INARTICULATE rage boiled upwards within Sebastian. ‘How dare you go through my personal things!'

Aneesa stood before him, pale and intensely vulnerable- looking but with an unmistakably determined glint in her eyes. Her chin came up. ‘I dare because as your own brother just told me, I'm a part of your family now and will be for a long time to come, thanks to our baby.


‘Tell me,' she asked conversationally, colour returning to her cheeks, ‘was last night just a quickie before you asked me to move out, or were you planning on taking your fill before my body becomes too rounded and repulsive to you?'

‘Stop it,' Sebastian said curtly, the thought of her body growing more rounded having the complete opposite effect on his body. And before she could say anything else he asked, ‘What did you mean about my brother?'

Aneesa leaned back against the desk, still holding the wedding invitation and the brochures. ‘Jacob just called. He wants to know why he hasn't been able to get in touch with you and if you're coming to Nathaniel's wedding.'


Acute pain lanced Sebastian to hear that name. ‘I've already told you I'm not going and it's none of his business.' He put out an imperious hand. ‘Give me the invitation.'

Aneesa held it to her chest. ‘No. If you want it you can come and get it. And you could have got rid of it properly but you didn't, so what does that say?'


Sebastian strode towards her then, fury all over his face, but Aneesa didn't feel scared. He stopped a couple of feet away and she could see the agitation on his face, in his blue eyes. His hands were fists by his sides. Tension bounced off him in waves.

Aneesa stood strong. ‘I'm not giving you the invitation because it's not yours anymore. It's mine. Jacob has asked me to go and I've said yes.'


Sebastian's jaw clenched. ‘You can't go. You don't even know them.'

Aneesa glared up at him. ‘I might not know them but apparently now that we've been splashed all over the papers, they want to get to know me. They, unlike you, seem to be coming to terms with the fact that I'm carrying a Wolfe heir a lot quicker than you!'

‘He saw the papers …' It wasn't a question. ‘Yes. Why didn't you tell me?'

Sebastian raked a hand through his hair, exasperation evident. ‘I didn't want you to be upset by it.'

‘Perhaps you didn't want me to get any notions of permanency? You're forgetting that I'm not the one with the issues surrounding this pregnancy, you are.'

She looked at the brochures she held in her hand again and then stalked to Sebastian, pushing them into his chest where he had to catch them or let them fall. ‘And it's apparent now that you're going to do your damnedest to get rid of all the evidence—shut your inconvenient ex-one-night stand away with her even more inconvenient baby.'

She walked past him to the door and turned back. ‘I won't go to a place of your choosing like some pregnant concubine, Sebastian. I'd prefer to take my chances and return to India rather than endure that. And whether you like it or not, I'm going to your brother's wedding. I want my child to know his or her family.'

Aneesa was shaking by the time she reached her bedroom. Trembling all over. Standing up to Sebastian's rigid stance had been a lot harder than she'd thought, and still that awful hurt lanced her, right through her belly, to think that he would want to shut her and the baby away like that. And yet what else had she expected? Despair gripped her.

She was sitting on the window seat and looking out at the view, not really seeing it, just waiting for the inevitable sound of the front door slamming as it heralded Sebastian's return to work and away from her. But it didn't come. And when a knock sounded on her door, her nerves were so tightly


wound that she jumped.

She stood to see the door open and Sebastian standing there, his tie ripped off, jacket gone and shirt open. And he looked so damned gorgeous that every bone in her body wanted to melt. But she stood firm with arms crossed, fully prepared to tell him that she was going to return to India after the wedding if he was going to insist that she move out.

‘Don't you have work or a meeting or something?

I don't want to be accused of disrupting your routine.'

Sebastian closed the door behind him and smiled grimly, making Aneesa's heart thump unevenly. He rested against it and said without rancour, ‘I've cancelled my meeting, and my routine got disrupted the moment I first saw you in Mumbai.'

Hurt gripped Aneesa again. ‘Well, I'm sorry about that


but—'


He put up a hand. ‘I'm not.'

And then he prowled towards her and she wished she


could run but the window was at her back. Sebastian being cold and distant and prickly was one thing, but this more ambiguous Sebastian threatened every level of her already shaky equilibrium.

