“When you explain yourself,” he answered easily, pressing down upon her legs just to show her he could keep her there all night if he had a mind to.
“Oh, very well. Though why you should need an explanation eludes me. It should be perfectly clear that love had nothing to do with what happened in this bed.”
One of Rhys’s dark brows slanted upward. “Didn’t it?” he asked softly.
“You know it didn’t. It was an experiment, nothing more. I posed a question and you gave me an answer. There is no need to puff the thing up with romantic balderdash.”
“I see. Then what happened in this bed, as you euphemistically put it, was nothing more than the coupling of two animals. Perhaps the stable would have suited your needs better. A stallion and a filly acting purely on their instincts as nature intended.”
Kenna was only now becoming aware of how annoyed Rhys was with her. The gentle, inquiring tone of his voice had made her blind to his heat until he mentioned coupling and the stables. “There is no need for crudity. We are hardly animals.”
“That is precisely what we are, Kenna Dunne, though mayhap I should have likened you to a brood mare.”
She gasped and would have slapped his face if he had not anticipated her action and pinned her wrist to the bed. “What is that supposed to mean?” she said, frustrated in the extreme because she could not move.
“It means you could beenceinte. Have I put that delicately enough for your ears?”
Kenna felt the fight drain out of her and she went limp against him. “A child? It isn’t possible.”
“Of course it is,” he scoffed. “Surely you know how a woman gets with child?” To Rhys’s astonishment he saw all the color leave Kenna’s face. “My God, you didn’t know!”
“Of course I knew,” she snapped. “Or rather I knew it had something to do with…something,” she finished lamely, ignoring Rhys’s hoot of sardonic laughter. “But it cannot happen from this one time. I forbid it!”
Rhys lifted his shoulder and removed his leg from Kenna’s. “Tell that to my son or daughter nine months hence.”
Kenna twisted away from Rhys and sat up, curling against the mahogany headboard. The comforter was pulled tautly across her breasts and her heavy hair tumbled about her face and shoulders. “You are teasing,” she accused. “You wouldn’t dare give me a babe. It would be the grandchild of the man you murdered.”
“Seventy-five minutes,” he said tersely after glancing at the clock.
“What nonsense are you saying now?”
Rhys threw off the covers and slipped off the bed. With uninhibited grace he began gathering his clothes and putting them on. “By my reckoning it’s been seventy-five minutes that we’ve been together and this is the first mention of your father. Who, by the way, happened to be the man I admired, not murdered.”
He was leaving. That’s what she wanted, wasn’t it? Then why did she feel strangely bereft that she had chased him from her bed with her sharp tongue?
“As to a child,” he continued roughly, “we shall have to wait and see, won’t we?” He paused in buttoning his shirt and eyed her narrowly. “You could plan for that eventuality and marry me now.”
“Marry you!” she sputtered, astonished. It was exactly this pass she had hoped to avoid and instead she had fallen neatly into his trap. If she didn’t know better she would think he had planned the thing himself, even to putting the words in her mouth. She could never ask another man to accept Rhys’s child any more than she could bring herself to marry Rhys. “I am not going to marry you.”
“You will if you are carrying my child.”
“Will you lower your voice?” she whispered. “The entire house will be down upon us!”
“That would suit me though I can see you are plainly horrified by the prospect.”
“If Nicky or Victorine…”
Kenna could not finish the sentence but Rhys had no such difficulty. “If they found you cowering in your bed, wearing nothing but your modesty, the banns would be posted on the morrow. Is that what you wanted to say?”
“More or less,” she murmured.
Rhys’s lips curled in derision. “The scenario will be much the same when they notice the thickening of your waist.”
“Stop it! I am not with child. You cannot know. It would ruin everything.”
Rhys sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on his boots, “Ruin everything? What sort of plot have you been hatching?”
“Do not make light of this, Rhys Canning.”
