Movement was a bit bumpy at first since the men carried the thing into the water and the waves washing onto shore battered it until they were completely submerged. Emma’s fear level leapt to high alert and stayed there until the smoother movements began to lull her.
She was still tense as she settled to feed the baby, but cuddling him was comforting, watching him eat, and then dosing off.
He was so sweet when he was asleep! Like a little angel. Not that he wasn’t a sweet child at all times! But the calmness of sleep just emphasized his sweetness and innocence.
“Let me take him and settle him,” Hauk said.
Emma shook her head. “It’s hard to settle him without waking him. I’ll do it.”
He looked doubtful, but he just helped her up from the lounge and steadied her. Nye shifted and complained a little when she put him in the crib but the gentle rocking of the pod seemed to soothe him and he settled after a few moments.
Hauk was standing at a porthole Emma saw when she turned. She studied him for several moments and finally approached him.
He surprised her by gathering her into a light embrace with her back against his chest so that she could look out, as well. One big hand settled on the slight roundness of her belly, almost as if he knew there was a child nestled there.
It made her uncomfortable since there was no doubt it wasn’t his.
“You did not ask if I was enamored,” he said, referring to the conversation they had had regarding Valee and the motives for her maliciousness.
Emma twisted her head to look up at him, studying him. Because she had thought it very unlikely that he thought of her that way at all. “Are you?”
“I think it was the stick,” he said pensively.
Emma’s mind went blank. “The stick?”
“When we had chased you from the house and you snatched up that rotted branch and waved it at us as if it was a sword.”
Emma felt her face redden. “And that was all it took and you were … uh … smitten?”
“Pretty much,” he said, chuckling wryly. “Of course there was the fact that you made my dick hard the moment I saw how beautifully you were made—that was the finest ass I’d ever seen cutting across the back lawn—and your pretty face made my mind go blank. Eyes wide as saucers in fear, face pale as death, and determination in every line of your jaw. I knew in that very moment that I wanted you for my own.”
Emma uttered a half-hearted laugh. “I always suspected you were way too pretty not to be a playboy.”
He bent his head to nuzzle her neck. “You think I am handsome?”
“On a scale of one to ten?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“At least fifteen.”
He chuckled huskily and nibbled a path down the side of her neck. “You are beautiful—In all ways. I do not know how I have contained myself.”
“Lack of opportunity?”
He laughed, scooped her into his arms and carried her to the lounge. “Mostly that. But here we are with at least an hour on our hands, from what I was told, and no way for anyone to burst in and interrupt.”
“And the baby’s asleep.”
He settled her and sprawled over her, careful not to crush her. Lifting his head, he checked the baby before he gave her one hundred percent of his attention.
His kiss was everything she remembered … and more. She was dizzy with the excitement jumping in her veins before his lips even made contact with hers and when he pressed them to her, she descended into a swirling lava pit of need, of sizzling nerve endings and coiling desire.
He built the heat with patience, slowly, leaving no part of her neglected. She writhed in exquisite agony, panted for breath, chanted his name mindlessly, telling herself she would remain passive, enjoy, allow him to set the pace.
But there came a time when she could bear no more of the exquisite torture, when she had no more patience, when she could hardly bear her own skin. She began to urge him to take her and then to beg with desperation, fearful she’d come before he even entered her, afraid she wouldn’t.
She spread her thighs at his command, looking down between them as he pressed the head of his cock to the mouth of her sex.
That was when she realized his cock had nubs all over it, in a pattern—whether natural or not. It made her heart lurch with anxiety, but the moment he entered her she just lost her mind at the feel of those nubs bumping along her love corridor. She thought she might have come in that very moment, but he kissed her and it seemed to halt her ascent, to hold her at the pinnacle, just teetering toward the brink and unable to launch.
He stroked her until she felt feverish and faint, until she was moaning incessantly.
“Hauk! Please!” she managed to gasp finally.
As if he had only waited for that, he increased his pace and took her to the stars with a cosmic eruption that shattered her soul and sent her flying off in fragments.
When she caught her breath at last, came to herself, gathered her scattered wits, she discovered that he was lying beside her, trailing his fingers lightly over her abdomen in a light caress. As if he sensed she was looking at him, he met her gaze. “This child is ours—Mine, Kadin’s and Gaelen’s. I want you to know that, regardless of how it came to be, I love this child of ours.”
Chapter Twenty
Emma wanted to simply lay in Hauk’s arms forever, soaking up the afterglow from true bliss. What she didn’t want was to have her moment tainted with anything ugly, though, so when she felt the change in speed and descent of the pod, she pulled away from Hauk to get up and straighten her clothes.
Hauk tensed, but made no attempt to
