The Billionaire's Trophy (9 page)

‘You’re Emmie,’ Lilah remarked with her cut-glass laugh.

And Emmie cringed, thinking, Good grief, he’s told her he was with me last night!
There was something so knowing and nasty about Lilah’s scornful smile. ‘And you’re Lilah,’ Emmie responded flatly.

‘Bastian picked you up at the office, I believe—how sweet but how
lazy
of him. Men can be such bastards,’ Lilah trilled like the evil fairy as Emmie stared down at the brunette feeling sick with embarrassment, guilt and discomfiture. ‘He’s using you to get at me. Don’t you have any pride?’

‘Don’t you?’ Emmie dared. ‘We’re not having this conversation.’

And Emmie swept on past, with her head held high, pale and trembling a little and grateful to have escaped Bastian’s shrewish former fiancée. If the brunette had really cared for him would she ever have risked losing him in the first place? As Emmie crossed the room to Bastian’s side she was seethingly conscious of his stunning dark golden gaze clinging to her. She mightn’t like him but she
adored
his eyes. Suddenly it was hard to drag oxygen into her lungs and a flock of butterflies were dive-bombing her tummy. He reached out and closed a hand over hers to draw her close with an ease she resented. He seemed to feel no discomfiture at all over what had happened between them the night before. Colour crawled up Emmie’s cheeks, her nostrils flaring on the hot evocative scent of him that close to her, memory dragging her down and down so deep and fast she was lost within seconds. Her heartbeat quickened as she recalled the driving intensity of his body over and inside hers and an instant surge of heat snapped her nipples painfully tight and mushroomed in her pelvis.

‘We need to talk,
glyka mou
,’ Bastian breathed in a roughened undertone, but it was the very last thing he wanted to do. Her slender body was trembling infinitesimally beneath his arm and that close to the warmth of her he had an instant erection. Hunger was raging through him like a bush fire and all he wanted to do was drag her back to his bed and keep her there fully occupied until he felt normal again, cool again,
himself
again. Instead he thrust open the door into the conservatory and walked her in there.

‘What are you doing?’ Emmie demanded thinly. ‘I don’t want to be alone with you. The show of togetherness is only for public viewing!’

Smouldering golden eyes fringed by lush black lashes zeroed in on her. ‘Stop fighting with me. It’s childish. I apologised—’

‘The man
apologised
!’ Emmie scorned.
‘
I’m impressed.’

‘You really do know how to press my buttons,’ Bastian growled, golden eyes bright with anger as he hauled her into his arms. ‘We start again afresh now—’

‘No,’ Emmie cut in, face uncertain and hectically pink as she looked up at him, fiercely resisting temptation. He had made a fool of her once; she wouldn’t let him do it to her twice.

‘I want you to be the same way you were with me last night,’ Bastian admitted darkly.

‘A tipsy stupid pushover?’ Emmie snapped. ‘Not a chance!’

He brought his hot devouring lips down on hers and it was like a lethal rocket attack on her treacherous body, sending a wave of melting heat to her feminine core with a kiss so boldly sexual and exciting that it left her head swimming and her knees weak. Her hands clutched at his shoulders to keep her upright, a drowning, quivering, overwhelming awareness engulfing her like a tide as her every skin cell lit up like a traffic light. He kept on kissing her, his tongue delving hungrily, one lean hand massaging the pouting curve of her breasts, releasing a whimper of sound from her throat as he rubbed her straining nipples through the fabric. His fingers reached down to yank up the skirt of her dress, trailed along her thigh and she froze, dragging her mouth free in desperation.

‘No, Bastian.’

‘Maybe some guys get off on rejection—I don’t!’ he bit out angrily.

The ache between her slender thighs hurt along with the knowledge that she could not satisfy her outrageous craving for him. ‘Monday I’ll be back at work for two short weeks and we pretend none of this ever happened...OK?’ she pressed in desperation.

‘If that’s what you want,’ Bastian framed between gritted teeth.

