A Debt Paid in Passion by Dani Collins Read Free Book Online

here?” she asked, struggling to use her severed stomach muscles to heft herself onto the bed.
    He smoothly moved to her side, set down his coffee and helped her.
    “I don’t—” She stiffened in rejection, but he bundled her into his crisp shirt anyway. The press of his body heat through the fabric burned into her as he used a gentle embrace to lift her. His free hand caressed her bare, dangling leg, sliding it neatly under the sheet as he slid her into bed as if she weighed no more than a kitten.
    Shaken, she drew the sheet up to her neck and glared at him.
    He picked up his coffee and sipped, staring back with his poker face. “Your doctor said he’d have the paternity results when he did his rounds this morning.”
    Her heart left her body and ran down the hall to bar the door of the nursery.
    She wasn’t ready to face this. Last night had been full of sudden jerks to wakefulness that had left her panting and unable to calm herself from the nightmare that Raoul would disappear with their daughter.
    That he would disappear from her life again.
    Why did it matter whether he was in her life? She felt nothing but hatred and mistrust toward him, she reminded herself. But the weeks of not seeing him while she waited out her pregnancy had been the bleakest of her life, worse even than when her family had left for Australia.
    Logic told her he wasn’t worth these yearning feelings she still had, but she felt a rush of delight that he kept showing up. When he was in the room, the longing that gripped her during his absences eased and the dark shadows inside her receded.
    She couldn’t forget he was the enemy, though. And she was running out of defenses.
    He must have seen her apprehension, because he drawled, “Scared? Why?” The question was like a throwing star, pointed on all sides and sticking deep. “Because I might be the father? Or because you know I am?”
    The stealthy challenge circled her heart like a Spanish inquisitor, the knife blade out and audibly scraping the strop.
    She noticed her hands were pleating the edge of the sheet into an accordion. What was the use in prevaricating? She licked her numb lips.
    “Are you going to try to take her from me if you are?” she asked in a thin voice.
    If? You bitch, he thought as the tension of not knowing stayed dialed high inside him. The last three days had been hellish as he’d grown more and more attached to that tiny tree frog of a girl while cautioning himself that she might belong to another man.
    Just like her mother.
    “I could have taken her a dozen times by now,” he bit out. “I should have.”
    It wasn’t completely true. The hospital had accommodated his visiting the baby, but only because he was the kind of man who didn’t let up until he got what he wanted. They wouldn’t have let him leave with her, though.
    If Sirena believed he could have, however, great. He wanted to punish her for the limbo she’d kept him in.
    Her hands went still and pale. All of her seemed to drain of color until she was practically translucent, her already wan face ashen. Fainting again? He shot out a hand to press her into the pillows against the raised head of the bed.
    She tried to bat away his touch, but in slow motion, her tortured expression lifting long enough to let him glimpse the storm of emotions behind her tangled lashes and white lips: frustration at her weakness, a flinch of physical pain in her brow, defensiveness that he had the audacity to touch her and terror. Raw terror in the glimmering green of her eyes.
    Rolling her head away, she swallowed, her fear so palpable the hair rose on the back of his neck.
    Advantage to me, he thought, trying to shrug off the prickling feeling, but guilty self-disgust weighed in the pit of his stomach. All he could think about was the hours he’d spent right here, telling her how unfair it was for a child to grow up missing a parent. The questions Lucy would have, the empty wedge in the wholeness of her life, would