Baby Bonanza / For Blackmail...or Pleasure

But damned if he could bring himself to get interested in the latest flurry of one-night-stand invitations, either. The cards and letters had been sitting on his desk since early this morning and he hadn’t bothered to open one yet. He knew what he’d find when he started going through them.

Panties. Cabin keys. Sexy photos designed to tempt.

And not a damned one of them would mean anything to him.

Hell, what did that say about him? Laughing silently at himself, Nick acknowledged that he really didn’t want to know. Maybe he’d been spending too much time working lately. Maybe what he needed was just what these ladies were offering. He’d go through the batch of invites, pick out the most intriguing one and spend a few relaxing hours with a willing woman.

Just what the doctor ordered.

Teresa was still holding the envelope out to him and there was confusion in her eyes. He didn’t want her asking any questions, so he took the envelope and idly slid his finger under the seal. Deliberately giving her a grin and a wink, he said, “You think it’s easy being the dream of millions?”

Now Teresa snorted and, shaking her head, muttering something about delusional males, she left the office.

When she was gone, he sat back and thoughtfully looked at the letter in his hand. Pale blue envelope, tidy handwriting. Too small to hold a pair of lacy thong panties. Too narrow to be hiding away a photo. Just the right size for a cabin key card though.

“Well, then,” he said softly, “let’s see who you are. Hope you included a photo of yourself. I don’t do blind dates.”

Chuckling, Nick pulled the card from the envelope and glanced down at it. There was a photo all right. Laughter died instantly as he looked at the picture of two babies with black hair and pale blue eyes.

“What the hell?” Even while his brain started racing and his heartbeat stuttered in his chest, he read the scrawled message beneath the photo:

“Congratulations, Daddy. It’s twins.”

Two

She wasn’t ready to give up the sun.

Jenna set her coffee cup down on the glass-topped table, turned her face to the sky and let the warm, late-morning sunshine pour over her like a blessing. Despite the fact that there were people around her, laughing, talking, diving into the pool, sending walls of water up in splashing waves, she felt alone in the light. And she really wasn’t ready to sink back into the belly of the ship.

But she’d sent her note to Nick. And she’d told him where to find her. In that tiny, less-than-closet-size cabin. So she’d better be there when he arrived. With a sigh, she stood, slung her bag over her left shoulder and threaded her way through the crowds lounging on the Verandah Deck.

Someone touched her arm and Jenna stopped.

“Leaving already?” Mary Curran was smiling at her, and Jenna returned that smile with one of her own.

“Yeah. I have to get back down to my cabin. I um, have to meet someone there.” At least, she was fairly certain Nick would show up. But what if he didn’t? What if he didn’t care about the fact that he was the father of her twin sons? What if he dismissed her note as easily as he’d deleted all of her attempts at e-mail communication?

A small, hard knot formed in the pit of her stomach. She’d like to see him try, that’s all. They were on a ship in the middle of the ocean. How was he going to escape her? Nope. Come what may, she was going to have her say. She was going to face him down, at last, and tell him what she’d come to say.

“Oh God, honey.” Mary grimaced and gave a dramatic shudder. “Do you really want to have a conversation down in the pit?”

Jenna laughed. “The pit?”

“That’s what my husband, Joe, christened it in the middle of the night when he nearly broke his shin trying to get to the bathroom.”

Grinning, Jenna said, “I guess the name fits all right. But yeah. I have to do it there. It’s too private to be done up here.”

Mary’s eyes warmed as she looked at Jenna and said, “Well, then, go do whatever it is you have to do. Maybe I’ll see you back in the sunshine later?”

Jenna nodded. She knew how cruise passengers tended to bond together. She’d seen it herself in the time she’d actually worked for Falcon Cruises. Friendships formed fast and furiously. People who were in relatively tight quarters—stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean—tended to get to know each other more quickly than they might on dry land.

Shipboard romances happened, sure—just look what had happened to her. But more often, it was other kinds of relationships that bloomed and took hold. And right about now, Jenna decided, she could use a friendly face.

