Reclaiming His Pregnant Widow Read Free Page B

now.”
    Clea pressed a wall switch and light flooded the room, catching forgotten glints of precious copper in her long, dark curls, hinting at the fire that lay beneath.
    Lust caught him by the throat.
    He’d missed her so damn much. Missed talking to her. Missed touching her.
    Most of all he’d missed loving her.
    Clea.
    In a flash, Brand closed the space between them and took her in his arms again. He couldn’t get enough of touching her, reassuring himself that she was here, in his hold. Not a wraith that would vanish with his dreams asdawn cracked over the endless, empty horizon. Bending his head, he slanted his lips across hers. She gave a surprised gasp, and a beat later melted into his embrace.
    She tasted so sweet, and his hunger soared.
    Tracing the indent of her spine with shaking fingers, Brand’s hands moved up…up…until his fingers speared into the soft, glossy mass of constrained curls. Her head fell back and he deepened the kiss.
    Her breasts pressed against his chest, and despite her weight loss they seemed fuller than he remembered. Clea had always bemoaned her lack of curves, but now she was positively lush.
    Another change.
    But this one he would savor…
    He brought his hands forward to shape her ripe flesh and his fingers skimmed her belly. Fuller there, too. A curious anomaly given the slenderness of her shoulders, the sharp definition of her high cheekbones. His hands rested on the rise, his fingers exploring…and he felt her still.
    Blood roared in Brand’s ears. He couldn’t absorb what his fingertips were telling him.
    No!
    His first reaction was denial. But his hands had developed a life—a reasoning power—all their own, even as his mind sputtered then stalled. His palms stroked over Clea’s curves, sending bursts of unwelcome information back to his struggling brain until he could no longer deny the truth of what lay beneath his hands.
    Raising his head, he glared accusingly down into her startled green eyes. “You’re pregnant!”

Two
    C lea knew at once how it must appear.
    â€œIt’s not what you think,” she said quickly, reaching up to cradle Brand’s beloved face between her cupped hands. “Remember how we—”
    â€œIt certainly didn’t take you long to find someone else.”
    The blaze of accusation rocked her. Brand had gone all tense, his jaw clenching and unclenching against her hollowed palms as he glowered at her from between slitted lids.
    In the stillness of her office, Clea stared up at him in absolute shock, the awfulness of what he was saying—what he believed—finally sinking in.
    There was no one else.
    â€œI didn’t—”
    â€œShut up,” he snarled.
    â€œWait a minute…”
    Clea’s voiced trailed away as his hands manacled herwrists. He forced her fingers away from his skin and dropped them with palpable distaste, and all the while the beautiful ocean-hued eyes bored unblinkingly into hers. “It didn’t take you long to accept that I was dead—or was it a case of out of sight, out of mind?”
    The injustice of that caused her to reel away, almost tripping over the visitor’s chair in front of her desk. Clea sank onto the padded black leather, her legs weak. How could Brand believe that?
    Especially when she’d never stopped believing in him!
    Five days after her last telephone conversation with Brand, unable to contact him, Clea had sounded the alarm. It had taken another thirteen days—the longest stretch of Clea’s life—for the official channels to relay back to her that Brand was no longer in Greece. He’d entered Iraq over two weeks earlier through the Kuwait border and had checked into a battle-scarred hotel once favored by foreign businessmen in Baghdad. No one knew where he’d gone after checking out a few days later.
    There had been nothing left to do but wait. She’d made every excuse