.

anything … even when you heard its heartbeat?’ Rosie pressed hopefully, moving back to the limo at the kerb. ‘I found that really exciting!’

      Shrewd gaze screened, Alexius glanced at Rosie. The most exciting part of his day had happened when she emerged from her home, clad in a short black stretchy skirt and a fitted top that outlined her sleek little body to perfection. He was still enjoying the view of her long shapely legs, well, they were long in proportion to the rest of her, he reasoned, and that sweet little swell of her bottom when she bent over right in front of him to fix her shoe was downright indecent. He only had to think of sinking into the hot, wet, velvet welcome of her and he was hard as a rock and feverishly hungry to enjoy what he had enjoyed only once before. And that wasn’t like him. In fact, more and more he was feeling uneasy inside his own skin around Rosie. He should be moving on to pastures new. Rosie was already the past and, even though she would essentially be part of his future as well once she had the blob, he should be delighted that she wasn’t trying to nail him down to fully committed partner and parenting duties and promises of everlasting fidelity: he was still free as a bird, he reminded himself doggedly, disappointed when no spark of anticipation ignited at the prospect of his next lover. Of course, he was thirty-one years old and he had had an active sex life from around the age of sixteen when one of his mother’s friends had seduced him. When it came to women, he had had more freedom, experience and choice than most men enjoyed and it was possible that he was currently a little jaded.

      Rosie was deeply disappointed by Alexius’s lack of a warm response to the sonogram picture of their future son or daughter. She wondered why he had bothered to come and she had noticed how squeamish he had been when Dmitri Vakros mentioned the possibility of a Caesarean. Alexius had turned a grey shade, his look of horror unhidden. He was such a bloke. She already had an emotional connection with the child she carried but possibly she was expecting too much too soon from a guy who had only known for a week that fatherhood was on his horizon. Did it loom like a black cloud, she wondered, or as something new and different?

      Alexius breathed in deep. ‘I’m taking you to get measured for a new wardrobe.’

      Rosie settled disbelieving eyes on him. ‘You’re … what?’

      ‘You need to dress up for Greece and you haven’t got the clothes for it. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable in your grandfather’s home,’ Alexius admitted.

      Rosie was enraged at his confident assumption that he knew how she would feel about anything. ‘I don’t care about stuff like that!’

      ‘You think you don’t but you will,’ Alexius forecast, reckoning that she was planning to be as stubborn about the clothes as she was about everything else. Everything was a battle with Rosie: she hated him calling the shots but all his life he’d been a dominant personality and he had no plans to change.

      ‘And how the heck do you make that out? Is my grandfather as wealthy as you are?’ she suddenly demanded.

      ‘No, but he is a multimillionaire,’ Alexius revealed for the first time. ‘And he and his family enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.’

      ‘A multimillionaire?’ Rosie gasped in panic. ‘Truthfully?’

      ‘Truthfully,’ Alexius confirmed.

      Rosie was silenced, irritated that she had not suspected that reality for herself. After all, how likely was it that someone as rich as Alexius would have a godfather who was an ordinary man on a middling income? Suddenly she felt intimidated by what might await her in Greece.

      ‘I don’t want you to look and feel like a poor relation when you meet your father’s family,’ Alexius admitted.

      ‘Even if it’s the truth?’ she fielded between gritted teeth. ‘Why should I care about what I look like? That’s superficial.’

      ‘I agree but that’s how the world is,’ he responded with irrefutable logic. ‘Appearances are important.’

      Her thin shoulders hunched. ‘I don’t want you spending any more money on me, and I can’t afford a new wardrobe,’ she pointed out flatly.

      ‘The cost is nothing to me,’ Alexius retorted with a grimace.

      ‘But not when it came to fixing up Bas?’ she queried sharply, thinking with relief of how well the little dog had recovered while studying Alexius, wishing he were not so beautiful that he kept on ensnaring her attention. No matter how desperately hard she tried not to look at him her gaze repeatedly swerved back to him. Her entire body tingled as she remembered the raw sensuality of his mouth on hers and the air in her lungs shortened as if she were zooming down too fast on a roller-coaster ride.

      ‘I would have covered the dog’s needs no matter what you did,’ Alexius countered levelly, his libido reacting to the buzz of sexual energy in the atmosphere so that he had to fight the urge to simply grab her. All those years of sexual practice and sophistication, he thought grimly, and all he wanted to do was flatten her to the seat like a marauder and have her any way she would let him. For the first time ever with a woman he was being cautious.

      ‘But I didn’t know that!’ Rosie yelled back at him furiously in one of the sudden explosions of temper that always took him by surprise. ‘How was I supposed to know that?’

      ‘I’m not a monster … You’re carrying my baby—’

      ‘You mean, the blob?’ Rosie snapped nastily.

      Slight colour tinged his exotic cheekbones and his handsome mouth folded. ‘It did look like a blob. Was I supposed to lie to the woman who told me she valued honesty?’

      Out of nowhere a surge of stinging tears assailed Rosie’s eyes and she blinked them back hurriedly and reached spontaneously for the hand braced on the space between them. ‘No, I don’t want you to feel that you have to lie or pretend for my sake … I don’t ever want you to feel like th-that!’ she stammered.

      ‘You’re crying!’ Alexius noticed, aghast at the development.

      ‘No, it’s OK … OK!’ Rosie exclaimed, frantically grabbing at and stroking his hand in apology. ‘Remember what Dmitri said? My hormones are all over the place at the moment … The tears just come for no good reason—’

      ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Alexius pronounced, logical to the nth degree and hooking his hand into hers to draw her onto his lap without even thinking about it. Getting his arms round her tiny body at last felt amazingly good. ‘I’m sorry I called the baby a blob and hurt your feelings.’

      Rosie twisted to look at him with big, round green eyes. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

      In surely the most awkward position ever allotted to a man on the make, Alexius caught her chin and claimed the delicious moistness of her mouth and kissed her with devouring urgency. Rosie shivered in eager response, feeling her body light up on all systems go inside her skin. As she twisted, Alexius lifted her and brought her round sideways, pushing her bottom into stirring contact with his healthy erection. Her eyes opened even wider as a deft hand travelled up her skirt and slid between her thighs to cup the heart of her where she ached. ‘Alex!’ she gasped.

      He wrenched up the skirt and fought with her panties to access the warm, welcoming wetness of his fantasies, and he groaned with satisfaction against her swollen mouth as he got there and discovered that she was as ready as he was. His thumb circled her clitoris and set off a chain reaction through her pelvis that she could not control. She writhed, she moaned, made not the smallest attempt to escape, intoxicated as she was by the way he was teasing her overexcited body. She buried her mouth against his strong brown throat, kissing him, drinking in the glorious hot male scent of his flesh like an addict, all of her senses up and away on a magical tour of reacquaintance. With one finger, he slid inside and she ground down her bottom onto the thrust of his arousal, helpless in the grip of the most driving need she had ever experienced, feeling the gathering storm at the heart of her, rising up through her like an unstoppable force of nature. She splintered from the inside out with the intensity of the pleasure, her body jerking in the successive