Free A Season for Love by Heather Graham Page A

Potential consequences, you know. Say, should you produce a child, I can guarantee you I'll be back—to claim it."
Ronnie gasped, shocked by his vehemence and firm determination, and the very idea. "There is no child," she rasped, adding with narrowed eyes. "And you couldn't."
"Try me."
"It's irrelevant," she grated, swallowing. "Pieter—"
"I'm afraid Pieter would have to discover at that point that his wife is a crystal angel with the devil's own heart."
"Don't worry, at that point—" Ronnie began desperately. She broke off her own words. To go further would be to betray the confidence Pieter had entrusted her with. "Could you please let go of my chin?" she demanded haughtily.
He shook his head relentlessly. "I want to stare into those beautiful blue eyes when I listen to your treachery."
Ronnie grated her teeth with fury, further irked because she feared she would soon start trembling. It was too easy to remember when those same dark eyes had stared into hers with tenderness, too easy to remember when his touch was gentle, tender, demanding nothing but that she love him with equal ardency. . .
"Drake, please"—she searched his eyes for a shred of compassion and found none—"I swear to you. There is no child."
"And how do you know?" he queried sceptically, reminding her that forty-eight hours hadn't passed since they'd parted.
"Believe me, I know," she said with all the confidence she could muster. "I—" She faltered only a second. "I do know what I'm doing. This is the nineteen eighties."
He released her chin and hand and stood, annoying her as he towered above her. "Well, I don't know," he informed her curtly. "And I promise you, I'll be waiting to see. I'd hate to hazard a guess about you and Pieter, but the time you spent with me was wildly potent. You were a wanton. . . ."
Ronnie sprang to her feet, wilder than Drake had ever seen her, any semblance of her regal cool shot entirely to the winds of mindless wrath. She didn't give a damn at that moment if her house guest reappeared inside with her hand print clearly etched on the side of his face.
But she never raised her hand. His arms locked around her body as soon as as she sprang up. "No, no, no, Mrs. von Hurst. No outraged violence. I won't tolerate it from a woman who literally asked me to take her."
Seething with frustration, Ronnie went limp. To pinnacle her wretchedness the shelter of his arms, even in anger, was dangerously enticing. She so desperately wanted to bury her head in the mass of hair that she knew lurked beneath the crisp tie and pressed dress shirt; so desperately wanted to blurt out everything that had happened, the way that everything was. . . .
She stiffened her slender spine and met his eyes. Exhausted, dejected, she spoke to him tiredly. "I think we'd better get in. Pieter might start worrying."
He let her go and, squaring her shoulders, she started back down the tile path.
"Ronnie."
She stopped and turned back without expression as he called her name.
"You will sit tomorrow."
She shrugged dispiritedly. Arguing with Pieter could have caused him a lapse anyway, and he was looking so happy.
"Yes, I'll sit," she said coldly, resuming her trip back to the house.
Drake watched her go in a torn agony himself. He didn't know what to think, but he couldn't help what he felt.
Logically she was poison. A cold-hearted temptress. A woman who would betray an ailing husband to partake in an illicit affair with all-out ardency, and, unwittingly, granted, use against that husband a man who was his most fervent fan.
Used. Drake knew he had been used more shockingly than ever, and it was that thought that fully boiled his blood to where the cap could barely be kept on his steaming temper.
But it was impossible to look at her and not be touched, not be swept back into a land of passion and tenderness.
She was still incredibly beautiful. And majestic. That proud lift of her shoulders and bracing of her spine when challenged . . .
She would never be