Читать книгу Baby for the Tycoon - Emily McKay - Страница 8

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jonathon barked, too shocked to temper the edge of his words. “Nobody quits a job because they have a baby, much less because they inherited one.”

Wendy rolled her eyes in exasperation. “That’s not—” she started, but he held up a hand to cut her off.

“I know how stupid that sounded.” This was why he needed Wendy. Why she was irreplaceable. Most of the time, he was too outspoken. Too blunt. Too brash. He had a long history of pissing off people who were easily offended. But not Wendy. Somehow, she managed to see past his mistakes and overlook his blunders.

The thought of trying to function without her here as his buffer made him panic. He wasn’t about to lose her over a baby.

“FMJ has one of the highest-rated on-site child-care facilities in the area. There’s no reason why you can’t continue to work here.”

“I can’t work here because I have to move back to Texas.”

As she spoke, she crossed to the supply closet in the corner. She moved a few things around inside and pulled out an empty cardboard box.

“Why on earth would you want to move to Texas?”

She shot him another one of those looks. “You know I’m from Texas, right?”

“Which is why I don’t know why you’d want to move back there. I’ve never once heard you say anything nice about living there.”

She bobbed her head as if in concession of the point. Then she shrugged. Rounding to the far side of the desk, she sank into the chair and opened her drawer. “It’s complicated.”

“I think I can keep up.”

“There’s a chance members of my family won’t want me to raise Peyton. Unless I can convince them I’m the best mother for her, there’ll be a custody battle.”

“So? You don’t think you can win the battle from here?”

“I don’t think I can afford to fight it.” Sifting through things in the drawer, she answered without looking up. She pulled out a handful of personal belongings and dropped them into the open box.

He watched her for a moment, barely comprehending her words and not understanding her actions at all. “What are you doing?”

She paused, glancing up. “Packing,” she said as if stating the obvious. Then she looked back into the drawer and riffled through a few more things. “Ford called yesterday to offer his condolences. When I explained, he said not to worry about giving two-weeks’ notice. That if I needed to just pack up and go, I should.”

Forget twenty-two years of friendship. He was going to kill Ford.

The baby squirmed. Wendy jostled her knee to calm the little girl, all the while still digging in the drawer. “I swear I had another tube of lip gloss in here.”

“Lip gloss?” She’d just pulled the rug out from under him.

If he’d had two weeks, maybe he could talk some sense into her. But no. His idiot of a partner had ripped that away too. And she was worried about lip gloss?

She must have heard the outrage in his voice, because her head snapped up. “It was my favorite color and they don’t even make it anymore. And—” She slammed the drawer shut and yanked open another. “Oh, forget it.”

“You can’t quit.”

She stood up, abandoning her task. “You think I want this? You think I want to move? Back to Texas? You think I want to leave a job I love? So that I can move home? I don’t! But it’s my only option.”

“How will being unemployed in Texas solve anything?” he demanded.

“I…” Peyton squirmed again in her arms and let out a howl of protest. Wendy sighed, sank back into the chair and set it rocking with a pump of her leg. “I may not have mentioned it before, but my family has money.”

She hadn’t mentioned it. She’d never needed to.

People who grew up with money had an air about them. It wasn’t snobbery. Not precisely. It was more a sense of confidence that came from always having the best of everything. It was the kind of thing you only noticed if you’d never had money and had spent your life trying to replicate that air of entitlement.

Besides, there was an innate elegance to Wendy that was in direct contrast to her elfin appearance and plucky verve. Yet somehow she pulled it off.

“From money?” he said dryly. “I never would have guessed.”

Wendy seemed too distracted to notice his sarcasm. “My grandfather set up a trust for me. For all the grandkids, actually. I never claimed mine. The requirements seemed too ridiculous.”

“And the requirements are?”

“I have to work for the family company and live within fifteen miles of my parents.” She narrowed her eyes as if glaring at some unseen relative. Peyton let out another shriek of frustration and Wendy snapped back to the present. “So if I move home now—”

“You can claim the trust,” he summed up. “You’d have enough money to hire a lawyer if it does come down to a custody battle.”

