, lean hips and corded thighs, her face just inches from his ownâas though they were lovers about to kiss.
Caroline had never been so close to Nick Valkov before, and, in that instant, she was acutely aware of himânot just as a fellow employee of Fortune Cosmetics but also as a man. Of how tall and ruggedly handsome he was, dressed in an elegant, pinstriped black suit cut in the European fashion, a crisp white shirt, a foulard tie and a pair of Cole Haan loafers. Of how dark his thick, glossy hair and his deep-set eyes framed by raven-wing brows wereâso dark that they were almost black, despite the bright, fluorescent lights that blazed overhead. Of the whiteness of his straight teeth against his bronzed skin as a brazen, mocking grin slowly curved his wide, sensual mouth.
“Actually, I
was
hoping for a sweet roll this morningâbut I daresay you would prove even tastier, Ms. Fortune,” Nick drawled impertinently, his low, silky voice tinged with a faint accent born of the fact that Russian, not English, was his native language.
At his words, Caroline flushed painfully, embarrassed and annoyed. If there was one person she always attempted to avoid at Fortune Cosmetics, it was Nick Valkov. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, he had emigrated to the United States, where her grandmother had hired him to direct the company's research and development department. Since that time, Nick had constantly demonstrated marked, traditional, Old World tendencies that had led Caroline to believe he not only had no use for equal rights but also would actually have been more than happy to turn back the clock several centuries where females were concerned. She thought his remark was typical of his attitude toward women: insolent, arrogant and domineering. Really, the man was simply insufferable!
Caroline couldn't imagine what had ever prompted her grandmother to hire himâand at a highly generous salary, tooâexcept that Nick Valkov was considered one of the foremost chemists anywhere on the planet. Deep down inside Caroline knew that no matter how he behaved, Fortune Cosmetics was extremely lucky to have him. Still, that didn't give him the right to manhandle and insult her!
“I assure you that you would find me more bitter than a cup of the strongest black coffee, Dr. Valkov,” she insisted, attempting without success to free her trembling body from his steely grip, while he continued to hold her so near that she could feel his heart beating steadily in his chestâand knew he must be equally able to feel the erratic hammering of her own.
“Oh, I'm willing to wager there's more sugar and cream to you than you let on, Ms. Fortune.” To her utter mortification and outrage, she felt one of Nick's hands slide insidiously up her back and nape to her luxuriant mass of sable hair, done up in a stylish French twist.
“You know so much about fashion,” he murmured, eyeing her assessingly, pointedly ignoring her indignation and efforts to escape from him. “So why do you always wear your hair like this . . . so tightly wrapped and severe? I've never seen it down. Still, that's the way it needs to be worn, you know...soft, loose, tangled about your face. As it is, your hair fairly cries out for a man to take the pins from it, so he can see how long it is. Does it fall past your shoulders?” He quirked one eyebrow inquisitively, a mocking half-smile still twisting his lips, letting her know he was enjoying her obvious discomfiture. “You aren't going to tell me, are you? What a pity. Because my guess is that it doesâand I'd like to know if I'm right. And these glasses.” He indicated the large, square, tortoiseshell frames perched on her slender, classic nose. “I think you use them to hide behind more than you do to see. I'll bet you don't actually even need them at all.”
Caroline felt the blush that had yet to leave her cheeks deepen, its heat seeming to spread throughout her entire quivering body. Damn the man! Why must he be so infuriatingly perceptive?
Because everything that Nick suspected was true.
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To read more, don't miss
HIRED HUSBAND
by Rebecca Brandewyne,
Book One in the new
FORTUNE'S CHILDREN
series
,
beginning this monlh and available only from
Silhouette Books!