Читать книгу Prince Charming's Child - Jennifer Greene, Jennifer Greene - Страница 9

Two

“Oh, no! You couldn’t be the father, Mitch! You just couldn’t be!”

Mitch didn’t wince, but he wanted to. Although Nik might not appreciate it, his mind was racing from shock, no different than hers. Obviously he was aware they’d taken a risk the night they made love, but there’d been no tip that night had repercussions until this instant. That she seemed stunned at his admitting paternity was bad enough, but she also threw herself in her office chair as if she lacked the strength to face such appalling news.

At thirty-two, naturally Mitch had taken a few slices in his masculine ego—but nothing that knifed his male esteem quite so fast or lethally.

Way, way back—in the era before Nicole had upended his entire life—he vaguely remembered a pleasant historical time when women actually liked him. One even told him he was a creatively inspired lover. Several had chased him downright ruthlessly. Amazing as it seemed now, he’d never had a complaint about his prowess or talent between the sheets. Until Nik, no woman had ever felt obligated to completely block all memory of sleeping with him. And until now, he’d never taken up with a woman who looked aghast at the idea of him in her bed.

Any second now, Mitch figured the letter of resignation burning a hole in his pocket would strike his sense of irony. Quitting was obviously out of the question now. A baby in the picture changed everything.

Only it was hard to imagine how an impossible situation could possibly have become even more disastrous. Mitch had learned the hard, bloody way that he had a problem with tenacity. Sensible people turned off when they saw a dead-end road sign. Not him. If there was something he wanted or valued, he stubbornly persisted in charging forward long past the hopeless point. He hated giving up on anything. But this afternoon, he thought he’d finally gotten smarter and was doing the rational, practical thing by resigning. Getting out of her life. Removing himself from the hopeless temptation of Nicole altogether.

Only this afternoon wasn’t going precisely like he planned. Under any other circumstances, that would have been great news. He never wanted to get out of her life. He never wanted to quit a job he loved. Hell, as soon as he recovered from the life-threatening shock that he’d fathered a child, he was likely gonna spin high on the baby news, too. Unfortunately, one teensy small detail hadn’t changed from the original core problem.

Nicole still couldn’t see him for dust.

And she was still facing him with that aghast expression.

“Mitch...it just couldn’t have been you. The two of us just couldn’t have slept together. I mean, for one thing, I know there’s already a woman in your life, a Suzanne or Susan or something—”

Bewilderment furrowed his brow. For a moment he was completely confounded how Suz could have possibly entered this conversation—but that didn’t stop him from immediately correcting her misconception. “Whoa—there’s no one in my life. Nor would anything have happened between us if someone else had been in the wings. If I’m involved, I believe in doing the loyal-as-a-hound routine. No exceptions. I can’t imagine how you even heard Suz’s name?”

“From Wilma. I’m positive she said—”

Aw, hell. Finally it clicked how she’d made the association. “Yeah, well...before I moved and took the job here, there was a Suz. And when I was first hired on, Wilma came on pretty strong. I didn’t know then that flirting was a life-style with her. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and didn’t want to start a new job with an awkward situation, so I made some comment about there being a Suz in my life. Good grief, I never even thought about it again. It was just a chance comment at the time. It never occurred to me that she’d spread the word or that anyone else had made anything of it.”

That didn’t stop her from sputtering. “But Mitch, it still couldn’t have been you.”

A billion women on the planet, and he had to fall for the one who used his masculine ego for machete practice? “Trust me. It was.”

“But I always thought you didn’t even like me—”

“Um, Nik, that’s not remotely true.”

Instead of that comment reassuring her, it seemed to cause more mental wheels to spin in her mind. She seemed to sink even deeper in that office chair. A flush of guilt splashed her cheeks with color. “Oh, God. Look, I have to face this, so I just you want you to be honest with me. What did I do? Throw myself at you at that party? Put you in a position where you couldn’t say no because I was the boss?”

“Nicole, that’s not at all how it happened.”

“Then how did it happen? And why didn’t you ever say anything to me long before this?”

