Love by Proxy (16 page)

“Amazing,” Worth said quietly, “that you’d try to protect me, after the way I’ve treated you.”

He dropped down in the chair beside the bed, staring at Amelia while Jeanette glanced from one set face to the other and frowned.

He took Amelia’s free hand in his, feeling its coldness. His dark eyes went to meet his grandmother’s. “There’s something I have to confess,” he said gently. “The man she’s trying so hard to protect is me. I went to her for comfort the night before your surgery, Grandmother, and out of misplaced generosity, she gave everything I asked for. The baby is mine.”

Amelia looked up at him, pained. “Oh, Worth,” she whispered. “I’m sorry!”

His fingers contracted around hers. “It takes two,” he said, his voice deep and rough.

Jeanette’s face was glowing, her lifeless eyes suddenly sparkling, a happy dancing blue as she caught her breath. “The baby is my great-grandchild?” she asked delightedly.

“I’m afraid so,” Worth returned with faint humor. His dark eyes searched Amelia’s shamed ones. “There isn’t the remotest possibility that the baby could have been fathered by anyone else.”

Amelia’s lips trembled. She lowered tear-filled eyes to her lap and saw the tears splatter onto his hair-covered wrist.

“Don’t,” he whispered. He produced a handkerchief and dried her eyes. “Don’t. Everything is going to be all right now.”

“Of course it is, my dear,” Jeanette said gently. She reached out and stroked Amelia’s long, disheveled hair. “Worth and I will take care of you. A baby,” she sighed, dreamy-eyed now, so different from the defeated-looking woman she’d been only minutes before. And then it hit her. “But, my God, Worth, you aren’t married!”

“We will be within the week,” he said imperturbably. He got up, sticking his hands in his pockets to study Amelia. “And don’t argue,” he told the young woman, who’d just opened her mouth to protest. “If you do, I swear I’ll call that photographer who snapped you in the trench coat out here, and I’ll give him a Pulitzer-prizewinning shot! And then I’ll mail a copy to your parents, Amy. I mean it. You’re marrying me, whether you like it or not.”

“Damn you!” Amelia fumed at him.

“So that’s how you got her to come back with you,” Jeanette murmured dryly as she studied her grandson. “You threatened to tell her parents what you’d done, didn’t you?”

“It was the only way to get her here,” he confessed on a heavy sigh. “I saw history repeating itself,” he said gruffly, turning away, and Amelia and Jeanette exchanged knowing glances. He went to the window and smoothed back the curtain. “It’s funny,” he said, laughing bitterly. “I can do cost estimates in my head, I can beat out competitors on contracts, I can put up enormous skyscrapers. But when it comes to people, I just can’t seem to read character.” He turned slowly, his eyes dark with regret as they touched Amelia’s face and body. “Amy, I said some horrible things to you today. I hope eventually you may be able to forgive me for them. And for what I’ve done to you. If it’s any consolation, I’m no happier than you are about the situation.”

So he didn’t want the baby, she thought. Well, it was what she already knew, wasn’t it? She felt old.

“Why don’t you go and lie down?” Jeanette told her gently. “I’m better already. I daresay I’ll eat a monstrous supper now that I have so much to anticipate. I can knit, did you know? I’ll make the most precious little booties and caps. Make her lie down, Worth,” she told her grandson. “She needs lots of rest now. And send Baxter in here, I want him to go to town and get me some yarn.” She frowned. “We’ll need to put wedding announcements in the papers, and Amy must call her parents….”

Worth gestured Amelia out into the hall while Jeanette was still talking and closed the door behind them.

Amelia quickly moved away from him and went to the guest room. Her eyes fell when she saw the bed, and all the memories came flooding back of the last time he’d been in here with her.

Her bags had been put on luggage racks, the only indication of occupation. She smelled perfume and knew it must be from a broken bottle in her cosmetics case.

“I’ll buy you some more toiletries,” Worth said as her eyes went to the square case. “I’m sorry I tossed the case to you like that. I didn’t know you were pregnant or I’d never have done it.”

“Don’t bother handling me with kid gloves,” she said shortly. She sat down on the bed and with a long breath stretched out, dangling her feet over the side. “I’m so tired,” she whispered. Her eyes closed.

“Tired and sick and upset, all of it my fault,” he said quietly. He bent and took off her sandals before he pulled a quilted pink coverlet over her legs.