“You bet,” she said, giving Mary a wide smile. “How about margaritas on the Calypso Deck? About five?”

Delighted, Mary beamed at her. “I’ll be there.”

As Jenna walked toward the elevator, she told herself that after her upcoming chat with Nick, she was probably going to need a margarita or two.

Nick jolted to his feet so fast, his desk chair shot backward, the wheels whirring against the wood floor until the chair slammed into the glass wall behind him.

“Is this a joke?”

Nick held the pale blue card in one tight fist and stared down at two tiny faces. The babies were identical except for their expressions. One looked into the camera and grinned, displaying a lot of gum and one deep dimple. The other was watching the picture taker with a serious, almost thoughtful look on his face.

And they both looked a hell of a lot like him.

“Twins?”

In an instant, emotions he could hardly name raced through him. Anger, frustration, confusion and back to anger again. How the hell could he be a father? Nobody he knew had been pregnant. This couldn’t be happening. He glanced up at the empty office as if half expecting someone to jump out, shout, “You’ve just been punk’d,” and let him off the hook. But there were no cameras. There was no joke.

This was someone’s idea of serious.

Well, hell, he told himself, it wasn’t the first time some woman had tried to slap him with a paternity suit. But it was for damn sure the first time the gauntlet had been thrown down in such an imaginative way.

“Who, though?” He grabbed the envelope up, but only his name was scrawled across the front in a small, feminine hand. Turning over the card he still held, he saw more of that writing:

“We need to talk. Come to cabin 2A on the Riviera Deck.”

“Riviera Deck.” Though he hated like hell to admit it, he wasn’t sure which deck that was. He had a lot of ships in his line and this was his first sail on this particular one. Though he meant to make Falcon’s Pride his home, he hadn’t had the chance yet to explore it from stem to stern as he did all the ships that carried his name.

For now, he stalked across the room to the framed set of detailed ship plans hanging on the far wall of his office. He’d had one done for each of the ships in his line. He liked looking at them, liked knowing that he was familiar with every inch of every ship. Liked knowing that he’d succeeded in creating the dream he’d started more than ten years before.

But at the moment, Nick wasn’t thinking of his cruise line or of business at all. Now all he wanted to do was find the woman who’d sent him this card so he could assure himself that this was all some sort of mistake.

Narrowing his pale blue eyes, he ran one finger down the decks until he found the one he was looking for. Then he frowned. According to this, the Riviera Deck was below crew quarters.

“What the hell is going on?” Tucking the card with the pictures of the babies into the breast pocket of his white, short-sleeved shirt, he half turned toward the office door and bellowed, “Teresa!”

The door flew open a few seconds later and his assistant rushed in, eyes wide in stunned surprise. “Geez, what’s wrong? Are we on fire or something?”

He ignored the attempt at humor, as well as the look of puzzlement on her face. Stabbing one finger against the glass-covered ship plans, he said only, “Look at this.”

She hurried across the room, glanced at the plans, then shifted a look at him. “What exactly am I looking at?”

“This.” He tapped his finger against the lowest deck on the diagram. “The Riviera Deck.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There are people staying down there.”

“Oh.”

Pleased that she’d caught on so fast, Nick said, “When the ship came out of refit ready for passengers, I said specifically that those lower cabins weren’t to be used.”

“Yeah, you did, boss.” She actually winced, whipped out her PDA and punched a few keys. “I’ll do some checking. Find out what happened.”

“You do that,” he said, irritated as hell that someone, somewhere, hadn’t paid attention to him. “For right now, though, find out how many of those cabins are occupied.”

“Right.”

While Teresa worked her electronic wizardry, Nick looked back at the framed plans and shook his head. Those lower cabins were too old, too small to be used on one of his ships. Sure, they’d undergone some refurbishing during the refit, but having them and using them were two different things. Those cabins, small and dark and cramped, weren’t the kind of image Nick wanted associated with his cruise line.

“Boss?” Teresa looked at him. “According to the registry, only two of the five cabins are being used.”

“That’s something, anyway. Who’s down there?”