Emmie simply nodded. It
had
to be what she wanted. After all, no relationship between her and Bastian could go anywhere but the bedroom. He was a billionaire businessman, for goodness’ sake, way out of her league and right now he was at a loose end and probably frustrated because he had a high-voltage libido and he was just out of a long relationship. All he could possibly want from her was sex and she refused to lower herself to that level.
A typical shag,
she reminded herself doggedly of his comment about his expectations of her the night before, which represented all too clearly how he saw her: as an escort for hire, an easy little office girl, surprising only in her lack of experience and currently the only available sexual option below his roof because most of his guests were his relatives.

He freed her and Emmie returned to the ballroom, shaken but determined to stay in control. She followed everyone else out to the big hall where Nessa stood on the upper landing of the stairs, posing for the hovering photographer to throw her bouquet. Twenty seconds later, the bouquet pitched down into Emmie’s startled arms and Nessa whooped with satisfaction.

‘I don’t think so,’ Lilah Siannas derided, treating Emmie to a contemptuous appraisal.

Emmie ignored the brunette and was literally watching the clock to calculate how soon she could excuse herself and retire to her room for the night. After all, once the bride and groom had departed, her role was surely at an end.

His simmering gaze pinned to Emmie’s retreat up the stairs, Bastian knocked back a brandy without respecting the vintage and gritted his teeth: Emmie had thrown in the towel while Lilah was behaving like a demented stalker. Suddenly, Bastian was out of all patience with the entire female sex and he crossed the room to join his grandfather and make a suggestion about how they could best spend what remained of the night. Theron’s lean weathered face lit up in surprise and pleasure.

‘No, I don’t want to talk about it,’ he told the old man grimly.

* * *

Emmie wakened when a maid brought her breakfast. She had slept like a log, exhausted by the strain of keeping up a front on Nessa’s wedding day. In the warmth of the sunlight now filling the room, she felt stronger and brighter, and she took a quick shower to freshen up before sitting down at the table out on the balcony where her breakfast awaited her. The view of the empty beach and the turquoise sea arched over by a clear blue sky was fantastic. A text beeped on her cell phone and she lifted it.

‘Be ready to leave at nine. I will not be travelling with you. Thank you for your assistance.’

It was from Bastian, no
x
at the end, nothing personal. A sharp sense of disappointment pierced Emmie and she questioned her response. After all, her role was at an end and as she had refused Bastian the night before he naturally saw no point in further contact with her. She was once again the woman he had hired to do a job and the job was done, she reminded herself painfully, disconcerted that her eyes were filling with stinging tears. What the heck was wrong with her? This was how the cookie crumbled when he was a billionaire and she was an office worker...unless she fell pregnant, a little voice whispered in the back of her mind, sending a cooling shiver of consternation through her. With that possibility in mind it might be more sensible to be a little less aggressive in her attitude to him, she reasoned unhappily, and she stood up, wondering if Bastian was still in his room. Not even sure of what she planned to say, she went to the door between their rooms on impulse and knocked. She was shocked when the door jerked open to reveal Lilah.

‘Oh...’ Emmie breathed, losing colour and falling back a step.

A complacent smile on her lips, Lilah preened in the doorway, making the most of Emmie’s surprise at her being in Bastian’s bedroom.

‘You’re being sent straight back to London,’ Lilah pointed out as though her presence in Bastian’s room and Emmie’s travel itinerary were connected, which very probably they were, Emmie reflected with a sinking heart and a despondent sense of humiliation. If Bastian was back with his ex, Emmie was too much of an embarrassing extra to keep below the same roof.

‘Yes,’ Emmie agreed with no expression at all, too proud to betray her mortification to the other woman but feeling vindicated in her decision not to take Bastian’s apparent interest in her seriously the night before. Evidently he was back in the arms of his ex. That hadn’t taken long. Bastian had been on the rebound; that was the only reason he had come after her but, clearly and understandably, it was Lilah whom he had
really
wanted. For no reason that she could comprehend, Emmie felt gutted, absolutely gutted by that obvious fact.

The door closed. Dry-eyed, facial muscles locked tight, Emmie packed her case. She had better hope she wasn’t pregnant for, in this situation, what a disaster such an unwelcome development would be!

