He looked...incredible.
Dressed entirely in black, he wore jeans and a buttery leather jacket, beneath which was a sweater so soft it could only have been made from cashmere. But that was the only soft thing about him. His body was hard and his face was even harder. Black eyes studied her as coldly as chips of jet and those wickedly sensual lips were set and unsmiling. How weird it was to think of all the pleasures those lips had showered on her while they’d been in bed together, when now they seemed to flatten at the edges with a look of faint disdain. Or was that her imagination?
Hollie knew she had to pull herself together. She couldn’t keep catastrophising or trying to get inside his head. She had to act as normally as possible, although that was never going to be easy given what she was about to tell him. How would she have spoken to him if she hadn’t had sex with him? How did she used to speak to him when he came into the office, during those easy, uncomplicated days before she’d been stupid enough to allow him to seduce her? With an enormous effort, she fixed a bright smile to her lips, aware of the stupidity of her greeting even as it tumbled from her.
‘Good afternoon, Señor Diaz!’
Maximo tried very hard not to react to the instinctive punch to his gut as he studied the woman standing before him. He should be on his guard after her rather embarrassing determination to see him, yet all he could think about was her pale, soft flesh and the thickness of her shiny golden-brown hair as it had tumbled down over her bare breasts. Was that unwanted reaction responsible for his drawled words, which weren’t the words he intended? ‘Don’t you think such formality is a little inappropriate, in view of what happened?’
‘Even though you didn’t even know my name at the time?’ she answered quickly.
Maximo winced. She was right. How had that even happened? He still wasn’t sure, and looking at her now provided no easy answers. The provocative minx in the towering red heels and thigh-skimming green dress was nothing but a distant memory, for she’d reverted back to her usual sensible look. Her magnificent hair was tied back into a tight bun and her lips were bare. She wore a neat skirt and forgettable sweater, which had obviously not been bought with the intention of emphasising her curves, and her brown leather boots had seen better days. They were obviously old boots which had been carefully polished—and something about that recognition of someone who was ‘making do’ struck a raw and distant chord deep inside him. She looked unremarkable, yet... He frowned. Wasn’t there a glowing inner quality about her, which seemed to transcend her rather drab appearance?
‘But I do know your name now,’ he said, attempting a placatory smile. ‘Hollie.’
‘Hollie Walker,’ she supplied crisply and then blushed, and that only seemed to emphasise her innocence.
Had he really had sex with her? Taken her virginity in one smooth and delicious thrust? Yes, he had. And it had been amazing. No. That wasn’t quite accurate. It had been nothing short of sensational. Turned on and beguiled by those long legs and cascading hair and the startlingly dramatic change in her appearance, Maximo had succumbed to a one-night stand in a way he hadn’t done since his teenage years. Her innocence had come as a shock and he still wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t extricated himself from the situation as quickly as possible after that first time, doing them both a favour and recognising that someone like him was bad news for a small-town woman like her.
But he hadn’t. He had carried on losing himself inside her sweet, tight body for most of the night, over and over again. And when they’d eventually run out of condoms—something which had never happened to him before—he had pleasured her in other ways. He had used his tongue and his fingers and, at one point, an ice cube from the freezer downstairs, he recalled—so that the memory of her shuddered cries of fulfilment had stubbornly lodged themselves in his brain for days afterwards. He’d had difficulty forgetting the way she’d cried out his name and the way her soft thighs had wrapped themselves around his thrusting back. He’d had difficulty concentrating on work too, drifting off into sensual daydreams at the slightest provocation, until he had forced himself to stop thinking about her.
But none of those things addressed his immediate concerns and now a feeling of wariness crept over him as he looked into Hollie Walker’s face. Because, why had she asked to see him? Deliberately pushing away the brief cloud of darkness which hovered on the edge of his mind, he met her gaze with a look of polite enquiry.
‘So. What can I do for you, Hollie? I meant it when I told you I was busy. There are things I need to get finished before Christmas, which is in a few days’ time, as you clearly know.’ He forced himself to give a curt nod of acknowledgement in the direction of the smallest tree he had ever seen.
Her mouth was working and her previously glowing complexion had paled. ‘There’s no easy way to say this. I wish there was.’ She clenched her hands into two fists and squeezed them tight until the knuckles grew white. ‘I’m pregnant, Maximo,’ she husked. ‘I’m going to have your baby.’
The world spun and a dull sound inside his head threatened to deafen him. For a minute Maximo thought he must be dreaming, but her trembling body and white face were real enough and told their own story.
For this was no dream. The nightmare had become real.
‘You can’t be.’ His words were icy but the anger growing inside him felt hot and vital and all-consuming. ‘We took precautions.’
‘Well, obviously those precautions didn’t work,’ she said. ‘Look, I realise this has come as a complete shock to you—’
‘But clearly not to you.’ He frowned as he did some rapid mental calculations. ‘We had sex in—’
‘October,’ she supplied swiftly, her cheeks flaming. ‘Just in case you’re muddling me with someone else.’
‘There hasn’t been anyone else,’ he snapped before wondering why on earth he had told her that. Because wouldn’t it give her more power than she already had if she realised that every other woman had left him cold since he’d exited her bed, that wet dawn morning? Would she mistakenly start thinking she was special, or different?
‘Oh. Right,’ she said, looking startled.
His gaze skated over her as it had done with so many women in the past, but for once there was only one place it was focussed on. Not on her hair or lips or the curve of her breasts, but on her abdomen. ‘Pregnant,’ he repeated, as if affirming what his naked eye could not see.
‘Eleven weeks.’
He felt as if he were speaking in a language he didn’t really understand. As if he had entered a world which was now defined by dates. ‘You certainly took your time telling me.’
She nodded. ‘I know. I didn’t realise for a while. At first I couldn’t believe it, because I thought we were so careful. I made myself do three tests, until eventually I had to accept the evidence of what I found. And you weren’t around to tell, Maximo. You were supposed to be coming back to Trescombe. Everyone thought work was going to start on the castle before Christmas—’