Mitch rubbed an exasperated hand at the back of his neck. For almost three months, he’d have given gold for those questions to come up. He’d had to battle every grain in his character to shut up, when his nature was to charge into a problem and confront it head-on. It was only for her sake—ever—that he’d been silent.

Now, though, blurting out the plain truth wasn’t that simple. He was painfully conscious that how he handled the situation could either open doors—for her, for him, for the two of them—or permanently close them. Somehow, he had to buy himself some thinking time.

Slowly he stood up. “I’m not ducking those questions, Nik—I want to answer them. But it’s after hours. You look beat. And I don’t think the office is the best place to discuss this. I’m guessing you’d like to go home, put your feet up, get a chance to catch your breath. How about if I pick up some Chinese—or whatever you feel like for dinner—and we meet up at your place?”

“I don’t know...” She started shaking her head.

“I understand—you just had all this sprung on you. And I don’t want you to feel put on the spot. About anything. But before you start making plans about the baby, I think you need to know what happened that night. I’m part of this, too...and it doesn’t matter to me whether we talk at my place or yours, but I assume you’d be more comfortable on your turf.”

She agreed—not, Mitch suspected, because she willingly wanted more time with him, but because she really, really wanted to know what happened that night. After that, they both went in motion. She locked the office; he called ahead to order dinner, and they separated in the parking lot. A half hour later, he’d picked up the Chinese takeout and was swinging his red Miata into her drive.

Juggling the overfull bag of Chinese food cartons, he climbed out of the car and hip-slammed the door with his gaze riveted on her house. He’d only seen it once—the night of the Christmas party. And one look was all it took for him to recall that night in Technicolor and surround-sound detail... but remembering his redhead naked and her warm, willing body and those lethally vulnerable eyes of hers was trouble. At the time, he thought he was waking up Sleeping Beauty. In fact, he could have sworn that was exactly what happened...except that the princess failing to remember a damn thing had totally screwed up the end on the fairy tale.

But the question was what to do now. He stood a moment longer, studying her place, willing answers about Nicole to come to him from her choice of home.

Nik picked up clients from the spray of Oregon tourist towns up and down the coast—Florence and Newport and Reedsport—but her property was between those splashes of civilization, off the beaten path. Once upon a time, it had probably been someone’s summer beach house. The outside was ramshackle, but ramshackle with character. The house was two sturdy stories, with clapboard siding that showed off years of weathering winds. A wraparound porch circled the bottom story, where balconies jutted off bedrooms on the second floor. The yard was an overgrown garden of willowy ornamental grasses like sea oats and sweet grass, a shade spot created by a gnarled old cypress tree. The steps leading down to the bluff edge of the sea were beat-up boards.

Maybe an artist had built the place, because it had that bohemian I - don’t - give - a - damn - what - anyone - else - thinks kind of character. And the first time Mitch saw it, he’d fallen in love. It seemed so right for Nik. The house capsulized the secret romantic and wild free spirit he’d always sensed in her.

In the office, she was so contained. Right from the start, her quicksilver mind had ransomed his heart, but she was a different woman at work, always worrying about doing the right thing, behaving the right way with the team. There was no reason she couldn’t laugh and loosen up—except in her own mind—but from the day he met her, he wondered where she’d learned all that control, what life lessons had taught her all that worry. He’d seen loneliness in her eyes. He’d seen her start to laugh, then cut it off. He’d seen her passionate zest for life a million times when she was brainstorming ideas, but that exuberance got clipped with ruthless scissors around people. Her choice of house reflected both the mystery and challenge that Mitch had always seen in Nik. There was a warm, sensual life-lover under the surface—if the right lover could just coax her to set it free.

Once upon a time, he’d even been arrogant enough to think that lover could be him.

The screen door suddenly clapped open. “Mitch? I thought I heard your car. Come on in.”

He didn’t want to go in. Given a choice, what he really wanted to do was drop the food, grab her, and try kissing her senseless. Just looking at her had always made his hormones stand up and bay like a mournful, lonesome hound, and right now she was damn well breathtaking. A west wind had scuttled away the afternoon’s blustery clouds, and the evening was turning clear as glass. Her hair caught the sunset flame, made her skin glow with a sensual, soft, pearl luminescence.

