Sweet Deception

It took only seconds for her to make a decision. “I want to go to Buenos Aires.”

“Buenos Aires, Argentina?” She nodded. “What’s in Buenos Aires?”

“Tango lessons,” Zabrina replied. “I want our first dance as husband and wife to be a tango, and what better place to learn the dance of love and passion than in Argentina?”

Rising, Myles walked around the circular table and gently pulled Zabrina to her feet. He dipped his head and pressed his mouth to the column of her scented neck. “I happen to believe we dance very well together.”

She giggled like a child. “Are you talking about the horizontal mambo?”

“Yes, I am.”

Moving into his embrace, Zabrina wrapped her arms around Myles’s waist. He felt so good, smelled so incredibly delicious. His cologne was specially blended to complement his body’s natural pheromones. She closed her eyes and smiled. “I seem to have forgotten the steps.”

Pulling her closer, Myles reveled in the soft crush of firm breasts against his chest. “How long has it been, baby?” he whispered.

Zabrina thought back to the last time they’d made love. “It’s been at least three weeks.”

“I promise to make love to…”

She placed her fingertips over his mouth, stopping his words. “Don’t promise. Just do it.”

Bending slightly, Myles swept his fiancée up into his arms and carried her off the terrace to the bedroom. He hadn’t wanted to believe he hadn’t made love to Zabrina in weeks. When, he thought, had his work taken precedence over the woman he loved and planned to marry? She’d become the most important thing in his life, yet he’d let something else replace her.

Their candlelit terrace dinner was forgotten when he placed Zabrina on the bed, his body following hers. It took less than a minute for Myles to remove her sandals, sundress and panties. The light from the bedside-table lamp, dimmed to its lowest setting, spilled over her nude body, making it appear like a statue of gold.

He undressed and then moved over her. “I can’t believe I’ve neglected you for so long. I want you to remind me when I get so caught up straightening out other people’s lives that I forget what I have right in front of me.”

Zabrina buried her face between Myles’s neck and shoulder at the same time her arms went around his waist. “How often do you want me to remind you?”

“Every night,” he said in her ear.

She opened her eyes and smiled. “If that’s the case, then I’ll be certain to do it.”

Myles breathed a kiss under her ear, along the column of her neck and to her throat. His rapacious tongue charted a path down her body as he suckled one breast, then the other. Zabrina’s breathing came faster and faster. His tongue swept over her like a wild cat savoring its kill. He tasted her belly. Effortlessly he turned her over to taste her back, nipping the skin covering her hips. Pressing a kiss to the small of her back, he moved lower to the area between her legs. Myles anchored his hands under her thighs and pulled her up into a kneeling position.

Zabrina was on fire! It was as if Myles had struck a match and set her ablaze. The increasing heat between her legs escalated as her hips undulated in a natural rhythm that communicated a long-denied need.

Myles felt and inhaled the rising desire from the slender body pushing back against his belly. He hardened quickly, so quickly he feared spilling his passion on the sheets. Guiding his erection, he eased it between Zabrina’s thighs. The two of them sighed as flesh closed around flesh, making them one.

Grasping her waist with both hands, he held her captive as she pushed back to meet his strong thrusts. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lip to keep the groans building in his throat from escaping, but the rising passion was too much and he moaned as if in pain. But it was the most pleasurable pain he’d ever experienced.

He didn’t know what it was about Zabrina Mixon, but once she had offered him her virginal body, every woman in his past had ceased to exist. And what he couldn’t understand was how had he gone nearly a month without making love with her. Had his quest to make partner taken precedence over the woman he loved? Zabrina didn’t want him to make promises, but he promised himself that tonight would signal change. He would put his fiancée first and his career second.

Heat began in Zabrina’s core and spread outward like spokes on a wheel. Reaching for the top of the headboard, she held on to the carved mahogany as if it were a lifeline. And at that moment it was. Unfamiliar sensations raced through her body, cutting a swath of pleasure that lifted her beyond ecstasy. She was caught up in a maelstrom of passion that bordered on hysteria. Her throat was burning from the screams that emanated from somewhere she hadn’t known existed, then, without warning, the orgasms came, one after the other, overlapping until she felt herself succumbing to the deepest desire she’d ever experienced.

Myles held Zabrina’s waist in a punishing grip as he rested his head on her back. He clenched his teeth so tightly his jaw ached, and try as he could he couldn’t hold back the passion threatening to erupt at any moment. Sucking in a lungful of breath, he surrendered to the raging fire in his loins, his body shaking like a stalwart tree in a storm.

In a moment of madness they’d surrendered all they were and would ever be to each other.

Chapter 2

The reason you’ve been feeling so tired is that you’re pregnant.

