Chapter 18

• Layla didn’t like it either and was taken aback that they could be so similar in outlook. Her fingers lifted involuntarily and laced through the blue-black hair falling across his brow. Rain lashed the window across the room and a smouldering silence fell indoors. Her heart was racing, and against her breast she could feel the quickened thump of his. Dense black lashes lifted on his stunning eyes and she forgot to breathe, registering that somewhere along the way, and without ever pausing to think it through, she had begun developing feelings for Lucas Jack that went way beyond what she had once envisaged.
• For a split second, fear grabbed her, fear of being hurt, humiliated, and rejected, but she pushed the reactions away and buried them deep. Just for a few hours, she promised herself, she would live only for the moment in a little safe pool of non-judgemental peace, because soon enough she would be forced to deal with the consequences of her accidental pregnancy.
• Lucas smoothed a stray strand of red hair behind her ear, noting how small her ear was and that at their last encounter he had miscounted the freckles on her nose. There were five, not four, tiny brown speckles that only accentuated the clarity of her luminous porcelain skin. He sank his hands beneath her, lifting her up to peel off her sweater. She was pregnant, he reminded himself in a daze, for that awareness was still so new to him that it felt unreal. He would have to be careful, and that would be a challenge when his raw need for her was threatening to explode out of restraint.