Unexpectedly, he sat down beside her, and her eyes flew open, wide and a little frightened.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said gently. His hand eased down to her tangled hair and smoothed it away from her face. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

Her eyes closed so that he wouldn’t see the tears. She could manage if he’d been angry, but that unexpected tenderness got to her. “I tried to keep you from finding out,” she whispered brokenly.

His hand stilled. “Yes, I know.” His fingers touched her lips. “Open your eyes, Amy.”

She did, and found him staring at her with an expression she couldn’t quite explain.

“Why didn’t you want me to know about the baby?” he asked gently.

He didn’t seem angry now; only curious. It calmed her a little.

“Because,” she began, her fingers restlessly pleating the coverlet, “I didn’t know how you’d react, or even if you’d believe it was yours.”

“Are you out of your mind?” he asked. “How could it be someone else’s?”

“You might have accused me of sneaking around,” she muttered.

“Sure. With who, Baxter?”

Her lips made a thin line.

He smiled slowly. Accusing eyes, mutinous mouth, exquisite color in her face. He studied her mouth. “You’ve given Grandmother a new lease on life. Now she has something to look forward to.”

“Yes, I saw that,” she said. Her eyes fell to his chest. “At least somebody’s happy about it.”

“Aren’t you?” he asked gently, and tilted her chin. He searched her eyes. “Don’t you want the baby?”

“Of course I want it, but you don’t!”

His heavy eyebrows went straight up. “I don’t?”

“You didn’t want commitment, remember?” she shot at him, dragging herself into a sitting position to glare at him. “No strings, you said, just a sweet interlude, you said!”

“And I thought you’d only pitied me, and that’s why you gave yourself.”

“I pitied myself, for being so stupid and—”

He bent forward and stopped her mouth by placing his against it. She started to draw away, but his hand slid behind her neck and kept her there.

“No,” he whispered. “Sit still.”

Her fingers went to his hand. “Worth, don’t, please….”

But his mouth coaxed and teased, and before she could find the willpower to resist him, the old magic was beginning to take her over. She felt her mouth softening, opening to the warm persuasion of his. She felt his tongue teasing the inside of her lips, probing further, felt his hands suddenly reach for her and bring her into a warm, fervent embrace.

“Oh, Worth,” she moaned, half protest, half pleasure. Her arms enfolded him, her mouth returned the hungry pressure of his. And the whole world seemed to spin away.

“My baby,” he whispered against her lips, easing her back down on the bed. “You’re carrying my baby….”

The thought seemed to inspire him to even greater efforts. She drowned in warm, hungry kisses, arched her body to hands that were gentle and slow and expert on her swollen breasts. Her eyes opened as he lifted his head, and she felt a breeze and realized that he’d opened her dress all the way down the front. He was looking at her, seeing the subtle changes that even the early days of pregnancy had made to her slender body.

“Very pretty,” he whispered with a purely masculine smile, the conquering male surveying his conquest and liking the visible evidence of it. “Your breasts are bigger.”

“They’re swollen,” she said shyly.

“This is darker.” His fingers traced around the hard nipple. His eyes dropped to the slight swell of her abdomen above the pink bikini briefs she was wearing.

He hesitated before he reached down to touch it, as if he was afraid he might hurt her. He looked up into her eyes with a question in his own as his hand slowly flattened over his child.

“My God,” he breathed, searching her face. “I never connected lovemaking with this,” he confessed. “I never even considered that a baby might come of it.”

“Men don’t, do they?” she asked gently. “Did you think women got them from the garden, under leaves?”

He smiled back. “No.”

His face was tender now, not accusing or cold, and she warmed to that tenderness.

“I’m sorry I left so quickly,” she said. “Jeanette promised to get a nurse, and I was so frightened….”

His eyes narrowed. “I can imagine,” he replied. He bent and kissed her forehead, so gently. “I’d gone off like a timber wolf to lick my wounds. I thought I could get over you, so I didn’t ask to speak to you when I phoned. I’m sorry about that. You could have told me if things hadn’t been so strained between us.”

“To lick what wounds?” she asked hesitantly, fixing on that unexpected confession.

He lifted his head and studied his hand on her abdomen. “You wouldn’t let me kiss you, before I left,” he replied quietly. “You jerked away, as if I disgusted you.”