The doctor’s diagnosis played over and over in Zabrina Mixon’s head until she felt as if it were a mantra. Warm tears spilled down her face, blurring her vision, but she could still see the indicator wand that came with the home pregnancy test. She was pregnant. She, a registered nurse, who hadn’t believed her ob-gyn, had stopped at a local drugstore and bought a kit to conduct her own test.

Her gynecologist had changed her contraceptive three times, the third being a lower-dose pill. The other two had adverse side effects: headaches, nausea and tender breasts. Apparently the lowest dose was too low, because she was now among the one percent of women who’d gotten pregnant on the pill. She and Myles Eaton had talked about starting a family, but at twenty-three Zabrina had wanted to wait at least two years. Two years would give her time to adjust to married life.

She’d been counting the days before she would exchange vows with the man she’d fallen in love with after they’d only dated a month. He’d waited a year to propose marriage and she’d accepted. It was now two weeks before her wedding and she would walk down the aisle with a new life growing inside her. It wasn’t how she’d planned to start married life.

Discarding the pregnancy kit in the wastebasket, Zabrina washed her hands. She walked out of the bathroom, stopping when she heard voices coming from the living room. She recognized her father’s voice and another that was vaguely familiar. A third voice, this one deeper than the others stopped her mid-stride. This voice she knew. It belonged to Thomas Cooper, her father’s protégé. Alarmed, she made her way into the living room.

“What’s going on here?”

Isaac Mixon turned when he heard his daughter’s voice. “When did you get home?”

Zabrina’s gaze shifted from her father to the other two men. It was obvious they’d thought they were alone. “I got here about twenty minutes ago.” She glared at City Council President Thomas Cooper, who, it was widely rumored, had aspirations to become Philadelphia’s next mayor. “Were you threatening my father?”

Thomas Cooper flashed a smile, the one he’d perfected for the media and his constituents. “Zabrina, please come and sit down.”

Zabrina’s eyebrows lifted. “You’re inviting me to sit down in my own home?”

The practiced smile vanished quickly. “Mixon, I think you’d better convince your daughter to listen to what we have to tell her, or she’ll read about your arrest in tomorrow’s Philly Inquirer.”

Isaac crossed the room and cradled his daughter to his chest. “Please, Brina, let me handle this.”

Light brown eyes flecked with hints of green studied the face of the man who’d protected her since her mother had died the year Zabrina had celebrated her seventh birthday. Isaac Mixon had become father and mother, refusing to remarry because he claimed he didn’t want to subject her to a dreadful stepmother. She knew he dated women, but he’d never brought one home.

She nodded. “Okay, Daddy.” Isaac pulled out a straight-back chair for Zabrina to sit in, and she watched as her father walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows to peer out at the Philadelphia skyline.

It was the third man in the room who spoke first. “Miss Mixon, your father has been misappropriating monies from Councilman Cooper’s campaign contributions.”

A heavy silence filled the room as four pairs of eyes exchanged glances, and Zabrina wondered how many more shocks she would have to endure in one day. First there was the news that she was carrying a child, and now the threat that her father was facing arrest for stealing money from the man whose political career he’d shepherded from political analyst to city council member and now city council president.

She didn’t believe it, she couldn’t possibly believe it. Her father didn’t have financial problems. In fact, she knew for certain that he was solvent. It was she who reconciled his bank statements because Isaac Mixon didn’t want to have anything to do with money. He was an ideas person, not a numbers guy. In fact, he was a political genius when it came to political campaign strategies.

“I don’t believe you,” she told the well-dressed man with a sallow pockmarked complexion. It was almost impossible to discern the color of his eyes behind a pair of thick lenses perched on a short nose that gave him a porcine appearance.

“Perhaps Councilman Cooper and I should leave you alone with your father for a few moments so he can bare his soul. Perhaps then you’ll believe me.”

Thomas nodded to Zabrina. “Mr. Davidson and I will be in your father’s study. Please, don’t get up. I know where it is.”

Zabrina felt her throat closing as a wave of rage held her captive, not permitting her to draw a normal breath. It was the second time the arrogant politician had usurped her in her home. Once she’d reached sixteen she’d thought of the three-bedroom condo as hers. It was then that she’d assumed the responsibility of mistress of the house when standing in as hostess for Isaac Mixon’s many political confabs and soirées.

She drew in a breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them and stared at her father he seemed to have aged within a matter of seconds. “What’s going on, Daddy?”

Isaac Mixon knew whatever he’d been instructed to tell his daughter was going to destroy her. But either he had to lie or go to jail for a crime he did not commit. And disclosing what he knew meant his chances of survival were slim to none. Thomas Cooper had too many connections in and out of prison.

He walked across the living room and sank down on a love seat. “I’m sorry, baby girl, I—”