Returning for His Unknown Son Page 3

  What did you say to a man who’d abandoned you for eight years?

  “You need to get out of those wet clothes.”

  His voice had always been deep. Now it bordered on a raspy whisper. Priya flushed, memories hitting her hard and in places she didn’t want to think of. She’d heard it that husky only once. On that long-ago night when they’d been stranded at a ski cabin in the Alps and she’d finally given in to what she’d considered to be a forbidden desire for him. Technically, they’d been married for five months by then.

  God, she’d been a naive, prudish fool. Chastising herself for days afterward about what it meant. Running away from her own desires as if they were somehow wrong.

  The memory was a whiplash against her senses—vivid and evocative. He’d sounded like that when he’d been deep inside her, whispering filthy things in her ear, tipping her over into climax again and again.

  “It’s clear that you have lost the little common sense you ever possessed,” he said, jerking her attention back to him in the now.

  Priya looked at him over her shoulder, fisting her hands, trying to find her equilibrium. Whatever sexual miasma clouded her head fizzed away instantly. “That’s what you want to say to me right now?”

  “I don’t care what you want to hear from me. You need to change, Pree. Now, before you almost die again from pneumonia.”

  His harsh words tilted her world back on its axis. Hot, scalding anger filled her, washing away every fond, heated memory. Turning around, she poked him in the chest, which was still annoyingly hard.

  “How dare you talk to me as though I’m a child. In case you’ve conveniently forgotten, you were gone for eight years. Doing God knows what while I held everything together—the company from all the vultures circling it, your grandfather and his grief and your...”

  Christ, he didn’t know about Jayden. He didn’t know that they had a...son!

  Tears gathered in her throat, and she took a deep breath to blink them away. No way in hell was she crying in front of Christian. No way in hell was she going to let him think she needed rescuing. That she was still that frail wisp of a girl.

  Something almost like anguish crossed his face. And she realized she’d hurt him, somehow. “I didn’t simply leave you. You know me better than that, Pree.”

  “No, I don’t. It’s been eight years, Christian. I know how to take care of myself, but you...you...”

  One dark blond brow rose in that stunningly good-looking face. His arms folded at his abdomen, he towered over her. “It’s good to see you’re still that Goody Two-shoes who turns pink at the mere thought of a curse word.” The flash of his white teeth against that dirty blond beard rendered him stunning.

  “You,” she poked him again, moving closer, “arrogant,” another poke, “smug,” once more even harder, “bastard.”

  The humor in his eyes deepened, turning them a dark gray blue. That glimmering, almost wicked challenge with which he’d always greeted her was back. And something more—a darker emotion she couldn’t quite identify.

  “I don’t need to be rescued anymore.”

  “And yet you stand there in that soaking-wet dress, spitting mad at me,” he said, the scent of him coiling around her, “when your first thought should be for yourself.”

  “It would serve you right if I did catch pneumonia again and died on you. Then you’d know how it feels to be left behind.” She regretted the childish declaration the moment she made it.

  Insult over injury came in the form of a sneeze. Then came one more and then another, until her head felt like it would explode. Her breathing turned shallow, and she shivered again.

  How very like the universe to mess with her in this moment.

  Christian’s smile disappeared and a flurry of the filthiest curses she’d ever heard painted the air. The scent of him assaulted her nostrils. In the next blink—or was it the next sneeze?—Priya was suspended over his shoulder, hanging upside down.

  For a few stunned seconds, she wondered if she was in one of those strangely feverish dreams she’d had of him so many times. If she was going to wake up and find herself scrabbling through the covers looking for that warm, male body, only to discover she was alone again.

  But the dig of his hard shoulder into her belly was far too real to ignore. As were his back muscles against her chest and his abdomen at her thighs. The thin linen of his shirt had dried and his skin through the material was warm against her chin. Whatever outrage Priya could’ve mustered dissipated like morning mist as warmth from his body tingled all over her. Her sinuses were happy for the ride and her head cleared of the shock that had taken over ever since she’d spied his figure waiting for her.

  She considered punching his broad back with her fists just to affect outrage. Instead she sighed and hung on.

  Challenging Christian with her mortality had been at best a cheap shot and at worst, a cruel joke. Didn’t matter if he deserved it or not. Death of the people he cared about—even as a joke—wasn’t something he could ever tolerate.

  With her slung over his shoulder, he walked up the wide staircase without breaking for a breath. Her eyes fell on the huge portrait of him hanging on the wall on the landing. Laughter burst out of her, cleansing the last remnants of grief, washing away the niggling doubt that all this was nothing but another dream she’d have to wake up from.

  Her breath grunted out of her when he hitched her higher on the shoulder and then she did call him a thousand names. The curses came as if she’d stored them up for eight years. His laughter exploded around them, his chest rumbling against her belly, sending a quiver of sensation up and down her body.

  He kicked the door of the master bedroom open—his room that was now hers—and walked past the huge king bed that had been custom made to accommodate his six-foot-three-inch frame, as he liked to sprawl out. Past the dresser with a framed picture of them on their wedding day eight and a half years ago.

