Ultimatum: Marriage / For the Sake of the Secret Child: Ultimatum: Marriage / For the Sake of the Secret Child

“Is that what I am to you—a bad habit?”

Pulling her closer even as she fought to resist him again, he gripped her arms hard. But just as he brought his mouth down to hers and she thought she would soon be lost on a wild, dark tide, he froze.

For a long moment he stood as immobile as a statue. He stared down at her as if he were struggling as hard as she was for control. Then he cursed low under his breath and pushed free of her.

Feeling hurt and rejected, which made zero sense, she jerked the edges of the robe together and spun away.

Hot color flared in his cheeks, too; a savage muscle was jumping along his jawline. His devouring gaze flamed with a fierce blue light.

“Sorry,” he finally muttered in an edgy, unapologetic tone. Then he rubbed his jaw where the muscle twitched. “I don’t know what … happened. I … I just lost control there for a second. Sorry.”

He looked down at the floor and raked a hand through his mussed dark hair. Then he clumsily jammed the edges of his shirt into his waistband. “If I can’t trust myself around you, even knowing what you are, I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

One minute he’d been out to prove she desired him; in the next he was running as scared as she was. And all because he’d lost his precious control.

She clenched her teeth and then unclenched them. “But we have to decide what to do.”

He took a deep breath. “First we have to find out if we have a problem or not. You need to call your doctor, make an appointment as fast as possible.”

“I need a place to stay tonight. Because of you, the feds took my apartment, all my furniture … and my car. I have no friends left in Louisiana.” She paused. When he didn’t say no immediately, she said, “I’d need a litter box and litter for Gus.”

“Okay. Of course, you can stay here if you like. But if you do, I’m moving out.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mean I’ll be here alone?”

“Just for tonight. Trust me. You’re better off with me gone. I don’t know what just happened between us or why. But I’ll be fine once I get off to myself, do some thinking and get a grip. I don’t like feeling trapped in this situation with you.”

“And you think I like it?”

“I’m not a mind reader, so I can only take your word for how you feel.”

She envied the way he could compartmentalize, the way his deep voice sounded almost cool and contained now when her heart was still racing.

Trying to copy him, she took a deep breath and tried to push down her emotions. It was probably better that they spend the night apart.

“Okay then,” she said. “Sounds like a plan.”

“I’ll give you my cell number. Call me after you make that appointment with your doctor.” He pulled a set of car keys out of his pocket. “I want to know when and where it is.”

“You’re leaving now?”

“I’ve got to get back to my office. Like I told you before—because of you, cher, I’ve got a lot of nice people to fire.”

“I’m sorry about that.” She truly was.

He hesitated. “Just so you know where I’ll be … Tonight I think I’ll drive out to Belle Rose and spend the night in a friend’s houseboat in the swamp. I need to be by myself—to think.”

She arched her brows. Poor guy. If it hadn’t been for his part in her father’s downfall, she might have felt sorry for him.

He’d been having a bad day even before she’d showed up on his doorstep and announced they might be pregnant. And what had he done—he’d given up his house for the night, so she’d have a safe place to stay.

Four

When the sagging roofline of Bos’s houseboat loomed out of the steamy gloom of shadowy dwarf palmettos, bald cypress trees and water tupelo, Jake cut the motor and sprang toward the bow. He’d hoped he’d experience at least a slight lifting of his mood once he was out of the city and had returned to his boyhood refuge. Despite the familiar roar of bull alligators, locusts and frogs, he felt like a stranger in a foreign land. His leaden heart kept him alienated from all that should have been familiar and dear.

Images of a big-eyed, pale Alicia in the patrol car, the dull stares of his employees after he’d let them go, Cici’s and Logan’s radiant smiles at their wedding bombarded him in a never-ending loop. The thick heat of the swamp pressed too close, making him feel trapped by business and personal problems—and most of it was the Butlers’ fault.

The air was dank with the stench of rot and mold. He would have preferred to be rock climbing in Utah or Alaska rather than hanging out in the swamp. Still, this was the wild and life was always simpler in the wild. He kept a cabin south of Denali National Park in Alaska that he visited every summer. Too bad he didn’t have time to go there now. It was the one place that was far enough away from his real life so that he could count on solitude there clearing his mind.

Grabbing the bowline, he spread his legs so that he stood in the middle of the eight-foot aluminum flatboat as it drifted silently through the mirror-black swamp water toward the houseboat.

A night to himself even in this wild place wasn’t long enough to sort it all out, but it was a start. If Alicia was pregnant, he couldn’t abandon his kid—even if she was Mitchell Butler’s daughter.

He thought about the families still living in three-room trailers to whom he’d promised homes before the funds to build them had vanished—because of her father.

Wrapping the line around a rusting cleat, Jake made sure the flatboat was snug against the used tires Bos had nailed as crude fenders along the side of the houseboat. Then he ran his gaze over the shabby structure.

The houseboat had two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, no bath. Surprisingly, the place didn’t look any worse for wear. It must’ve been a good ten years since he was last here. Bos had been ill of late, but when Jake had visited him a month ago, he’d told him he’d managed to do what was necessary to maintain it.

“Not that I get out to the houseboat much these days,” Bos had said. “You’re welcome to it—just like always, anytime. The fishin’s still pretty good even if the water in the swamp gets saltier every year.”

Bos was another man who felt the need to get away from civilization upon occasion.

With a frown Jake set his gear down beside Bos’s stacked crab traps. After opening the door to the cabin, he pitched his backpack inside.

This fish camp was located between the Claibornes’ ancestral mansion, Belle Rose, and Bos’s less developed properties to the south of Belle Rose. Pierre, Jake’s grandfather, had never approved of Jake hanging out at Bos’s camp in the swamp when Jake had been a kid. The truth was, his grandfather had detested Bos with an irrational passion. The old man had considered Bos, who’d run a bar and fought cocks, a bad influence, so most of the time Jake had chosen to sneak off, willingly risking the consequences of Grand-père’s rage later.

A rebel from birth, Jake had been as fascinated by Bos’s bad reputation as his grandfather had been repelled by it. Not that Bos was really such a bad sort once you got to know him. Bos had adopted his orphaned niece Cici, hadn’t he? He’d understood what it was like not to feel you fit into your family, and he’d taken Jake hunting and fishing and crabbing without even so much as asking a single prying question about his need to escape his domineering grandfather and cocky older twin.

Bos had encouraged him to learn to fend for himself in the wild, so as soon as he’d been old enough, Jake had explored the endless marshes and bayous on his own, hunting doves and ducks and swimming off forested islands.

Back then Noonoon, his nanny, used to fuss at him, saying she couldn’t keep a glass jar in the house because Jake was always borrowing them to house his crabs and frogs and minnows and turtles.

Jake smiled briefly at the memory of Noonoon’s dark face until concern about Alicia alone in his house intruded.

She was fine, he told himself. She was a big girl. He’d showed her how to set the alarm. Hell, he’d even sent Vanessa over to his house to make sure Alicia had everything she needed.

Alicia was fine.

Why couldn’t he forget how pale and shaken she’d looked in that patrol car?

His stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t brought any groceries.

Forget her.