‘Family get-togethers can put people on edge,’ Claire remarked with a roll of her eyes. ‘Did someone say something that upset you?’
‘Something like that,’ Freddie mumbled.
‘Well, you’d better get round to the hotel and sort it out first thing tomorrow morning with him. If you give the kids breakfast, I’ll take over. You have to go for your dress fitting at noon anyway and Richard and I are organised to accompany Zac and the kids to the zoo,’ the brunette reminded her drily.
Claire crept into bed, listening to Jack’s little snuffles and Eloise’s slow peaceful breathing. How could she have forgotten even for a moment what her marrying Zac would mean for the children? Shame dug talon claws of guilt into her tender flesh. She hadn’t been willing to have sex with Zac. Was she to blame him for taking what some other woman offered after she had rejected him? Was she really that much of a hypocrite? And why, oh, why had she taken it all so personally when feelings weren’t supposed to come into their agreement? She closed her eyes and cringed and wondered if he’d make her grovel and whether she would grovel if he made it impossible to do otherwise. It was hardly surprising that she didn’t get a wink of sleep that night and was waiting with breakfast on the table before the children even got up.
When she walked into the hotel foyer that morning, Marco immediately approached her. ‘The boss expecting you?’ he asked.
‘Er...no,’ Freddie admitted.
‘He’s in a meeting right now. I’ll check.’ He spoke in his own language into his headpiece before returning to her side. ‘That’s fine, Miss Lassiter. Go on up,’ he told her, showing her into the lift and putting the card in the slot for her.
Freddie breathed in slow and deep to gather herself. A young woman she didn’t recognise opened the penthouse door and ushered her out onto the big balcony where Zac was clearly enjoying a working breakfast while checking over documents with a young dark-haired man. The woman hovered and then sat down beside the man. Zac was back in jeans and a shirt, black hair rippling back from his lean bronzed features, his big powerful body poised in a relaxed sprawl.
‘Freddie...meet my personal assistants, Abilio and Catina,’ Zac introduced, rising fluidly upright, his eyes a cool luminous pale blue as they always seemed to be in sunlight, roaming over Freddie’s stiff little figure with no expression that she could see. If he was surprised at her arrival, he gave no sign of it.
Zac betrayed not an ounce of the relief he’d experienced when he’d heard she was in the hotel. She had worked it all out for herself and he wasn’t surprised at that. The night before she had acted on impulse with a temper that was quick to rise but equally quick to subside. Practicality had triumphed. But what would he have done had she not come back? Would he have chased after her? No, he was done with that, he decided decisively. She had to marry him of her own free will, knowing and accepting the limitations of such a marriage. Nothing else would work. But the shadows beneath her eyes, the evidence of a sleepless night troubled him all the same. He was finally beginning to appreciate that nothing about getting married and living with another person was as simple as he wanted to make it.
Freddie shook hands with his companions and then Zac headed indoors, long lithe legs moving at a fast pace. ‘We’ll take this into the bedroom because we don’t want to be interrupted and Abilio and Catina are about to leave.’
‘I didn’t know you had staff,’ Freddie remarked, keen to fill the smouldering silence.
‘I may not be running the family empire but I’ve made a lot of investments on my own behalf with the income,’ Zac admitted, lounging back against the solid wooden dresser that sat between the twin windows.
Freddie looked everywhere but at him, her gaze wandering to the gargantuan bed where the sheets still remained tossed from his occupancy. With a flush she glanced hurriedly away. ‘Like this hotel?’
‘Exactly.’
Freddie shot him a tense troubled glance. ‘I’m here to apologise. I was upset last night. I wasn’t thinking things through. I still want to marry you.’
Zac jerked his chin in acknowledgement.
‘I was so angry I didn’t even think about the children and...what would happen if we split up,’ she framed awkwardly.
‘Everyone has a price and the children are yours,’ Zac drawled softly.
Freddie’s eyes flared gold. ‘Not everyone has a price!’ she snapped back at him, nerves taking over and forging past her self-control.
‘What else am I supposed to think when you’re evidently still prepared to marry an untrustworthy, unreliable womaniser?’ he derided silkily.
Put on the spot, Freddie reddened to the roots of her hair. ‘I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I haven’t found you unreliable or untrustworthy and what you chose to do while you were single is none of my business,’ she completed with dogged determination. ‘But you had better stay faithful to our marriage while I’m still trying to get pregnant because I will not share you!’
His lean, strong face darkening, Zac dealt her a brooding appraisal. ‘No problem,’ he conceded to that condition without argument, because he could not imagine getting bored with her any time soon.
But he did not appreciate that she had only come back because she was terrified of losing the chance to adopt Eloise and Jack. That struck him as ironic when he knew the adoption was the only reason she was marrying him and willing to have a child with him. But something deep and visceral inside him still rebelled against that ego-zapping knowledge.
