The Pregnant Mistress. Sandra Marton

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СКАЧАТЬ Someone is—”

      “Shh.” He put his lips to her ear. “Don’t talk. Whoever it is will leave.”

      Leave? Sam squeezed her eyes shut. Please, yes. They had to leave…

      “…delighted you are prepared to make up your mind about the colt, Nick,” Rafe Alvares said, and chuckled. “I have had an offer. An excellent one, and I’m tempted to accept it.”

      “The hell you will,” Nicholas al Rashid replied, with lazy humor. “Doesn’t being your brother-in-law count for anything?”

      Both men laughed. Their footsteps sounded on the planked floor. Sam buried her face in Demetrios’s throat.

      “There he is. A fine animal. As handsome as ever.”

      Nick sighed. “More handsome than ever. All right. It’s a deal. Ship him to my farm in Greenwich.”

      “As soon as I can make the arrangements.”

      “They’ll go now,” Demetrios whispered—and followed it with an oath. He was wrong. The men weren’t leaving. The footsteps were drawing closer. Closer…

      He sat up quickly, whipped off his jacket and draped it around Sam’s shoulders. Then he shot to his feet and stood in front of her, blocking her from view.

      The light in the little office came on. “Let’s celebrate,” Rafe said, “with a brandy. Or would you prefer…Demetrios?”

      “Demetrios?” Nick said, his voice a puzzled echo of Rafe’s. There was a moment’s silence, and then he cleared his throat. “Oh.”

      Oh, indeed, Sam thought, and wished, with all her heart, that she were dead.

      “Have we, uh, have we interrupted something?”

      She squeezed her eyes shut in an old parody of the children’s game. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. They really couldn’t, she told herself frantically. Demetrios hadn’t moved. He was a protective wall, and she was huddled deep in his jacket with her knees drawn up, her face buried against them, but she had never felt more exposed in her life.

      “Let’s step outside,” he said. There was a shuffle of feet, the creak of the door half closing, then the sound of Demetrios’s voice saying calmly, almost lazily, “Actually, you have interrupted something,” as if were all some sort of joke.

      Sam curled her hands into fists.

      “Damn,” Nick murmured. “Sorry, Karas.”

      Sam’s heart pounded like a drum. Go away. Go away. Go away!

      Rafe cleared his throat. “I had no idea that you—that you were…” He cleared his throat again. “Well. I can see why you didn’t want to meet my wife’s sis…Damn! Never mind.”

      “Right,” Nick said quickly, “never mind. We’ll see you later, Demetrios. Rafe? Let’s go.”

      Sam held her breath until she heard the footsteps recede. The lights went off, the door banged shut and she scrambled to her feet just as Demetrios hurried towards her.

      “Kalóz mou,” he said, reaching for her…

      She slammed a fist against his chest. “Don’t—don’t ‘kalóz mou’ me! And don’t touch me, either!”

      “Sweetheart. I am sorry. I regret that we were interrupted, but—”

      “Yes. I’ll just bet you do.”

      She glared at him, her blood hot with rage. He was talking in a soft, soothing voice, trying to talk her back onto that couch, but that wasn’t going to happen. How could she have done this? She’d almost slept with a stranger—a stranger who hadn’t wanted to meet her. Wasn’t that what Rafe had just said? That Demetrios hadn’t wanted to meet his wife’s sister?

      The man who’d almost bedded her hadn’t wanted to meet her. Okay, he didn’t know she was the woman he hadn’t wanted to meet. Maybe that made a difference. Maybe her logic was flawed but dammit, who cared about logic? She’d been humiliated, embarrassed…and the man who was arrogance and self-conceit personified was still talking.

      “Oh, shut up,” Sam said, and brushed past him. She tried to, anyway, but he put out his arm and stopped her.

      “Have you heard a thing I said?”

      His faint accent, so softly sexy a little while ago, had thickened. Sam blew her hair back from her forehead.

      “This is all your fault. If you were any kind of gentleman—”

      “Ah. I see. You wish to pretend you had no part in this.”

      “I’m not the one who dragged me into this—this barn.”

      “One,” he said coldly, “it is a stable. Two, if I were not a gentleman, there might be some debate as to who dragged who.”

      “Whom,” Sam snapped.

      “Three,” Demetrios said, his voice cutting across hers, “we are only here because you refused to go into the house.”

      “Yes. Yes, I did. I, at least, have some sense of propriety.”

      “That is surely the reason you climbed all over me at the gazebo.”

      He wasn’t just arrogant, he was insufferable. Sam thought about slapping him but really, he wasn’t worth the effort. Exhaustion, she thought furiously, as she pushed past him and headed for the stable door. It was all a case of exhaustion.

      “You have my jacket,” he said sharply. “Or are you in the habit of taking souvenirs?”

      She swung towards him and flung a string of curses she’d just learned in Egypt in his face. Demetrios glowered; a horse in a nearby stall gave a soft whinny and looked on with interest.

      “What did you say?”

      “I said,” Sam replied, smiling brightly, “that I hoped your descendents would all be carrion-eating jackals, and that you’d lose all your teeth and go bald by the time you’re thirty-five. Good night. I’d say it’s been a pleasure, but it hasn’t.”

      “You’re right. It hasn’t.”

      “As for your precious jacket…” She shrugged the item in question from her shoulders and held it out in a two-fingered grasp. Demetrios looked from her face to the jacket to the horse in its stall…

      “No,” he said, but it was too late. The jacket dropped. The horse snorted. And the woman he’d been fool enough to have thought he wanted strode towards the door.

      “Good night,” Sam said pleasantly, and batted the door open with her hand.

      A single, harsh word floated out into the night. It was Greek, but she didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what it meant. Sam dusted her hands off as she strode towards the house. The jacket had, undoubtedly, found its hoped-for target, something that was the СКАЧАТЬ