  Her in a simple off-white knee-length dress and Christian in his black leather jacket with a white shirt underneath and blue jeans. Standing outside the city hall. There wasn’t the usual joy or laughter or love that was found in pictures of a newly married couple. They had married purely for convenience, after all. But there had at least been trust between them.

  Despite never understanding her strange, unbearable attraction to him after losing Jai, Priya had always trusted him. Because Jai, the common thread that had bound them to each other, that had brought them together, had trusted him implicitly.

  Of course, Christian hadn’t simply abandoned her. That wasn’t something he’d do. Was it?

  She couldn’t be sure, because they were little more than strangers now. And yet he was also her husband and, even more important, he was the father of her son.

  Priya’s feet hit the cold, solid black marble floor of the vast bathroom as Christian gently put her down. But she’d never felt less sure of the ground under her feet.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “UNZIP ME.”

  Christian’s head jerked in the direction of that soft command so fast that it wouldn’t be surprising if he’d permanently damaged his neck.

  Her dark, damp hair pulled away from her neck, Priya looked at him over her shoulder. Her brown eyes glittered with a challenge that struck him, hard and deep. He held her gaze, not caring what she saw in his. Then because he was a greedy bastard parched for sustenance, he let it rove over her with a thoroughly possessive attitude he didn’t even try to curb.

  For so many years he’d wondered if she was the product of his imagination. Of some illusion his mind was weaving because of a deep-seated need to discover who he was. The intense quality of those dreams about her, his mindless obsession with her, had kept him going. As if she was the tugboat he needed to hold on to to eventually reach the shore.

  Even when he hadn’t been able to remember who he was, battling the
blackness in his head year after year, her face had stood out in his mind, wreathed in shadows. Bits and pieces of her beckoning him closer. From the straight little nose and the wide mouth to the cascading silk of her jet-black hair.

  Now that he was here, staring at her, that desperate need he’d felt then was multiplied a thousand times. He drank her in, noting little details that had remained hazy in those dreams. He had a feeling it would take him a decade or more to fill in the smudged picture of her he’d carried inside his damaged memory for so long. Another decade to note all the new facets of her.

  His wife—Christian refused to think of her any other way—looked like a goddess. A siren he was ready to surrender to, with pleasure.

  Her long neck arched as she considered him with a quiet boldness he’d always sensed beneath her surface shyness. His fingers itched to follow the deep dip of her small waist and the flare of her hips. He wanted to cup her buttocks and pull her to him until she was plastered against him. This need for the woman in his dreams had forced him to survive when all he’d wanted to do was surrender to the black void in his mind.

  But now that she was in front of him, a thread of something he didn’t understand filled his heart. It kept him still, even as desire filled his very veins, washing away all that aching emptiness that had driven him nearly insane.

  “Have you forgotten how to take the clothes off a woman, Christian?” she said, her expression full of a haughty arrogance that was like tinder to the explosive desire coursing through him. “Have the last eight years changed you that much?”

  Laughter barreled out of him, from deep within him, shaking him, purging the last remnants of the fear he’d carried within himself. Until he’d seen the shock and surprise in those beautiful brown eyes. Until he’d held her slender body in his arms and carried her into the house. Even his childhood home had felt like a stranger without her in it.

  But beneath his laughter, there was discombobulation, too.

  This wasn’t the Priya he’d met when he’d been a cocky eighteen-year-old.

  She wasn’t the girl he’d been fascinated by when she’d been his best friend’s shy yet whip-smart fiancée who’d found holes in his code and broken his app with one try. Not the girl with whom his obsession had tied him up in knots of guilt and self-loathing.

  Because he was the man who’d always had everything in the world and still, he’d lusted after his best friend’s girl. The very friend who’d been a brother and family to Christian from the moment they’d bonded in middle school.

  She wasn’t the girl he’d rescued from a fog of grief and gut-wrenching loneliness that had threatened to devour them both after they’d lost Jai in a freak road traffic accident. She wasn’t the girl with a shy smile and wary words and unwavering loyalty who had been his only link to sanity when all he’d wanted was to howl at the universe and its cruelty in snatching away a person he’d loved yet again.

  She wasn’t the girl he’d married and tried his best to keep at arm’s length, even then protecting her, this time from himself.

  She wasn’t the girl in whose eyes he’d seen desire for him and promised himself that he’d taste it once. Only once.

  She wasn’t a girl at all. This was a woman fierce and angry and sexy—a combination that sent his muscles curling with the kind of need that he was sure he’d never allowed to touch him.

  The last eight years had left their mark on her. There was a fire in her eyes now and a cloak of armor she seemed to have wrapped herself up in. The hot pink dress clung to her curves—a sure departure from the mostly baggy clothes she’d worn then. The stilettos made her legs look longer.

  Even the way she stood there and watched him over her shoulder was different. It was confident. Sexy as hell. It was also inexplicably bewildering.

  With that hard-won patience he’d developed out of necessity, he examined his own confusion. He wanted the comfort of that shy, quiet girl she’d been. He wanted the comfort of knowing that she hadn’t changed in eight years. That she hadn’t moved on with her life without him. That she hadn’t stopped...needing him.

