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  ‘You’re in love with me?’

  ‘I’ve said my piece and I won’t beg for you.’ Or would he? He just didn’t know and that was the humiliating thing. ‘I…that guy…you said you loved me…’ He looked away and then down at his feet. He could feel the muscles in his jaw clench.

  ‘There’s something I need to show you.’ She stepped towards him and laid her hand gently on his arm. ‘Come.’ Her heart felt as if it were going to burst. The moment seemed as delicate as an eggshell.

  She led him into the sitting room and pointed to the secondhand piano that was by the small bay window overlooking the back garden.

  ‘The guy’s brought his piano over? Is that what you want to show me?’ Pierre asked bitterly.

  ‘It’s my piano,’ Georgie said. ‘Michael’s my piano teacher. I thought it would be a nice thing to do and I needed something nice in my life after you left. I needed a distraction.’

  ‘He’s your piano teacher? Didi said…’

  ‘Didi may have been a little naughty in her descriptions.’ Georgie smiled and reached up to stroke the side of his face. ‘How could you ever have imagined that I would see you walk out of my life and immediately get involved with someone else? I love you, Pierre.’

  He took her hand in his and brought it to his lips, closing his eyes as he kissed her wrist and then let his mouth rest there for a while.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said roughly. He led her to the sofa and pulled her down onto him so that he could properly feel her soft, yielding body against him. How could he ever have thought that he could live without this woman who had been fashioned to fit so perfectly with him? ‘I haven’t stopped thinking about you.’ He held her face in both his hands and tenderly kissed her mouth. ‘I thought I could live without you but it’s been hell and, the worse it got, the more I told myself that I was doing the right thing. Then when Didi came…I felt as though I’d been kicked in the gut. Just the thought of you in someone else’s arms…I felt physically sick.’

  ‘And you came down.’

  ‘I had to. For once in my life, I had absolutely no control over my actions. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had much control over my actions since I met you, my darling. You took me out of my safe zone and I lost the desire to step back into it. Do you know I spent the entire train journey torn between needing to tell you how I felt and wanting to rip that musician man of yours to shreds.’

  Georgie laughed. ‘Michael would be horrified at that. Or maybe not horrified. Maybe amused. He’s gay.’

  ‘And Didi knew!’

  ‘No. She just knew that I was seeing him for some piano lessons. She obviously decided to bend the basic truth for her nefarious purposes. And I’m glad she did or else you might never have taken that step to come down here.’

  ‘I would have,’ Pierre admitted heavily. ‘My life was a mess. You were missing from it. I love you so much it hurts.’ He slipped his hands under her tee shirt and cupping her breasts felt to him like coming home, back to the place he belonged. ‘And I never want to go through the agony of not having you around. So. Will you marry me? For real?’

  ‘Just try and stop me!’

  Everything seemed so much easier than she could ever have anticipated. Didi was over the moon, naturally, and sheepishly admitted that perhaps she had exaggerated the truth about Michael just a wee bit to see if she might get the desired response.

  The desired response was a small wedding at the local church six weeks later. Georgie wore a simple ivory silk dress and all the kids in her class were there, which made her want to burst into tears. She was leaving the school but would be back regularly to check on their progress, she warned them. But the fast life in London was not for her and neither, Pierre confessed, was it any longer for him. He had had a glimpse of how pleasurable life could be when lived at a slightly slower pace and so they had found a charming house in a village just outside Winchester. They would be able to visit Didi regularly and she would visit them.

  Naturally, because it was Pierre, the process of house-hunting, which would have taken any normal person months, was accomplished in under two weeks. He put his people onto it, which meant that they sourced the possibilities, including some which were not technically possibilities but became so when large sums of money were waved in front of certain house owners. And so they simply had had to devote a couple of days to the business of looking around other people’s homes.

  Georgie laughingly told him that it was like being on one of those property shows on television where other people took the hard work out of house hunting.

  But they had found the house of their dreams.

  ‘You can even bring the chickens,’ he told her as they looked round the huge garden with its forest of bluebells at the back. ‘The kids will love playing with them.’

  ‘One child,’ Georgie corrected. Because that was something else. They had abandoned contraception and Nature had worked far more quickly than either of them had expected.

  ‘So far.’ Pierre looked at his new wife lovingly. Now a husband and, in only a few months, a father, and he was basking in the glory of it.

  Children running through the sprawling old house, playing in the garden. He could imagine it all and when he looked at his beloved wife, he could tell that so could she.

  And he was looking at her now as she stood at the little wooden railing smiling out to the moonlit sea, on their slightly delayed honeymoon to the most perfect island in the Indian Ocean.

  He wrapped his arms around her and she leaned back into him and sighed.

  ‘You’re beginning to show,’ he murmured. ‘Sexy.’

  Georgie laughed and swung round so that she was facing him. ‘What are you trying to say?’ she asked, grinning.

  ‘That I predict the view will be a lot more tempting in an hour’s time? After I’ve shown you just how sexy I think my pregnant woman is…’ He slipped his hand under her loose cotton top. No bra. Just how he liked it. Her soft breasts fitted perfectly in his big hands and he gently caressed them until her eyelids were fluttering, her head thrown back as she relished what he was doing to her. ‘Tempted at all, my darling?’

  Georgie tiptoed and kissed him, then she slowly nodded. He was right. The scenery could wait for later. Right now she wanted him touching her, suckling on her nipples, which were already getting bigger and darker, teasing between her legs with his fingers and his mouth.

  Paradise wasn’t just the stunning scenery and the crystal-blue water and the powdery sand. Paradise was wherever he was and always would be.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-4279-5

  BEDDED AT THE BILLIONAIRE’S CONVENIENCE

  First North American Publication 2009.

  Copyright © 2008 by Cathy Williams.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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