Bound by Their Scandalous Baby Read online

  She was dropped to her feet. She staggered and would have fallen, but for the iron grip as his hand snagged her upper arm.

  ‘What did you say?’ Blackstone demanded.

  * * *

  She’s lying.

  Lukas fought to regain his cast-iron control. And locate the cold hard logic he relied on which had deserted him the minute he’d set eyes on the woman. But as he held the girl’s slender arm, watched her pulse batter her collarbone and studied her heart-shaped face, seeing the anguish and defiance in her vivid emerald eyes, the sprinkle of freckles across her nose, the full lips reddened by his angry kiss—one realisation blindsided him.

  This girl was not the woman who had disturbed his brother’s mind with her insidious lies four years ago. The shape of her face was different; she was slightly shorter—and she had none of Darcy O’Hara’s guile.

  Strangely, the knowledge quelled at least a little of his fury.

  He would have hated himself if he had responded to Darcy in that way. If she were really dead, he certainly felt no regret. But then he registered what else the girl had said. She was Darcy’s sister, and still peddling the same damn lie her sister Darcy had used four years ago to extort money from Alexei.

  So was his attraction to this girl really any better?

  He shouldn’t have touched her, certainly shouldn’t have kissed her. But the compulsion to teach her a lesson had become mixed up in a host of unbidden and unwanted desires as her fresh, subtle scent had engulfed him and her body had surrendered to his during the steps of the dance.

  One look at those damn lips as they’d finished dancing, her panting breaths making her full breasts rise and fall against the bodice of her gown—and all he’d wanted to do was feast on her mouth.

  He didn’t like it. He mastered his urges. Controlled them. Unlike his brother, he had learned at an early age that impulse and need were a weakness, and dangerous if you indulged either one. But he’d never had that control tested until about five minutes ago, when he’d spied her in the crowd. Instincts beyond his control had taken over at that point. It was something he would have to examine carefully after he was finished with her—because he did not intend to let it happen again.

  ‘Please, you have to listen to me,’ she begged, even though the flash of defiance in her eyes told a different story.

  He felt a certain admiration for her. She might be as much of a gold-digger as her sister, but she had none of Darcy’s acting ability—her enmity towards him was plain on her face.

  ‘I have to do no such thing,’ he said. But he didn’t let go of her arm. Instead he walked towards the staircase, hauling her with him—the crowd already closing in on him.

  ‘Mr Blackstone, the police are on their way.’ Jack Tanner, the head of his security team for Blackstone’s Manhattan, fell into step on his other side, looking ill at ease.

  And well he should.

  ‘Find out how she got past security,’ he barked, fuming at that oversight. ‘I want a full report on my desk in an hour.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Tanner replied. ‘Do you want us to take her off your hands?’ he offered, two of his security detail following close behind as they mounted the stairs.

  The girl hadn’t objected to being marched out of the ballroom, but he felt her stiffen at the suggestion.

  Pausing at the top of the stairs, he could see the paparazzi firing off shots from behind the security cordon and Dex Garvey having a microphone shoved in his face. The eyes of the guests were on them. This little incident was going to be all over the gossip columns in the morning and would already have started hitting the celebrity blogs and websites. He’d helped with that—by not resisting the foolish urge to dance with her, and then kiss her—but the icing on the cake would be the girl’s fatuous claim about Alexei having a child.

  The pulse of loss hit him hard. And then fury reverberated through him. He’d make sure she paid for that piece of theatre. He had no doubt at all she’d been waiting for an opportunity to announce the lie at a moment when it would get maximum exposure—to increase the price of her silence and her bargaining position. That he’d gifted her the perfect photo op with that kiss only made him more furious, with himself as much as her.

  This girl was about to find out that he could not be as easily manipulated as he had been four years ago, when he’d parted with fifty thousand dollars simply to save Alexei the embarrassment of having to make a public announcement that he was not responsible for Darcy’s so-called condition.

