The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс

of the atmosphere.

      ‘I’m not the devil. I only want to do what’s best for you,’ Bastian told her thickly, staring down at her with smouldering golden eyes.

      Emmie felt her treacherous body react to his proximity and the husky, sexy note in his deep voice. Her nipples tingled, awareness washing through her in an exhilarating overload of sudden sexual energy. But this time, Emmie fought what she was feeling to the last ditch. She stepped hurriedly back from him, her cheeks burning as she deliberately turned her head away from him to avoid eye contact. She was hugely attracted to him but could not forget his renewed intimacy with Lilah on the night of his sister’s wedding. Although there had been no reference in the gossip columns to a reconciliation between Bastian and his former fiancée, Emmie didn’t want to risk getting more deeply involved with a man already entangled with another woman. Wasn’t it worrying enough that she was pregnant by him? The last thing she needed now was to let her overwrought emotions persuade her that she was in some way attached to Bastian Christou.

      ‘Emmie…’ he breathed thickly, stroking a fingertip very lightly over the back of her hand, making her quiver and long to twist round and hurl herself into his arms like a lovesick fool. But she wasn’t lovesick and she wasn’t a fool, she told herself fiercely.

      ‘Let’s not complicate things,’ Emmie pleaded in a charged undertone. She found him almost impossible to resist but there was such a thing as common sense and it was way past time she exerted it over her more self-destructive promptings. And going to bed with Bastian again would definitely come under the heading of destructive, she thought painfully.

      Bastian closed a strong hand to her shoulder and turned her back to face him. Diamond-bright dark eyes locked to hers enquiringly. ‘We’re already complicated.’

      ‘Exactly, and you’re helping me out here, which I’m very grateful for,’ she said shakily. ‘But—’

      His winged black brows drew together. ‘Just as you didn’t expect diamonds, I’m not expecting any kind of reward for helping out,’ he told her drily.

      Discomfited at the way he had interpreted her statement, Emmie reddened. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

      Bastian had her cornered in the hall, his lean, powerful body squarely planted between her and the front door. ‘Then what did you mean?’ he pressed.

      Emmie jerked an awkward shoulder in the tense silence that had fallen. ‘I know you slept with Lilah the night of the wedding—’

      Bastian lifted a frowning black brow, dark eyes widening in surprise. ‘No, I didn’t—’

      ‘She was in your room the next morning.’

      ‘But I wasn’t,’ Bastian riposted with hard emphasis. ‘I spent the night at my grandfather’s and we sat up playing poker until the early hours. I lost a packet to the wily old buzzard too. If Lilah was in my room she was there uninvited. Think about it, Emmie. Do you think I’m such a fool that I would hire you to keep her at bay and then get back into bed with her again?’

      Emmie didn’t know what to think. ‘She even knew that I was leaving the island—’

      ‘Anyone in the house could have given her that information as I made the arrangements for your departure with my staff before I left the night before.’ Bastian frowned down at her and slowly shook his handsome head. ‘Obviously Lilah would have wanted you to think that I had been with her and she knew that I was spending the night at Theron’s. I can’t believe you fell for it.’

      Mortified by that assessment, Emmie said nothing. The doorbell buzzed and Bastian yanked the door open. The suitcase she had taken to her friend’s house was carted over the threshold. ‘Is this all that you have?’ Bastian asked in surprise.

      ‘No, I left some stuff boxed up at my mother’s,’ Emmie admitted wryly.

      ‘I’ll sort that out for you as well,’ Bastian declared, carrying the case into the bedroom and then striding back to the front door with an air of relief. ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow…check that you’re all right.’

      And that fast he was gone and Emmie was left blinking at the space he had occupied and guiltily suppressing a strong sense of disappointment. Her bringing up the subject of Lilah and falsely accusing him had evidently stifled any desire on his part to make their relationship more intimate, she registered ruefully. Had he truly spent that night at his grandfather’s house?

      ‘There are two heartbeats,’ the obstetrician informed Emmie. ‘You’re carrying twins.’

      ‘Twins?’ Emmie listened transfixed to the galloping pace of her babies’ heartbeats. She was only eight weeks into her pregnancy and was amazed at how much could already be seen on a scan.

      ‘I think this is why you’ve been feeling so sick. Severe nausea is more common with a twin pregnancy,’ the older man informed her.

      Emmie rested her head back down and wondered how Bastian would react to the news. The prospect of two babies unnerved her, raised as she had been on horror stories of how hard her mother had found it to cope with twins. Her heart sank as a rather more practical concern struck her: how many years would it be before she could hope to earn enough to afford childcare for two children? And if she couldn’t earn enough, how would she ever get her independence back? Was she destined to live off Bastian’s largesse for years to come?

      For the present, Bastian was keeping her and Emmie wasn’t comfortable with that arrangement, no matter how often he pointed out that the baby that was putting her out of commission with nausea was as much his responsibility as hers. During the past two weeks while Emmie struggled to cope with the almost constant sickness, which even medication had failed to banish, Bastian had become a surprisingly regular visitor. He would call in to check up on her on his way home, sometimes he would order in food for them both and stay a while and on two occasions he had sent the limo to pick her up and bring her back to his penthouse to enjoy a meal cooked by his housekeeper. The new relationship they had forged had limits though, Emmie acknowledged tautly. Bastian would ask her how her visit to the obstetrician he had engaged had gone but he wouldn’t accompany her or make his questions too personal. In the same way he had made no further attempt to renew the intimacy they had so briefly enjoyed.

      Spending time with Bastian on a platonic basis, however, was torture for Emmie and she was thoroughly ashamed of that truth. It was as though, having been programmed to react to him once, her body could not learn how to block the signals of attraction. She had to consciously will herself not to stare at him, not to lean closer, indeed not to touch him in any way. It disconcerted her that even feeling unwell couldn’t stifle the strong sexual feelings Bastian still awakened in her.

      Before she could lose her nerve she texted her news to Bastian, reasoning that that was less emotional than telling him face to face.

      ‘Had scan. We’re having twins,’ ran her text.

      And the text was sent before she could think better of using that royal ‘we’ as if they were a couple, rather than two very different people attempting to find common ground as potential parents on the strength of an accidental pregnancy.

      Twins? An unholy grin of satisfaction illuminated Bastian’s lean dark features in the midst of the meeting he was chairing. He totally forgot what he had been saying while texting back a one-word response. Emmie was having two babies and he thought that was terrific news. He had been a lonely only child for more years than he cared to count but his child would have company and a sibling to play with. He left the meeting to instruct Marie to send Emmie flowers. He saw the flash of surprise in his PA’s face when she heard the name and realised where Emmie was living and frowned, wishing he could bring the relationship out of the closet. Unfortunately, Emmie didn’t want people gossiping about them and preferred to stay in the background of his life while totally ignoring the reality that a child could not be hidden indefinitely.

      Bastian, however, didn’t want to stage an argument with Emmie and lay down the law. How could he when she was getting so thin