He smiled, and even though Natalie knew it wasn’t meant to be charming it definitely was. Scott was usually so serious and no-nonsense that the appearance of a smile had always made Natalie feel as if she was basking in a special glow—a side of him that was rarely revealed. It had been that way the first night they’d met in the bar and his guard was down. She wondered whether she would have fallen for him so quickly if their first meeting had been the mission briefing where he’d been 100 percent “don’t try to stand in my way” SEAL commander.
Probably. She looked at him. Definitely. There was something supremely sexy about a man confident in his own skin. A man who knew he was one of the best and commanded authority wherever he went. Scott was the guy whom everyone would turn to when things went south—to use SEAL parlance—and he shouldered that burden with an ease that seemed effortless.
And then there were his looks.
Put it all together and she hadn’t had a chance. Thedull ache in her chest told her that she still didn’t. She would love him until the day she died. Which, admittedly, might not be that long from now.
Maybe the doctor wasn’t quite as skilled at hiding her reactions as Natalie thought—or having all that masculine perfection beaming on her was too much for any woman to resist. Natalie thought she detected a slight blush in the doctor’s cheeks as she smiled back at him. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Scott thanked her and the doctor left.
“Do you always get what you want?” Natalie asked.
She’d meant it wryly, but his reply was deadly serious. “No. Sometimes I’m completely disappointed.”
It was hard to misinterpret that. She turned away, unable to bear the condemnation in his eyes or the burning in her chest.
Nine
It was late afternoon by time they returned to the farmhouse from urgent care. Scott left Natalie in bed to rest and went downstairs to make the phone call to his sister that he’d been putting off. He wasn’t ready to talk about Natalie—or what the hell he was going to do with her—even to Kate. Not until he knew whether the baby was his. He was relieved when she didn’t answer. He left her a message not to worry, but he was going dark for a day or two.
Glad for the respite, he turned off his phone and went into the kitchen to see what he could find to make for dinner. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he could boil water for pasta or throw potatoes in the oven to bake.
He’d noticed an old grill outside, but as Natalie ate mostly rabbit food, he wasn’t holding out much hope for meat to put on it. The sandwich that he’d picked up at the market to have for lunch hadn’t been enough to put a dent in his hunger after the two missed meals that had come before.
It was strange how when he was downrange on missions he could go for days subsisting on MREs orwhatever other almost-inedible food the military thought to provide them, but as soon as he was stateside he was starving if he missed a meal.
He caught sight of the plate of muffins and helped himself to one of the two that remained. They really were good, and as he wiped the remnants of the crumble topping from his mouth with a napkin, he still found it hard to believe that she baked. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if it was unusual, but the domesticity of it seemed so incongruous with the sophisticated, high-powered DC insider that he’d known.
His mouth fell in a hard line. That was just it. He hadn’t really known her. She’d confounded him from the start.
When she’d introduced herself as an “assistant” that first night in the bar, he’d assumed she worked for a lobbyist or someone on the Hill—sure as hellnotthe second-highest-ranking official in the DoD. It was well known in the Pentagon that if you wanted to get Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Waters to do something, you needed to appeal to his assistant.
She was known as being smart, a tough negotiator, extremely protective of her boss, and hot as hell. But her cool, confident exterior scared a lot of guys off. She definitely had that Eastern European sexy, but hard “don’t fuck around with me” thing working for her. Ironically, he’d thought she might be Russian or Czech and had asked about it one time. She’d paled, and only now did he realize the significance.
Given that he usually dated the girl next door, he’d been surprised by that initial attraction. But not by what had come after. He’d never forget the first time he’d looked down at her in bed—when they’d finally made it to the bed—and he’d seen that soft, tousled, well-sated look of a woman who’d been well pleasured.
Knowing that he’d done that to her. That he’d been theone to make her look like that... it was satisfying as hell. It had made him feel powerful—as if he was revealing a different side of her that no one else could see.
That two-sides-of-the-coin thing had sucked him in. Hard. It was still doing it.
Scott opened the refrigerator and he had this very fact brought home to him again. He was stunned to see a variety of leftovers that included not only chicken and steak butbacon—a food she’d turned away from every time he’d offered it to her. His herbivore was apparently a hard-core carnivore.
Was there anything about her that had been real?
It was hard to believe that the woman he’d shared so much with—whom he’d fallen in love with—had deceived him so completely. Their relationship might have started on the X-rated side, with forty-eight hours of pretty much nonstop sex, but it had never been just about that. Over the next six months every moment that he wasn’t working he’d spent with her, making up every ridiculous excuse in the book to get to DC. He’d been drawn to her in a way that he’d never been drawn to another woman. When they were together, he could put the stress of his job behind him and relax. He’d told her things—personal things—that he’d never shared with anyone else. He’d always been too focused on his job to get serious with anyone.
How the hell could he have gotten it so wrong?
He pulled out the plate of roasted chicken and mashed potatoes and sat down at the table to eat. He didn’t bother heating it in the microwave; it looked too damned good. It tasted better.
Natalya Petrova wasn’t just a spy, she was also a hell of a cook.
He was so busy devouring the food that he didn’t hear her come up behind him. “Hey. I was going to have that for dinner.”
He frowned when he saw her. “You should be resting.”
She was pregnant.Pregnant.It was still hard to accept or know how to react. A few months ago, he would have been shouting from the rooftops. He would have jumped up and pulled out a chair for her and made her put her feet up. Hell, he probably would have swung her into his arms and carried her back to bed. But now... now it wasn’t his place. Even if the baby was his, he couldn’t pretend the happy-family thing. He could hate her all over again for what this would do to their baby—if it was his baby.
