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  He bent down in front of her, grabbing hold of her skirt and drawing it down her legs without bothering to take off her shoes. Her shirt went next.

  “Sit down,” he commanded, and her legs were far too weak to disobey him. He looked up at her, those gray eyes intent on hers. “Take your bra off for me.”

  With shaking hands, she found herself obeying him.

  “I imagine you’re going to report me to HR for this too.” The smile that curved his lips told her he didn’t much care.

  “I might,” she responded, sliding her bra down her arms and throwing it onto the floor.

  “Well, then I might have to keep you trapped here so you can’t tell anyone.”

  “This is a major infraction.”

  “Maybe. But then again. I am the boss. I suppose I could choose to reprimand you for such behavior.”

  “I... I suppose you could.”

  “You’re being a very bad girl,” he said, hooking his fingers in the waistband of her panties and pulling them down to her knees. “Very bad.”

  Panic skittered in her stomach, and she had no idea how to respond. To Isaiah being like this, so playful. To him being like this and also staring at her right where he was staring at her.

  “You need to remember who the boss is,” he said, moving his hands around her lower back and sliding them down to cup her ass. Then he jerked her forward, and she gasped as he pressed a kiss to the inside of her thigh.

  Then he went higher, and higher still, while she trembled.

  She couldn’t believe he was about to do this. She wanted him to. But she was also scared. Self-conscious. Excited. It was a whole lot of things.

  But then, everything with Isaiah was a lot.

  He squeezed her with both hands and then moved his focus to her center, his tongue sliding through her slick folds. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from making an extremely embarrassing noise, but she had a feeling he could still hear it, muffled or not.

  Because he chuckled.

  Isaiah, who was often humorless, chuckled with his mouth where it was, and his filthy intentions were obvious even to her.

  And then he started to show her what he meant by punishment. He teased her with his tongue, with his fingers, with his mouth. He scraped her inner thigh with the edge of his teeth before returning his attention to where she was most needy for him. But every time she got close he would back off. He would move somewhere else. Kiss her stomach, her wrist, her hand. He would take his attention off of exactly where she needed him.

  “Please,” she begged.

  “Bad girls don’t get to come,” he said, the edge in his voice sharp like a knife.

  Those words just about pushed her over the edge all on their own.

  “I thought you said you didn’t play games,” she choked out.

  “Let me rephrase that,” he said, looking up at her, a wicked smile curving his mouth. “I only play games in the bedroom.”

  He pressed two fingers into her before laughing at her again with his tongue, taking her all the way to the edge again before backing off. He knew her body better than she did, knew exactly where to touch her, and where not to. Knew the exact pressure and speed. How to rev her up and bring her back.

  He was evil, and in that moment, she felt like she hated him as much as she had ever loved him.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said.

  “You know.”

  “I do,” he responded. “But you have to tell me.”

  “You’re mean,” she panted.

  “I’m a very, very mean man,” he agreed, sounding unrepentant as he slid one finger back through her folds. Tormenting. Teasing. “And you like it.”

  “I don’t,” she insisted.

  “You do. Which is your real problem with all of this. You want me. And you want this. Even though you know you probably shouldn’t.”

  “Well, what about you?” she asked, breathing hard. “You want it too. Or you wouldn’t be trying so hard to convince me to go through with this marriage. Maybe you should beg.”

  “I’m on my knees,” he said. “Isn’t that like begging?”

  “That’s not—”

  But she was cut off because his lips connected with that most sensitive part of her again. She could do nothing but feel.

  She was so wet, so ready for him, so very hollow and achy that she couldn’t stand for him to continue. It was going to kill her.

  Or she was going to kill him. One of the two.

  “Tell me,” he whispered in her ear. “Tell me what you want.”

  “You,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “You. Inside me. Please.”

  She didn’t have to ask him twice.

  Instead, she found herself being lifted up, brought down onto the bed, sitting astride him. He maneuvered her so her slick entrance was poised just above his hardness. And then he thrust up, inside her.

  She gasped.

  “You want to be in charge? Go ahead.”

  It was a challenge. And it gave her anything but control, when she was so desperate for him, when each move over him betrayed just how desperate she was.

  He knew it too. The bastard.

  But she couldn’t stop, because she was so close, and now that she was on top she could...

  Stars exploded behind her eyes, her internal muscles pulsing, her entire body shaking as her orgasm rocked her. All it had taken was a couple of times rocking back and forth, just a couple of times applying pressure where it was needed.

  He growled, flipping her over and pinning her hands above her head. “You were just a bit too easy on me.”

  He kissed her then, and it was like a beast had been unleashed inside him. He was rough and untamed, and his response called up desire inside her again much sooner than she would have thought possible.