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
HREE
WEEKS
LATER
, Emmie ripped open a pregnancy-testing kit during her break at the café and pulled out the instruction leaflet. Her heart was beating as fast as a drum, sheer tension slicking her taut face with a sheen of perspiration. After all, she was already homeless and pretty much jobless and she most definitely did not need to be pregnant into the bargain. Admittedly, she had sore breasts and was feeling sick round the clock. But so what? It was a bug she had picked up some place, a stupid bug, she told herself frantically.

At the same time, in the considerably greater comfort of his office in the City, Bastian was tossing aside his phone after contacting Emmie’s mother, Odette Taylor. That had proved to be a fruitless call. Evidently Emmie had moved out without leaving a forwarding address and her fond parent neither knew nor cared where she had gone. That was the point when Bastian realised that he had hit a brick wall. Of course, he hadn’t expected to learn that Emmie had already left his employ when he arrived back in London but he still
had
to see her, had to check she was all right. He owed her that consideration at least, Bastian reasoned grimly, and as far as he was aware his PA, Marie, was the only member of his staff who had got to know Emmie in any depth. He called the efficient brunette in and after a couple of going-nowhere minutes of tactful probing lost patience and simply admitted that he wanted to contact Emmie.

Back in the tiny café staffroom, Emmie scanned the test wand again with swimming eyes. She wanted to sob and scream like a little child for the pregnancy test had proved positive and for a couple of shameful minutes nothing less than terror controlled Emmie. A
baby
...she was going to have a
baby
and the pregnancy was already making her as sick as a dog! She felt awful, truly awful! And yet she couldn’t contemplate a termination because she was all too well aware that had Odette had that option, neither she nor her sisters might ever have been born. Didn’t her baby deserve love and appreciation? She could not reject her child simply because the timing didn’t suit, the pregnancy was unplanned and she had no supportive man in the picture. Emmie released her breath on a dismissive hiss on that latter score. With the single exception of Kat, neither Emmie nor her siblings had enjoyed the advantage of a caring father in their lives.

‘It’s getting busy out here!’ her boss called through the door to bring her break to an early conclusion.

Emmie straightened her overall, locked her bag away again and returned to work. She had no choice now but to go home to her sister, Kat, she reflected guiltily. At present she was sleeping on a friend’s sofa and she wasn’t earning enough at the café to pay rent and eat at the same time. Kat ran a guesthouse in the Lake District and would probably be glad to have help with the cleaning and catering, Emmie thought, striving for a more positive angle than a daunting image of herself being forced to run home like a helpless teenager, who couldn’t cope with the adult world. Of course she could have approached her sister Saffy for assistance: Saffy owned an apartment in London. But the prospect of asking for help from her very much more successful twin was too humiliating for Emmie. She could not imagine the shrewd and worldly-wise Saffy ever making such a basic mistake as to fall accidentally pregnant. In short Emmie literally cringed at the idea of having to admit to her twin how very badly her own move to London had gone for her.

Bastian was able to pick Emmie out from across the café. She wore a candy-pink overall that was a little too short for such a leggy young woman and she looked incredibly pale. Maybe she just wasn’t wearing make-up, he reasoned, taking a seat in a booth while still studying her tall slender figure. Her head turned, treating him to a flash of dazzling blue eyes, luscious pink lips parting to show a glimpse of the oddly enticing gap between her two front teeth. His body, recently proven to be woodenly impervious to the charms of more available women, reacted with an instant arousal that set his teeth on edge. Emmie saw him and stilled in obvious dismay. Bastian smiled regardless, shifted lean brown fingers in fluid invitation, mentally willing her to move in his direction.

The potent pull of Bastian in the flesh was so powerful that Emmie felt as if she were being yanked across the floor by a force stronger than she was. She approached him reluctantly, notepad in hand, mouth dry, every muscle strained taut. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked breathlessly.

‘When do you finish?’