Still, he cut the juice on the electric charge in his pulse. Kissing her senseless might be an inspiring idea but could too easily end up a disastrous one. And as he hiked toward the house, he discovered they had a new and interesting problem. “You’d better be hungry. I brought enough Chinese to feed a platoon.”

“I can see that,” she said wryly. Swiftly she took the food cartons when he stepped in, but her eyes flashed on his face and then skittered away. Nik wasn’t a skitterer. She’d take on a tiger and not look back for something she wanted to win. So, he mused, she’d done some thinking. And maybe she didn’t remember that night, but it was pretty obvious she was suddenly aware of him in a whole different way. He’d metamorphosed from a nice, safe, tame employee into an unknown quantity of lover.

He liked those nerves. It evened things up. He’d suffered sexual tension all these months alone, when God knew he was more than willing to share. Of course, unanswered questions suddenly hung in the air between them like grenades, but Mitch figured one thing at a time. “If you tell me where the plates are, I’ll help put the dinner on,” he offered.

“You don’t have to help. It won’t take me a second. Can I get you a drink first?”

“Yeah, water—which I’ll get for myself. I didn’t suggest dinner so you could wait on me, Nik. The idea was to give you a chance to relax.”

That plan worked on a par with peace talks in the Middle East. They settled in her blue-tiled kitchen. He watched her poke at her egg roll, fork down a little sweet and sour shrimp, sample some of the war sui gui. Mostly she gulped water and charged down conversational roads like religion and politics—gutsy stuff to argue about, but nothing remotely related to anything on either of their minds.

Mitch didn’t mind her stalling; he thought she needed the unwind time. But typically Nik never cut herself any slack, and as if she realized how long she’d been chitchatting, she suddenly set down her fork. “We’re not getting it done,” she said impatiently.

“Getting what done?”

“Both of us are avoiding the subject of babies like it’d bite us. And it’s my fault. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. I do. But somehow I can’t figure out what to say, how to start...”

“There’s nothing to be blaming yourself for. You’re uncomfortable with me—”

“No, of course not. We’ve worked together for months, for heaven’s sakes. Even when we don’t see eye to eye, we trade insults and bicker like old friends. We’ve never really had a problem talking together.”

But there was a difference, Mitch thought, and that difference was her thinking of him as a lover instead of an employee. He pushed back his chair. “Look, how about if we try getting out of the house, take a walk on the beach?”

Her eyes immediately brightened. “Yeah. Fresh air sounds good.” But then she glanced down at her business suit.

“I’ll do the dishes. That’ll give you a chance to change into something warmer and more comfortable than work clothes.”

“You don’t have to do the dishes—”

“It’s nothing, Nik. Go on.”

She hesitated, but then said okay and disappeared upstairs to change. Mitch leveled the dishes in two minutes flat, then wandered into her living room. The night of the Christmas party, the inside of her house had fascinated him as much as the outside—but for entirely different reasons.

The open staircase led to three bedrooms and two baths on the second story. Downstairs, the front door opened onto a massive living area with big bay windows overlooking the ocean bluff. The blue-tiled kitchen was chunked down in the middle, leading down two steps to a dining and sunroom that both faced east. Tucked on like an afterthought was a small wing that contained an office study and bathroom.

The layout was fine—it was the decor that confounded Mitch. At work, he and Nik were a natural team. With his architectural background, he was at home with beams and studs, where she was the pro at color and style and all that female stuff. Hell, she’d built up a thriving business from scratch because her perception was so sharp. Meet a client and right off she tuned into the individual’s personality and all the internal decor ingredients that worked for that person. Get her going on the Feng Shui concepts about balance and harmony and it was tough to shut her up.

Yet the decor in her own place was perplexingly horrible. He wandered around, hands in his pockets, just looking. She’d obviously put time and money into it, but the decorating style was stark minimalist—unrelenting neutrals, taupe carpet, taupe couches, taupe walls. A pale oak table displayed coffee-table art books. Appropriate, pricey pictures hung on the walls. Nobody could criticize a single furnishing. It was all textbook perfect. They’d had clients who’d probably orgasm to achieve the same look, but they weren’t Nik. There were no splashes of colors, no hint of her vibrant creativity or independent spirit.

