Expecting the Boss's Baby Read Online Free PDF Page A

trying to do.”
    He ground his teeth. Reasoning with her had been so much easier when she’d been his employee. “People marry for lesser reasons. For the well-being of this child, you and I must marry. Dammit, I won’t have a child of mine born illegitimate and without the financial security I can easily afford. I knew too many kids who suffered under those circumstances and this will not happen to my child.”
    She stared at him for a long moment. “You never talk about your family,” she finally said.
    He hated like hell to discuss his childhood, but he was determined to make her see the only right course. “I don’t have a family. My father left my mother soon after she became pregnant with me, and my mother died when I was six. I spent time in foster care and at the Granger Home for Boys. I can give you a first-hand account of what it’s like to grow up without a father and it’s not pretty. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”
    Kate put the cat down and turned away from Michael. She’d always wondered about his family, but had never asked. Michael had seemed to be a man with no personal attachments. Now she understood why. With a sinking feeling she also understood why he would be adamantly opposed to putting his child through an illegitimate upbringing. His disclosure took the wind out of her sails. “So what kind of arrangement are you proposing?” she asked in a low voice.
    She felt him step closer to her. He gave her asheet of paper. She scanned it, but the numbers were a blur. “What is this?”
    “My financial statement. I’ve had my accountant put aside—”
    Kate’s stomach roiled. “Oh my God,” she said, tossing the offending paper to the floor and walking to the other side of the room.
    Michael stepped in front of her, his hands on her arms, male frustration emanating from every pore. “I want you to know that I can and will take care of you and the baby. I want you to see it in black and white. I don’t want you to ever worry about it.”
    In some corner of her mind, she suspected his intentions were good. She could see it was vital to him to protect her and the baby, but the timing couldn’t be worse. This was a far cry from the sweet, sentimental tale her mother had often repeated to her about her father’s proposal on bended knee in an ice-cream parlor. “So this is a business arrangement. You sign over part of your money to me and the baby, you and I get married, we live separately, and I raise our child.”
    “No,” he said firmly, immediately. “You and the baby will live with me.”
    “Why?” she demanded. “You don’t want me.”
    His gaze traveled over her, and Kate felt a surprising flicker of the forbidden but mutual attraction she’d thought he’d killed. “I never said I didn’t want you. I may not have much of a heart,but I am a man. I wanted to take you to bed from the beginning. Every day I saw you, I thought how it would be to touch you and feel you hot and wet. But you were too valuable to me as an assistant to muddy the waters with sex.”
    “And now?”
    “Now you’re no longer my assistant,” he said. “You’re fair game.”
    Confused, rattled and, embarrassingly, a little turned on, Kate backed away. She took a careful breath and shook her head. “This is just a little too primitive for me. Your protectiveness, the money, the—” she groped for a benign description and came up empty “—the sex.” She shook her head again. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t feel like I know you at all, yet you’re insisting we marry.”
    “Do you remember what it was like between us before that night we spent together?”
    She nodded, remembering that underneath the forbidden wanting, there’d always been an ease, occasional laughter, and respect. Everything had felt so dreadfully tense between them, however, ever since that night. “We laughed a lot more.”
    “You were a friend.”
    Kate felt the push and pull of loss and