Mandy laughed and waved as they walked on past.
“You didn’t even defend me,” Damien said in mock protest. “I am not cheap.”
“Well, I don’t think you are, but I’m really not entirely sure, having never seen you shopping. But you’re not going to distract me from my original question.” Her fingers pressed into his flesh. “Are you happy?”
Damien stopped walking and looked down at her, at the warm expression in her mocha brown eyes. She had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose that he wanted to kiss. “Why does it matter to you, Mandy?”
“Because I like you,” she said simply, and it stirred to life embers he had thought were long burned out.
He started walking again, eager to move past the vendors, to where the sun and the ocean met with nothing but beach between them. He ached inside and out, with the physical need to bury himself inside Mandy, to seek pleasure and oblivion in that tender sensual give and take of sex with someone he respected, admired, was a bit in awe of.
“I’m content,” he told her, figuring that was close enough to the truth. “Or at least I was until I met you.”
“What did I do?” she whispered.
“You made me see that I’m lonely...” Damien stopped, took Mandy’s hand in his, turned her to him. They were only a few feet past the noise and laughter of the vendors, but he didn’t care. “I can’t—don’t want—a relationship. But Mandy, I find you very attractive, and I would really like to kiss you right now. ”
Of course, he wanted to have sex with her under the nearest beach umbrella, but he figured he should ease her into the idea.
Start with a kiss,thenmove to wild sex on the beach.
Mandy swallowed about a bucketful of saliva.Whoa, boy. This was unexpected.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
They had spent the evening talking, laughing, relaxing, and in Damien she saw some of the same loneliness, the same fears that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her.
She thought, perhaps, Damien Sharpton wasn’t so much a cruel, heartless man as he was a wounded man, scarred inside where no one could see it. Except her.
And she wanted to hold him, be held in return, in a mutual clasp of comfort.
But he was her boss, and she was keeping a big secret from him, and this was a sandy beach far away from home where reality was skewed and where mistakes could be made.
“Damien, I find you very attractive as well. Both physically and as a person. So I’m very much afraid that a kiss would lead to something else, and would that really be such a good...”
Mandy lost complete track of her thought as a fluttering sensation moved across her abdomen. “What on earth?” Heart racing, she placed her hands over her stomach and felt it again. The very first movements of her baby.
Oh, my God, it was incredible, absolutely amazing. She reached out and clutched Damien’s linen shirt with her free hand, suddenly lightheaded.
“Are you going to throw up again?” Damien grabbed her elbows, looking left and right as if seeking help.
Mandy laughed. She was going to be a mother. There was achildgrowing inside her, and she/he was swimming laps back and forth from the feel of it. An almost overwhelming surge of love stole over her for this baby, and she wanted to share such a perfect moment with someone. Had to explain to another person that her whole world was shifting and morphing and she was settling into a wondrous kind of excitement over those changes.
“I’m not going to be sick.” She grabbed Damien’s hand and laid it flat on her abdomen. “Can you feel it, Damien? The baby’s moving.”
“The baby?” he squawked, eyes the size of dinner plates. “What baby?”
Now he looked like the one capable of tossing his tea and toast. “My baby. The one I’m having in approximately twenty-three weeks.”
His mouth moved, but nothing came out. His gaze dropped to her stomach, where his hand was pressed over the coral sundress. Mandy put her hand over his, so he wouldn’t pullback. She wanted someone to feel the same miracle she was experiencing. Maybe it was too early for someone else to feel the movements, but if it wasn’t...
There was a quick push outward, as if the baby had jettisoned off a springboard, and Mandy broke into a smile as awareness dawned on Damien’s face.
“Holy shit,” was his opinion, and he looked a little as though he’d walked into a wall after drinking a fifth of gin, but at the same time his thumb stole over her belly in a little soft stroke.
“That’s amazing.” His eyes locked with hers, and she saw the same wonder in them that she felt. “I actually felt it.”
Tears of joy blurred her vision. “I think I just fell completely in love with my baby.”