The living room—the whole inside decor—made him think of a trapped soul. He saw that side of her at work, too. Nik was always proper, hyper about doing the right thing, no bending on standards. Gutsy in her business, but sleeping through life. Restlessly Mitch jingled the change in his pocket, thinking that if he hadn’t glimpsed the other side of Nik, he’d never have this damn fool convoluted problem of being gut-deep in love with her.

But he bad. Memories stirred of another room in her house—the only room where she hadn’t bleached out every stamp of her personality. Her bedroom. He remembered all of it. The thick, soft rose carpeting. The antique sleigh bed. The old-fashioned dressing table with a needlepoint seat, pearls dripping from a crystal bowl, vials of perfume and cosmetic pots and a cloisonné dish heaped with earrings.

The room reflected the Nik he’d always sensed under the surface, exuberantly female, a free-flow of rich textures and sensual colors. But it wasn’t the furnishings in that bedroom that had kidnapped a niche on his soul the night of the Christmas party. It was Sleeping Beauty coming awake in his arms, coming alive, the rigidly careful Nik forgetting all that control in the dark...but abruptly Mitch heard footsteps.

He spun around to see Nicole bounding down the stairs, dressed in skinny jeans and old sneakers and a voluminous threadbare black sweatshirt.

“I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “Who’d have guessed you’d own anything with a frayed collar? I’m impressed.”

“No teasing allowed. It’s a sacred sweatshirt,” she said dryly.

“I understand. I’ve got a sacred tee from college basketball days. When my dad got sick a few years ago, I showed up in the hospital wearing that tee. My mom was disgusted. I didn’t care. I wanted luck for my dad any way I could get it.”

A flash of a smile in her eyes, but then she cocked her head. “Your dad’s okay now?”

“Fit as a fiddle. You ready to head out?”

“I am...but I’m not sure this is such a great idea. You’re still stuck wearing your shoes from work. I’m afraid they’ll get wrecked on the beach. And it’s cold—I could loan you a jacket, but I can’t imagine having anything of mine that’d fit.”

Mitch figured it’d be an uphill job to teach her some selfishness. Typically she was worried about him—even under the circumstances—rather than thinking of herself. But she was also a good head shorter than his six-three. Imagining how he’d fit in anything of hers made him grin. “These loafers have seen sand before. And I’ve got a fleece jacket in the car I’ll grab when we go out.”

“Okay, then. Let’s hit it.”

Outside, the sky had darkened to a deep velvet-blue, the moon just rising to light their way. He fetched his fleece jacket and zipped up, feeling the sharp salt air suck in his lungs, fresh and invigorating. Pale stars illuminated their climb down to the beach from the board steps. The surf was sleepy at high tide. Foam sneaked up the sand, leaving a lacy collar of froth in its wake. Common to this stretch of Oregon’s coast, giant rocks jutted from the water, plunked down like mythical black sculptures of all shapes and sizes. In the darkness they looked like a giant’s play toys.

He let Nicole set the walking pace, which naturally for her was a full-speed charge. They hiked in silence for a bit, both of them savoring the magic of the sea, the night, the fresh air. Striding next to her, he was conscious of his height and her smallness, conscious of how the worn jeans showed off her fanny and long slim legs, conscious that she stole looks at his face...and conscious that no matter how good walking with her felt, it wasn’t getting their talking done.

“I moved here from Seattle,” he said finally.

“I know. I remember from your job application. You were one of the architects for a firm named Strickland’s.”

“I was an architect there, yes. But what I didn’t mention on the ap was that I owned the firm.”

She tilted her face, her eyebrows arched in question. “Why didn’t you say so at the time?”

“Because when I started job hunting—for the work I wanted—I got a steady round of turndowns. On paper, I looked overpriced and overqualified. I had no way to make anyone believe from a résumé that the work I was applying for was what I really wanted to do.”

“Obviously there’s more to that story,” she prodded him.