He stood before her, close enough to touch but not touching, eyes raking her face. Resting on her mouth with indecent explicitness before climbing upwards again where their heat nearly made her wobble.

He growled out, ‘You're a thorn in my side, Aneesa Adani, but a thorn I'm finding impossible to ignore, no matter how much I try.

‘I admit that I had thought of offering you a place of your own to live, ostensibly to get out you out of my apartment

… but every time I try and push you away I find myself pulling you in again. I can't have you near me and yet I can't stand the thought of you not being here….'

Aneesa's heart thumped crazily now. ‘That sounds

messy.'

Sebastian grimaced. ‘It is. Very. Especially when my life


up to now has been very clear and controlled.'

His eyes held her mesmerised. ‘I told you that I would take more time out for you and the baby and then I promptly went back on my word. I'm sorry.'

He came closer then and Aneesa found it hard to breathe, her gaze slipping to his mouth. His hands went to her waist, pulling her into him, and she could feel his arousal, her own body rejoicing helplessly, despite all the turmoil in her head.

Valiantly though, she stayed rigid in his arms. She put her hands on his chest and tried to ignore the treacherous melting in her groin. ‘Sebastian, you can't keep doing this, pulling me in, only to push me away again. It's not fair.'

‘I know,' he said quietly. ‘I don't think I have the strength to push you away again.'

He sighed heavily and she felt his chest move against her hands. A slither of foreboding went down her spine. ‘But, Aneesa, I also can't promise you a happy ever after. There are dark secrets in my family, bad things happened. It's a long legacy of hurt and pain. And the last thing I want to do is visit that on my own child.'

Everything in her rejected that assertion. ‘But you wouldn't—'

Sebastian put a finger over her mouth, stopping her words. ‘After everything I witnessed, I won't commit just for the sake of propriety. My father wreaked havoc with his inconsistency and I can't promise to be any better.'

An aching sadness welled inside Aneesa even though she appreciated his candour. He was basically saying his feelings for her weren't strong enough to risk overcoming his fears. And was she strong enough to weather his stubbornness? To try and make him see that history didn't have to repeat itself? What was the point if he didn't even have feelings for her beyond physical desire?

And then as if he'd heard her thoughts, he said heavily, ‘If you want to return home, then I won't stop you, and of course I'll come to visit when the baby is due. But if you decide


to stay in England, here with me … you have to know that I can't promise anything more than I've already given.'

Aneesa quelled the urge to cry at Sebastian's searing honesty. He was offering her a no-win situation and only an extreme masochist would take the option she was about to. ‘I can't go home yet, especially if the news has broken there as to who the father is. I should call my parents.' Her eyes lifted from where they'd rested on a button on his shirt. ‘So I'm afraid you're stuck with me for now.'

‘Are you sure about this, Aneesa?'

She nodded her head because, at that moment, she wasn't sure at all but she knew that the thought of walking away from him was far harder to contemplate than the alternative.

‘Well, then, after you've called your parents we've got shopping to do.'

She frowned. ‘Shopping?'

Sebastian's jaw clenched. ‘If you're determined to go to this wedding, then you're not going on your own.'

Aneesa held in a stunned gasp and damped down a spark of hope. Sebastian was saying one thing, but his actions were saying something else, and despite her head sending out warning bells, her heart couldn't help but give a little lurch of treacherous hope. Grimly she answered, ‘I'm determined.'

Sebastian sighed. ‘In that case, I need to get a suit and you need to get a wedding outfit.'

Aneesa was not like any woman Sebastian had ever known. She was brave: brave enough to deal with the collapse of a successful career, to deal with ostracism and cross the other side of the world to face up to a huge personal crisis. And yet her eyes had filled with tears only that afternoon when they'd witnessed a harried mother clipping her small son around the ear on the street with enough violence to make him squeal with genuine pain. Afterwards Aneesa had apologised to Sebastian and said, ‘I'm sorry—it must be my hormones.'

But it had made Sebastian feel even more strongly about his reasons not to commit. When he'd seen the child


being brutalised on the street, he'd just felt sympathy for him, but not shock. And it was that sense of being anaesthetised that scared him.