The Reporter and the Billionaire Scottish Wolf Lord (He Wanted Me Pregnant!) Read online

  He Wanted Me Pregnant!

  The Reporter and the Billionaire Scottish Wolf Lord

  by Victoria Wessex

  Each time I release a story, I price it at $0.99 for the first 24 hours. My mailing list subscribers get an email so they can snap it up cheap before the price goes up. To get on the list, sign up here: (you must be over 18). There’s no spam, just one mail per story.

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  Also by Victoria Wessex at All Romance Ebooks

  He Wanted Me Pregnant…

  The British Nanny and her Billionaire Employer

  The Lawyer and the Outlaw Biker

  The Stewardess and the Billionaire CEO

  The Intern and the Senator

  The Maid and the Billionaire Prince

  The Cocktail Waitress and the Card Shark

  The Lady and the Pirate I and II

  The Nurse and the Soldier

  The Curvy Waitress and the Billionaire French Count

  The Curvy Vet and the Billionaire Cowboy

  Blurbs and free extract at the end of this book!

  Can’t find a story? http://victoriawessex.com

  Chapter 1

  She’d heard that jet lag was really two things: the time difference and the culture shock. Time-wise, she was only eight hours distant from her home in LA. Culture-wise, though, the small Scottish village was at least eight hundred years in the past.

  “I said: could you row me over to the island?” She said it very slowly and loudly.

  “Yeegota fyne pair, lassie, but that duna meen a’can brek tha rools,” said the fisherman.

  “What?! I can’t understand you.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Is there anyone here who speaks something other than quaint?”

  Three other fishermen and a dog all gazed balefully back at her.

  Rachel sighed. The whole adventure had started less than twenty-four hours ago and it was getting steadily worse with each passing minute.

  Twenty-Four Hours Earlier

  Rachel was staring at an email from the news director asking if she’d consider dyeing her honey-blonde hair auburn. Channel 38 have seen a ratings jump, and we think it’s down to Tanya Tonoski’s hair color, he’d written. Would you consider….

  She clicked delete. If she did as he asked, next he’d be asking her to get a boob job. What happened to crediting ratings jumps to the stories the news team dug up, or the skill with which they presented them? He made her feel as if she was nothing more than a plastic mannequin reading off a script. This is not why I went to journalism college….

  “Rach!”

  She turned in time to see Shelly coasting towards her on an office chair. As usual, Shelly had misjudged it and would have gone halfway across the newsroom if Rachel hadn’t reached out and snagged her hand.

  “Thanks,” said Shelly. “Now help me again: I have a problem.”

  Rachel raised an eyebrow.

  “Brad just called. He wants to take me away this weekend as a birthday surprise. Pack your bags, we’re going to Paris, kind-of-a-thing. Except it’s only Vegas, but hey—the thought’s there.”

  “Okay…” said Rachel slowly.

  “Only…I’m meant to be going to Britain tomorrow to cover the Royal Wedding.”

  “And you want me to go instead? Wait—didn’t they already get married?”

  “Not them—the other ones. It’s all happening very fast—small wedding and they’ve asked for no press. So obviously the network wants someone there.”

  Rachel looked outside to the glorious LA sunshine. “You want me to fly thousands of miles so that I can get pictures of a security cordon?”

  “No. We already have a crew going to the wedding itself. I was just going to interview some minor royals and celebrities. Distant relatives, that sort of thing. Talk to them about how excited they are for the happy couple.”

  Rachel looked thoroughly unenthusiastic.

  “Please?” Shelly made puppy-dog eyes at her.

  Rachel sighed. “Fine. So where am I going?”

  “Scotland,” said Shelly, beaming. “It’s, like, near Britain.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s in Britain,” said Rachel. “So it’ll be gray and rainy.”

  “No, it’s the England part that’s always gray and rainy. I’m sure Scotland will be great.”

  Now

  Rachel held a newspaper over her head to keep the worst of the rain off her hairdo. If she didn’t manage to wangle a boat over to the island soon, she was going to give up and go to one of those British pubs, and order herself a Guinness. That was Scottish, right?

  “I need you to row”—she mimed rowing—“me to the island, so I can film”—she did a charades-style film camera—“Lord McKillington.”

  The fisherman looked back at her blankly. No, not blankly. Boredly.

  Her crew—a camera operator and a sound guy—had been held up at the airport thanks to Britain’s new, super-tight border control. She’d gone on alone with a tiny camera, so she could get the interview and send it back to the newsroom in time for the wedding special. She couldn’t let herself be defeated now, so close to the prize.

  There was nothing else for it. She took out four fifty pound notes and fanned them out enticingly. She’d expense it as travel.

  The fisherman eyed the notes suspiciously and then snatched them from her. “Alright,” he said, suddenly intelligible. “But no good will come of this.”

  ***

  The wind had whipped the loch waters into jagged gray peaks topped with white. Rachel clutched the side of the boat with one hand while the other held the newspaper over her head. Night was falling, the sky already the darkest blue. Yet there were no lights on in the castle as it loomed up in front of them.

