Scandals Of The Rich: A Façade to Shatter

He’d fully intended it to be temporary when he’d said it. It had seemed the perfect solution. He didn’t know the first thing about being a father, wasn’t sure he could even do it. If he married Lia, gave their child a name and a legacy, they could go their separate ways in a few months and everything would be fine.

Except, strangely, since the moment the doctor had given him the test results earlier, he’d felt a sense of duty that warred with those thoughts.

And more than duty. When Lia had come downstairs tonight, he’d felt the same shot of lust he’d experienced in his room in Palermo. The same hard knot of desire had coiled inside his gut and refused to let go.

He bent toward her, breathed in her scent. “What is your perfume, Lia?” he asked, his breath against her ear. A shudder rolled through her. He could feel it in his fingertips where they pressed into her back and throat.

“It’s my own,” she said, her voice husky. “I went to a perfumer in the village. She made it for me.”

Zach breathed again. “Vanilla. A hint of lavender. Perhaps even a shot of lemon. For tartness,” he finished.

“I—I don’t know,” she said quickly. “I didn’t ask.”

Zach couldn’t stop himself from what he did next. He touched his tongue to her throat, glided to the sweet spot beneath her ear. The sound that came out of her made him hard.

Her hands were on his lapels, clutching him. “Zach, stop …”

“Do you really want me to?” he said against her sweet flesh.

She shuddered again, and he reacted with animal instinct, pushing her into an alcove where they were hidden from prying eyes. Unless someone was standing right in front of the opening, they would not be visible from down the corridor.

It was appalling behavior for a public event, but right now Zach was operating on a pure shot of desire.

“I definitely taste lemon,” he said, tilting her chin up and back until her eyes were on his. “You are so beautiful, Lia. So hot.”

“You are trying to seduce me,” she said, closing her eyes. “You would say anything to further your purpose.”

His hand slid around her back, up her rib cage. He shaped her breast, his thumb caressing her nipple beneath the fabric. He was gratified when it pebbled beneath his touch.

“Why do you say such things? Why don’t you want to believe the truth? If you weren’t hot, I wouldn’t be unable to control myself with you. Don’t you remember how it felt? How we burned together?”

“I remember it every day,” she said, still not looking at him. “I carry a reminder.”

He let his hand fall to her belly, pressed gently against her there. She uttered a little protest, but he didn’t take his hand away. He knew it bothered her that her belly wasn’t hard and lean. No, she was soft and pliable, womanly. Her body was curvy, not angular and hard from exercise. He liked it just the way it was.

“Maybe we should alter the arrangement,” he said, his tongue suddenly feeling thick in his mouth. As if he didn’t know the right thing to say. As if he were so new at this game of seducing a woman that the outcome could be in doubt.

She turned her head toward him, as if she was going to speak, and he knew the answer wouldn’t be what he wanted to hear from the way she stiffened at his words.

But he wasn’t going to give her a chance to say a thing. He brought his mouth down on hers, trapping her body between him and the wall. His heart was thundering in his chest, the way it did when he’d gotten that adrenaline rush after he’d aimed his jet straight up and climbed the sky like it was a mountain. Once he’d stopped climbing and starting racing toward earth again, only to pull up before it was too late, the g-forces holding him tight to his seat, he’d gotten another huge rush that made him laugh out loud at the sheer joy of flight.

Kissing Lia was similar to that feeling. Her lips were soft beneath his, though he sensed she didn’t want them to be. Her hands curled into fists on his lapels—but she didn’t push him away. He ghosted a thumb over her nipple and she gasped, letting his tongue inside her mouth.

Another shot of unfiltered desire ricocheted into his groin, making him painfully hard. He’d not been with a woman since he’d been with her. And before that, he’d not been with a woman in months. Lia had been the one to break the drought—and, strangely, he still desired her the way a man desired cool water after a hot trek in the desert.

Zach slid his tongue along hers, coaxed her into responding. She made a little noise in her throat—desire, frustration, he didn’t know which—but she stroked him in return. He tightened his grip on her, pulled her in closer to his body.

And then he assaulted her mouth more precisely, more urgently, taking everything she had to give him and demanding yet more. Her arms went around his neck, and then her body was arching into his, her hips pressing ever closer to that hardness at the core of him.

He cupped her ass with both hands, pulled her tightly to him, so tightly there could be no doubt what he wanted from her. He flexed his hips, pressing his hardness into her, finding that precise spot that made her gasp and moan.