  Which was more than a little messed up but at least it was the truth.

  He was Christian Mikkelsen, billionaire, one-half of the brilliant tech company Modi Mikkelsen Technologies and a philanthropist to boot. Although that last part had been mostly instilled in him by Jai. The one man he’d tried to emulate and whose standards he’d always tried to live up to, even after he’d died.

  And this woman who stared at him with such undisguised anger and poorly hidden desire was his wife. A wife he’d acquired as a chess move against his grandfather and the MMT board’s compulsive need to curb his extracurricular activities. More important, she’d been a friend he’d sworn to protect, even from himself.

  As he reached her and breathed in the scent of her, Christian understood the most important thing in all the muddy disaster of blackness his life had been for the last eight years. The attraction between them was as fierce and as wild as he remembered.

  His heart thudding, he moved closer to her. Because of her struggle, the zipper of her dress had gotten stuck in the fabric. It was still damp in places. That urge to rip it off her and envelop her in the thickest, warmest blanket was overwhelming.

  Weird how his mind remembered so vividly the time when she’d almost died due to pneumonia. He and Jai had spent an agonizing forty-eight hours in the sterile hospital café waiting for news. He’d been on edge all night, and Jai, as always, had been the calm, solid presence. When Priya had finally been out of danger, the distasteful truth had dawned on him—he was madly in love with his best friend’s fiancée.

  At that time, he’d told himself that her appeal was that she was forbidden to him. God, what an idiot he’d been.

  “It’s stuck,” he said, raising his hands but unable to drop them down onto her shoulders. His fingers shook slightly. It wasn’t that he felt useless so much as he was awed by how desperately he wanted to touch her. Anything that made him this desperate, he usually resisted. That was a truth he knew of himself.

  The tall mirrors all around them reflected them back, blurring the boundaries between their bodies. He met her gaze in one.

  “Christian?”

  “I haven’t touched anyone in eight years.” The words came easily.

  Her eyes widened, the bones in her neck standing out in stark relief. “What?”

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone touching me, either.”

  He wasn’t sure why he was telling her this. He was also sure that this wasn’t him—this man who simply said whatever was in his heart. The skin of his abdomen still stung a little after she’d raked her fingers over him, marking him when she’d thought he was nothing but a mirage. How desperately she’d wanted for him to be real.

  A cacophony of emotions sang through him, not that he could make head or tail out of them. Only that he needed her to know. To understand.

  Her chest rose and fell and the calm she cloaked herself with shattered.

  Christian thought she’d bolt out of his reach, out of shock if nothing else. He hated the thought of her being scared of him. Despised it.

  A fire he’d never seen before burned in her gaze as she held his in the mirror. “Why didn’t you come back once you recovered from the plane crash? How could you stay away? After what happened with Jai, how could you be so cruel as to let me go on thinking, even for one damned day more, that I’d lost you, too?”

  He touched her then, the anguish in her words pulling him along.

  She was cold and shaking and he pressed his fingers deeper into her shoulders. It felt as if he’d touched a live wire. Her skin was soft and silky to touch. “I was in a coma for two years after I washed up ashore. Stuck in a corner bed in some hospital on Saint Martin, dependent on the charity and goodwill of strangers. This French nurse... She looked after me, I was told, with devo
tion I’m sure I didn’t deserve. After I regained consciousness, I had no idea who I was.” He leaned his forehead against the back of her head, his breaths coming shallow again. “My mind’s been blank for so long, Pree—like a dark, long, stretch of the ocean I couldn’t cross however hard I swam...”

  He shuddered at the memory of how thick and biting that darkness had been.

  The tips of her fingers reached his, barely touching, but reminding him he wasn’t alone in that unblinking darkness anymore. Christian sensed her hesitation as clearly as the thud of his heartbeat. Her ache for him was written across her lovely features.

  He continued, wanting to get it over with. “Two days ago, I saw your face on an old newspaper. Wrapped up around a piece of fried fish. It was from the tech convention in London two months ago. Your name was under it in big letters—Priya Mikkelsen. Everything fell into place, as if someone had suddenly played a reel of my entire life and forced me to watch. You and Grandpa and Jai and...” He swallowed, trying to keep emotion out of his tone. “It was as if a curtain had suddenly been pulled back. It took me this long to put enough funds together to buy the plane ticket home.”

  She didn’t move or speak for a long time. For all the reflections of her face in the mirrors around him, he had no idea what she was thinking. The silence that surrounded them didn’t feel uncomfortable or awkward though. Didn’t feel like that unending quiet in his head that he had hated so much.

  They stood like that for a long time, almost touching but not quite.

  “Tear it off,” she said suddenly, the words rupturing the quiet. “The dress, now. I think I’ve wasted enough time walking around in it like some hapless waif.”

  If he felt a sliver of disappointment in his gut, Christian shoved it away. Priya had never been one for elaborate words or expressing effusive sentiments. And he had no doubt today had taken a toll on her.