“It never crossed my mind that you would,” she said calmly. She wasn’t going to allow him to upset or stress her out in any way.
“That baby belongs to me, doesn’t she?” he demanded, cutting right to be heart of the matter.
“That baby has a name—Amanda Grace. I call her Mandy. She’s almost seven months old.” Heather walked across the room to pull the nursery door closed to keep their raised voices from disturbing her daughter. “And if by belong, you mean are you her biological father? The answer is yes.”
“What happened? I used protection.”
Was he actually questioning that he was the father of her child?
“I’m well aware of that. It obviously had a defect.” She raised an eyebrow. “Surely you’re aware that nothing is one hundred percent effective except abstention. And if we’d gone that route—”
“We wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he finished for her.
“Exactly.” She looked him directly in the eye. “But let me assure you, Mandy is your daughter.”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t questioning that. She looks just like me.”
Heather watched a muscle work along his lean jaw as Jake stared at her for what seemed like an eternity. She could tell his anger was bordering on outrage, but that was just too bad. As far she was concerned, not knowing he’d fathered a child was his own fault and she wasn’t about to let him turn the blame back on her.
“Did you even think about getting in touch with me when you discovered you were pregnant?” he finally asked, his voice low and menacing.
Heather had told herself that she wasn’t going to let him get to her, but his accusatory tone angered her as little else could. “I really don’t think you want to go there, Jake. Believe me, you won’t like hearing what I have to say.”
“Go ahead. Try me.” He took a step toward her. “I told you I’m here to get answers.”
“Then I would suggest you drop the intimidation tactics as well as the idea of being the wounded party in all of this because you’re not.” When she turned to walk into the kitchen to put a little more distance between them and the nursery, she fully expected him to follow.
He didn’t disappoint her. “Did you or did you not consider letting me know that you were expecting my child?”
Turning on him, she took a deep breath in an effort to calm down. She had a lot to say and she was going to savor every second of it. She’d wanted this conversation for over a year, but never thought she’d have the chance to have her say. She wasn’t going to allow herself to lose momentum by becoming overly emotional. She refused to give Jake that kind of power over her.
“I not only considered letting you know, I spent my first trimester leaving messages that I needed to talk to you urgently.” She met his angry gaze head-on. “You never returned my calls, and I wasn’t comfortable leaving that kind of information with your secretary.”
“I—”
Holding up her hand to stop whatever lame excuse he came up with, she went on, “Then I spent the second trimester trying to convince myself that there had to be a reasonable explanation for you ignoring my requests to get back to me. It turns out I was wrong. There wasn’t a good reason, other than you really are an insensitive, self-absorbed jerk who uses women, then casts them aside.”
He opened his mouth to no doubt refute her assessment of his character, but she cut him off again.
“And somewhere during the course of my third trimester, I came to the conclusion that you really didn’t deserve to know about our daughter and that we were both going to be a lot better off without you in our lives.” She folded her arms beneath her breasts. “Any more questions?”
Heather could tell by the stunned look replacing the angry expression on his handsome face that she’d gotten through to him.
Rubbing the back of his neck as if to relieve tension, he shook his head. “I have my secretary—”
“Screen your calls so that you don’t have to deal with uncomfortable situations with the women you’ve bedded,” she interrupted. When he remained silent, she knew that her comment had hit a little too close to home. “And you don’t have to worry, Jake. Mandy and I are just fine on our own.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re going to try to cut me out of her life?”
Heather shook her head. “That’s not what I said. I’m telling you that you’re off the hook. You’re free to go back to Los Angeles and resume your life as if nothing happened. I don’t want or need your help—financially or otherwise. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of and providing for my daughter. I just thought you had the right to know about her.”
“She’s mine, too.”
Having had her say, she suddenly felt drained of energy. “I’m relieving you of that responsibility, Jake.”
“I think we need to get this straight once and for all, Heather.”
He stepped forward to place his hands on her shoulders. The heat from his touch seeping through her T-shirt and the determination she detected in his deep baritone sent tingles zinging straight up her spine. But when he used his thumb and forefinger to lift her chin until their gazes locked, the sensation danced across every nerve in her body.
“I accept that it was my own damned fault I didn’t know about the pregnancy. But it doesn’t mean that now that I’m aware I have a child I don’t intend to be a big part of her life. And that will be much easier for me to do when I move you and Mandy into the mansion with me.”
“That’s not going to happen, Jake. We’re very happy right here in the carriage house.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Before she could protest or step away, his mouth covered hers and the feel of his firm lips once again caressing hers with such care caused her head to spin. She tried with all of her might to remain unaffected, but her traitorous pulse took off and a delicious warmth began to flow through her veins.
Placing her hands on Jake’s wide chest, instead of pushing away from him as she intended, she reveled in the feel of his strength beneath her palms and the steady beat of his heart. This was total insanity. He’d used her, then cast her aside with little or no regard for her feelings. But when he traced the seam of her mouth with his tongue, she parted her lips without so much as a second thought and allowed him to deepen the kiss.
As he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her more fully against his large frame, he teased her with a tenderness that caused every fiber in her being to quiver to life and her stomach to flutter wildly. The excitement she’d experienced in his arms fifteen long months ago began to fill her from head to toe and it scared her as little else could. Losing herself to Jake’s kiss was the very reason they found themselves in their current set of circumstances.
“Please…stop,” she said, leaning away from him.
Jake immediately put a bit of space between them, but continued to hold her loosely in his arms. “All things considered, I probably shouldn’t have done that.” He gave her the same seductive smile that had been her downfall that night in Los Angeles. “But I’ll be damned if I’m sorry I did. You have the sweetest lips I’ve ever tasted.”
She shook her head. “Forget my lips. It’s not going to happen again.”
He stared down at her for endless seconds and just when she thought he was going to argue the point, Nemo chose that moment to come lumbering in through the doggie door. Finding the two humans standing face-to-face, he apparently took it as an open invitation to push his way between