Princes of the Outback: The Rugged Loner / The Rich Stranger / The Ruthless Groom. Bronwyn Jameson

jitters.

      “Of course I’m nervous,” she answered. “Aren’t you?”

      “Why ‘of course’? You said it was ‘only sex.’”

      Shaking her head, she released a soft breath of laughter. “Trust you to remember that!”

      “You didn’t mean it?”

      “Of course I didn’t mean it. Saying ‘it’s only sex’ is like saying this is only a hotel room, and Dom Pérignon is only a sparkling wine, and this—” she tugged at her lapel “—is only a bathrobe.”

      He could have asked why in blue blazes women didn’t say what they meant, but that would be like asking why the wet season followed the dry. It simply was. But Angie? He’d always thought her a straight-shooter, and what her heated words implied sent a paradoxical chill through his blood.

      “Why are you here? Why did you agree to do this?”

      “I told you—because I can.”

      “The truth, Angie.” He met her eyes, held her gaze. “No bull.”

      Angie stared back at him, taking in the uncompromising set of his jaw, the icy chill in eyes she’d always thought of as hot summer-blue, and her stomach swam with anxiety. Everything rested on her answer…yet if she told him her expectations, her belief that she could heal his wounded heart if he only gave her the chance, she wouldn’t see him for dust.

      Yet she couldn’t lie. Not to him and not to herself.

      “Well, there is the fact I’ve always wanted to sleep with you,” she said slowly. Truthfully. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. I told you that last week, at the waterhole. When I first suggested having your baby.”

      “That was hypothetical.”

      “Maybe you thought so. I didn’t. I had a crush on you as a teenager, not that you noticed, but that’s the truth. Do you remember my eighteenth?”

      “The party at Shardays?”

      Stupid question. Of course he remembered, since he’d met Brooke that night. But he’d asked for the truth and, painful topic or not, she couldn’t stop midstory. “I remember going shopping and picking out the sexiest dress I could find for that party. It was white, this real slippery fabric that clung in all the right places.” She shaped her hands over her body as she talked, remembering how excited she’d been to see herself in that dress, how keen her anticipation when she walked into the nightclub. She’d been humming with it, buzzing, singing. “I picked it out thinking about you, Tomas. I had this fantasy going that you’d see me in it and that would be it.”

      “You had a boyfriend.”

      “Yes, but he was a boy.” She shrugged. “You were a man.”

      He made a rough sound, of disbelief or rejection or both. “That was seven years ago.”

      “And I’ve always wondered what it would be like, you and me.”

      “You mean you and me scr—”

      “Yes.” She spoke over the top of him, blocking out the harsh word he’d chosen. Deliberately, she knew, to shock her.

      “Because that’s all it can be,” he said tightly, as if he needed to drive the point home. “Only sex.”

      “I hear you, although I think you should know for me it’s never ‘only sex,’ not with any man. I’m a woman, in case I need to point that out.”

      “You don’t.”

      For a long moment she stared back at him, her annoy-

      ance at his stubborn stance yielding to those two little words. He’d noticed her as a woman. And he could talk until he was blue-faced about “only sex” but her heart swelled with the knowledge that it would be so much more. If he would only give her the chance. The chance she may have blown with the honesty of her confession.

      Moistening her dry lips, she concentrated on what mattered to Tomas—the reason he’d agreed to “only sex” in the first place.

      “You know that book I’ve been reading?” She waited for his nod of acknowledgment, for him to remember the title and make the mental switch from sex-with-Angie to the end result. “Well, I’ve read all about fertility and conception and, frankly, you couldn’t get a better candidate if you advertised. My cycle is regular as a twenty-eight-day clock, which the book says is pretty rare. I’ve never had any gyno problems. I’m strong and I’m healthy and I’m at my prime.”

      “You’ve thought about this. You really want to have a baby?”

      “Several, eventually. All perfect angels who don’t cry or give their mother a minute’s grief.”

      She smiled. He didn’t. And she sensed that she’d taken this one step too far. That perhaps she should never have admitted to nerves and thus diverted his focus back at “just do it.” But, with all that had been said in the interim, how could she get back to that point?

      Perhaps she did need to remind him about being a woman…a naked woman who’d agreed to have sex with him.

      Slowly she closed the space between them, releasing her hair so it tumbled down past her shoulders. As she came up beside him she raked a hand through the thick tresses, no longer slick and straight but rendered thick and curly by the bathroom steam. She leaned down to recover her glass from the windowsill and her arm brushed against his in a slow heated slide. And again as she straightened.

      “Have to enjoy this while I can,” she said, taking a long sip of champagne. Their gazes connected over the rim of her glass. “If I do fall pregnant, I’ll not have the opportunity much longer.”

      Something shifted in his eyes, sharpening their focus to a hard glitter for a split second before he turned abruptly to stare out the window. “There’ll be a lot you have to give up.”

      “There’ll be a lot to gain.”

      “What about your job?”

      “It’s only temporary. I’m replacing somebody on maternity leave. There’s a certain irony in that, don’t you think?”

      He didn’t answer, and Angie’s confidence gave a nervy little jitter. She didn’t think it possible that he could look any tenser than when she’d first come out of the bathroom, but he did. Because it was time to get down to it, to just do it, and that was easier said than done.

      She took another sip of champagne but all she tasted was her own anxiety. “Awkward, huh?” she said into the lengthening silence. “This. Us. Standing here wondering what to do next.”

      A muscle jumped in his jaw.

      “How about we go into the bedroom? At least that’s a first step.” When he didn’t answer, she turned and started to walk in that direction.

      “Angie.”

      She whipped back around, caught him watching her in a way that made her heart thunder like a bronco let loose on the northern plains. Heat and fear; fear and heat.

      “Don’t expect too much,” he said stiffly.

      “I never do.”

      That was a straight-out lie. Seven years she’d been waiting, wondering, ever since her coming-of-age party. Tonight she had expectations, and Tomas had no one to blame but himself.

      He’d asked about her nerves. He’d insisted on the truth. No bull, he’d said, and wasn’t that a load of it!

      Disgusted in himself, he dragged a hand through his hair. She even remembered the damn dress, when all he remembered about that night was meeting Brooke. The only woman he’d ever loved; the only woman he would ever love. The only woman he’d ever taken to bed.

      How the hell was he going to do this? How was he going to walk through that door and take