  But it was Isaiah.

  And with him, she had a feeling it would always be like this.

  Always?

  She pushed that mocking question aside.

  She wasn’t going to think about anything beyond this, right now.

  She wasn’t going to think about what she had told him before he carried her upstairs. About what she believed she deserved or didn’t, about what she believed was possible and wasn’t.

  She was just going to feel.

  This time, when the wave broke over her, he was swept up in it too, letting out a hoarse growl as he found his own release.

  And when it was over, she didn’t have the strength to get up. Didn’t have the strength to walk away from him.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow would sort itself out.

  Maybe for now she could hang on to the fantasy.

  * * *

  Poppy woke up in the middle of the night, curled around Isaiah’s body. Something strange had woken her, and it wasn’t the fact that she was sharing a bed with Isaiah.

  It wasn’t the fact that her resolve had weakened quite so badly last night.

  There was something else.

  She couldn’t think what, or why it had woken her out of a dead sleep. She rolled away from him and padded into the bathroom that was just off his bedroom. She stood there for a moment staring at the mirror, at the woman looking back at her. Who was disheveled and had raccoon eyes because she hadn’t taken her makeup off before allowing Isaiah to rock her world last night.

  And then it suddenly hit her.

  Because she was standing in a bathroom and staring at the mirror, and it felt like a strange kind of déjà vu.

  It was the middle of the month. And she absolutely should’ve started her period by now.

  She was two days late.

  And she and Isaiah hadn’t used a condom.

  “No,” she whispered.

  It was too coincidental.

  She wen
t back into the bedroom and dressed as quickly and quietly as possible. And then she grabbed her purse and went downstairs.

  She had to know.

  She wouldn’t sleep until she did. There were a few twenty-four-hour places in Tolowa, and she was going over there right now.

  And that was how, at five in the morning in a public restroom, Poppy Sinclair’s life changed forever.

  Nine

  When Isaiah woke up the next morning, Poppy wasn’t in bed with him. He was irritated, but he imagined she was still trying to hold on to some semblance of control with her little game.

  She was going to end up agreeing to marry him. He was fairly confident in that. But what he’d said about her being like a stray cat, he’d meant. She might not like the comparison, but it was true enough. Now that he wanted to domesticate her, she was preparing to run.

  But her common sense would prevail. It didn’t benefit her not to marry him.

  And she couldn’t deny the chemistry between them. He wasn’t being egotistical about that. What they had between them was explosive. It couldn’t be denied.

  When he got downstairs, he saw Poppy sitting at the kitchen table. She was dressed in the same outfit she’d been wearing last night, and she was staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed on her clenched fists.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she responded. She looked up at him, and then she frowned. “Could you put a shirt on?”

  He looked down at his bare chest. He was only wearing a pair of jeans. “No.”

  “I feel like this is a conversation we should have with your shirt on.” She kept her gaze focused on the wall behind him.

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve decided I like the conversations I have with you without my shirt better.”

  “I’m not joking around, Isaiah.”

  “Then you don’t have time for me to go get a shirt. What’s going on?”

  “I’m pregnant.” She looked like she was delivering the news of a death to him.

  “That’s...” He let the words wash over him, took a moment to turn them over and analyze what they made him feel. He felt...calm. “That’s good,” he said.

  “Is it?” Poppy looked borderline hysterical.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling completely confident and certain now. “We both want children.”

  It was sooner than he’d anticipated, of course, but he wanted children. And...there was something relieving about it. It made this marriage agreement feel much more final. Made it feel like more of a done deal.

  Poppy was his.

  He’d spent last night in bed with her working to affirm that.

  A pregnancy just made it that much more final.

  “I broke up with you last night,” she pointed out.

  “Yes, you did a very good impression of a woman who was broken up with me. Particularly when you cried out my name during your... Was it your third or fourth orgasm?”

  “That has nothing to do with whether or not we should be together. Whether or not we should get married.”

  “Well, now there’s no question about whether or not we’re getting married. You’re having my baby.”

  “This is not 1953. That is not a good enough reason to get married.”

  He frowned. “I disagree.”

  “I’m not going to just jump into marriage with you.”

  “You’re being unreasonable. You were more than willing to jump into marriage with me when you agreed to my proposal. Now suddenly when we’re having a child you can’t jump into anything? You continually jump into my bed, Poppy, so you can’t claim we don’t have the necessary ingredients to make a marriage work.”

  “Do you love me?” There was a challenge in her eyes, a stubborn set to her chin.

  “I care very much about you,” he responded.

  It was the truth. The honest truth. She was one of the most important people in his life.

  “But you’re not in love with me.”

