His Seductive Proposal: A Touch of Persuasion / Terms of Engagement / An Outrageous Proposal

“But you probably have it at the house, right? In order to register her for kindergarten?”

She nibbled her bottom lip. “Well, I…”

Thank God she was a lousy liar. “Whose name is on the birth certificate, Olivia? You might as well tell me. You know I can find out.”

Suddenly she looked neither sweet nor innocent. “Kevin Wade. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

The sharp pain in his chest took his breath away. “Kevin Wade…”

“Exactly. So you can see that no judge would think you have any rights in this instance at all.” Her eyes were cold, and even that realization was painful. The Olivia he had known smiled constantly, her joie de vivre captivating and so very seductive.

Now her demeanor was icy.

“You put my name on her birth certificate,” he croaked. It kept coming back to that. Kevin Wade was a father. Kieran had a daughter.

“Correction,” she said with a flat intonation that disguised any emotion. “In the hospital, when I gave birth to my daughter, I listed a fictional name for her father. It had nothing to do with you.”

He clamped down on his frustration, acknowledging that he was getting nowhere with this approach. Unable to sit any longer, he sprang to his feet and paced, pausing at the windows to look out at the ocean in the far distance. One summer he had lived for six weeks on a houseboat in Bali. It was the freest he had ever felt, the most relaxed.

Too bad life wasn’t always so easy.

Olivia continued to sit in stubborn silence, so he kept his back to her. “When you hired an investigator, what did you find out about me?”

After several seconds of silence, she spoke. “That your real name is Kieran Wolff. You lost your mother and aunt to a violent abduction and shooting when you were small. Your father and uncle raised you and your siblings and cousins in seclusion, because they were afraid of another kidnapping attempt.”

He faced her, brooding. “Will you listen to my side of the story?” he asked quietly.

Olivia’s hands were clenched together in her lap, her posture so rigid she seemed in danger of shattering into a million pieces. Though she hid it well, he could sense her agitation. At one time he had been attuned to her every thought and desire.

He swallowed, painfully aware that a king-size bed lay just on the other side of the door. The intensity of the desire he felt for her was shocking. As was the need for her to understand and forgive him. He was culpable for his sins in the past, no doubt about it. But that didn’t excuse Olivia for hiding the existence of his child, his blood.

“Will you listen?” he asked again.

She nodded slowly, eyes downcast.

With a prayer for patience, he crossed the expanse of expensive carpet to sit beside her, hip to hip. She froze, inching back into her corner.

“Look at me, Olivia.” He took her chin in his hand with a gentle grasp, lifting it until her gaze met his. “I’m not the enemy,” he swore. “All I need is for you to be honest with me. And I’ll try my damnedest to do the same.”

Her chocolate-brown eyes were shiny with tears, but she blinked them back, giving him a second terse nod. He tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and forced himself to release her. Touching her was a luxury he couldn’t afford at the moment.

“Okay, then.” He was more a man of action than of words. But if he was fighting for his daughter, he would use any means necessary, even if that meant revealing truths he’d rather not expose.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and dropped his head in his hands. “You were important to me, Olivia.”

A slight humph was her only response. Was that skepticism or denial or maybe both?

“It’s true,” he insisted. “I’d been with a lot of girls before I met you, but you were different.”

Dead silence.

“You made me laugh even when I wanted you so badly, I ached. I never meant to hurt you. But I had made a vow to my father.”

“Of course you had.”

She could give lessons in sarcasm.

“Sneer if you like, but the vow was real. My brothers and cousins and I swore to my father and my uncle that if they would let us go off to college without bodyguards, we would use assumed names and never tell anyone who we really were.”

“So it was okay to sleep with me, but you couldn’t share with me something as simple as the truth about your real name. Charming.”

This time it was Olivia who jumped to her feet and paced. He sat back and stared at her, tracking the gentle sway of her hips as she crisscrossed the room. “I was going to tell you,” he insisted. “But I had to get my father’s permission. And before I could do that, he had a heart attack. That’s when I left England so suddenly.”

She wrapped her arms around her waist. “Leaving behind a lovely eight-word note. Dear Olivia, I have to go home. Sorry.”

He winced. “I was in a hurry.”

“Do you have any clue at all how humiliated I was when I went to the Dean’s office to beg for information about you and was told that Kevin Wade was no longer enrolled? And they were not allowed to give out any information as to your whereabouts because of privacy rules? God, I was embarrassed. And then I was mad at myself for being such a credulous fool.”

“You weren’t a fool,” he said automatically, mentally replaying her words and for the first time realizing what he had put her through. “I’m sorry.”

She kicked the leg of the coffee table, revealing a hint of her mother’s flamboyant temper. “Sorry doesn’t explain why suddenly neither your cell phone nor your email address worked when I tried to reach you.”

“They were school accounts. My exams were over. I knew I wasn’t coming back, so I let them go inactive, because I thought it was the easiest way to make a clean break.”

“If you’re trying to make a case for yourself, you’re failing miserably.”

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he insisted.

“They call them clichés for a reason.” The careful veil she’d kept over her emotions had shredded, and now he was privy to the pure, clean burn of her anger.

“Things were crazy at home,” he said wearily. “I stayed at the hospital round-the-clock for a week. Then when Dad was released, he was extremely depressed. My brother Jacob and I had to entertain him, read to him, listen to music with him. I barely had a thought to myself.”

She nodded slowly. “I get it, Kieran.” He watched her frown as she rolled the last word on her tongue. “I was a temporary girlfriend. Too bad I was so naive. I didn’t realize for a few weeks that I had been dumped. I kept making excuses for you, believing—despite the evidence to the contrary—that we shared something special.”

“We did, damn it.”

“But not special enough for you to pick up the phone and make a call. And you had to know I was back home in California. Yet you didn’t even bother. I should thank you, really. That experience taught me a lot. I grew up fast. You were a horny young man. I was easy pickings. So if that’s all, I’m out of here. I absolve you of any guilt.”

Fortunately for Kieran, the arrival of dinner halted Olivia’s headlong progress to the door. She was forced to cool her heels while the waiter rolled a small table in front of the picture window and smiled as Kieran tipped him generously. When the man departed, the amazing smells wafting from the collection of covered dishes won Olivia over, despite Kieran’s botched attempts to deal with their past.

Neither of them spoke a word for fifteen minutes as they devoured grilled swordfish with mango salsa and spinach salad.

Kieran realized he’d gotten off track. They were supposed to be talking about why Olivia had hidden the existence of his daughter. Instead, Kieran had ended up in a defensive position. Time for a new game plan.

He ate a couple of bites of melon sorbet, wiped his mouth with a snowy linen napkin and leaned back in his chair. “I may have been a jerk,” he said bluntly, “but that doesn’t explain why you never told me I had a daughter. Your turn in the hot seat, Olivia.”

Three (#ulink_32b24cac-c050-530a-90f9-ec7993dad118)