Breathless, she whispered, “Brand …?”
It couldn’t be. Disbelief made her blink. Brand was dead.
The man coming toward her was tall, dark and very much alive.
A ghost from the past.
Heat seared her, instantly followed by an icy chill. He was a dead ringer for her very dead husband—the man she’d officially had declared dead eight months ago, a month after being given his ring back.
This was cruel. Brand was gone. Forever. Hadn’t she spent the past nine months trying to come to terms with the final proof of his death after nearly four years of terrible, traumatic uncertainty?
Blood rushed to her head. The sudden airlessness of the room pressed in on her.
Clea couldn’t breathe, and she felt horribly ill. Her father would never forgive her if she was sick all over the marble floor … with press cameras everywhere to immortalize the moment.
“Clea!”
The hands that came down on her shoulders were so intimately familiar … yet so painfully strange. She shook her head, resisting the cold mist closing in on her. He was dead. Yet the fingers cupping her shoulders were warm, strong and very much alive.
This was no ghost.
This was a human being. A man she knew too well.
“Don’t faint on me,” he warned in that deep, slightly hoarse voice.
“I won’t.” She’d never fainted in her life. Yet she had to admit that she felt weak, dizzy … dazed. “You’re supposed to be dead!” She sucked in a ragged breath, and then added inanely, “But you’re back.”
Clea!
A raw, burning hunger he hadn’t experienced for more than a thousand nights overpowered Brand. He pulled the woman he’d dreamed of every day—every night—toward him, drinking in the scent of her, a heady mix of honey and jasmine. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Her warmth and fragrance flooded him.
Beneath the exploring pads of his fingers her shoulders were more slender than he remembered, the bones fragile, but her skin was as soft as ever. “You’ve lost weight.”
She stiffened under his touch. “Maybe.”
Brand buried his face in the side of her neck, iron bands of emotion constricting his chest.
“I’ve missed you,” he breathed, “so much.” Without her, a void had replaced the man he’d been. His arms tightened around her slender frame, words pouring from him, rough guttural sounds against her smooth skin.
“Brand, I can’t hear you.” Clea drew away a little. “It’s too loud in here—let’s find somewhere quieter.”
She slipped out of his hold and a sense of loss swamped Brand.
Clea held out a hand. “Come.”
He took the fingers she offered, the delicate link frighteningly fragile.
She pulled him along with her, threading between the press of staring people until they broke clear, escaping through open double doors into a carpeted corridor beyond. Clea halted outside a set of glass doors in the clear floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Letting go of his hand, she fished in her evening purse looped over her shoulder by a delicate chain and extracted a keycard, which she swiped in the security slot. The doors sprang open and Brand followed her into a reception area and the corridor beyond. “My office is through here.”
Brand paused. “You used to be down in the basement.”
Her chin tilted up in a gesture that was pure Clea, and his heart clenched.
“I’ve moved up in the world,” she told him, her eyes hungrily searching his face. “I’m more important now.”
Clea pressed a wall switch and light flooded the room, catching forgotten glints of precious copper in her long, dark curls, hinting at the fire that lay beneath.
Lust caught him by the throat.
He’d missed her so damn much. Missed talking to her. Missed touching her.
Most of all he’d missed loving her.
Clea.
In a flash, Brand closed the space between them and took her in his arms again. He couldn’t get enough of touching her, reassuring himself that she was here, in his hold. Not a wraith that would vanish with his dreams as dawn cracked over the endless, empty horizon. Bending his head, he slanted his lips across hers. She gave a surprised gasp, and a beat later melted into his embrace.
She tasted so sweet, and his hunger soared.
Tracing the indent of her spine with shaking fingers, Brand’s hands moved up … up … until his fingers speared into the soft, glossy mass of constrained curls. Her head fell back and he deepened the kiss.
Her breasts pressed against his chest, and despite her weight loss they seemed fuller than he remembered. Clea had always bemoaned her lack of curves, but now she was positively lush.
Another change.
But this one he would savor …
He brought his hands forward to shape her ripe flesh and his fingers skimmed her belly. Fuller there, too. A curious anomaly given the slenderness of her shoulders, the sharp definition of her high cheekbones. His hands rested on the rise, his fingers exploring … and he felt her still.
Blood roared in Brand’s ears. He couldn’t absorb what his fingertips were telling him.
No!
His first reaction was denial. But his hands had developed a life—a reasoning power—all their own, even as his mind sputtered then stalled. His palms stroked over Clea’s curves, sending bursts of unwelcome information back to his struggling brain until he could no longer deny the truth of what lay beneath his hands.
Raising his head, he glared accusingly down into her startled green eyes. “You’re pregnant!”
Two
Clea knew at once how it must appear.
“It’s not what you think,” she said quickly, reaching up to cradle Brand’s beloved face between her cupped hands. “Remember how we—”
“It certainly didn’t take you long to find someone else.”
The blaze of accusation rocked her. Brand had gone all tense, his jaw clenching and unclenching against her hollowed palms as he glowered at her from between slitted lids.
In the stillness of her office, Clea stared up at him in absolute shock, the awfulness of what he was saying—what he believed—finally sinking in.
There was no one else.
“I didn’t—”
“Shut up,” he snarled.
“Wait a minute …”
Clea’s voiced trailed away as his hands manacled her wrists. He forced her fingers away from his skin and dropped them with palpable distaste, and all the while the beautiful ocean-hued eyes bored unblinkingly into hers. “It didn’t take you long to accept that I was dead—or was it a case of out of sight, out of mind?”
The injustice of that caused her to reel away, almost tripping over the visitor’s chair in front of her desk. Clea sank onto the padded black leather, her legs weak.
How could Brand believe that?
Especially when she’d never stopped believing in him!
Five days after her last telephone conversation with Brand, unable to contact him, Clea had sounded the alarm. It had taken another thirteen days—the