Tessa Radley - Reclaiming His Pregnant Widow

Blood rushed to her head. The sudden airlessness of the room pressed in on her.

Clea couldn’t breathe, and she felt horribly ill. Her father would never forgive her if she was sick all over the marble floor … with press cameras everywhere to immortalize the moment.

“Clea!”

The hands that came down on her shoulders were so intimately familiar … yet so painfully strange. She shook her head, resisting the cold mist closing in on her. He was dead. Yet the fingers cupping her shoulders were warm, strong and very much alive.

This was no ghost.

This was a human being. A man she knew too well.

“Don’t faint on me,” he warned in that deep, slightly hoarse voice.

“I won’t.” She’d never fainted in her life. Yet she had to admit that she felt weak, dizzy … dazed. “You’re supposed to be dead!” She sucked in a ragged breath, and then added inanely, “But you’re back.”

Clea!

A raw, burning hunger he hadn’t experienced for more than a thousand nights overpowered Brand. He pulled the woman he’d dreamed of every day—every night—toward him, drinking in the scent of her, a heady mix of honey and jasmine. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Her warmth and fragrance flooded him.

Beneath the exploring pads of his fingers her shoulders were more slender than he remembered, the bones fragile, but her skin was as soft as ever. “You’ve lost weight.”

She stiffened under his touch. “Maybe.”

Brand buried his face in the side of her neck, iron bands of emotion constricting his chest.

“I’ve missed you,” he breathed, “so much.” Without her, a void had replaced the man he’d been. His arms tightened around her slender frame, words pouring from him, rough guttural sounds against her smooth skin.

“Brand, I can’t hear you.” Clea drew away a little. “It’s too loud in here—let’s find somewhere quieter.”

She slipped out of his hold and a sense of loss swamped Brand.

Clea held out a hand. “Come.”

He took the fingers she offered, the delicate link frighteningly fragile.

She pulled him along with her, threading between the press of staring people until they broke clear, escaping through open double doors into a carpeted corridor beyond. Clea halted outside a set of glass doors in the clear floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Letting go of his hand, she fished in her evening purse looped over her shoulder by a delicate chain and extracted a keycard, which she swiped in the security slot. The doors sprang open and Brand followed her into a reception area and the corridor beyond. “My office is through here.”

Brand paused. “You used to be down in the basement.”

Her chin tilted up in a gesture that was pure Clea, and his heart clenched.

“I’ve moved up in the world,” she told him, her eyes hungrily searching his face. “I’m more important now.”

Clea pressed a wall switch and light flooded the room, catching forgotten glints of precious copper in her long, dark curls, hinting at the fire that lay beneath.

Lust caught him by the throat.

He’d missed her so damn much. Missed talking to her. Missed touching her.

Most of all he’d missed loving her.

Clea.

In a flash, Brand closed the space between them and took her in his arms again. He couldn’t get enough of touching her, reassuring himself that she was here, in his hold. Not a wraith that would vanish with his dreams as dawn cracked over the endless, empty horizon. Bending his head, he slanted his lips across hers. She gave a surprised gasp, and a beat later melted into his embrace.

She tasted so sweet, and his hunger soared.

Tracing the indent of her spine with shaking fingers, Brand’s hands moved up … up … until his fingers speared into the soft, glossy mass of constrained curls. Her head fell back and he deepened the kiss.

Her breasts pressed against his chest, and despite her weight loss they seemed fuller than he remembered. Clea had always bemoaned her lack of curves, but now she was positively lush.

Another change.

But this one he would savor …

He brought his hands forward to shape her ripe flesh and his fingers skimmed her belly. Fuller there, too. A curious anomaly given the slenderness of her shoulders, the sharp definition of her high cheekbones. His hands rested on the rise, his fingers exploring … and he felt her still.

Blood roared in Brand’s ears. He couldn’t absorb what his fingertips were telling him.

No!

His first reaction was denial. But his hands had developed a life—a reasoning power—all their own, even as his mind sputtered then stalled. His palms stroked over Clea’s curves, sending bursts of unwelcome information back to his struggling brain until he could no longer deny the truth of what lay beneath his hands.

Raising his head, he glared accusingly down into her startled green eyes. “You’re pregnant!”

Clea knew at once how it must appear.

“It’s not what you think,” she said quickly, reaching up to cradle Brand’s beloved face between her cupped hands. “Remember how we—”

“It certainly didn’t take you long to find someone else.”

The blaze of accusation rocked her. Brand had gone all tense, his jaw clenching and unclenching against her hollowed palms as he glowered at her from between slitted lids.

In the stillness of her office, Clea stared up at him in absolute shock, the awfulness of what he was saying—what he believed—finally sinking in.

There was no one else.

“I didn’t—”

“Shut up,” he snarled.

