I Married A Prince. Kathryn Jensen

      His hands tightened painfully on her shoulders. “You’re not that kind of woman.”

      Cray was still crying from the back room, but no longer urgently.

      “How would you know?” she said, her eyes falling away from his, despite her determination to give as good as she got. “You didn’t hang around long enough to get to know me.”

      “I knew you well enough, Alli.” Jacob bent over her, capturing her eyes once more with his. “I knew you inside and out—every inch of your body, every corner of your sweet, generous soul.”

      In one quick move, he released her shoulders but enclosed her in his arms. She could feel the heat of his body through their clothing. His lean, hard strength met her soft curves. He pressed her to him, and she could feel that he was aroused. Knowing that embarrassed her.

      But not enough to make her struggle to be released. Some secret need or inner force kept her from fighting him. It had been so long, so very long since a man had held her. There had been a few dinners or group movie dates, arranged by Diane or one of her girlfriends. But she hadn’t encouraged a second meeting or allowed herself to be alone with a man. Now she realized how much she’d missed the intoxicating sensations that were rushing through her body.

      Cray’s cries had turned to sleepy whimpers. She wished he’d let out a long, hearty scream to give her an excuse for breaking out of Jacob’s arms. She wished she had more willpower than she seemed to have at the moment. She wished...wished that Jacob would stop doing whatever it was he was doing.

      His thumb stroked the side of her breast through her cotton sweater. Fiery tongues licked through her, making her knees feel weak. “Don’t do that,” she whispered.

      “Tell me the name of the baby’s father?” Jacob said, his voice rumbling in his chest, vibrating against hers.

      “I—I can’t.”

      “You can’t. That’s different from you don’t know.”

      Allison felt incapable of accomplishing anything more demanding than continuing to breathe in and out. And she wasn’t too sure she could keep that up for much longer. She was powerless to mold her thoughts into words.

      “I can’t, Jay...Jacob...don’t make me...”

      “Make you what?” His lips were less than an inch from hers. She could taste the spicy tang of his breath passing between them, smell subtle traces of male perspiration, feel a tension within his body that seemed to radiate through his skin and slip beneath hers.

      She closed her eyes, steeling herself with a moment of darkness and silence, shutting herself off from him visually, although she felt him all around her.

      “Jacob, he’s all I have. You left. Please stay away. I can’t deal with this.”

      She felt all the strength rush out of the man. His hands dropped away from her and he stepped back. “My God,” he breathed. “He is my child.”

      Her eyes flew open in sudden terror. “No! He’s mine, just mine and no one else’s.”

      Jacob stared at her as if he still didn’t believe what he knew in his soul must be true. “Someone is that child’s father. Let me see him. I’ll know.”

      “No!” she shouted. “Get out. Get out or I’ll call the police. I swear I will!”

      He reached out for her, but she dodged away. A terror unlike any she’d ever experienced raced through her, blinding her to all thoughts but one. If Jacob was who he claimed to be—the man whose picture Diane had showed her in the newspaper—he had power and money enough to do anything he wished. Anything.

      That included taking her child away from her, if he could prove he was Cray’s father. Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might be in real danger of losing Cray. She’d believed all she had to fear was another bruising to her heart and pride.

      This was worse, far worse.

      “Listen to me, Alli,” Jacob begged in a hoarse whisper. “No one is going to hurt you or that baby. You have my word.”

      Maybe it was because she heard a subtle undercurrent of fear in his voice that she felt comforted. She kept her distance but turned toward him. His dark eyes looked sad, confused. This was all new to him. As he stood there, he must have been absorbing the various concepts attached to fatherhood, one at a time, but very rapidly. She’d had fifteen months to become comfortable with being a mother.

      Jacob spoke to her again, his voice uneven. “I’m not going to hurt you again. I’m sorry. I didn’t know...didn’t realize—” He let the unfinished thought go. He turned his head away as if uneasy with meeting her gaze. He blinked at the wall and held himself rigid in the middle of her living room unsure of which way to move, or whether he should move at all.

      Allison reached out one hand and touched the arm of her couch. Slowly, she let herself down onto a lumpy cushion, then dropped her head into her hands. “If you mean what you say about not hurting me, you’ll leave now,” she whispered dully.

      “Is that really what you want?”

      “Haven’t I said so a dozen times?” she moaned. “Just go away...and don’t come back.”

      She heard him pacing the carpet, cursing beneath this breath. She sensed him standing over her, studying her...and she kept her eyes closed, her palms pressed over her eyes, blocking him out as best she could, as she prayed he’d do what she asked.

      But when the door closed with a faint, irrevocable click, Allison felt something fragile shatter inside of her.

      “Jacob?” she whispered, dropping her hands and staring at the door. “Jacob?”

      

      The rental car was a shiny white Lincoln Continental—plush, smelling new-car pungent, richly upholstered in buff-colored butter-soft leather. Its luxurious interior contrasted sharply with the simple, homey furnishings of Alli’s beach house.

      Jacob had stood helplessly over her as she collapsed onto the cheap plaid upholstered couch, which looked like something older people might have bought decades earlier and left with the house. Or maybe it was one of Alli’s yardsale treasures. He actually didn’t remember it from the summer they’d spent together.

      But now he was unable to get the damn colors of the room out of his head. Shades of rust and gold matched the mustard-colored carpet that looked carefully maintained to last another twenty years. Nothing he’d seen in the house was of any real worth, except for a few pieces of antique porcelain displayed on a sideboard. The whole lot would have brought a couple hundred dollars on the auction block—less than the cost of the hand-tailored silk shirt he wore.

      Back when they’d been together, she hadn’t seemed so different from him. They both loved books. They talked endlessly about their favorite kinds of music, art, literature. She daydreamed about traveling to foreign lands. He’d played along, promising to take her wherever she wanted—Rome, Vienna, Paris, Madrid—not letting on he’d already been to all the places she dreamed of visiting. And she’d laughed at him, never suspecting that he had the power to do all that he said.

      Today, she seemed to him to come from another world—one where people proudly pinched pennies to afford new slipcovers, one where a two-bedroom single-bath cottage was large enough to raise a family with three or four kids. One where a young woman’s pride and love were worth more than any amount of money.

      On top of all that—the existence of the child was a total shock. He had always been so careful. Hadn’t his father’s closest adviser, Frederik, constantly stressed to a young prince the dangers of unprotected contact with young women? He must have been no more than twelve years old the first time he’d suffered through the lord counselor’s tedious lecture. But soon it had come to make more sense to him. Not only was health an issue, there were vast financial and dynastic considerations.

      If a young