HER ONE AND ONLY VALENTINE - Read Online Free PDF

were concerned, couldn't it? She'd fight with her dying breath to stop him.
    Kane swore again. 'What the hell kind of man do you take me for? Of course I'm not bloody well going to take her from her mother! But I have a right to spend time with her, to be a part of her life. And you took that right from me. I can't believe that you thought for one second I wouldn 't be angry about that!'
    Rhiannon wrapped her arms around her body, pressing them in tight as if she could somehow force the inner shaking away while she continued to stare up at him. 'You knew I had a baby. Many things you may have been, but stupid wasn't one of them. Surely you were able to do the maths?'
    His jaw clenched. 'You married Stephen.'
    Rhiannon's jaw dropped—literally. 'And you assumed that meant that Lizzie was his?'
    'Apparently I wasn't the only one making assumptions back then.'
    Nice try. They might not have been head over heels in love, but he had automatically assumed she'd jumped straight into bed with someone else the second they had split up or, worse still, might even have been with him at the same time. That told her exactly what he thought of her, didn't it? He probably even thought that, coming from the background she had, any rich guy would do!
    Rhiannon couldn't bear to be in the same room with him any more. She really couldn't.
    Unfolding her arms, she stood up as tall as her five foot eight would allow. 'Well, if you're so certain that's the kind of person I am, then maybe I am mistaken about who her father is. I'll have to check through that long list of people I was sleeping with, won't I?'
    He had her lower arm caught in yet another tight grip in the blink of an eye as she tried to leave the room. He tugged, just once, but with the shock of his hot hand on her cold skin it was enough to unbalance her and tip her in against his hard body.
    Again.
    No matter what she did, she seemed to end up being touched by him or trapped close to his body. Where his very male spiced scent invaded her nostrils so that she could almost taste the cinnamon undertones in the back of her throat and where the blazing heat of him immediately filtered through both layers of clothing to burn her chilled body—like being doused in boiling water after lying in ice.
    Rhiannon gasped silently, her eyes focused on the column of his neck as she pushed against the wall of his broad chest with her free hand. But he already had his other hand pressed into the small of her back, his arm holding her still.
    'I need to know if she's mine.'
    Rhiannon swallowed hard while she tried to stay still, to ignore the building heat and the knot in her stomach because it was the way it had always been with them—physical awareness, in its purest form, on its most basic level—instant and powerfully overwhelming. It was exactly this— chemistry — that had drawn them together the first time. But she didn't want it to be there this time. She was mature enough now to know that there was more to any relationship worth having than just the physical. Even if the physical had given her the one person in her life she could love without reservation.
    Slowly her gaze rose, following a ribbed line of dark wool upwards, over the fold of the polo-neck where it met his deeply tanned skin, over the tense line of his mouth, until she was looking into his blue eyes.
    She searched, from one to the other, willing her heartbeat to settle at the sight of the fierce determination there, the need she could see to know the truth. It almost made him look vulnerable. When he was the least vulnerable person she knew.
    Whatever it was, it forced the truth from her lips. 'No matter what you think, there wasn't anyone else. There's no question of her not being yours.'
    There had never been any question. And, even if there had, the evidence was staring her in the face when she looked at him. It had been the hardest thing about watching Lizzie growing up. Every day she would do something, say something,