  Well, Alexei was gone now—the car crash that had killed him while he was out of his head on cocaine and champagne a direct result of Darcy O’Hara’s lies, to Lukas’s way of thinking. So Lukas had no reason and certainly no incentive to pay another cent. But this girl needed to be taught a lesson. Once and for all.

  He wasn’t leaving that task to the police or anyone else. He owed it to Alexei.

  ‘I wish to talk to her in private,’ he said to Tanner. ‘Keep the police busy until then. And get rid of the press.’ He would speak to Garvey tomorrow about a press release to quell any rumours arising from this evening’s events. Alexei had always wanted to avoid just such a necessity, but Alexei was gone now. And the truth could no longer hurt him. If anything, it ought to stop any more gold-diggers like the O’Hara sisters coming out of the woodwork.

  He felt the girl’s body sag, no doubt with relief. As he marched her down the corridor towards his private suite he felt an answering surge of satisfaction. She thought she’d just got what she wanted. He was going to enjoy proving the opposite.

  He entered the suite and hauled her in after him, then let her go. As she stumbled to a stop in the centre of the room, he slammed the door and clicked the lock.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets, angered anew by the pulse of heat in his crotch which hadn’t subsided since that ill-advised kiss.

  She wrapped her arms around her midriff, the tremors racking her body a nice touch, he thought, as she lifted her chin and faced him, the leap of defiance still sparkling in the green depths of her irises. Her freckles stood out against the vivid flush of exertion on her cheeks—but he noticed for the first time the shadows under her eyes.

  He ruthlessly quelled the prickle of sympathy.

  Maybe she was an even better actress than her sister, after all. From the look of her, anyone would think she was an avenging angel on the verge of collapse, not an accomplished little blackmailer.

  His gaze roamed over her, and he let every ounce of his contempt show. In the brighter light, the dress looked considerably less impressive. It didn’t even fit her properly, the soft mounds of her breasts pressed indecently against the satin. His gaze snagged on the outline of her nipples. He jerked it away again, before the heat in his crotch swelled.

  She’d lost her shoes in the struggle with the security guard, her bare unpainted toes peeping out from underneath the gown’s frayed hem.

  His gaze rose to examine her face. She wore no jewellery and minimal make-up. Her dewy skin was as soft and clear as a child’s. He flinched inwardly—exactly how old was she? She looked like a teenager, eighteen or nineteen at the most, playing dress-up.

  The Little Orphan Annie look wasn’t one he’d been susceptible to before now—which only made the incendiary effect of having her in his arms, her mouth at his mercy, all the more galling and inexplicable.

  ‘Talk,’ he said. The curt demand made her flinch. ‘You’ve got five minutes to explain exactly how much you think your little revelation about Alexei fathering a son is worth before I hand you over to the cops.’

  At which point he would take great pleasure in adding a charge of extortion to the ones of trespass and assault.

  * * *

  ‘What?’ Bronte’s voice broke on the word, her shock almost as huge as her exhaustion. And her confusion.

  ‘You heard me. How. Much.’ The jag
ged scar on his cheek pulsed, emphasising his hatred.

  And, as much as she hated him in return, she didn’t understand it.

  Exactly how cruel and arrogant was this man? She’d just told him his dead twin had a child. And all he seemed concerned about was money—and humiliating her.

  He’d treated her with complete contempt, from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. He’d as good as ravaged her in front of hundreds of people—and said the most vile things imaginable about a woman who couldn’t defend herself—and now he was accusing her of being some kind of blackmailer.

  She bit into her lip, hard enough to taste blood. And held on to the diatribe she wanted to scream at him.

  Don’t punch him again, Bronte. You need his co-operation. Nico needs his cooperation.

  She flexed her fingers, pressing the bruised knuckles under her arm, and tried to channel Mahatma Gandhi. Not easy when she was feeling more like Genghis Khan.