He could make her come this way. He would make her come this way. He needed to hear her pleasure, needed to be the one to make her feel it.

Dimly, the click of heels against tile registered in his brain. The sound was coming closer, closer. With a frustrated groan, Zach broke away from the sweet taste of Lia. She looked up at him, blinking dazedly, her eyes slightly unfocused and distant, her lips moist and shiny. By degrees, her features changed, set, hardened into a cool mask.

“I’m sorry,” he said right before the heels clicked to a stop in front of the alcove. Except he didn’t know what he was sorry for.

“Mr. Scott?”

Zach closed his eyes for a brief moment. Then he turned to greet the socialite who stood there. “Yes, Mrs. Cunningham?”

Elizabeth Cunningham’s gaze darted past him to Lia, then back again. He didn’t miss the tightening of Elizabeth’s mouth, or the disapproving gleam in her eye. It pissed him off. Royally. Elizabeth Cunningham was thirty years younger than her husband, and much too judgmental for one who’d reached the pinnacle of society by marrying into it.

Zach reached for Lia’s hand, pulled her to his side. Claimed her. He thought she might move away from him, but she didn’t. She seemed to grasp the importance of appearances, after all.

“It’s time for your speech,” the other woman said, her gaze settling on his face once more.

Zach made a show of looking at his watch. “Ah, yes, so it is. I lose track of time when I’m with my lovely fiancée, I’m afraid.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened. They darted to Lia. To Lia’s credit, she didn’t flinch or give away by look or gesture that she was anything other than what he’d said she was.

“Come, darling,” he told her, tucking her hand into his arm and leading her back toward the gathered crowd. Another speech, another event to tick off his social calendar.

Afterward, he would take Lia home … and then he’d finish what he’d started here tonight.

Lia was shell-shocked. She sat through the rest of the evening in a daze. Her mouth still tingled where Zach had kissed her. Her body throbbed with tension and need. She’d been so furious with him, so convinced she would never, ever be susceptible to his charms again.

She’d been wrong. Woefully, pitifully wrong.

She was still the same lonely girl she’d always been, the same girl looking for acceptance and affection. She despised herself for that weakness, despised Zach for taking advantage of it. She took a sip of her water and let her gaze slide over the crowd before turning back to Zach.

He stood at a podium close to their table, talking about his father, about the war, about the night he was shot down over enemy territory. He said the words, but she wasn’t convinced he felt any of them.

He was detached. Cold. The crowd was not. They sat rapt. And Lia couldn’t help herself. She was rapt with them. She learned about how his plane took a hit and he’d had to bail out. How he’d broken his leg in the landing, and how he’d had to drag himself to shelter before the enemy found him.

Then she listened to him talk about the six marines who’d been sent in to extract him after several days. They had all died trying to save him. He was the only survivor. It sent a chill down her spine and raised the hairs on the back of her neck.

He’d suffered much, she thought. So much that she couldn’t even begin to understand. She wanted to go to him, wanted to wrap her arms around him and lower his head to her shoulder. And then she just wanted to hold him tight and listen to him breathe.

Toward the end of his speech, a photographer started to take photos. His flash snapped again and again. Zach seemed to stiffen slightly, but he kept talking, kept the crowd in the grip of his oratory. The photographer moved in closer. No one seemed to think anything of it, but Lia remembered that night in Palermo and her palms started to sweat.

Zach gripped the sides of the podium, his knuckles white. The flash went off again and again and she didn’t miss the way he flinched in reaction. It was so subtle as to seem a natural tic, but something told Lia it was not. Then he seemed to stumble over his thoughts, repeating something he’d just said. Panic rose up in Lia’s chest, gripped her by the throat.

She couldn’t watch him lose his way like he had in Palermo. She couldn’t let him suffer that kind of public meltdown. She didn’t know that he would, but she couldn’t get past the memory of the way she’d met him, plastered against that wall with his eyes tight shut and the flashing and booming of lights and bass all around.

She didn’t have to look at this crowd any longer to know it would be disastrous if he did.

Right now, everyone seemed to be paying attention to Zach. She didn’t quite know what to do, or how to deflect their attention—and then she did. She coughed. Loudly. After a moment, Zach’s gaze slid in her direction. She kept coughing, and then she reached for the water, took a swallow as if she were having trouble. Zach’s attention was firmly on her now. He darted his eyes over the crowd, but they inevitably came back to her.