“1A is occupied by a Joe and Mary Curran.”

He didn’t know any Currans and besides, the card had come from whoever was in the only other occupied cabin on that deck.

So he waited.

“2A is…” Teresa’s voice trailed off and Nick watched as his usually unflappable assistant chewed at her bottom lip.

That couldn’t be good.

“What is it?” When she didn’t answer right away, he demanded, “Just tell me who’s in the other cabin.”

“Jenna,” Teresa said and blew out a breath. “Jenna Baker’s in 2A, Nick.”

Nick made record time getting down to the Riviera Deck, and by the time he reached it, he’d already made the decision to close up this deck permanently. Damned if he’d house his paying guests in what amounted to little more than steerage.

Stepping off the elevator, he hit his head on a low cross beam and muttered a curse. The creaks and groans of the big ship as it pushed through the waves echoed through the narrow passageway like ghosts howling. The sound of the water against the hull was a crushing heartbeat and it was so damned dark in the abbreviated hallway, even the lights in the wall sconces barely made a dent in the blackness. And the hall itself was so narrow he practically had to traverse it sideways. True, it was good business to make sure you provided less expensive rooms, but he’d deal with that another way. He’d be damned if his passengers would leave a cruise blinking at the sun like bats.

With his head pounding, his temper straining on a tight leash, he stopped in front of 2A, took a breath and raised his right fist to knock. Before he could, the narrow door was wrenched open and there she stood.

Jenna Baker.

She shouldn’t have still been able to affect him. He’d had her after all. Had her and then let her go more than a year ago. So why then was he suddenly struck by the turquoise-blue of her eyes? Why did that tight, firm mouth make him want to kiss her until her lips eased apart and let him back in? Why did the fact that she looked furious make his blood steam in his veins? What the hell did she have to be mad about?

“I heard you in the hall,” she said.

“Good ears,” he conceded. “Considering all the other noises down here.”

A brief, tight smile curved her mouth. “Yeah, it’s lovely living in the belly of the beast. When they raise anchor it’s like a symphony.”

He hadn’t considered that, but he was willing to bet the noise was horrific. Just another reason to seal up these rooms and never use them again. However, that was for another time. What he wanted now were answers.

“Good one,” he said. “That’s why you’re here, then? To talk about the ship?”

“You know why I’m here.”

He lifted one hand to the doorjamb and leaned in toward her. “I know what you’d like me to think. The question is, why? Why now? What’re you after, Jenna?”

“I’m not going to talk about this in the hall.”

“Fine.” He stepped inside, moving past her, but the quarters were so cramped, their chests brushed together and he could almost feel his skin sizzle.

It had been like that from the beginning. The moment he’d touched her that first night in the moonlight, he’d felt a slam of something that was damn near molten sliding through him. And it seemed that time hadn’t eased it back any.

He got a grip on his hormones, took two steps until he was at the side of a bed built for a sixth-grader, then turned around to glare at her. God, the cabin was so small it felt as though the walls were closing in on him and, truth to tell, they wouldn’t have far to move. He felt as if he should be slouching to avoid skimming the top of his head along the ceiling. Every light in the cabin was on and it still looked like twilight.

But Nick wasn’t here for the ambience and there was nothing he could do about the rooms at the moment. Now all he wanted was an explanation. He waited for her to shut the door, sealing the two of them into the tiny cracker box of a room before he said, “What’s the game this time, Jenna?”

“This isn’t a game, Nick,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “It wasn’t a game then, either.”

“Right.” He laughed and tried not to breathe deep. The scent of her was already inside him, the tiny room making him even more aware of it than he would have been ordinarily. “You didn’t want to lie to me. You had no choice.”

Her features tightened. “Do we really have to go over the old argument again?”

He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. He didn’t want to look at the past. Hell. He didn’t want to be here now. “No, we don’t. So why don’t you just say what it is you have to say so we can be done.”

“Always the charmer,” she quipped.

He shifted from one foot to the other and banged his elbow on the wall. “Jenna…”

“Fine. You got my note?”