  Unfortunately, Lukas Blackstone was the one with all the power here. Not just in terms of his money and influence, but even within the confines of this room. He towered over her. In her bare feet she was barely five foot three; she suspected he was at least a foot taller, with an impressively fit build for a man who had probably spent every moment of his existence being pampered to within an inch of his life. There wasn’t an ounce of softness or give about him. He looked completely indomitable—and completely furious. Like a lion in his prime—who could devour her and all her hopes with one vicious swipe of his paw, and then forget about her.

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ she said, as clearly as she could while her knees were shaking.

  She wasn’t scared of him, she told herself staunchly. This was just a reaction to everything that had happened in the last few minutes, and hours, and days and weeks. It felt as if all her hopes and fears, all her dreams and all her nightmares, were centred in this one room, concentrated on this one man—and, for better or worse, she had to come out on top in this battle of wills or she would lose everything that mattered to her.

  Unfortunately, she had never been the sunny, flirtatious, irresistible sister. That had always been Darcy. Darcy with her sweet smile and her effervescent laugh and her determination to always see the best in people, even the father who had discarded them both to start another family. And Alexei Blackstone, who Darcy had been convinced had fallen madly in love with her, even if all the evidence from their one-night stand and its aftermath had suggested the opposite.

  Alexei Blackstone had used Darcy. He’d been nothing more than a billionaire playboy who had hooked up with her sister for a night in Monaco, while her sister had been working at the casino bar and he’d been touring the tables. After a moonlit drive in his new sports car, he’d seduced her hopelessly romantic sister over champagne and canapés in the Blackstone Villa on the Côte D’Azur. He’d taken her virginity and then discarded her the next day. Darcy had lost her job and returned to London, confused and heartbroken, but when she’d found out she was pregnant, contacting Alexei had been impossible. He’d never responded to any of the frantic messages Darcy had left him. And then Lukas had appeared in London a few days later, his limousine taking Darcy to a private meeting at the Blackstone Park Lane. There he’d tried to bully and blackmail Darcy into having an abortion, which Darcy had been convinced had all been Lukas’s idea.

  Bronte wasn’t convinced that Alexei wasn’t the one who had set his big brother on Darcy and told him to bribe her into silence, but Darcy wouldn’t hear of it.

  Alexei Blackstone was as much of a creep as his brother to Bronte’s way of thinking—just a more charming one. But when Darcy had spoken of him that last time, months after his death, her eyes glazed with fever and love, an hour after Nico’s birth, Bronte had simply nodded, having lost the desire to destroy her sister’s comforting delusions.

  ‘Promise me you won’t tell Alexei’s brother I didn’t have the abortion. Lukas must never know about Nico.’

  Bronte’s mind stalled, the fog of exhaustion burned away by the flash fire of memory. She flexed her fingers, feeling Darcy’s weak grip tightening on her hand as the sharp sickly smell of morphine and disinfectant clogged Bronte’s lungs. And the words that had haunted her and driven her for three years whispered across her consciousness.

  ‘I promise, Darcy. I’ll look after Nico. And Lukas Blackstone will never know he exists.’

  She’d only been eighteen when Nico had come into her life and the double whammy of responsibility and Darcy’s death had cut her carefree existence off at the knees. The newborn baby had been nothing but a burden at first, especially in the depths of her grief, when just getting out of bed each morning had felt like an endeavour on a par with building the Taj Mahal singlehanded.

  But eventually Nico, such a sweet, smiley baby boy, had become Bronte’s salvation, yanking her out of her grief and back into the world. She’d found a secure job as a nightclub cleaner and worked her backside off to raise Nico alone. And eventually she and Nico had found a rhythm. A rhythm which suited them. They’d weathered the highs and the many lows together. They were a team. And she’d kept her promise to Darcy. Until Nico’s paediatrician Dr Patel had told her two days ago—in her bright airy office at Westminster Children’s Hospital—that Bronte wasn’t the donor they needed for Nico’s treatment. And maybe they should look for a donor in his father’s family.