Emmie collided with dark golden eyes as compelling as chains snaking out to entrap her body. She supposed there was no avoiding what had to be faced. He had a right to know about the pregnancy. His preference for Lilah did not enter the equation because that was personal,
his
personal business. All that should really matter to Emmie was that she was carrying his child; however the shock of that discovery was still rippling through her like the aftermath of an earthquake. ‘My shift ends at ten.’

‘I’ll be waiting.’ Without further ado, Bastian sprang up and strode outside: decisive, impatient, stubbornly practical, she affixed ruefully. She knew he would have demanded she leave right now in the middle of her shift had he believed he could bully her into doing so.

When she emerged from the café at closing time a limousine was parked by the kerb.

‘Miss Marshall?’ the driver asked out of the window before getting out to whip open the passenger door for her. Emmie swallowed hard, struggled to suppress the nausea in her stomach, and climbed in. She was disconcerted by the discovery that the limo was empty and asked Bastian’s driver where he was taking her.

‘I’m to drive you back to Mr Christou’s apartment.’

Emmie pushed her weary head back against the headrest. She didn’t care at the moment where she was going, was only grateful that she did not have to walk there. If she had to make her big announcement, it was better to do so where they would not be overheard or interrupted. How would he react? Would he be angry, resentful, bitter? Would he offer to pay for a termination or even suggest adoption as an alternative? The driver escorted her into a luxury block of apartments and, tucking her into a lift, pressed the correct button for her.

Bastian impatiently paced the wooden floor of his elegant lounge. He was convinced that he knew what she was going to tell him: he had suspected the truth the minute her strained eyes had met his. Three weeks ago, Emmie had been considerably more cheerful and calm and he could not credit that escaping her harpy of a mother had left her in such low spirits. Now Bastian, who was confident that he excelled at solving problems, was bent on working out how he could best turn an apparent negative into a positive.

A man in a suit had the door of Bastian’s apartment standing open for her arrival when she stepped out of the lift into a stylishly decorated hallway. Crossing it, Emmie tightened the sash on her raincoat and dug her nervous hands into her pockets, pushing her shoulders back as she entered the dimly lit apartment, noting the long expanses of window that denoted a penthouse, the clean lines of sleek contemporary furniture and the same lack of clutter that distinguished Bastian’s office. Even on that level they didn’t suit each other, Emmie mused, for she was a great hoarder of sentimental bits and pieces.

Bastian strode forward. ‘Take your coat off. Make yourself comfortable,’ he urged huskily.

Emmie flicked a glance at his lean, darkly handsome face and the lustrous brilliance of his dark, thickly lashed eyes and turned pink and uncomfortable. He was spectacularly good-looking and had the most colossal impact on her every time she saw him. Heat flickering like an uneasy flame low in her pelvis, she undid her coat, shrugged it off, sat down, and pressed her knees and her hands together like a child urged to be on her very best behaviour. ‘It’s not good news,’ she told him awkwardly.

Bastian’s gaze roamed across her flawless face and down over the elegant lines of her willowy figure with instinctive appreciation. There was something special about her and he still didn’t know what it was but it was a quality that shouted at him every time he saw her. ‘That depends on how you look at it.’

‘I’m pregnant,’ Emmie delivered curtly. ‘And no matter how you look at it, it’s a problem. I don’t want a child right now when I’m only at the start of my career and yet I couldn’t live with having an abortion just because it’s a case of bad timing—’

‘
I
could take the baby,’ Bastian interrupted.

Thoroughly taken aback by that suggestion, Emmie lifted her head and stared back at him with bright blue eyes of disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious?’

‘Why not? I was prepared to get married to have a family. How is this situation different?’

‘If you had married, you would have had a wife—’

‘Don’t be prejudiced. I would make an excellent single father. Certainly, I know all the things a father
shouldn’t
do,’ Bastian proffered with brutal honesty. ‘My father was an appalling role model.’

‘So was mine...er—’

‘All I’m saying is that if you don’t want the baby, I
do
—’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t want it!’ Emmie protested, dismayed by his attitude and suddenly feeling ridiculously protective of the new life forming inside her. And yet on another level, she respected him for his unexpected willingness to get involved and take responsibility. ‘I think it’s just that I don’t know what to do
now.
’

‘We don’t have to make any serious decisions for months yet,’ Bastian pointed out soothingly.