Her breath caught. “Oh, no!” she said, lifting her hand to his face. She touched his cheek, feeling it go rigid. He caught it and ground his mouth into the palm. “No,” she repeated, looking at his dark head as it bent. “It wasn’t disgust! I thought you hated me. And I knew if I let you kiss me it would be the way it was a minute ago, I’d go to pieces, and then you’d see that it was all a front.”

His eyes lifted, searching, waiting. “That what was all a front?” he asked in a deep, quiet tone.

“All that cold pride I was showing you,” she said simply. “You didn’t want me, and I knew it. I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“I didn’t want you?” He laughed faintly, as if he found that amusing. He looked down at her bareness. “I didn’t want you!” His chest rose and fell roughly. “I stopped eating and sleeping. I lost a contract because I couldn’t think. I went to bed with the memory of your mouth on mine, I woke up aching because I wanted to roll over and kiss you awake and you weren’t there. I walked around as empty as a tomb for weeks and months, and came back hoping to make you see that you weren’t a medicine I’d only taken for temporary relief. And you were gone.”

“Worth, don’t let me trouble your conscience too much,” she said, touching his dark hair, as she felt a rush of compassion for him. He had wanted her, after all, even if love hadn’t entered into it. Perhaps, in a way, he’d suffered as much as she had. “I wanted you, too,” she confessed. “You didn’t force me.”

His fingers locked with hers and he sighed. “I thought you hated me for it, Amy,” he murmured. “I hate myself, because of the way it happened.”

“I was worried about Jeanette, too,” she told him. “Not as much as you were, I’m sure, but I understood what you were going through. I knew you weren’t thinking straight. It didn’t matter. And you gave me…more pleasure than I ever expected to feel. You showed me that I wasn’t too old to be a woman.”

“You’re more woman than I expected to find in a repressed twenty-eight-year-old virgin,” he murmured dryly. He shook his head as he looked at the bare pink flesh he’d exposed. “God, what a beautiful body you have, Miss Glenn.” His fingers brushed down her body to her abdomen. “Are you going to let me have it when we’re married, Amy? Are you going to sleep with me?”

Exquisite thought, it made her tremble with pleasure. “If you want me,” she said.

He only laughed. “Yes. I want you. I’ll try to curtail my traveling as much as possible, too, so that I’ll have more time to spend with you while you’re carrying the baby.” He took a last look at her nudity and slowly buttoned the dress up again. “That’s enough of that. Get some rest, darling. I’ll see you later.”

Her face colored as she thought about being with him, sleeping in his arms. There were deep hurts on both sides from the past few months, but she loved him. And he wanted her. Perhaps there was some hope left.

The wedding took place a week later, at a justice of the peace’s office, with Jeanette wobbly but radiant standing beside Baxter to witness the brief ceremony. Worth had seemed enthusiastic about marrying her, and Amelia was both surprised and pleased by his easy acceptance of her new status in his life. If anything, he seemed radiant. And he’d been so attentive in the past few days that even Baxter had started to grin behind his hand. One morning, Worth had brought her breakfast tray, and he hadn’t been satisfied with her nibbling, so he’d fed her every bite of it himself. The tender, caring way he acted made her feel exquisitely warm and safe. If only he loved her, it would be heaven.

They’d decided not to go away for a honeymoon, because Worth didn’t want Amelia on a plane again despite all her protests that she’d be fine. So Jeanette decided to spend a couple of days with a friend across town, and wouldn’t be argued with. They needed some time to themselves, she informed them, so shut up. She felt fine and wanted to get out of the house.

She left early in the afternoon. Worth and Amelia had a quiet dinner together and then went to watch a movie he’d bought for the VCR.

It was a love story, something she hadn’t expected that he’d like, with a wildly adventurous theme and some uproarious comedy. By the time it was over, her stomach ached from laughing.

He grinned at her. “I saw it in New York on a business trip,” he told her, “and I had to have it. The heroine reminded me of you. Impulsive and adventurous and very, very lovely.”

She blushed at that personal remark and smiled up at him shyly. “I’m plain, actually,” she whispered.

“You’re pregnant, actually,” he returned, letting his dark eyes wander over her. They were sitting together in a love seat in the big living room, with the doors closed, the curtains drawn, the lights off. Except for the light from the screen and the whir as the videocassette automatically rewound, there wasn’t a noise or light in the room.