Jennifer Greene - The Honor Bound Groom

The baby suddenly kicked, and Kelly’s hand instinctively covered her abdomen. Even with the dim visibility, she recognized the property and house.

Mac had brought her here once, a few days before. Two weeks was an incredibly short time to upend your whole life. He’d insisted she see it to decide if she could live here. Possibly he really meant to give her one last-ditch chance to say no to the whole marriage idea, but truthfully, Kelly never felt as if she had a chance or a choice. The attack had petrified her. She had to protect her baby. Nothing else mattered, but the last two weeks had still felt like a fastmoving train. There hadn’t been time to catch her breath, much less figure out what all these monumental changes and decisions really meant.

She still hadn’t had that time. But her first look at the house had touched something inside her. And it did now, even more.

The place was lit up. Snow spiraled in the outside porch lights, and inside lamps shone in the windows like welcoming beacons. Kelly remembered the first time she’d seen Kate Fortune’s house. She’d grown up on a struggling single mom’s budget, and the opulence of the home base Fortune mansion had her bug-eyed. It just went on and on—the landscaped grounds, objets d’art, priceless rugs, loot and luxuries she’d never seen outside of movies. Kelly remembered thinking God, how easy it would be to develop a lust attack for material possessions. But working with Kate had somehow sabotaged her developing that vice. She’d seen firsthand what a life of privilege was about, and she’d choose a mortgage anytime over having to live in a museum.

But Mac’s place was no museum. The house was stone. Two sturdy stories, with gleaming casement windows and gables and arched doorways. Compared to her three-room apartment, it was monster-size—and she hadn’t seen all of it—but the place had so much character and personality that it looked like... well, it looked like a home. Smoke chugged out of the chimneys and snow cuddled in the windowsills. Whoever had cleared the walk had left the shovel in the porch overhang. Maybe an ordinary person could live here. Like the kind of person who would forget to put away the shovel. Like her.

She only glimpsed the front for a second, then Mac punched a button and the garage doors opened. A Jeep already took up one parking place—not a fancy Jeep, but one with mud-crusted tires and a little dent in its fanny. It wouldn’t particularly have startled her, except that Kelly had never seen Mac dressed less normally than a suit, formally ready for a shot in GQ. “The Jeep is yours?”

“Yeah.” Mac was already climbing out, the Jeep obviously the last thing on his mind. If he hadn’t suddenly rolled his shoulders, she wouldn’t have realized that he was whip-tired from the challenging drive—not counting everything else that had happened that day. “Just head inside, Kelly. No one’s here—I can’t remember if you met Benz and Martha the other day. They live on the far side of the property, do some housekeeping and chores for me, and I’ve lined them up to come in more often. While I’m at work, I don’t want you here alone, especially when you’re this far pregnant. But for a few days, I thought you might want to explore the place on your own and not feel like strangers were hovering over you. If you don’t remember the layout, that door leads to the kitchen—just settle in wherever you want. I’ll follow you in two seconds—I just want to check a few things out here first. The house has a generator if we lose power, and the way this storm’s building we could be holed up for a couple of days—oops.”

“Oops?” Somehow Kelly didn’t think that expression got much of a workout in Mac’s normal vocabulary, and suddenly there was that potent quicksilver smile again.

“Yeah, I don’t know where my head was. Here I’m rambling on about silly subjects like blizzards, when I should have remembered there are bigger priorities. The bathroom is the first door on the left,” he informed her.

She chuckled, and for the craziest moment they shared a smile. A real smile. For an instant she forgot he was a sexy hunk, forgot he was the formidably powerful Mac Fortune, forgot he’d been sucked into protecting the woman his brother got pregnant. For that instant, Mac was just...a man. A man with rumpled dark hair and the shadow of whiskers on his chin and a smile that warmed up those cool green eyes. A man she wanted to know. Not had to get to know.

But he had that generator thing he wanted to look at, so she hustled inside. After shedding her coat on a kitchen chair, she kicked off her shoes and peeled promptly for the teal-and-white bathroom she saw off the kitchen.

When she washed her hands, she caught sight of herself in the vanity mirror and immediately considered hiding out in the bathroom—like for the next two weeks. She’d looked worse. She just couldn’t remember when. Her fine blond hair was tumbling down, her makeup long gone and the elegant cream satin dress just looked silly over her basketball-size tummy. The bride of Frankenstein surely looked more put-together than this... but objectively Kelly knew that vanity was a pretty silly thing to worry about. Mac had no reason to care what she looked like.

It was just that this was the part of the day she’d dreaded a hundred times more than the ceremony. Facing her new husband. Alone. There was no question or worry about intimacy—even if she weren’t seven months pregnant, she couldn’t imagine being the kind of woman who would remotely attract Mac. Besides, he’d already broached that lion in its den, and so had she. They had reasons to marry. They had no reason to sleep together—or to feel awkward about that. But the average new bride would undoubtedly be flying into her lover’s arms by now...and Kelly didn’t know what to do, what to say, or even how to start the whole business of living together.

Well, postponing it wasn’t getting the job done—or making it any easier. After running a quick brush through her hair, she charged out. Immediately she noticed that the back door was bolted and the outside lights shut off—and Mac must have hung up her coat because it had disappeared—so he was obviously in the house somewhere.

She padded through the kitchen, trying to remember the downstairs layout. The east side of the house held the kitchen, a long dining room with cushioned window seats and then a library/study kind of room with a fireplace and ceiling-tall bookshelves and a fat, plush, Oriental carpet in a million colors. She half hoped to find Mac there—she’d already identified that room as a great private haven—but no dice.

Across the hall was a polished staircase leading up, and although she didn’t remember much about the west side of the house—she didn’t have to. She promptly found Mac in the giant living room. And one look from the doorway was enough to make restless nerves prowl through her pulse again.

The room was ... stupendous. The ceiling and walls had all been paneled in heart-of-redwood. A stone fireplace arched to the beamed ceiling and was big enough to roast a boar. None of the furnishings were exactly fancy. They were just ultracool guy stuff—a ten-million-button entertainment center, throne-size chairs, two long couches, sturdy antiques with a western flavor, fabrics in a forest green that complemented the rich redwood. The whole darn room was perfect—at least for a guy—except for the pile of battered suitcases and boxes all over the place.

Mac had shed his tux coat and unlatched the buttons at the top of his shirt. Until he saw her, he was hunkered down by the hearth, getting a fire going. Flames were already dancing, licking the kindling, warming the whole room with the tangy scent of pine—but all she could see were her waiflike suitcases cluttering up his elegant room.