He studied her slight figure, sheathed in leggings, ankle boots and a jazzy fitted tunic. Her breasts and her hips and a good part of her legs were hidden so he could not understand why just looking at her soft full mouth and caramel-brown eyes made him so aroused. He wondered how long it would take for him to work out the secret of her irresistible attraction, how long it would take for him to get jaded and start living for the day he would get his freedom back. He had never stayed with a woman longer than a week and even then only on the most casual basis. Now, he recognised, he was facing a steep learning curve.
Conscious of Zac’s scrutiny and his unsettling silence in the face of her retraction of her insults, Freddie grew increasingly tense, the tip of her tongue sliding out to moisten her dry lips as her breath shortened in her throat. ‘So, where do we stand?’ she prompted anxiously.
Zac moved forward, seething energy and hunger powering him. Glittering eyes settled on her tense little face. ‘Where we started. Me wanting, you backing away...’
Her breath literally rattled in her throat because without even realising it she had taken a step back as he approached, and in dismay at that awareness she fell still where she stood.
‘That’s getting old, particularly the day before our wedding.’ Zac lifted a lean brown hand to trail a finger along the taut line of her delicate jaw. ‘What are you so scared of?’
‘I’m not scared,’ she told him tightly, but she knew she was lying. Her body was in a state of conflict, her adrenalin buzzing while little internal alarms shrilled inside her. She wanted him close and she wanted to push him away, because pushing men away came more naturally to her than touching one. Yet she longed to touch him, to unbutton the shirt stretched across his taut pectoral muscles and trace every rippling leashed line of him with her fingers. She wanted shameless things she had never wanted before and that unnerved her.
Yet the little tingles already ignited by his proximity warred with her alarm system. Her skin prickled, her breasts pushing against the restraint of her bra as her nipples tightened almost painfully. Her mouth ran dry, her breathing rupturing into little snatched spurts of air while her body struggled to combat the wave of heat rising from her pelvis.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Zac husked, coiling an arm round her with lazy strength, bending her back to trail a hungry kiss across her delicate collarbone and up the slender column of her neck.
A tiny gasp escaped her, her reactions plunged into overdrive and intensifi
ed when he lifted her up against him and then brought her down on the tumbled bed. Eyes flying wide, she gazed up at him in disconcertion and got lost in the blazing magnificence of his crystalline eyes.
‘Trust me,’ Zac murmured softly, reaching down to flip off her boots and toss them on the floor. ‘But at least tell me why you’re so scared. Were you assaulted? Hurt?’
‘No...no.’ Freddie tried and failed to swallow, fighting to gather her wits. ‘But, you know, I saw things...when I was living with my sister...and it put me off...er...sex,’ she mumbled as he embarked on her leggings, tugging them down to expose her legs.
‘Anything you don’t like, you only have to tell me,’ Zac told her thickly. ‘Any time you want me to stop, I will.’
‘O-Okay,’ she stammered, barely grasping how she had arrived on the bed and wondering if she should be moving away, reminding him that he had agreed to wait until they were married. Only that restriction seemed so petty now in retrospect that she couldn’t make herself voice that reminder. Tomorrow they would be married and all such restraint would naturally be at an end.
Her leggings went flying and she gulped, feeling overpowered and out of her depth with her rather shabby cheap knickers on view. And she was with a guy who loved luxury lingerie, she recalled in intense mortification, yanking her tunic down to cover herself again.
‘Fique tranquilo...don’t worry,’ Zac urged, convinced she was ready to flee at any moment. ‘I’m worrying enough for both of us.’
Taken aback, Freddie gazed up at him in astonishment. ‘What do you have to worry about?’
A flashing grin softened the taut line of Zac’s mobile mouth. ‘I’ve never been with a virgin before. I want to make it good for you but I don’t know if that’s possible.’
‘Kiss me,’ she heard herself say.
He pressed a soft kiss to her lips and she stopped breathing, her heart hammering a frenzied beat.
Zac shot her a heart-stopping smile of surprise and laughed, his darkly handsome lean features compelling. ‘It was wonderful and now you can stop worrying about it.’
‘I wasn’t worrying... Zac!’ she yelped in disconcertion as he twitched her out of the towel’s folds and lifted her to settle her down into the bath he had run for her. She was taken aback by how natural it felt to be with him in such circumstances while the tender ache between her thighs reminded her of how physically close they had been. Physically close, not mentally close, she conceded ruefully.
‘I hope you don’t get pregnant too quickly, meu pequenino,’ Zac confided, running his bright silvery eyes over her flushed and beautiful face. ‘I’m looking forward to having a lot of fun with you in the short term.’
Sex as a simple fun activity was beyond Freddie’s imagination but she could see that it was very much Zac’s approach and that daunted her. He strode into the shower, evidently in the best of moods, and to console herself she counted her blessings. The sex had been acceptable, their wedding was still on and the adoption application was progressing.
Short term, he had been careful to remind her, she mused, her shoulders drooping a little. Fun in the short term. Could she do that? She had to do it. Too much would be lost if she failed to maintain a good relationship with Zac. She had to at least try to do things his way even if it felt foreign and threatening to embrace such beliefs. Only if they were reasonably content as a couple would the children thrive.