  “He is there, right?” she asked. “Because if his Lordship is sunning himself in the Seychelles, I’m going to want my money back.”

  “He’s always there, lassie,” the fisherman told her. His accent was still thick, but it was amazing how money had worked to bridge the language gap.

  Back in LA, she’d had a researcher print out the royal family tree. They’d needed a whole ream of printer paper and a lot of Scotch tape—it wasn’t so much a family tree as a small forest, with numerous offshoots to small copses in different countries. Tucked away in one corner was a solitary name: Lord McKillington.

  “Legend has it,” her researcher had said, “that he was the bastard son of her”—she stabbed a name—“but that would be too embarrassing, so she”—another stab—“said that he had knocked up a local prostitute, but then when he married her it all came out.” By now her fingers were moving across the paper too fast to follow. “So he made her choose a sister to marry him and that freed up the castle in Scotland, so they gave it to him along with a whole swathe of land and made him a Lord to keep him quiet. Simple as that.”

  On the flight, she’d paid a ridiculous amount for WiFi and searched through newspapers to learn more about Lord Alex McKillington, reclusive billionaire. From what she could tell, he owned a sizable chunk of Scotland, including the rights to some offshore areas that had made him a fortune during the oil and gas boom. Yet he kept no private jet, no army of staff, not even a flashy car, just a castle on a small island in a Scottish loch. He was a hermit—in fact, he was a hermit even by hermit standards. He was seen only a few times a year. He donated money to keep the local village running—books for the school, windows for the church, that sort of thing. It seemed like a peaceful, if lonely existence, so—

 
“So, okay, he’s a bit of a shut-in…but why does no one from the village come out here to visit him?” she asked the fisherman as they neared the island.

  The fisherman shook his head, his straggly beard scratching on his waterproof jacket. “I willna’ say. No good will come of it.”

  Rachel sighed and gave him another fifty. He hauled in the oars and let them drift the rest of the way towards the island. “A few years ago,” he said, “some lassie like you thought she’d try to bag herself a lord. Sneaked over in a boat, when no-one was looking, and—so they say—got inside the castle.” He leaned close. “And she saw something.”

  “What?”

  “She never said. But she was so scared, she swam back across the loch in the depths of winter—almost drowned.”

  Rachel wanted to laugh. It was a ridiculous story…but something about the way he told it made her uneasy. He didn’t look as if he was delighting in scaring a naïve tourist. He looked serious.

  There was a roll of thunder overhead, the sky darkening.

  The boat scraped gently against the stone dock and the fisherman nodded at her to get out. She climbed carefully onto the dock, looking up at the castle, and the feeling of being on an island—of being isolated—made everything turn and shift in her mind. Back on shore, she’d presumed the fisherman’s reluctance had been just the usual local stonewalling of an outsider—she’d seen that before, on her travels. But now that she was here…suddenly it felt as if he’d been trying to protect her.

  And she’d overridden his concerns with money.

  She looked back to the boat, about to ask him whether the story was really true, only to find he’d already rowed a good distance away. “Hey!” she yelled. “Wait! How am I supposed to get back?”

  He simply shook his head, as if to say he’d done all that he dared to.

  ***

  The light was fading fast and the rain seemed to be getting worse. The wind was rising, beginning to howl like an animal. Rachel hauled her carry-on bag up a flight of stone steps from the dock and around to a huge, wooden door. She hesitated and then knocked timidly. The thick wood seemed to swallow the impact—she barely heard a thing. He won’t know I’m here, she thought. I’ll be out here all night!

  There was a window a few feet from the door. It was almost completely black inside, but she thought she saw…yes! A large, dark shape moving across the room. Much too low to the ground to be a man. A dog, then—a big one. And if Lord McKillington’s dog was there, it followed that he must be there. There was no barking. Maybe it was well trained.

  She strained her eyes into the darkness for any sign of a person, but there was no more movement. The dog must have hunkered right up against the door, because she didn’t see it cross the room again.

  Then suddenly, the lights went on, the room bathed in a warm orange glow. At the same time, she heard the thump of heavy wood moving and the sound of a lock turning. Rachel darted back to the door just as it swung inward a hand’s width.

  The face that looked down at her took her breath away. The man reminded her most of a statue—some flattering bust of an honored dignitary, far too handsome to be the real thing. His looks were timeless—he would have looked as good in a king’s medieval robes as in a stockbroker’s Armani—and he was noble in that way that only royals are, with strong brows and full, sensual lips. His gaze was unwavering, his expression frozen and cold.

  What really caught her attention, though, were his eyes. They seemed to be gray but they were astonishingly bright and clear. And if she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn that, just as he’d opened the door and seen her, they’d changed color for a second, to burning gold. A trick of the light, she decided.

  She couldn’t look away from those gray eyes, though. They held her gaze almost hypnotically—it was easy to imagine him addressing a crowd or an army. She could feel every hair on the back of her neck standing straight up, every muscle in her body suddenly primed and ready for action. She was breathing faster, too—she could feel her heart racing in her chest, hammering against her ribs so hard it almost hurt. It felt as if she was waiting for him, like a peasant waiting for the king’s proclamation.