  “I already told you—”

  “Yes. You’re not going to do love. Well, you know what? I’ve decided that it feels fake if we’re not in love.”

  “The fact that you’re pregnant with my child indicates it’s real enough.”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t understand anything.”

  “You sound like a sixteen-year-old girl having an argument with her parents. You would rather have some idealistic concept that may never actually happen than make a family with me?”

  “I would rather... I would rather none of this was happening.”

  It felt like a slap, and he didn’t know why.

  That she didn’t want him. Didn’t seem to want the baby. He couldn’t sort out the feeling it gave him. The sharp, stabbing sensation right around the area of his heart.

  But he could reason through it. He was right, and her hysterics didn’t change that.

  There was an order to things. An order of operations, like math. That didn’t change based on how people felt.

  He understood...nothing right now. Nothing happening inside him, or outside him.

  But he knew what was right. And he knew he could count on his brain.

  It was the surest thing. The most certain.

  So he went with that.

  “But it is happening,” he said, his voice tight. “You are far too practical to discard something real for some silly fantasy.”

  Her face drained of color. “So it’s a fantasy that someone could love me.”

  “That isn’t what I meant. It’s a fantasy that you’re going to find someone else who can take care of you like I can. Who is also the father of your child. Who can make you come the way that I do.”

  “Maybe it’s just easy for me. You don’t know. Neither do I. I’ve only had the one lover.”

  That kicked up the fire and heat in his stomach, and he shoved it back down because this was not about what he felt. Not about what his body wanted.

  “Trust me,” he bit out. “It’s never this good.”

  “I can’t do this.” She pressed a balled-up fist to her eyes.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “Because you will.”

  Resolve strengthened in him like iron. She was upset. But there was only one logical way forward. It was the only thing that made sense. And he was not going to let her take a different route. He just wasn’t.

  “I don’t have to, Isaiah.”

  “You want your child growing up like you did? Being shuffled between homes?”

  She looked like he’d hit her. “Foster care is not the same as sharing custody, and you know that. Don’t you dare compare the two. I would have been thrilled to have two involved parents, even if I did have to change houses on the weekends. I didn’t have that, and I never have had that. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

  “I understand well enough. You’re being selfish.”

  “I’m being reasonable!”

  Reasonable.

  Reasonable to her was them not being together. Reasonable to her was shoving him out of her life now that he’d realized just how essential she was.

  “How is it reasonable to deny your child a chance at a family?” he asked. “All of us. Together. At my parents’ house for dinners. Aunts and uncles and cousins. How is it unreasonable for me to want to share that with you instead of keeping my life and yours separate?”

  “Isaiah...”

  He was right, though. And what he wanted wasn’t really about what he wanted. It was about logic.

  And he wasn’t above being heavy-handed to prove that point.

  “If you don’t marry me, I’m going to pursue full custody of our child,” he said, the words landing heavily in the room.

  Her head popped up. “You what?”

  “And bel
ieve me, I’ll get it. I have money. I have a family to back me up. I can make this very difficult for you. I don’t want to, Poppy. That’s not my goal. But I will have my way.”

  The look on her face, the abject betrayal, almost made him feel something like regret. Almost.

  “I thought you were my friend,” she said. “I thought you cared about me.”

  “I do. Which is why I’m prepared to do this. The best thing. The right thing. I’m not going to allow you to hurt our child in the name of friendship. How is that friendship?”

  “Caring about someone doesn’t just mean running them over until they do what you want. Friendship and caring goes both ways.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “What I feel—what I want—has to matter.”

  “I know what you should want,” he insisted.

  If she would only listen. If she could, she’d understand what he was doing. In the end, it would be better if they were together. There was no scenario where their being apart would work, and if he had to play hardball to get her there, he damn well would.

  “That isn’t how wanting works. It’s not how feelings work.” She stood up, and she lifted her fist and slammed it down onto his chest. “It’s not how any of this works, you robot.”

  He drew back, shock assaulting him. Poppy was one of the only people who had never looked at him that way before. Poppy had always taken pains to try to understand him.

  “I’m a robot because I want to make sure my child has a family?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  “Because you don’t care about what I want.”

  “I want you to want what I want,” he said, holding her fist against his chest where she had hit him. “I want for this to work. How is that not feeling?”

  “Because it isn’t the right feeling.”

  Those words were like a whip cracking over his insides.

  He had never had the right feelings. He already knew that. But with Poppy his feelings hadn’t ever felt wrong before. He hadn’t felt wrong before.

  She’d been safe. Always.

  But not now. Not now he’d started to care.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “I’m sorry I can’t open up my chest and rearrange everything for you. I’m sorry that you agreed to be engaged to me, and then I didn’t transform into a different man.”