He reached into the pocket of his shirt, pulled out the card, glanced at the pictures of the babies, then handed it to her. “Yeah. I got it. Now how about you explain it?”

She looked down at those two tiny faces and he saw her lips curve slightly even as her eyes warmed. But that moment passed quickly as she lifted her gaze to him and skewered him with it. “I would have thought the word daddy was fairly self-explanatory.”

“Explain, anyway.”

“Fine.” Jenna walked across the tiny room, bumped Nick out of her way with a nudge from her hip that had him hitting the wall and then bent down to drag a suitcase out from under her bed. The fact that she could actually feel his gaze on her butt while she did it only annoyed her.

She would not pay any attention to the rush of heat she felt just being close to him again. She would certainly not acknowledge the jump and stutter of her heartbeat, and if certain other of her body parts were warm and tingling, she wasn’t going to admit to that, either.

Dragging the suitcase out, she went to lift it, but Nick was there first, pushing her fingers aside to hoist the bag onto the bed. If her skin was humming from that one idle touch, he didn’t have to know it, did he?

She unzipped the bag, pulled out a blue leather scrapbook and handed it to him. “Here. Take a look. Then we’ll talk more.”

The book seemed tiny in his big, tanned hands. He barely glanced at it before shooting a hard look at her again. “What’s this about?”

“Look at it, Nick.”

He did. The moment she’d been waiting so long for stretched out as the seconds ticked past. She held her breath and watched his face, the changing expressions written there as he flipped through the pages of pictures she’d scrapbooked specifically for this purpose. It was a chronicle of sorts. Of her life since losing her job, discovering she was pregnant and then the birth of the twins. In twenty hand-decorated pages, she’d brought him up to speed on the last year and a half of her life.

Up to speed on his sons. The children he’d created and had never met.

The only reason she was here, visiting a man who’d shattered her heart without a backward glance.

When he was finished, his gaze lifted to hers and she could have sworn she saw icicles in his eyes.

“I’m supposed to believe that I’m the father of your babies?”

“Take another look at them, Nick. They both look just like you.”

He did, but his features remained twisted into a cynical expression even while his eyes flashed with banked emotion. “Lots of people have black hair and blue eyes.”

“Not all of them have dimples in their left cheek.” She reached out, flipped to a specific page and pointed. “Both of your sons do. Just like yours.”

He ran one finger over the picture of the boys as if he could somehow touch them with the motion, and that small action touched something in Jenna. For one brief instant, Nick Falco looked almost…vulnerable.

It didn’t last long, though. His mouth worked as if he were trying to bite back words fighting desperately to get out. Finally, as if coming to some inner decision, he nodded, blew out a breath and said, “For the sake of argument, let’s say they are mine.”

“They are.”

“So why didn’t you tell me before? Why the hell would you wait until they’re, what…?”

“Four months old.”

He looked at the pictures again, closed the book and held on to it in one tight fist. “Four months old and you didn’t think I should know?”

So much for the tiny kernel of warmth she’d almost experienced.

“You’re amazing. You ignore me for months and now you’re upset that I didn’t contact you?”

“What’re you talking about?”

Jenna shook her head and silently thanked heaven that she’d been smart enough to not only keep a log of every e-mail she’d ever sent him, but had thought to print them all out and bring them along. Dipping back into the suitcase, she whipped a thick manila envelope out and laid it atop the scrapbook he was still holding. “There. E-mails. Every one I sent you. They’re all dated. You can see that I sent one at least once a week. Sometimes twice. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for more than a year, Nick.”

He opened the envelope as she talked, and flipped quickly through the printouts.

“I—” He frowned down at the stack of papers.

She took advantage of his momentary speechlessness. “I’ve been trying to reach you since I first found out I was pregnant, Nick.”

“How was I supposed to know that this is what you were trying to tell me?”

“You might have read one or two of them,” Jenna pointed out and managed to hide the hurt in her voice.

He scowled at her. “How the hell could I have guessed you were trying to tell me I was a father? I just thought you were after money.”

