He glanced briefly at her and smiled before turning his attention back to the road. “That’s a tall order since the Steele family is a big one. My grandparents had six sons and two daughters. Two sons moved from Arizona and settled here back in the sixties and started the Steele Corporation; a manufacturing company. My father was one of the brothers, and my uncle was the other. Uncle Harold died of lung cancer around twelve years ago, leaving his share of the company to his wife and three daughters, Vanessa, Taylor and Cheyenne. My father retired eight years ago and left his share to his four sons. My brother Chance is the oldest and CEO. Sebastian, whom we call Bas, is the second oldest and is a troubleshooter in the company. Morgan is brother number three and heads the research and development department, and I’m the youngest. I manage the product administration department.”

  She nodded. “Your cousins, the three females, do they work for the company, as well?”

  “Only Vanessa. She’s over our PR department. Taylor and Cheyenne have seats on the board of directors. Taylor is a wealth asset manager and she and her husband live in DC, and Cheyenne is a retired model. She and her husband live here in Charlotte and had triplets less than a year ago, so she’s pretty busy these days.”

  Natalie chuckled. “I can imagine. Triplets. Wow. So who’s having a baby now?”

  “Bas’s wife, Jocelyn. But in another month we’ll be doing this scene again since Morgan’s wife, Lena, is expecting, as well and is due to deliver in September.”

  He continued talking about his family, and Natalie heard the warm affection in his voice. He also told her about his other cousins that were spread all over the country and how close all Steeles were. She drew in a deep breath when he pulled into the hospital’s parking lot, still not sure why he had asked her to come. But at the moment she couldn’t think of any other place she’d rather be than with him.

  Chapter 14

  The miracle of life always amazed him, Donovan thought, gazing into the very happy and smiling face of his brother as he held his newborn baby daughter in his arms. They had named the baby Susan after Jocelyn’s favorite aunt. Jocelyn’s sister Leah, who’d given birth to a daughter earlier that year, had named her daughter after their mother who’d passed away when Jocelyn and Leah had been young girls.

  Donovan glanced over at Natalie who was sitting in a chair next to Kylie, Vanessa and a very pregnant Lena. All four women, who’d had tears in their eyes earlier were talking to Jocelyn, who looked rather relaxed after giving birth. He looked at Chance and Morgan to find both of them staring at him instead of their newborn niece, and he knew why. They were still in shock. This was the first time he’d ever brought a woman to a family gathering of any kind, and they were curious as to why. Hell, he was trying to figure out the answer to that question himself. All he knew was that at the time he’d gotten the call from Chance to tell him that Bas was on his way to the hospital with Jocelyn, he hadn’t been ready to let Natalie out of his sight.

  And then he’d talked her ears off while en route to the hospital. She’d asked about his family, and that had opened him up. Instead of sticking to the basic facts, he had ended up telling her practically everything, including information about the Steele brothers’ weekly Saturday morning on the basketball court. He also told her about how Chance had met Kylie, how Bas had met Jocelyn; how relentlessly Morgan had pursued Lena; how far Cameron had gone in his pursuit of Vanessa and about Cheyenne and the triplets. Never had he shared so much information about his family to any woman.

  And then there were the women in his family who’d latched onto Natalie the moment he had walked into the waiting room with her by his side. He hadn’t had to introduce them since they had proceeded to introduce themselves. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see they were just as shocked as his brothers.

  “So what do you think about my baby girl, Donovan?”

  He glanced over at Bas, who was still wearing a proud smile even after the nurse had come to take baby Susan and place her back Jocelyn’s arms. “She looks tiny, not as tiny as Athena, Venus and Troy looked when they were born, of course,” he said of Cheyenne’s triplets who’d been born premature. “But she’s still a tiny thing.”

  He chuckled. “It will be fun watching her grow up, and I hope when she gets older that you don’t play the big bad wolf of a daddy to her dates.”

  Bas grinned. “I won’t unless she brings home a man like her uncle Donovan.”

  It was a joke but Bas’s words were still on Donovan’s mind when he and Natalie walked out of the hospital to the parking lot. Was he really that bad that his own brother found his ways with women despicable? Bas hadn’t been an angel before he’d married Jocelyn. In fact his engagement to Cassandra Tisdale gave Donovan the shudders every time he thought about it. No one knew how glad the family had been when Bas had come to his senses and broken off the engagement.

  But still, Donovan knew that he would be the first to admit that none of his brothers had ever been diehard bachelors, at least not with the concentration that he had. He was a proud playa card member. Did he have any regrets about keeping one close to his hip? Not really. But he knew that although he’d claimed otherwise, eventually one day he would settle down. He had just refused to think about doing so.

  Deciding to switch gears, he thought back on his family, namely his parents. They had arrived, and thanks to his mother, there was no chance of anyone else holding the baby any time soon. And after introducing Natalie to his parents, he wanted to get her out of here before his mother could start the inquisition, which he figured would happen had they lingered.