“Wait a minute …”

Clea’s voiced trailed away as his hands manacled her wrists. He forced her fingers away from his skin and dropped them with palpable distaste, and all the while the beautiful ocean-hued eyes bored unblinkingly into hers. “It didn’t take you long to accept that I was dead—or was it a case of out of sight, out of mind?”

The injustice of that caused her to reel away, almost tripping over the visitor’s chair in front of her desk. Clea sank onto the padded black leather, her legs weak.

How could Brand believe that?

Especially when she’d never stopped believing in him!

Five days after her last telephone conversation with Brand, unable to contact him, Clea had sounded the alarm. It had taken another thirteen days—the longest stretch of Clea’s life—for the official channels to relay back to her that Brand was no longer in Greece. He’d entered Iraq over two weeks earlier through the Kuwait border and had checked into a battle-scarred hotel once favored by foreign businessmen in Baghdad. No one knew where he’d gone after checking out a few days later.

There had been nothing left to do but wait. She’d made every excuse in the book for him. But time passed and still he hadn’t gotten in touch.

To the men in black suits who materialized like spooks at her workplace Clea had insisted there had been nothing suspicious about her husband’s visit to Iraq; after all, Brand made his living from dealing in antiquities, a love he’d developed while stationed with the Australian Special Air Services elite forces in Iraq. But it had been galling to admit that he hadn’t told her about his intention to enter Iraq, and she decided not to tell her visitors about the argument she’d had with Brand the second to last time she’d spoken to him.

Once the shadowy men in black suits departed, on her father’s advice and using his extensive contacts, Clea had hired a firm of investigators to locate her missing husband.

It had never been a case of out of sight, out of mind.

She hadn’t stopped thinking about him, not for one minute. Even the two identical clocks on her office wall bore testimony to that—one set to Eastern Time, the other to Baghdad time. She’d never stopped thinking what he might be doing at any moment of her day. She’d wanted her husband back. She’d wanted answers about his disappearance. Real answers. Not speculation that he’d deserted her for another woman, which had been the first theory the investigators had come up with. The news of the grisly discovery of the burned-out SUV in the desert had terrified her. But she’d stubbornly clung to her belief that she would’ve known in her heart if Brand was dead. She’d demanded incontrovertible proof.

When they’d brought her his wedding ring nine months ago, Clea had been shattered, her dreams pulverized to dust, her hopes charred to ashes.

The idea of a baby had become a lifeline to sanity.

Getting pregnant had given her back her life. Not the life she’d hoped to share with Brand, but something better than the hopelessness that had overtaken her.

Yet now Brand stood over her accusing her of forgetting him. Instead of taking her in his arms, he was behaving like the world’s biggest bastard. And he showed no signs of listening anytime soon. Clea shook her head to clear it and pressed her hands protectively over her stomach.

Brand laughed—a harsh, grating sound she’d never heard before. “Nothing further to say? How unfortunate for you I didn’t remain dead.” The sea-green gaze had turned arctic.

Slumped in the chair, Clea’s whole body ached. Her feet. Her head. Her heart. Was it possible Brand was hurting every bit as much as she was? “I can explain …”

Brand recoiled.

“I don’t need your explanations!” He looked down on her from the full height of his six-foot-two-inch frame. His eyes froze her out. “It’s easy enough to see what happened.” One side of his mouth kicked up. “So who’s the lucky man?”

“Will you stop interrupting me?” Her voice rose. Hauling in a shaky breath, she tempered her tone. “We always talked about having a family—”

“ Our family,” he said, pointedly inspecting her belly, covered by the silk of her designer dress and sheltered by her clasped hands. “Not some other man’s bastard.”

“Brand, wait!”

Clea rose to her feet and reached for him, then dropped her hands to her sides at the icy look he bestowed on her.

“Please listen—”

“What’s the point of listening?” There was contempt in the frigid gaze that met hers, and something else …

Disappointment?

His lack of faith stung. She deserved a chance to explain, and she didn’t doubt that he’d listen once he’d calmed down. Brand might have a dangerous reputation, but he loved her.

Or did he?

The first shadow of doubt stole over her. Clea stilled. She’d always imagined that something terrible must’ve happened to keep him away for so long. A horrific accident. Memory loss. Trauma so terrible he hadn’t wanted her to see him in such a state.

Instead he stood before her looking breathtakingly hunky in the tuxedo and black shirt, his body even better conditioned than four years earlier—some feat because Brand had always honed his body to perfection. His face was burnished bronze by the sun, contrasting with the color of his sea-green eyes to devastating effect. An aura of reckless danger now clung to him, causing her heart to beat faster.

He might not be the Brand she’d kissed goodbye at the airport—but he wasn’t damaged or scarred.

Yet she had to admit, dressed all in black, he looked like the devil incarnate.

Without taking her eyes from him, she toed off her shoes, adding another two inches to the height advantage he already possessed. “So why didn’t you tell me you were going to Baghdad?” she challenged.

Brand stared back at her.

Did he cause Anita Freeman’s heart to beat faster, too? “Answer me!”