‘I
do
want my baby,’ Emmie started to confide but her tummy was rolling about like a ship on a stormy sea and she was forced to leap back upright. ‘Where’s the cloakroom?’ she gasped in dismay.

Luckily, she made it there in time and was sick for the second time that evening. Afterwards, limp and drained, she leant across the vanity unit to freshen up and peered at her bloodshot eyes and extreme pallor in the mirror. She looked like death warmed over, she conceded painfully.

‘Should I call a doctor?’ Bastian greeted her right outside the door, which embarrassed her. ‘Take you to a hospital?’

‘No, I assume this is what the books call morning sickness, only it seems to strike me at all hours of the day,’ Emmie told him morosely, rubbing her cheeks on the recollection of how pale she had looked and then wondering why she was bothering...as if
that
were going to make a difference and transform her from a humble waitress clad in an ugly overall into a sexually appealing woman! Why on earth would she even want to appeal to him now?

‘I didn’t think you would be affected by anything of that nature this early,’ Bastian remarked.

‘That makes two of us, but I already feel pretty sick most of the time.’

‘Where are you staying at the minute?’ Bastian asked.

Emmie reddened and sat down again. ‘How did you know I’d moved out of my mother’s flat?’

‘I tried to contact you there.’

‘She was still trying to get me to accept bookings from her clients,’ Emmie admitted reluctantly. ‘I had no choice but to leave.’

‘I thought she would continue to put you under pressure. Where are you currently staying?’ he asked again.

Emmie admitted she was sleeping on a sofa at a friend’s house. ‘There’s not much else I can do. I’m not earning enough to pay rent,’ she admitted stiffly, mortified by the difference in their financial situations but determined to be as honest as she could be.

Bastian’s face tensed, his wildly sensual mouth compressing into a taut line. ‘That
is
something I can help with. I own several apartments for the use of employees flying in from abroad. You can move into one of them.’

Emmie frowned. ‘I couldn’t possibly—’

‘Of course you can,’ Bastian cut in firmly. ‘I’m responsible for the situation you’re in. It’s the least I can do.’

Emmie swallowed hard on the pride threatening to choke her. The prospect of sleeping on a sofa for another night had little appeal and she couldn’t possibly inconvenience her friend by staying with her for much longer. Being homeless was frightening, Emmie acknowledged wretchedly. The security of a roof over her head would give her a much-needed breathing space, which she could use to decide what to do next. ‘OK, but I’m only agreeing because I don’t have any other option.’

Bastian pulled his phone out and spoke to someone at length in his own language. ‘The place will be fully stocked for your use by the time we arrive,’ he asserted. ‘Give me the address where you have been staying and I will arrange to have your belongings conveyed to the apartment for you.’

He made everything sound so easy. Although she could not help being impressed she also knew that nothing could have better illustrated the vast gulf between them—the extent of his wealth and power versus her poverty and lack of influence. Only that did not mean she had to be weak or meek, she reflected, tilting her chin. But sometimes accepting a helping hand when life was tough was the most sensible move.

* * *

Two hours later, Bastian gave Emmie a tour of the apartment he had offered her. It contained every luxury she could think of, from a stock of DVDs and a power shower to a fridge freezer stocked with every necessity. ‘I’ll be very comfortable here,’ Emmie remarked carefully. ‘But you have to promise to tell me when you need it for someone who works for you.’

Dark golden eyes accentuated by luxuriant black lashes focused on her intently and her heart hammered hard beneath her breastbone. ‘Right now, your needs are more important. Let’s face it, that’s
my
baby you’re carrying,’ he traded levelly. ‘Naturally you’re my first priority.’

The possessive note of that comment about the baby disconcerted her. Her soft pink lips parted. ‘Is that really how you feel? Do you like children?’

‘Never really thought about it. I don’t
dislike
them,’ Bastian declared pensively. ‘But the child you have, whether it’s a boy or a girl, will be my heir.’