An Heir for the Millionaire by Julia James Read Free Book Online

time there was a different emotion in it. Her features contorted.
    â€˜You conceited oaf!’ she gasped at him. ‘Just who do you think you are? First you think I played some stupid manipulative game by walking out the way I did! Now you think, you really think, that I didn’t tell you I was pregnant so I could get some kind of revenge on you?’
    â€˜What other reason can there be?’ he snarled back at her.
    A choking sound came from her.
    â€˜How about the fact you’d just replaced me with a new model and had given me my pay-off of a diamond necklace, like I was some kind of whore ?’ she spat at him.
    Xander’s mouth whitened.
    â€˜You knew you were pregnant that evening?’ His voice was a raw rasp. ‘You knew you were pregnant and you kept quiet about it! You walk out, carrying my baby, and you never say a word to me—in four years ?’
    She was staring at him. Staring at him as if he had spoken in Greek.
    â€˜Well?’ he demanded. His jaw was gritted, fury still roiling inside him. Fury and another emotion, even more powerful, that he must not, must not yet yield to, but which was driving him—driving him onwards with impossible motion.
    â€˜You’re not real,’ she said. Her voice had changed. ‘You’re just not real. You actually think I would tell a man who’d chucked me on the garbage pile, who’d paid me off with a diamond necklace, that I was pregnant by him?’
    His expression stiffened. ‘I did not “pay you off”,’ he bit out. ‘It’s customary to give a token of appreciation to—’
    â€˜Don’t say that word to me! Don’t ever say that word to me again! And don’t even think of trying to tell me that after you’d just flushed me down the pan I was supposed to announce I was carrying your child.’
    Emotion was mounting in Xander’s chest.
    â€˜If you had told me, obviously I would have rescinded my decision to—’
    A look of incredulity passed across her contorted features.
    â€˜Rescinded your decision?’ Her voice was high-pitched and hollow. ‘It wasn’t a bloody business meeting. You had made it clear—absolutely, killingly clear—that I was out. You had someone new to warm your bed and that was that.’
    His face tightened. ‘Obviously, had you told me that you had got pregnant, then everything would have been very different.’
    She turned away. The gesture angered him. He reached out for her again, his hand closing on her shoulder.
    She froze at his touch. He could feel it, all her muscles tensing. Her reaction angered him even more. Why should she resist him?
    She never resisted me—always yielded to me…eager for me. All that cool, English composure dissolved, like ice in heat…my heat…
    He thrust the memory aside. It was irrelevant. All that was relevant now was to deal with this shattering discovery.
    I have a son!
    The impulse, overwhelming and overpowering, to go now, this instant, to find the child that was inside the house, find him and—
    No, he could not do that either. Not yet. Not until—until… Christos , he could hardly think straight, his mind a storm of emotion.
    His hand dropped from her.
    â€˜As,’ he said heavily, ‘it will be different now.’
    She was still half turned away from him. He could not see her face. He didn’t care. Providing she could hear, could understand, that was all that mattered. He fought the storm inside him for control. He had been iron-willed all day. Controlled enough to instruct his London PA, very calmly, to find out the address of Clare Williams from the hotel she had been working at. Detached enough to rearrange today’s schedule so that he could be free by late afternoon to drive and find her. She’d run out on him once before, vanished into the night—she was not going to do so a second time.
    But the reason he had