Free Aces High by Kay Hooper

presence the instant he entered a room, even if her back was to him, and when he was with her she found it almost impossible to look at anything but him.
    On the third day it occurred to her with devastating simplicity that she was falling in love with him.
    She was sitting at her desk, conscious of the faint smile that Skye had left her with just minutes before, and when the realization dropped into her mind it did so with the clarity of total certainty.
    I’m beginning to love him.
    She put her pen down with unnatural care and folded her hands on her neat desk blotter, conscious of her heart beating like a drum in her ears. She felt both hot and cold, eager and fearful, delighted and hurting. She hadn’t meant to love him. He had crept into her heart with charm and patience.
    And she couldn’t let him know, because she was still afraid of giving him her heart.
    Despite his careful patience these last days, Katrina knew only too well that the power of his desire for her was an all-consuming thing, stark and possessive. Whatever his feelings for her now, he wouldn’t be content with only a “loving and passionate” woman in his bed. He would demand a total surrender this time, driven by his own doubts about the depths of her feelings before to be certain of them now.
    Beginning to understand him, Katrina knew that his harsh demands on that first night had not been uttered only with the desire to exact revenge for what he had gone through after Germany. There had been a certain amount of truth in his avowed intention to purge himself of her.
    She wondered if he realized himself what he was after this time.
    He had gone through hell after Germany; she didn’t doubt that. In all truth, he had been more deeply hurt than she had, because the shallowness of her own emotions had protected her somewhat, and because she had known there had been no betrayal. For six years Skye had remembered her, his own feelings eating at him. Then they had met again, against all odds, and he was bent on a “second chance.”
    Katrina couldn’t help but believe that whether or not Skye knew it himself, what he wanted was to get her out of his system once and for all. So she couldn’t very well tell him she loved him.
    She
couldn’t.

Chapter 4
    Teddy Steele began to push herself into a sitting position on the bed, but then turned somewhat green and hastily fell back onto the pillows. The very powerful arm of her husband reached out with perfect timing, and a cracker was placed between her lips. Teddy didn’t waste time with thanks, but munched the cracker with her eyes closed, willing her stomach to settle.
    Zach raised himself on an elbow and looked down at his wife’s pale face with a worried frown. “Better, honey?”
    One of her big brown eyes opened cautiously, then the other, and she sighed in relief as her stomach behaved. Blinking away the morning dryness of her contact lenses, she answered, “Yes, but it’s the pits.”
    “Why don’t you sleep in today?” he suggested casually.
    Teddy eyed him with loving understanding, her gamine smile quirking her lips. “I’m fine, Zach.” She reached up a hand to his lean cheek, stroking gently. “I’m not going to lose this one.”
    Zach had a great deal of faith in his vivacious wife’s peculiar psychic certainties, but he had too much experience with the vagaries of fate to share her confidence. He also remembered far too vividly Teddy’s miscarriage months before, and the terror he’d gone through at almost losing her. Not all her assurances—or those of the doctor who was still astonished by this second conception—could allay his fears. He caught her hand and held it firmly to his face, his free hand moving to push the sheet aside and cover her very slightly rounded belly. “You should have stayed in New York,” he said a bit harshly.
    “What, and miss our final hurrah?” she said, deliberately light. “It isn’t a jungle this time, remember? There’s no danger at