  Unlike Darcy, Bronte had always been a realist, a pragmatist, the one who knew people rarely, if ever, were as good as they appeared to be on the surface. And if she’d ever been an optimist she wasn’t one any more. But if the paediatrician had believed the devil himself was Nico’s best hope she would have tracked him down—and forced him to cooperate. But having to dig deep and find a way to charm Lukas Blackstone now she’d found him felt impossible somehow—probably because her experience of charming any man was precisely zilch.

  Just concentrate on the now. And get through this. For Nikky and Darcy.

  Lukas’s brows drew down, making his harsh, brooding face look even more forbidding.

  ‘If you don’t want money,’ he said, the cynical note a clear indication he was humouring her with that supposition, ‘then why did you gatecrash this event?’

  ‘I told you why,’ Bronte snapped, then wished she could bite off her tongue. But he didn’t seem particularly fazed by her show of temper. Probably because he held all the cards. ‘Because I need to talk to you about Nico,’ she continued. ‘Who is your brother Alexei’s son.’

  Lukas’s eyes flickered with an intense emotion she couldn’t name. But then the tiny reaction was gone, and the look he sent her could only be described as scathing. And dismissive.

  She pushed against the despair threatening to engulf her. Had coming here been a terrible mistake?

  ‘Nico is your nephew,’ she reiterated, even though admitting the connection between this cynical, indifferent man and that innocent, funny, beautiful little boy made her stomach hurt. ‘He’s only three years old and he’s very ill—his only hope is an experimental stem cell treatment. We need at least a partial donor match but, with both his biological parents dead, Dr Patel says his best hope of finding a match is you—because you’re his father’s identical twin.’

  Her voice trailed off because his face had remained impassive. Except for the tiny tic of a muscle in his jaw. Exactly how inhuman was he, that the plight of a child—his brother’s child—wouldn’t move him, even in the slightest?

  But then his frown became more pronounced, as if he were considering what she’d said. Had he heard her? Would he at least consider helping?

  ‘If there even is such a child,’ he said, his tone laced with scepticism now as well as barely concealed contempt, ‘and he is actually sick, I think we both know there is no chance I will be a suitable donor.’

  ‘No, we don’t. How could we? If you haven’t been tested.’

  ‘Because there is no
possible way Alexei could have fathered this boy. Something your sister knew when she tried to claim the same thing four years ago.’

  ‘Why are you saying that?’ she asked, confused now as well as frightened. ‘You knew Alexei was the father, or you wouldn’t have given my sister fifty thousand dollars to have an abortion.’

  His eyebrows rose then, and for the first time she could see she’d surprised him. ‘Is that what your sister told you?’

  ‘Yes, and I believed her—she would never have lied to me.’ Darcy had never had a single duplicitous or greedy bone in her body. She’d taken this man’s blood money, yes, but only for the sake of her child—to put a down payment on the tiny basement flat where they lived in Hackney, East London.

  ‘How melodramatic,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell her to have an abortion, for the simple reason that I didn’t believe her story about being pregnant. And if she was pregnant I knew damn well the child wasn’t Alexei’s. If she thought that was what the money was for, that was her interpretation. I simply told her I was paying her the money to rid myself and Alexei of the problem she presented.’

  ‘But she was pregnant and Alexei is the father...’

  ‘I met your sister exactly once,’ Lukas interrupted, the contempt in his voice slicing Bronte to the bone. ‘Obviously I underestimated the problem. I thought she was simply a good liar, an accomplished gold-digger. I didn’t realise she was delusional and that she actually believed Alexei was the father.’

  ‘But Darcy wasn’t delusional. She was telling the truth.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t. Alexei could not possibly have fathered her child.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because my brother was infertile. He had been since the age of sixteen.’

  ‘But that can’t be true.’ Bronte’s mind stalled, the revelation a crushing blow. Had Darcy made a mistake? About Nico’s father? Had this mission all been a pointless, futile exercise which was likely to get her arrested for no good reason...?