Free The Housekeeper's Daughter by Laurie Paige

baby.”
    She looked so fierce, so insulted, so damn beautiful, he couldn’t stop what happened next. He kissed her.
    As if he were dying and she was the breath of life. As if he couldn’t get enough of her. As if he would never let her go.
    When she struggled to rise, he rose with her, continuing the wild, foolish kiss that his heart demanded.
    Curving his body around her rounded tummy, he felt their child kick vigorously, whether in delight orprotest, he didn’t know. A surge of pride rolled into the passion he couldn’t suppress. She stood stiffly in his arms. He eased the kiss but couldn’t quite give it up yet.
    Suddenly, she softened and with a little moan, laid her hands on his chest, to touch him, he realized. She wasn’t pushing him away. Triumph blazed in him.
    Folding her in his arms, he savored the smoothness of her lips, the sweetness of her mouth. Eight months of dreams narrowed to this single moment of bliss.
    He ran his hands up and down her back and into the thick waves of her hair. The tactile sense of her, the taste and scent, the bliss of her being, her existence, fed that inner place where need dwelt. He slanted his mouth this way and that upon her lips.
    Maya fought against responding, but it was useless. This was Drake. He was part of her life, of her dreams and expectations of the future. She sensed the powerful hunger in his lean, hard frame. More than that, she knew there were feelings between them. They had shared too much to be indifferent. But was need enough?
    She sighed when he moved down her throat, pulling her shawl aside to place random kisses on her neck. Putting her arms around him, she rubbed his shoulders and into his hair, soothing something raw and hurting in him almost the way she would have had he been one of the youngest Colton boys.
    However, her body reacted far differently. Drake was a man, and she responded as a woman to him. She wanted the passion and the fire. She’d missed his arms and the strength of his body surrounding hers inheady desire. She’d missed the hot, hot hunger that blazed to life at the slightest touch between them.
    Resting against the railing, she let the kiss take her to that place of dreams and hopes. If only love could be enough, she thought sadly, and realized it wasn’t. Only Drake could overcome the strange darkness she sensed within him. Only he could take that one giant step forward into the sunshine of life. He had to want a future in order for there to be one.
    Tears crowded behind her closed eyes. She wanted so much for him…for them and their little girl.
    â€œMarry me,” he whispered, raising his head and staring into her eyes as if he would control her with his will.
    She shook her head. “I can’t.”
    â€œWhy? Dammit, why?”
    â€œYou have to want it, too.”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œYou don’t. Not really.”
    He gripped her shoulders, but his touch remained gentle. “If not for us, then for her, ” he said, grabbing whatever argument he could, fair or not. He ran his hands over her abdomen.
    She looked at him in mute despair, shredding his heart into confusion and anger and lots of other things.
    â€œYou want me,” he reminded her, slipping his hands inside the shawl and touching her breasts, taking their weight and measuring their fullness in his palms.
    Maya couldn’t lie. “Yes, but sometimes a person wants too much.”
    â€œSuch as?” he asked almost absently, as if his entire attention was focused on her body and its changes as he explored her new contours.
    â€œI don’t know,” she admitted with a tiny gasp as her nipples contracted swiftly, painfully.
    The familiar heat flamed in her. The delicious softening of her body and her will followed.
    Drake felt no flash of triumph as she yielded to the passion between them. The feelings were too deep for that, going beyond anything he’d ever experienced with any woman.