He had no reason to believe her, and she had every reason to lie. It was one of the oldest tricks in the book, wasn’t it? An attempt to play the one card that would guarantee his sympathy and stay his hand with caution.
Scott should call her bluff and take her back to DC right now. It was his duty, not just to the SEAL badge or the bars on his uniform but to his men, and she’d already compromised his job enough. The job that he’d built his life around. He needed to stay on track. To not let her distract him with pregnancy tests and doctors.
She made a fool of you....
But what if she wasn’t lying? If there was even a small chance that she could be telling the truth, he had to know.
Damn it, a baby?
His stomach turned again, but he stepped to the side to let her walk back into the house. “If you are lying about this, Natalya, I swear I’ll kill you myself.”
How someone who had betrayed him so horriblyand committed treacherous and treasonous deeds that led to the death of eight men could manage to look so affronted—as ifhewas the one in the wrong—he didn’t know. But her acting skills were Oscar-freaking-caliber.
“I’m not,” she said, brushing by him.
It wasn’t just her nose-in-the-air, “how dare you question my honor?” attitude that pissed him off—although it did—it was the brushing part that really made him angry. Or rather, his reaction to it. How could he feel anything after what she’d done?
But he felt it, all right. He felt the same blast of heat and firing off of every nerve ending—including the major one—that he had when she’d accidentally brushed by him on the way to the bathroom at the bar that first night they’d met. He’d never felt anything like it. It had almost been like the zap of an electrical current of attraction. Instantaneous, shocking, and sparking with all kinds of intense impulses.
She was a knockout, but he’d known a lot of beautiful women. This had been different. It had been elemental. Bone-deep. Chemical. Whatever you wanted to call it. Whatever had caused him to leave the bar with her and spend the next forty-eight hours in bed with her.
But instant attraction like that was one thing that couldn’t be faked. He didn’t know whether to be glad about that or not. Did the fact that some of it had been real make up for the fact that the rest of it hadn’t?
No. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to let it get in his way now. His dick might not have gotten the message, but he sure as hell had.
He shut the door behind her. She crossed the foyer and started heading up the staircase. “Where the hell do you think you are going?” he asked.
She turned around and glared at him. “To take a shower and then go to bed.”
“At 2030 hours?”
She held his gaze in a silent challenge. “It’s been a long day.”
Did she take him for a fool? Better not ask that. It would just piss him off. But he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not without me.”
She arched an eyebrow in the way that she did when she was about to tease him. “You want to shower with me?”
The naughty twinkle in her eye was so familiar it made the black hole in his chest squeeze. It was hard not to respond, but he tightened the steel vise around his emotions and ignored it. She needed to know that they were never going back to the way it had been. “If you want to shower, you can do so with the door open—after I make sure there aren’t any windows you can climb out of.”
Her cheeks flushed as if the insinuation had offended her. Too bad. He didn’t trust her not to run the moment his back was turned.
What he should do was drag her back to the urgent care and demand to see her records right now—whether the doctor was there or not.
But that could attract more attention than he wanted. Like her, Scott was in hiding and supposed to be dead. Besides, he was almost certain she was lying about the pregnancy and would try to use the time to escape. He wasn’t going to show his face around here or anywhere else if he didn’t need to.
But as sound as his reasoning was, he knew that wasn’t all of it. She looked wiped out. Fall-on-the-pillow-and-sleep-for-hours wiped out. He’d thought it was just exhaustion from a long day of work, but when she’d told him about fainting and hitting her head, he knew there could be a more serious explanation.
If she wasn’t lying to him about that, too, that is.
“I’m surprised the doctor let you leave if you hit your head when you fainted.”
She stood on the stairs looking down at him for a few moments before responding, understanding exactly what he was getting at. “He advised that I stay the night. I wish I’d listened to him.”
Her meaning was clear: because of Scott being here waiting for her. “I would have caught up with you eventually.”
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter any longer—which it didn’t. “I’m supposed to have someone wake me up every few hours. I guess you get to play nursemaid.”
He looked around; a thought suddenly occurring to him. “Is there someone else living here with you?”