  After pulling out of the parking lot and merging with traffic, he glanced over at Natalie. She was quiet, and he couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking. Like everyone else, she’d taken a turn holding the baby and he doubted he would ever forget the way she looked with the infant in her arms. She’d had that maternal look on her face, and he’d known at that moment that motherhood was definitely in her future.

  “You have a nice family, Donovan.”

  He glanced over at her briefly. “Thanks. What about you? I know you have your aunt. Any parents or siblings?”

  She shook her head. “No, I was an only child. However, I was raised by my aunt and uncle. Their son, Eric, is five years older than me. My mother gave me to my aunt and uncle when I was just a few days old and kept trucking back to California. She would visit on occasion but did nothing but cause trouble whenever she did so—usually to get money out of my aunt and uncle by threatening to take me away if they didn’t pay up.”

  She paused for a moment, and he figured she was regrouping her thoughts, reliving the past. He couldn’t help wondering if she felt deprived of her mother’s love and attention.

  “Her boyfriend stabbed her to death when I was ten,” she said, continuing. “It had been four years since I’d seen her, and when they sent her body back here for burial she was nothing more than a stranger to me. My aunt, uncle and cousin were all the family I had and all that I needed.”

  “Where’s your uncle?”

  “He died when I was in my teens. And my cousin, Eric, is in the State Department and works for the embassy in Australia.”

  When the car came to a traffic light, he tilted his head to look over at her at the same time she glanced at him. Their gazes locked, held for a second. He knew he had to ask what he should have asked her before they’d made love, but he hadn’t because at the time it really hadn’t mattered since it was a one-and-done sort of thing, as she liked putting it.

  “Who broke your heart to make you take a hiatus from men?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Instead she broke eye contact with him and looked ahead through the shield. “Karl, the heartbreaker and manipulator. He practically stripped me of my self-confidence when it came to relationships by convincing me I was lacking in certain areas.” She glanced over at him. “You proved him wrong.”

  He remained silent for a moment and then he said, “I’m glad I was able to do so.”

  Natalie smiled. “I’m glad, too.”

  The interior of the car got quiet again, and she would have loved to know what was going on inside Donovan’s head. Why had he taken her to a place where he’d known his family would be congregating? Everyone had been nice but more than mildly curious. She could tell. That only led her to believe bringing a woman around his family was not his norm. She had liked everyone—his cousins, his sisters-in-law, his brothers and his parents. They’d made her feel right at home. Included. No one had asked her a lot of questions, and she was glad of that. She would not have wanted to lie to them.

  She hadn’t lied to Donovan just now. She’d told him about Karl. What was her rationale in doing that? It wasn’t like it would mean anything to him in the scheme of things. But for some reason she had wanted him to know sharing a bed with him had been therapeutic as well as pleasurable.

  “Do you mind if I drop by my house a minute to get something before I take you back to the café?”

  She glanced over at him and shook her head. “No, I don’t mind.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  The clock on the car’s console indicated it was a little after ten. She figured once she got back to the café she would get her car and go on to Farrah’s where she would be spending the weekend. Tonight they planned to do facials and watch romantic movies until dawn if they could last that long. Usually, they would both fall asleep by midnight.

  Moments later Donovan pulled into the garage attached to his condo. He closed the garage door behind them and then turned off the car’s engine. He glanced over at her. “Would you like to come inside?”

  She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ll just sit here until you come back.”

  “That might be a problem.”

  She stared at him a moment before lifting a brow. “And why might that be a problem?”

  “I told you I needed to drop by the house to get something.”

  She nodded, confused. “Yes, you did say that, and what of it?”

  “What I needed to drop by the house to get is you. So will you come inside with me, please? I want you so bad I can barely stand it.”

  She frowned, started to tell him that sounded like a personal problem, but when she glance down at his lap, she saw that it was a personal problem for him. A rather huge one.

  She stared back at his face. She’d never known a man to want her this much. “Bringing me here was rather presumptuous of you,” she said, her frown deepening.

  “I did ask.”

  “No, you led me to believe you needed to get something.”

  “I do need to get something.”

  She opened her mouth to argue at his logic but then closed it, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. The man gave arrogance a whole new meaning. “I’m staying put right here,” she said stubbornly.

  He smiled and leaned over the console, very close to her mouth and said, “Then I guess this place will have to do. At least for this.”

  Before she could draw her next breath, he had mingled it with his in a kiss that was so potent she felt it all the way to her toes. His tongue was dueling with hers, stroking varying degrees of desire within her. She knew the exact moment he slipped his hand underneath her skirt, expertly moving under her panties to insert his finger into the warmth of her. And then his fingers began moving to the same rhythm his tongue was using on her mouth.

  Nothing about the kiss was civilized. It was as untamed and wild as it could get, and when an orgasm threatened, his mouth on hers and his fingers inside of her boldly pushed her over the edge.

  “Now are you ready to go inside?” he asked a short while later, pulling his fingers out of her while greedily licking the corners of her lips.

  His words, a hoarse whisper, inflamed her body even more, and at that moment she couldn’t deny him anything, especially after what he’d just given her.

