The Marriage Contract

She’d turned to face him, crossing her arms under her breasts that he logically knew were engorged from childbirth, though that didn’t seem to stop his imagination from calling up what they looked like: expanses of beautiful flesh topped by hard, dusky nipples. McKenna had miles of skin that Des wanted to put his hands on.

What was it about her that called to him so deeply?

“I’m just teasing you.” Her eyes twinkled. “I actually couldn’t imagine you doing either one.”

A smile spread across his face before he could stop it. “I can dance.”

“Ha, you’re totally lying.”

“I can dance,” he repeated. “Just not to music.”

He fell into her rich, dark eyes and he reached out to snag a lock of her hair, fingering the silky softness before he fully realized that he’d given in to the impulse. The moment grew tense. Aware. So thick, he couldn’t have cut it with a laser.

“I should...go,” she murmured and blinked, unwinding the spell. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

The lock of hair fell from his fingers as the mood shattered. Fortunately her exodus was quick enough that she didn’t get to witness how well she’d bobbled his composure.

He’d have sworn there was an answering echo of attraction and heat in her gaze.

He wasn’t any closer to unraveling the mysteries lurking inside her, but he did know one thing. McKenna Moore had taken his seed into her womb and created a miracle through artificial insemination.

What had once felt practical now felt like a mistake. One he couldn’t rectify.

But how could he have known he’d take one look at her and wish he’d impregnated her by making love over and over and over until she’d conceived?

Madness. Build something and forget all of this fatalistic nonsense.

Women were treacherous under the best of circumstances and McKenna Moore was no different. She just had a unique wrapper that rendered Des stupid, apparently.

Of course the most expedient way to nip this attraction in the bud would be to tell her how badly he’d wanted to thread all of his fingers through her hair and kiss her until her clothes melted off. She’d be mortified and finally figure out that she should be running away from Desmond Pierce. That would be that.

* * *

McKenna fled Desmond’s workshop, her pulse still pounding in her throat.

What the hell had just happened? One minute she was trying to forge a friendship with the world’s most reclusive billionaire and the next he had her hair draped across his hand.

She could still feel the tug as his fingers lifted the strands. The look on his face had been enthralled, as if he’d unexpectedly found gold. She hadn’t been around the block very many times, a testament to how long she’d been with James, her high school boyfriend, not to mention the years of difficult undergraduate course work that hadn’t allowed for much time to date. But she knew when a man was thinking about kissing her, and that’s exactly what had been on Desmond’s mind.

That would be a huge mistake.

She needed to walk out of this house in three months unencumbered, emotionally and physically, and Desmond was dangerous. He held all the cards in this scenario and if she wanted to dedicate her life to medicine, she had to be careful. What would happen if she accidentally got pregnant again? More delays. More agonizing decisions and, frankly, she didn’t have enough willpower left to deal with those kinds of consequences.

And what made her near mistake even worse was that she’d almost forgotten why she was there. She’d fallen into borderline flirting that was nothing like how she usually was with men. But Desmond was darkly mysterious and intriguing in a way she found sexy, totally against her will. They shared an almost mystical connection, one she’d never felt before, and it was as scary as it was fascinating.

Okay. Seeking him out had been an error in judgment. Obviously. But they never crossed paths and she was starting to wonder if she’d imagined that she’d come home from the hospital with a man. It only made sense that she should be on friendly terms with her baby’s father.

Why that made sense, she couldn’t remember all at once. Desmond didn’t want a mother for his son. Just a chuck wagon. Once she helped Conner wean, she’d finally be on track to get her medical degree after six arduous years as an undergrad and one grueling year spent prepping her body to get pregnant, being pregnant and then giving birth.

In a house this size, there was literally no reason she ever had to see Desmond again. She’d managed to settle in and live here for over a week without so much as a glimpse until she’d sought him out in his workshop.

Her days fell into a rhythm that didn’t suck. Mrs. Elliot fed her and provided companionable but neutral conversation when McKenna prompted her. Clothes magically appeared cleaned and pressed in McKenna’s closet. Twice a week, her beautifully decorated bedroom and the adjoining bathroom were unobtrusively cleaned. All in all, she was drowning in luxury. And she wouldn’t apologize for enjoying it.

To shed the baby weight that had settled around her hips and stomach, she’d started swimming in the pool a couple of hours a day. Before she’d gotten pregnant, she’d jogged. But there were no trails through the heavy forest of hemlocks and maples that surrounded this gothic mansion perched at the edge of the Columbia River. Even if she found a place to run, her enormous breasts hurt when she did something overly taxing, like breathing and thinking. She could only imagine how painful it would be to jog three miles.

The pool was amazing, huge and landscaped with all sorts of indoor plants that made her feel like she was at a tropical oasis on another continent instead of in northwest Oregon where she’d spent the whole of her life. A glass ceiling let in light but there were no windows to break the illusion. She could swim uninterrupted for as long as she liked. It was heavenly.

Until she emerged from the water one day and wiped her face to see Desmond sitting on one of the lounge chairs, quietly watching her. She hadn’t seen him since the workshop incident a week ago that might have been an almost kiss.

“Hey,” she called, mystified why her pulse leaped into overdrive the second her senses registered his presence. “Been here long?”

“Long enough,” he said cryptically, his smooth voice echoing in the cavernous pool area. “Am I disturbing you?”

He’d sought her out, clearly, since he wasn’t dressed for swimming and wore an expectant expression.

So she lied. “Of course not.”

In reality he did disturb her. A lot. His eyes matched his name, piercing her to the bone when he looked at her, and she didn’t like how shivery and goose-pimply he turned her mostly bare skin. There was something about him she couldn’t put her finger on, but the man had more shadows than a graveyard. She could see them flitting around in his expression, in his demeanor, as if they weighed him down.

Until he smiled. And thank God he didn’t do that more often, because he went from sexy in an abstract way to holy-crap hot.

So she’d do everything in her power to not make him smile for however long he planned to grace her with his presence. Hopefully that would only be a few minutes. If she’d known he was going to make an appearance, she’d have brought something to cover her wet swimsuit, like a full suit of armor made of inch-thick chain mail.

The way he was looking at her made her feel exposed.

She settled for a towel, draping it around her torso like a makeshift toga, which at least covered her pointy nipples, and sat on the next lounge chair, facing him.

Desmond was wearing a white button-down shirt today, with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and, despite teasing him the other day about his fashion sense, he had such a strange, magnetic aura that she scarcely noticed anything extraneous like clothes. All she saw was him.

“Are you settling in okay?” he asked.

She had the sense the question wasn’t small talk. “Sure. What’s not to like?”

His eyebrows quirked. “The fact that you’re here in the first place.”

“You’re making it worth my while, remember?”

That shouldn’t have come out so sarcastically. After all, she’d been the one to shake her head at monetary compensation, which he’d likely have readily ponied up.

But he was making her twitchy with his shadowy gaze. After visiting his workshop, she’d looked up the things he’d invented and his mind was definitely not like other people’s. Innovation after innovation in the areas of robotics and machinery had spilled onto her screen along with published papers full of his endless theoretical ideas.

She was not a stupid person by any stretch, having graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and a 3.5 grade point average, but Desmond Pierce existed on another plane. And that made him thoroughly out of reach to mere mortals like her.

But he was still oh, so intriguing. And they were married. Funny how that had become front and center in her mind all at once.

He nodded. “I’m sorry my request has delayed your own plans.”

Clearly he didn’t get offended by her jokes that weren’t funny. That was a good thing.