She hissed in a breath as the insult of that slapped at her. Bubbling with fury, Jenna really had to fight the urge to give him a swift kick. How like Nick to assume that any woman who was with him was only in it for what she could get from him. But then, he’d spent most of the past ten years surrounding himself with the very users he’d suspected her of being. People who wanted to be seen with him because he was one of the world’s most eligible billionaires. Those hangers-on wanted to be in his inner circle because that’s where the excitement was and it made them feel important, to be a part of Nick’s world.

All Jenna had wanted was his arms around her. His kiss. His whispers in the middle of the night. Naturally, he hadn’t believed her.

Now things were different. He had responsibilities that she was here to see he stood up to. After all, she hadn’t come here for herself. She’d come for her kids. For his sons.

“I wasn’t interested in your money back then, Nick. But things have changed and now, I am after money,” she said and saw sparks flare in his icy eyes. “It’s called child support, Nick. And your sons deserve it.”

He stared at her. “Child support.”

“That’s right.” She lifted her chin even higher. “If I only had myself to think about, I wouldn’t be here, believe me. So don’t worry, I’m not here to take advantage of you. I’m not looking for a huge chunk of the Falco bank account.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right. I started my own business and it’s doing fine,” she said, a hint of pride slipping into her tone while she spoke. “But twins make every expense doubled and I just can’t do it all on my own.” Lifting her gaze to meet his, she said, “When you never responded to my e-mails, I told myself you didn’t deserve to know your babies. And if I weren’t feeling a little desperate I wouldn’t be here at all. Trust me, if you think I’m enjoying being here like this, you’re crazy.”

“So you would have hidden them from me?” His voice was low, soft and just a little dangerous.

Jenna wasn’t worried. Nick might be an arrogant, self-satisfied jerk, but physically dangerous to her or any other woman, he wasn’t. “If you mean would I hide the fact that their father couldn’t care less about them from my sons…then, yes. That’s just what I’ll do.”

“If they are my sons,” he whispered, “no one will keep me from them.”

A flicker of uneasiness sputtered in Jenna’s chest, but she told herself not to react. Physical threats meant nothing, but the thought of him challenging her for custody of their children did. Even as she considered it, though, she let the worry dissipate. Babies weren’t part of Nick’s world, and no matter what he said at the moment, he would never give up the life he had for one that included double diaper duty.

“Nick, we both know you have no interest in being a father.”

“You have no idea what I do or don’t care about, Jenna.” He moved in close, taking that one small step that brought his body flush to hers. Jenna hadn’t been prepared for the move and sucked in a gulp of air as his chest pressed into hers.

She looked up into his eyes and felt her knees wobble a little at the intensity of his stare. He cupped her cheek in one hand, and the heat of his skin seeped into hers, causing a flush of warmth that slid through her like sweet syrup.

“I promise you, though,” he murmured, dipping his head in as if he were going to kiss her and stopping just a breath away from her lips, “you will find out.”

Three

She ducked her head and slapped his hand away and even that contact felt too damn good. Nick stepped back and away from her, which, in that cabin, meant that he was halfway out the door. So once he felt as though he could look at her without wanting to wrap his hands in her hair and pull her mouth to his, he shifted his gaze to hers.

“I don’t have the time to go through this right now.”

She smirked at him, folded her arms over her chest in a classic defensive posture. “Oh, sure, worlds to conquer, women to seduce. Busy, busy.”

“Clever as ever, I see.” He didn’t even want to admit to himself how much he’d missed that smart mouth of hers. Always a retort. Always a dig, putting him in his place, deflating his ego before it had a chance to expand.

There weren’t many people like Jenna in his life. Mostly, those he knew were too busy kissing his ass to argue with him. Everyone but Teresa, that is. And of course, Jenna. But she wasn’t a part of his life anymore.

“We’ll have dinner tonight. My suite.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You came here to talk to me, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“So we’ll talk. Seven o’clock.”

Before she could argue, stall or whatever else might come into her too-quick mind, he opened the door and left her cabin. He took a breath in the dark hall, then headed for the elevator that would take him out of the bowels of the ship back into the light.