Baby Bonanza

A brief, tight smile curved her mouth. “Yeah, it’s lovely living in the belly of the beast. When they raise anchor it’s like a symphony.”

He hadn’t considered that, but he was willing to bet the noise was horrific. Just another reason to seal up these rooms and never use them again. However, that was for another time. What he wanted now were answers.

“Good one,” he said. “That’s why you’re here, then? To talk about the ship?”

“You know why I’m here.”

He lifted one hand to the doorjamb and leaned in toward her. “I know what you’d like me to think. The question is, why? Why now? What’re you after, Jenna?”

“I’m not going to talk about this in the hall.”

“Fine.” He stepped inside, moving past her, but the quarters were so cramped, their chests brushed together and he could almost feel his skin sizzle.

It had been like that from the beginning. The moment he’d touched her that first night in the moonlight, he’d felt a slam of something that was damn near molten sliding through him. And it seemed that time hadn’t eased it back any.

He got a grip on his hormones, took two steps until he was at the side of a bed built for a sixth-grader, then turned around to glare at her. God, the cabin was so small it felt as though the walls were closing in on him and, truth to tell, they wouldn’t have far to move. He felt as if he should be slouching to avoid skimming the top of his head along the ceiling. Every light in the cabin was on and it still looked like twilight.

But Nick wasn’t here for the ambience and there was nothing he could do about the rooms at the moment. Now all he wanted was an explanation. He waited for her to shut the door, sealing the two of them into the tiny cracker box of a room before he said, “What’s the game this time, Jenna?”

“This isn’t a game, Nick,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “It wasn’t a game then, either.”

“Right.” He laughed and tried not to breathe deep. The scent of her was already inside him, the tiny room making him even more aware of it than he would have been ordinarily. “You didn’t want to lie to me. You had no choice.”

Her features tightened. “Do we really have to go over the old argument again?”

He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. He didn’t want to look at the past. Hell. He didn’t want to be here now. “No, we don’t. So why don’t you just say what it is you have to say so we can be done.”

“Always the charmer,” she quipped.

He shifted from one foot to the other and banged his elbow on the wall. “Jenna…”

“Fine. You got my note?”

He reached into the pocket of his shirt, pulled out the card, glanced at the pictures of the babies, then handed it to her. “Yeah. I got it. Now how about you explain it?”

She looked down at those two tiny faces and he saw her lips curve slightly even as her eyes warmed. But that moment passed quickly as she lifted her gaze to him and skewered him with it. “I would have thought the word daddy was fairly self-explanatory.”

“Explain, anyway.”

“Fine.” Jenna walked across the tiny room, bumped Nick out of her way with a nudge from her hip that had him hitting the wall and then bent down to drag a suitcase out from under her bed. The fact that she could actually feel his gaze on her butt while she did it only annoyed her.

She would not pay any attention to the rush of heat she felt just being close to him again. She would certainly not acknowledge the jump and stutter of her heartbeat, and if certain other of her body parts were warm and tingling, she wasn’t going to admit to that, either.

Dragging the suitcase out, she went to lift it, but Nick was there first, pushing her fingers aside to hoist the bag onto the bed. If her skin was humming from that one idle touch, he didn’t have to know it, did he?

She unzipped the bag, pulled out a blue leather scrapbook and handed it to him. “Here. Take a look. Then we’ll talk more.”

The book seemed tiny in his big, tanned hands. He barely glanced at it before shooting a hard look at her again. “What’s this about?”

“Look at it, Nick.”

He did. The moment she’d been waiting so long for stretched out as the seconds ticked past. She held her breath and watched his face, the changing expressions written there as he flipped through the pages of pictures she’d scrapbooked specifically for this purpose. It was a chronicle of sorts. Of her life since losing her job, discovering she was pregnant and then the birth of the twins. In twenty hand-decorated pages, she’d brought him up to speed on the last year and a half of her life.

Up to speed on his sons. The children he’d created and had never met.

The only reason she was here, visiting a man who’d shattered her heart without a backward glance.

When he was finished, his gaze lifted to hers and she could have sworn she saw icicles in his eyes.

“I’m supposed to believe that I’m the father of your babies?”

“Take another look at them, Nick. They both look just like you.”

He did, but his features remained twisted into a cynical expression even while his eyes flashed with banked emotion. “Lots of people have black hair and blue eyes.”

“Not all of them have dimples in their left cheek.” She reached out, flipped to a specific page and pointed. “Both of your sons do. Just like yours.”

He ran one finger over the picture of the boys as if he could somehow touch them with the motion, and that small action touched something in Jenna. For one brief instant, Nick Falco looked almost…vulnerable.

It didn’t last long, though. His mouth worked as if he were trying to bite back words fighting desperately to get out. Finally, as if coming to some inner decision, he nodded, blew out a breath and said, “For the sake of argument, let’s say they are mine.”

“They are.”

“So why didn’t you tell me before? Why the hell would you wait until they’re, what…?”

“Four months old.”

He looked at the pictures again, closed the book and held on to it in one tight fist. “Four months old and you didn’t think I should know?”

So much for the tiny kernel of warmth she’d almost experienced.

“You’re amazing. You ignore me for months and now you’re upset that I didn’t contact you?”

“What’re you talking about?”

Jenna shook her head and silently thanked heaven that she’d been smart enough to not only keep a log of every e-mail she’d ever sent him, but had thought to print them all out and bring them along. Dipping back into the suitcase, she whipped a thick manila envelope out and laid it atop the scrapbook he was still holding. “There. E- mails. Every one I sent you. They’re all dated. You can see that I sent one at least once a week. Sometimes twice. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for more than a year, Nick.”

He opened the envelope as she talked, and flipped quickly through the printouts.

“I-” He frowned down at the stack of papers.

She took advantage of his momentary speechlessness. “I’ve been trying to reach you since I first found out I was pregnant, Nick.”

“How was I supposed to know that this is what you were trying to tell me?”

“You might have read one or two of them,” Jenna pointed out and managed to hide the hurt in her voice.

He scowled at her. “How the hell could I have guessed you were trying to tell me I was a father? I just thought you were after money.”

She hissed in a breath as the insult of that slapped at her. Bubbling with fury, Jenna really had to fight the urge to give him a swift kick. How like Nick to assume that any woman who was with him was only in it for what she could get from him. But then, he’d spent most of the past ten years surrounding himself with the very users he’d suspected her of being. People who wanted to be seen with him because he was one of the world’s most eligible billionaires. Those hangers-on wanted to be in his inner circle because that’s where the excitement was and it made them feel important, to be a part of Nick’s world.

All Jenna had wanted was his arms around her. His kiss. His whispers in the middle of the night. Naturally, he hadn’t believed her.