  When he spoke, his voice was deep and cultured, his Scottish burr encasing the word in a throaty rasp. “Leave.”

  Her eyes were locked so firmly on his that the order seemed to come from a million miles away. It was only when the door started to swing shut that she snapped to alertness and panicked. “Wait!” she told him. “I just want to talk to you!”

  The door stopped, though now it was open only a sliver. For the first time, she glanced down and caught her breath. He was naked! She could see a broad, tan chest, the center line leading down between chiseled abs. No, wait—not naked. He was wearing a robe, loosely open at the front. Was he wearing anything underneath? She couldn’t see—all was in shadow below his waist.

  “Leave,” he told her again. “Now.”

  “My name’s Rachel Reece, with Now News Weekly. Please! I just want to ask you about the Royal Wedding.” And while I’m here…why are the locals so scared of you?

  His face tightened. “They want no part of me and I want no part of them.” And he closed the door the rest of the way.

  Only to find it stopped by her foot.

  He glared at her in outrage—and what looked to be shock, that anyone would dare to do such a thing. But Rachel found herself glaring back just as hard. She’d had enough.

  News was a hard business and being a woman—a blonde! Who dared to have actual breasts!—made it harder still. Half of her competition wanted to sleep with her and half of them wanted to stab her in the back. She hadn’t got where she was by taking “No” for an answer—not even from royalty.

  “Now listen,” she said sternly. “I have traveled fifteen thousand miles on a second-rate airline to come to this godforsaken island in the middle of a freezing lake in the village that time forgot and I’ve already spent all my cash on bribing the old man of the sea and I am standing out here in the rain so how about you stop with the Braveheart and make with the famous British hospitality?”

  His expression barely changed, but she’d had to deal with politicians—she was good at reading people. She saw the flicker of curiosity in his eyes, the tiny hint of a smile at the corners of his lips.

  “Well,” he said, and he tightened the belt of his robe, drawing the sides together. “You’d better come in, then.”

  Chapter 2

  Rachel wiped her feet. God, even the doormat looked like it was some ancestral heirloom. She instinctively looked around for the dog, expecting some huge furry thing to leap up at her. But she couldn’t see it or hear it moving around.

  “Where is it?” she asked. When he looked blank, she added, “The dog?”

  That little flicker of surprise, again, as if she’d noticed something that others didn’t. “I don’t keep a dog,” he said.

  Weird…why would he lie about it? Some banned species? An underground, aristocratic dog fighting ring? It didn’t make any sense. And there was something about the way he spoke, a slight awkwardness as he formed the words. It had been stronger when he’d first opened the door and was fading each time he said something. It was almost as if he was having to remember how to converse, as if he’d been asleep for a long time.

  She stripped off her soaked jacket, leaving her in skirt, a red silky blouse and heels. It was an outfit carefully judged to be both demure and alluring—respectable enough to interview a senator, yet providing enough eye candy—her toes curled at the term—for the male viewers.

  She was in. She had a small camera and tripod she could use to get a quick interview, if she could convince him to talk. Ten minutes, a few sound bites and she could be out of there, although how she was going to get off the island was anyone’s guess. Though, looking at him, she suddenly wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry to leave.

  She could now fill in the bits she hadn’t been able to see through the crack of the door. He
was well over six foot and, combined with his wide shoulders, it made him imposing—even before you factored in the money and the royal connections. Thirty, according to Wikipedia—five years older than her. He was indeed in a bathrobe—royal blue, appropriately—but his dark hair was dry and his body didn’t seem to be wet, either. Now that he’d pulled it closed, it was impossible to tell if he was wearing anything underneath. Certainly, his legs were bare—thickly muscled and dusted with curling black hair, they stood braced like tree trunks. Her eyes kept being drawn back to that chest, broad and well-shaped, the curve of his pecs easily visible under the robe. God, there was no other word for it: he was gorgeous.

  She lifted her gaze back to his face only to find him staring straight at her. “Have you studied me enough?” he asked. “Or would you like to count my teeth?”

  He smiled as he said it, flashing a gleaming smile. It was an innocent enough quip, but something about him, something about the word teeth, sent a weird prickle down the back of her neck.

  Rachel coughed and flushed a little. “Thank you, Lord McKillington,” she said. She made a big thing of using his title, expecting him to say “No, no, call me Alex.”

  He didn’t. He walked over to a bureau on the far side of the room and started to fix a drink—for himself, presumably, because he didn’t ask if she wanted anything. Well, fine! Be like that! It gave her a chance to glance around the room. Ancient gray stone softened by wall hangings and thick velvet curtains. There was a roaring fire with several cushions strewn in front of it and the floor was mostly covered with rugs. For all its formality and grandeur, the overall impression was…cozy. It made you want to curl up.

  “Why me?” he asked without turning around.

  Rachel swallowed and tried to recall the massive family tree. “Because you’re their…um…”—she flushed—“you’re related to them.”