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that. My grandmother still controls the purse strings. The rest of the family will follow her wishes. Once she sees what a great mother I’m going to be, she’ll back off and just let me raise Peyton.” Wendy’s jaw jutted forward in determination. “But if it does come to a custody battle, I want to be sure I have enough money to put up a good fight.”

“I don’t get it. You’re doing all this for a cousin you barely knew? Someone you hadn’t seen in years?”

Wendy’s eyes misted over and for a second he thought that—dear God—she might actually start crying. She squeezed the baby close to her chest and planted a kiss on top of her head. Then she pinned him with a steady gaze brimming with resolution. “If something happened to Ford and Kitty, and they wanted you to take Ilsa, wouldn’t you do whatever it took to honor their wishes?”

All he could do in response was shove his hands deep into his pockets and swallow a curse. Damn it, she was right.

He stared at the adorable tot on Wendy’s lap, summing up his competition. He wasn’t about to lose the best assistant he’d ever had. He didn’t care how cute and helpless that baby was.

Peyton undoubtedly needed Wendy. But he needed her too.

Fighting the feeling of complete and utter doom—which, frankly, was a fight she’d been losing ever since the nanny had first handed her Peyton—Wendy glanced from the baby, to the open desk drawer and then to Jonathon.

She had so much to do, her mind couldn’t focus on a single task. Or maybe it was lack of sleep. Or maybe just an attack of nerves brought on by the way Jonathon kept pacing from one side of the room to the other, pausing occasionally to glower in her direction.

When she’d first started work at FMJ, Jonathon had made her distinctly nervous. There was something about his combination of magnetic good looks, keen intelligence and ruthless ambition that made her overly aware of every molecule of her body. And every molecule of his body for that matter. She’d spent the first six months on edge, jumping every time he came in the room, nearly trembling under his gaze. It wasn’t nerves precisely. More a kind of tingling anticipation. As if she were a gazelle who wanted to be eaten by the lion.

She’d forced herself to get over it.

And she’d thought she’d been successful. Only now that feeling was back. Either she could chalk it up to exhaustion and emotional vulnerability. Or she could be completely honest with herself. It wasn’t nerves. It was sexual awareness. And now that she was about to walk out of his life forever, she wished she’d acted on it when she’d had the chance.

Forcing her mind away from that thought, she stared at the open desk drawer. The lip gloss was gone forever, just like any opportunity she might have had to explore a different kind of relationship with Jonathon. The best she could hope for now was to gather her few remaining possessions and make a run for it.

She had a Voldemort for President coffee mug in the bottom drawer, her Bose iPod dock, a tub of Just Fruit strawberries and in the very back, a bag of Ghirardelli chocolate caramels. Precious few possessions to be walking away with after five years, and the cardboard box dwarfed them. On the bright side, at least she’d only have to make one trip out to the car.

Balancing Peyton on her hip, she wedged the box under her arm only to find Jonathon blocking her route to the door.

“You can’t go.”

“Right. The car seat. I can’t believe I forgot that.” She turned back around, only to notice the diaper bag as well.

She blew out a breath. Okay. More than one trip after all.

“No,” Jonathon said. “I’m not letting you quit.”

Turning back around, she stared at him. “Not letting me? How can you not let me? If I quit, I quit.”

“You’re the best assistant I’ve ever had. I’m not going to lose you over something this…” He seemed to be searching for the least offensive word. “Frivolous.”

She raised an eyebrow. “She’s a child, not a frivolity. It’s not like I’m running off to join the circus.”

There was something unsettling about the quiet, assessing way he studied her. Then he said, “If keeping this baby is really so important to you, we’ll hire a lawyer. We’ll find the best lawyer in the country. We’ll take care of it.”

She felt her throat tighten, but refused to let the tears out of the floodgate. Oh, how tempting it was to accept his help. But the poor man had no idea what he was getting into.

“You should know, my family is extremely wealthy. If they fight this, they’ll put considerable financial and political weight behind it.”