  “Yes,” she all but whispered back. “I’m ready to go inside.”

  Getting out of the car, he quickly came around in front to open her door. The moment she alighted he swept her into his arms and proceeded to carry her into his home.

  Not wasting any time, as soon as they passed through the back door he began stripping her naked right there in his kitchen. He then placed her on her back on his kitchen table, and then after practically tearing off his own clothes and putting on a condom, he crawled on top of her.

  He gazed down at her. “This is what I wanted to come here to get. Thank you for letting me have it.”

  He drew in a huge breath, and in one smooth thrust he entered her, then he pulled out slightly, only to thrust into her again.

  Over and over. Nonstop. Even when he felt her inner muscles clenching him and heard her soft sounds of sexual pleasure, he kept going and going. He couldn’t stop. Even the pain of her fingernails digging deep into his back couldn’t slow him down. And when an orgasm struck the both of them, he began giving and giving until he had nothing left to give.

  At least so he thought. He began getting hard again while buried deep inside the warmth of her body. “Natalie.” He’d lifted himself up slightly to say her name and then it was on again. The only thing he could think of was that he might never get enough of her.

  Natalie eased from the bed, careful not to awaken Donovan. After he had talked her into staying overnight she had called Farrah. Without going into a lot of details she cancelled their sleep-over with a promise they would do lunch next week.

  She glanced over at the clock on his nightstand. It was close to five in the morning.

  They had finally given the kitchen table a rest only to come upstairs to wear down his bed. Then a few hours later he had carried her back downstairs and after collecting their clothes off the floor and tidying up the kitchen, they had shared cooking duties and made omelets and coffee.

  After they had eaten and were headed back up the stairs, Donovan had gotten an unexpected visitor, a man he introduced as his best friend, Bronson Scott. Just like Xavier and Uriel, Bronson was handsome as sin, and although she wasn’t into auto racing, she recalled seeing his face a number of times in the newspapers as well as on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine as part of a NASCAR spread. When Donovan had mentioned her car being left at the café, Bronson had offered to bring it to her and leave the keys under the mat.

  After Bronson left, they had gone back to bed to make love again and had eventually drifted off to sleep. But as was the norm with her, she found herself waking up with chemical equations in her head that she needed to jot down. She didn’t have her laptop, but she always kept a notepad in her purse.

  Slipping Donovan’s T-shirt over her head she padded in her bare feet down the stairs to get the notepad out of her purse. Then she headed back upstairs to his office. She sat down behind his huge desk and inhaled deeply, thinking that sleeping with Donovan again had not been in her plans. But the man was a master at seduction.

  She glanced around the room. This was only her second time in here. The first time she had been concentrating too deeply on cleaning the room to pay close attention to the plaques on his wall and the trophies in a cabinet.

  Getting up from behind the desk, she walked over to study the plaques. All but one had been presented to him for his volunteer work in the Special Olympics. The other had been presented to him for being a mentor with the Charlotte public school system.

  Then there were all the basketball trophies he’d gotten while in college. She wished she could have been in the bleachers when he was running up and down the court. With his fine physique, that would definitely have been a sight to see.

  Returning to the chair behind the desk, Natalie knew she had to tread very carefully where Donovan was concerned or else those emotions within her which were already teetering close to the edge, would soon lose their balance and topple over. The last man she’d thought she loved had ended up hurting her badly. She knew that, because of her mother, she didn’t take rejection well, so she avoided it at all costs. Karl had taught her a lesson of what could happen if you were to let your guard down, and she could see herself falling for Donovan if she wasn’t careful.

  She had been working on various formulas for almost an hour when she heard a sound and glanced up. Donovan stood shirtless in the doorway wearing a pair of jeans, unzipped, and riding low on his hips. His shoulders looked powerful; the wide span of his chest was masculine, sexually compelling. His appearance was doing a number on her senses, and the degree of his sexuality set off a distinct throb in her body.

  She could vividly recall everything they had done since entering his home, and the memories made sensuous shudders flow through her. And it wasn’t helping matters that she was pinned by the deep intensity of his gaze.

  “I woke up and you were gone. You okay?” he asked in a concerned voice.

  She knew why he was asking if she was okay. Their lovemaking had been intense. She smiled. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  He glanced at her notepad. “What are you doing?”

  She closed the notepad and pushed it aside. Now would be a good time to tell him about the chemical equations she was working on for the global warming panel, which would lead into what she did for a living. But for some reason she wasn’t ready to reveal that to him now, especially when she remembered how other men had reacted, calling her a chemistry geek. She couldn’t handle it if he acted the same way. But she would have to tell him soon, especially since she would be flying out on Thursday for Princeton.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “and thought I’d come in and kill some time until you woke up.”

  A smile touched the curve of his lips. “I’m awake now.”

  He slowly crossed the room, and the closer he got the hotter the desire burned within her. “Are you sure you’re fully awake?” she asked, watching his approach and thinking just how undeniably handsome he was.