“Yeah, there is.” He picked up a flat stone, and tried skimming it. Three hops before it sank. He was out of practice. “I come from a long line of overachievers. My dad, mom, two brothers—everyone’s good with money, carved out a successful place in the business world. My dad used to say I had the strongest bent for turning a dime into a dollar—which he was proud of me for. I started investing when I was 14, had enough of a nest-egg to buy Strickland’s when I was 24. Of course the business was facing a Chapter Eleven, so anyone could have picked it up for a lick and a song. I was just so young and dumb I didn’t know what I was getting into. As it happened, though, by the time I sold it two years ago, the company had grown from a handful of employees to a staff of sixty and we were making money hand over fist.”

“This was a problem?” she asked wryly.

“For me, it was. I couldn’t control it. The drive. I was—maybe—catching four hours’ sleep a night. Had an ulcer that didn’t want to heal. Lost a woman I really cared for because I neglected her and the relationship both. And the real bug was, my degree was in architecture but all I was doing was management. Maybe I had a talent for the money side of things, but that wasn’t the point. I hated it. I got into architecture because my dream was to build, to create, to make things. I like studs and beams and fighting with contractors, not paperwork. But because the business was going so well, it was hard for me to see it was a personal dead-end road. I was running my life by my family’s expectations—trying to be someone I’m not. And getting nothing done that really mattered to me.”

For an instant her eyes glinted with a curious light. “I know what that’s like—trying to meet family expectations that don’t fit you any better than a round peg in a square hole. But anyway, you said you sold the business...”

“Yeah. And for a while I didn’t work. I bought a house here, got a boat, did some fishing and hiking and mountain climbing. I can’t say I needed the break so much. But I needed time to be more sure of myself, sure I wouldn’t get sucked into the family expectation thing again, sure about what I really wanted to do. And when I felt I had my ducks in a row, I sent out résumés—and took the job with you.”

She hesitated. “I can’t believe I didn’t guess your background long before this. You and I always bucked heads at work. Now, that makes more sense. You’re used to taking charge. You jump in to fix things. And when you do it better than me, it gets my dander up every time.”

“If you think that our bucking heads was about a power struggle, I’m telling you no. I don’t want your job, Nik. Never did. Personally I think that edginess between us comes from an entirely different source.”

“What?”

He thought the chemistry between them caused enough sexual friction to spontaneously combust a forest fire or two. But just then, he didn’t think Nicole was real open to hearing that. “We can talk about that another time. The reason I brought up all this stuff about my background was to prod your memory. Because I haven’t told you one thing you didn’t already know about me.”

She stopped dead, her expression a mirror of confusion. “No, I didn’t—”

“Yeah, you did. We talked about it the night of the Christmas party.” Maybe until that moment, he’d never completely believed her about not remembering. But he could see her swallow, see the way her eyes darted nervously to his face. Nik just wouldn’t be revealing that kind of vulnerability—or fear—if she’d recalled what happened. Slowly he said, “The others left just after midnight. I would have, too, only you and I started talking. Both of us. Not just me. You told me a bunch of personal things about yourself no different than—”

“Oh God. What’d I say?”

She’d told him no deep dark secrets. Mitch only wished she had. If he understood better what made her tick, he’d feel a lot more secure knowing how to handle this whole situation now. “You never said anything you need to worry about. I’m just trying to tell you how that night played out. I’d had a fair amount of champagne. So had you. I never planned to end up in your bed, Nik—hell, I’d have brought protection if I’d ever thought there was even a remote chance of that. We just started talking. And you’d never really talked with me before, not deep-type talk, and one kind of closeness led to another. I knew we’d been drinking, but I honestly didn’t think either of us had that much. As far as I understood, we were both fully aware of making a choice.”

Edgily she picked up a flat stone, skimmed it like he had. Hers bounced six times, which she didn’t even stop to appreciate. She was already looking at him again. “Mitch, it never crossed my mind to blame you. I already figured it was my fault.”

Frustration clawed through his pulse. He’d wanted her to understand that he’d never been a predatory wolf in the story, preying on a vulnerable woman who’d maybe sipped a little too much champagne. But he’d never intended to cop out on responsibility or for her to heap guilt on her own shoulders either. “Nicole, listen to me. Get that idea out of your mind. It wasn’t about fault. It was an unforgettable night. You were...incredible. Warm, giving, uninhibited. Wild. You went straight to my head. Champagne had nothing to do with it.”