One-Night Pregnancy by Lindsay Armstrong Read Free Book Online Page A

in a boardroom as a bedroom—he’s as sexy as hell. Where did you meet him? It has to be him, I would say. You couldn’t confuse that face easily.’
    Bridget blinked at the picture in the paper and thought, No, you couldn’t. ‘Beside a swollen creek in a flash flood, trying to rescue a carload of people.’
    Julia pursed her lips as she summed Bridget up from her short cap of coppery hair, her delicate features and her sparkling green eyes, her slender figure in a whitedotted voile blouse and khaki cargo pants to her amber suede pumps. ‘You may have been lucky if you looked like a drowned rat.’
    ‘Oh, I did.’ Bridget paused with a grimace that turned to a frown. ‘But—is he really a playboy?’
    ‘He has escorted some of the loveliest, most exotic women in the land, but not one of them has been able to pin him down. Uh-oh.’
    Julia wheeled herself back to her domain to answer her phone. And it occurred to Bridget as Julia did so that there was something in her colleague’s demeanour that was a little puzzling. But she couldn’t put her finger on it, so she turned her attention back to the picture in the paper.
    Adam Beaumont was thirty-one, and good-looking. In the picture, he was wearing a suit and a tie, and he’dbeen captured on the move, with the front flap of his jacket flying open—not at all how she remembered him.
    Despite his being soaked and unshaven that tempestuous night, and in jeans and boots, the two things she would always remember about him remained the same, however. It was the same tall, elegant physique beneath that beautiful suit, and the same haunting eyes—those often brooding or moody, sometimes mercilessly teasing, occasionally genuinely amused blue eyes.
    It all came flooding back to her, as it had in the moments before she’d made the exclamation that had grabbed Julia’s attention.
    But for the time being she was to be denied the opportunity to think back to that memorable encounter with Adam Beaumont, whom she’d known only as Adam. It was an hour before the six o’clock news. The main bulletin of the day was to go to air, and the usual tension was rising in the newsroom.
    She heard her name called from several directions, and she folded the newspaper with a sigh, then took a deep breath, grabbed her clipboard and leapt into the fray.
    When she got home, she made herself a cup of tea and studied the newspaper again, at the same time asking herself what she knew about the Beaumonts.
    What most people knew, she decided. That they were ultra-wealthy and ultra-exclusive. Adam and Henry’s grandfather had started the dynasty as a mineral prospector, looking for copper but stumbling on nickel, and the rest, as they said, was history.
    What she hadn’t known was that the family was plagued by a feud, until Julia had mentioned it. The moment Julia had remarked on the possibility of Adam finding the lever to unseat his brother, Henry, it had taken her right back to the shed, the paraffin lamps and the storm, and that hard, closed expression on Adam’s face. If she’d had any doubts that they were one and the same man, they’d been swept away.
    Her next set of thoughts was that Adam Beaumont had probably gone out of his way not to reveal his identity—because, to put it bluntly, he was way out of her league.
    Surely that was enough, on top of what he himself had said, to kill any lingering crazy longing stone-dead? she reflected—and wrapped her arms around herself in a protective little gesture.
    Three weeks had seen her go through a maelstrom of emotional chaos. Her bruises and scrapes might have healed, but her mental turmoil had been considerable. And, as she’d postulated to herself the day she’d been both rescued and abandoned, she felt torn between a bittersweet it was never meant to be sensation and a tart resentment that left her feeling hot and cold. If he’d known he wasn’t for her, why had he done it?
    Of course she’d been more than happy to participate,