Page 6 of Bound By Her Shocking Secret

She looked up. ‘What...?’

He was grim. Not looking at her, tugging her back towards thesalonbefore the photographers noticed. ‘Come on, I’ll take you home. My car is at the side entrance.’

Mia was so relieved that she would shortly be in a vehicle heading to her baby that she just followed Daniel along a corridor that led to another entrance.

A sleek black car was waiting in the street. The driver was standing by an open back door. Daniel handed the driver the piece of paper with Mia’s address on it and helped her into the car before getting in on the other side.

Then they were moving. It was only as they left Place Vendôme behind that Mia realised what was happening. Daniel was coming with her. A different kind of panic gripped her. She wasn’t ready for him to meet Lexi yet. To explain everything.

She looked at him in the gloom of the back of the car. His profile was stern. As she watched, he tugged at the bowtie at his throat, undoing it, flicking open a button on his shirt with long, dextrous fingers. His hands were masculine. She remembered being surprised that they weren’t soft, as she might have expected of a businessman...of a billionaire who handled precious gems every day.

To Mia’s disgust, flames of desire burst to life in her belly at that memory.

‘You shouldn’t have left the party. It’s an important night,’ she said.

He looked at her and her skin prickled with heat.

‘Yes, it is. But the news that apparently I’m a father has managed to eclipse the importance of the evening.’

The driver put up the privacy partition. Mia knew Daniel. She had been subjected to his very persuasive and determined brand of seduction, so she knew it would be nigh on impossible to persuade him to change his course of action.

Nevertheless, she tried. ‘It’s really not appropriate to come with me now. Lexi might be—’

‘Lexi. What kind of name is that?’

Mia bristled defensively. ‘It’s short for Alexandra.’

‘You say it’s not appropriate for me to come with you now? Yet you thought it was “appropriate” to come and disrupt one of the most important nights in the Devilliers calendar?’

Mia refused to feel as if she was in the wrong. ‘If I had been able to contact you through regular channels then obviously I would have done that. And I did try. But the number I have for you is no longer in operation, and when I tried to contact you through your office they refused to pass on just my name. I had to give more detail, and I wasn’t prepared to tell a stranger what I had to tell you. I would have come to thesalon, but as it was being renovated, obviously you weren’t in the office there.’

‘We set up temporary headquarters nearby.’

‘It would have been easier to try and arrange a meeting with the President of the United States.’

Daniel wasn’t amused. ‘If what you say is true and this...this baby is mine—which I can’t understand is possible since I saw you after—’

Mia cut him off before he could say it. ‘She’s yours.’

Daniel’s jaw clenched. ‘If she is, then why didn’t you come to me before now?’

A familiar ball of pain that Mia hated to acknowledge lodged in her gut, dousing the flames of desire. ‘You were married.’

A muscle in Daniel’s jaw ticked. ‘Nevertheless, I deserved to know.’

‘As soon as I read about your divorce I started trying to contact you.’

‘What if I hadn’t divorced?’

The ball of pain got heavier as she considered that. In truth, Mia hadn’t really contemplated the long-term plan, and that made her defensive. ‘If you hadn’t divorced, I would have told you at some stage.’

Daniel made a disbelieving sound.

Before Mia could lose her nerve, she said, ‘I’m sorry, by the way. About the divorce. No matter what the circumstances of your marriage were, I can’t imagine it was easy.’

‘By “circumstances” you mean the fact that it was an arranged marriage?’

Mia and Daniel had been dating for almost two months when a headline had appeared in the newspapers, speculating about a long-standing arrangement for Daniel to marry an heiress from one of France’s other great dynastic families. The news that he was promised to someone in marriage had blindsided her, reminding her painfully of a similar experience at the hands of her first boyfriend.

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