Virgin Mistress, Scandalous Love-Child

JENNIE LUCAS

She’s pregnant – and he’ll take what is rightfully his! In the sultry heat of Rio and its Carnaval, Ellie succumbs to her dangerously charismatic boss Diogo Serrador. But, having taken her virginity, the Brazilian billionaire wants nothing more to do with her – until he discovers she’s pregnant! Diogo will accept nothing less than taking Ellie as his bride.Their marriage is passionate by night but forced and hollow by day. Ellie realises that she’s in an impossible situation: Diogo’s dark past has frozen his heart, but she’s fallen in love with her husband…

“Obey me, and it will be easier foreveryone. Especially you.”

Obey him?

That was what had gotten her into this trouble in the first place. Just off Copacabana Beach, to the rhythmic beat of samba music and the howls of the crowds, he’d looked back at her. He’d taken her in his arms and kissed her with a sudden ferocity that had made her weak. “You’re coming home with me,” he’d whispered against the flushed heat of her skin. “You’re coming to my bed…”

And she hadn’t resisted. She’d thought she was in love with him. She’d dreamed so long of being his, and she’d surrendered to his orders without a fight.

But back then she’d only risked herself. Now she was pregnant. Her baby had to be protected at all costs. If Diogo meant her harm….

“You said you didn’t want to be a father. I accept that.” She shook her head desperately. “Send me back home. We’ll never bother you again. The child will never even know about you!”

Diogo’s dark eyebrows lowered. “Because you have other plans? No,” he said with a curl on his lip. “No baby of mine will leave Rio.”

Jennie Lucas grew up dreaming about faraway lands. At fifteen, hungry for experience beyond the borders of her small Idaho city, she went to a Connecticut boarding school on scholarship. She took her first solo trip to Europe at sixteen, then put off college and travelled around the US, supporting herself with jobs as diverse as gas station cashier and newspaper advertising assistant. At twenty-two she met the man who would be her husband. After their marriage, she graduated from Kent State with a degree in English. Seven years after she started writing she got the magical call from London that turned her into a published author.

Since then life has been hectic, with a new writing career and a sexy husband and two babies under two, but she’s having a wonderful (albeit sleepless) time. She loves immersing herself in dramatic, glamorous, passionate stories. Maybe she can’t physically travel to Morocco or Spain right now, but for a few hours a day, while her children are sleeping, she can be there in her books.

Jennie loves to hear from her readers. You can visit her website at www.jennielucas.com, or drop her a note at jennie@jennielucas.com

Virgin Mistress, Scandalous Love-Child

BY

Jennie Lucas

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

To Pete, who offered to whisk me to Rio for “research”. Happy anniversary, honey, today and forever.

CHAPTER ONE

PREGNANT.

As Ellie Jensen came up the stairs from the subway, her body was still shaking. She dimly heard taxi drivers yelling curses and honking their horns. Vendors were already setting up hot dog and pretzel carts on the sidewalks. After a long, gray winter, New York had finally surrendered to the brilliant warmth of May.

But Ellie was cold to the bone. She hadn’t felt her fingers or toes for hours. Not since she took the pregnancy test that morning and saw those two parallel pink lines

Pregnant.

She was getting married in six hours, and she was pregnant.

With another man’s baby.

Her boss’s baby.

Ellie stopped dead in front of the Serrador Building. She craned her neck to look up at the thirtieth floor, and panic ripped through her.

Diogo Serrador, the dark, ruthless steel tycoon who’d employed her for the last year, was going to be a father.

I cannot get you pregnant, querida. She still remembered his sensual voice that hot night, riding the hot drumbeat of Rio’s Carnaval. He’d whispered against