“So?”

She blew out a long breath. The moment of reckoning. She always dreaded this. “Leland is my mother’s maiden name. I legally took her name when I left college.”

Jonathon didn’t look impatient, the way some people did when she explained. That was one of the things she liked best about Jonathon. He reached conclusions quickly, but never judgments.

“My father’s name—” Then she corrected herself. “My real last name is Morgan.”

Most people, it took a couple of minutes for them to put together the name Morgan with wealth and political connections. She figured as smart as he was, it would take Jonathon about twenty seconds. It took him three.

“As far as I know, none of the banking Morgans live in Texas. That means you must be one of the Texas oil Morgans.”

He didn’t phrase it as a question. His tone had gone flat, his gaze distant.

“I am.” She bit her lip, not bothering to hide her cringe. “I should have told you.”

“No. Why would you have?” His expression was so blank, so unsurprised, so completely disinterested, that it was obvious, at least to her, that he cared deeply that she’d kept her true identity to herself. His calm, direct gaze met hers. “Then Senator Henry Morgan is…”

“My uncle.” In the interest of full disclosure, she nodded to the baby gurgling happily on her hip. “Peyton’s grandfather.”

“Okay then.” He stood with his hands propped on his hips, the jacket of his suit pushed back behind his hands. He often stood in that way and it always made her heart kick up a beat. The posture somehow emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and the narrowness of his waist all at the same time.

Despite his obvious disappointment, he immediately went into problem-solving mode. He stared at her blankly, then left the room abruptly. A moment later he returned with a copy of the Wall Street Journal. He flipped the paper open, folded it in half and held it out to her. “So, Elizabeth Morgan is your cousin. The baby’s mother.”

It was an article about her death. The first Wendy had seen. She didn’t need to read it to know what it would say. It would be carefully crafted. Devoid of scandal. Bitsy may have been an embarrassment but Uncle Hank would have called in favors to make sure the article met with his approval. That was the way her uncle did business, whether he was running the country or running his family.

Jonathon frowned as he scanned the article. His eyes crinkled at the edges as his face settled into what she thought of as his problem-solving expression. But if he could figure a way out of this one, then he was smarter than even she thought he was.

“It says here she is survived by a brother and sister-in-law. Why don’t they take the baby?”

“Exactly,” she said grimly. “Why not? It’s what every conservative in the country will be thinking. Those conservative voters made up a huge portion of Uncle Hank’s constituents.” And they weren’t the only ones who had that question. It was no secret that their grandmother, Mema, didn’t approve of modern families. In her mind, a family comprised a mother and a father. And possibly a dog. Mema would want Hank Jr. to take Peyton. And what Mema wanted was generally what the family did.

She may have been in her late eighties, but she was a wily old dame. More importantly, she still controlled the money.

“It’s so frustrating,” she admitted. “This wouldn’t even be an issue if I had a husband I could trot out to appease my grandmother and Uncle Hank’s constituents.”

“You really think that’s all you need?”

“For my family to see me as the perfect mother?” She gave a fake, trilling laugh. “Oh, yes, a husband is the must-have accessory of the season. The richer, the better. Optional add-ons are the enormous gas-guzzling SUV, the Junior League membership and the golden Lab.”

“And it’s really that simple?”

“Oh, sure. That simple. I’ll just head over to the laboratory and whip up a successful husband out of spare computer parts. You run out to the morgue and steal a dead body I can reanimate and we’ll be good.”

His lips quirked in a smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners, just a hint of cockiness. The expression gave her pause, because he wasn’t laughing at her joke. No, she knew this look too. It was his I’ve-solved-the-problem look. “I think we can do a little better than that.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said it yourself. All you need is a rich, successful husband.”

For a moment she just stared blankly at him, unable to follow the abrupt twist the conversation had taken. “Right. A rich, successful husband. Which I don’t have.”

“But you could.” He smiled fully now. Full smiles were rare for him. Usually they made her feel a little breathless. This one just made her nervous. “All you have to do is marry me. I’ll even buy you a dog.”