One Night Of Consequences Collection. Annie West

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СКАЧАТЬ And always unwanted.

      To think she’d tried so hard to win Edouard’s favor, his attention, as a child hungry for affection. To think she’d been so desperate for love that she’d agreed to keep her paternity a secret all her life. That she’d never gone against Edouard’s wishes and contacted his “real” family.

      Yes, she and André had both suffered at Edouard Bellamy’s hands, though she feared André would not view her experience the same way. Because she was a Bellamy, and there was nothing she could do about that.

      A man like André did not forgive deceit. And she’d deceived him. Was still deceiving him.

      Her hands glided over her belly, cradling the life that grew there. She should’ve told him the truth from the start. Gotten it out in the open before she lost her heart to him. Let her ghosts dance and rattle their chains along with his.

      But she hadn’t, because postponing the inevitable was easier than facing the truth. Because she was afraid to trust that he’d do the right thing. Because she didn’t want anything to throw a pall over their passionate tryst on this island. She wanted to prolong the inevitable.

      Now she was too tired to think straight—too exhausted from spent passion and from the tangled dreams she’d spun of her and André and their child. She was simply too heavy of heart to risk seeing the thin thread binding them snap in two.

      She’d seek him out in the morning and tell him everything, for the guilt of lying to him was tearing her apart. She had to believe that love was stronger than hate.

      André had been hunched over his desk since dawn, gaze fixed on the computer screen. The work he’d hoped to immerse himself in this morning stared back at him. The latest financial report was a jumble of words, none making sense. The spreadsheet might as well be random figures.

      All he could think about was Kira and the stricken look on her face when she’d left his bedroom. He’d shocked her by admitting he was Suzette’s brother, and shocked himself by revealing so much about his family’s connection to Edouard Bellamy. None of his contemporaries knew. Not one. So why had he trusted Kira with the truth?

      He caught a subtle whiff of her perfume a heartbeat before his door opened a crack. His gaze flicked from the wealth of auburn hair to her eyes that gleamed with moisture.

      “Are you too busy to talk?” she asked.

      He was, and talk was the last thing he wanted to do with her—especially if she was emotional. But he didn’t wish to turn her away either.

      “Come in,” he said, rising and hoping she wouldn’t hear his heart slamming against his ribs. “What’s on your mind?”

      She slipped inside like a shadow and closed the door, her eyes seeming too large for her face. She swallowed, looked away, then met his gaze again.

      “Something you said last night…” She waved a hand in a classic gesture of nervousness and eased onto the chair, but sat on its edge as if ready to bolt. “I’ve never told anyone before.”

      “A confession, then?”

      “A secret, actually.”

      His gut clenched, but he erased all emotion from his face. This was it. The declaration of guilt he’d dreaded to hear. Their affair would end swiftly and unpleasantly.

      She took a deep breath. Expelled it slowly. His gut clenched again. He was dreading what truth would spill from her lush lips.

      “My mother was a Las Vegas showgirl and my father—” She frowned. Swallowed. Paled. “My father—”

      He took pity on her struggle for a way to tell him. “I’ve seen your birth certificate and I know you are illegitimate.”

      A flush kissed her cheeks, but he couldn’t tell if it was from embarrassment or anger. “Yes, my mother obviously wasn’t sure which was one of her lovers was my father when she gave birth to me.”

      He stared at her, stunned for a heartbeat. In his mind he’d pictured her mother as a quiet Englishwoman, reserved and withdrawn. He’d imagined Kira had run away from the staid life she’d been born into to the glamour Bellamy promised.

      “Your mother sent you to England to be schooled, then?” Away from the lurid nightlife and her liaisons?

      A deeper red tinted her delicate cheekbones, and he knew at that moment that no matter what she told him she’d seen more than a young girl should. “She gave me up when I was quite young. Actually, I barely remember her.”

      “Is she still alive?”

      “I wouldn’t know.”

      “You’ve never tried to find her?”

      “No, and I never will.”

      André wasn’t sure what to make of that admission. Kira was compassionate to a fault. She wouldn’t cut her mother from her life without just cause—that cause being that the woman had obviously placed her lovers before her child. Yet Kira had followed in the woman’s footsteps—unmarried and pregnant.

      But where her mother had obviously been derelict in her duty, André believed Kira would make a fine parent. He trusted she’d cherish her child. His soul knew she’d put her child first, even above him. He trusted her with the care of their baby.

      He shook his head, keeping the last observation to himself. “I take it you were adopted?”

      “No, I was simply a ward.” She looked at him then, the lonely ache of her childhood plain to see, touching his heart as nothing else ever had. “As I said before, I know how you felt, being foisted off on people who cared nothing for you.”

      For a moment he thought she’d expand on her upbringing, but she stopped talking and frowned.

      “Then you understand why I must bring down everything Bellamy built,” he said.

      “No, I don’t understand that at all,” she said.

      She couldn’t mean that. “I don’t believe you haven’t thought of ways to make your mother pay for abandoning you. Or wanted to lash out at the guardian who closeted you away instead of welcoming you into a family.”

      Kira looked away, but not before he caught a flicker of anger in her expressive eyes. “I locked my ghosts away long ago. I knew to dwell on what I couldn’t change would turn me bitter and ultimately destroy me.”

      He sensed there was more, that she was holding something back, something that she was hesitant to divulge. He understood her reluctance, for he suspected she had never allowed herself to be angry at the cloistered life meted out to her. She’d been conditioned to accept her fate.

      “Will it help if you tell me about your ghosts?” he asked. “I assure you I’m not one to fear them.”

      “André,” she said, her face too pale and too drawn.

      André waited for her to go on, but she fell silent.

      Mon Dieu! He longed to rip open the shroud on her past, to make whoever had hurt her pay for their callous disregard. СКАЧАТЬ