Trish Wylie - Her Unexpected Baby

Adam gaped slightly at Lucy, the only one of the women he’d met before. Fun? To be around? Dana Taylor?

’Really?’

Dana glared up at him. If he was supposed to be pretending he was in some great relationship with her surely he shouldn’t look so damned surprised at the thought that she might actually be fun?

Fortunately Lucy appeared to be a couple of wine glasses past observant. ‘Oh, yeah! I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen her dance on tables or lead us all on some madcap trip somewhere. Do you remember the Twenty-Four-Hour Club, Dana?’

As his thumb continued to move along the edge of the material of her dress, over her skin and what he thought might be the minute string of her underwear, Adam’s mind worked overtime. He sincerely hoped that the Twenty-Four-Hour Club was no relation to the Mile-High Club, or he would never be able to share an office with Dana again.

Dana’s face began to flame. Not so much because of Lucy’s reminiscences of the past as the fact that she was now being completely distracted by Adam’s hand against her. The last thing she needed was for him to find his earlier assumption as to the kind of underwear a woman was forced to wear beneath this type of dress had in fact been correct. She tried to squirm subtly further away from the steel wall of his body.

But Adam was having none of it. He pressed his hand firmer against her hip and drew her closer. With a downward glance that said Oh, no you don’t, he asked the obvious question. ‘Twenty-Four-Hour Club, babes?’

She swallowed. He really could be quite intense close up, couldn’t he? She damped her lips. ‘Probably not what you’re thinking it was.’

‘Then why don’t you tell me?’

‘It was basically an excuse for drunken trips away.’

Dana grimaced at Lucy’s choice of words. They were accurate, which didn’t help her cause any. She gulped down more wine.

Lucy, meanwhile, continued. ‘The idea was to get as far away from base—which was college—as possible, and back again within twenty-four hours, on a pre-agreed budget.’

Adam smiled at the thought. ‘To anywhere?’

‘Oh, yes. We got all over the place—didn’t we, Dana?’

Dana opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again as Lucy continued. ‘It started with a boat trip to Scotland, then one to France, then some of us got a bit further afield until Dana the Master topped us all.’

His smile upgraded to a grin as he looked down at her. ‘Where’d you end up?’

‘New York.’ She finally managed to get a word in edge-wise.

‘On a budget of what?’

Lucy laughed. ‘That was the best bit. She dressed up as some kind of medical person, and carried a pig heart in a freezer case a medical student mate of hers had got from the hospital. She blagged her way onto the flight for virtually nothing because she was carrying a donor organ. Took some major flirting, from what I’ve heard, but she was famous after that.’

Adam looked at her with more respect than she’d ever seen before from him. Trust him to value her more for her immoral and irresponsible ways of old than for her ‘anally retentive’ organisation around the office. Typical. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘You just would be, wouldn’t you?’

He tilted his head. ‘I’m seeing a whole new side to you here.’

She managed a small smile at the truth in his words. ‘I guess you are.’

His thumb moved slowly backwards and forwards against her skin. Hypnotic, almost. With a lazy blink of his green eyes he lowered his voice to a deep rumble. ‘Anything else you want to tell me about?’

She hadn’t wanted him knowing anything in the first place. The hypnotic movement continued against her skin. ‘What do you want to know?’

His eyes looked deep into hers. What changed you? The question formed in his brain and almost made it to his mouth. But he closed it just in time. He needed to keep reminding himself this was Dana Taylor, his very own personal nemesis, the woman who made work days seem much longer than their allocated eight to twelve hours.

A voice sounded from outside the sexually charged bubble they were creating. ‘You know she sings?’

IT WAS officially becoming the longest night of her life.

You know she sings? had progressed as the evening continued to You should sing with the band for old times’ sake. Several glasses of wine later, and the runaway train had gained speed to Boys, get Dana to sing, and eventually half the room had chanted until she set foot on the stage.

Things had just never really improved from the minute the word makeover had left Tara’s lips until the second Dana stepped up to the mike and looked down on the face of her ex in amongst the crowd, disapproval written all over him.

Add to all that the fact that the make-believe game she was playing with Adam was proving entirely too easy and—dare she think it?—enjoyable, and really things couldn’t get much more complicated.

He had smiled down at her with his impossibly attractive smile as she’d been pulled from his side by the people she had once called friends but probably never would again after this night. And as she had glanced back over her shoulder at him she had, for a very brief second, not wanted to leave him. ‘Let’s pretend’ at its most convincing!

Billy, the lead guitarist with the band she’d regularly sung with at college, stepped forward to announce, ‘This one’ll bring back some memories for you lot. Guys, girls—give it up for Dana Lewis!’

She blinked for a moment at the use of her maiden name, then the first soulful notes of an old blues song sounded up. Oh, great. A song with innuendo.

Of course. What else would it be in the nightmare from hell she was currently having? Okay, so it was one she’d sung on many different occasions, but not to a crowd that held an ex-husband who might read a lot into the lyrics and a ‘date’ who appeared to be convinced she was in love with the ex. A ‘date’ who was forcing her blood to thrum in her veins in ways she’d never before experienced.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes to shut out the surreal place she was currently visiting, and began to sing.

Adam shut his mouth when it occurred to him he must look like a child who’d just been told Santa didn’t exist. Who the hell was this multiple-personalitied woman?

The Dana he worked with every day sure as hell didn’t look like the kind of woman who would stand on a stage and sing like that. Her voice was husky, sultry. In fact, in the dictionary under ‘sexy’ it probably said ‘listen to Dana Taylor sing’. The sound went straight from his ears to—well, much further south than his ears, and he was stunned by his own reaction.

She slipped a hand up to caress the mikestand, up and down, and his mouth went dry. Dear God.

Her hips swayed slightly as she tilted her head and stepped one foot out to the side. The long slit in the side of her dress allowed a long, glorious, illegal-in-most-countries length of leg to be exposed to the room. Adam gulped and glanced around at the number of men looking up at her. He felt a sudden need to run up and cover her with something—anything that would shield her from their prying gazes.

She opened her eyes and looked directly at him, damped her lips with the end of her now familiar pink tongue and sang directly at him, her eyes burning him from across the room.

He stepped closer, drawn in by the small smile she gave him. Then her eyes moved and he followed her line of vision to the tall fair-haired man near the back of the crowd. So that would be him, then.

His eyes moved back to her. She threw her long, dark, curled hair back over one shoulder with a flick of her head, her eyes shining with—what? Anger? Pain? Adam wasn’t sure he wanted to know which.

There was clear innuendo in the words of the song as she sang them—to him?—then turned her gaze back to the remainder of the crowd, closing her eyes and raising her arms slightly with a shrug of her naked shoulders as she continued.

Had she chosen to sing that song specifically for him? The ex? The one she claimed she wasn’t still in love with? And why the hell did he, Adam, care all of a sudden if she was or wasn’t?

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