Читать книгу The Boss's Baby Bargain - Karen Sandler - Страница 9

Allie couldn’t possibly have heard him right. She stared at his implacable face, waiting for him to continue, to clarify what he’d said. But he just stared back at her, his gray eyes unfathomable.

“Marry?” She swallowed, shaking her head. “You?”

For an instant, he seemed flustered, then he gathered his usual cloak of arrogance around him. “Hear me out.”

He leaned back in his chair, his gaze falling a moment to the linen tablecloth. She knew that impenetrable expression, had seen it dozens of time during staff meetings or when he was in the midst of acquisition negotiations. It meant he felt fully in control of the proceedings and intended to turn circumstances exactly the way he desired.

“Lucas—” she began, but he forestalled her with a raised hand.

“Hear me out,” he said again.

He lowered his hands to the edge of the table, his fingers gripping so tightly, his knuckles whitened. Allie suddenly realized he wasn’t nearly as in control as she’d thought.

He kept his eyes fixed on her as if it were an effort of will. “For the past several months, I’ve been attempting to adopt.”

“A baby?” she asked, incredulous.

“Or a young child.” He cleared his throat. “The county doesn’t want to approve a forty-year-old single man. My attorney tells me I could even the odds considerably if I married.”

He made the process sound so cut-and-dried, she might have thought he considered a child one more step in the well-thought-out business plan of his life. Yet she detected the faintest tremor in his voice, a shadow of desperation in his eyes. This from a man who remained aloof when employees brought their children into the office.

“Lucas, we hardly know one another. To marry—”

“If it’s sex you’re worried about…”

Sex! Good God, she hadn’t even considered the physical side of a marriage to Lucas. Despite herself, her mind raced, her heart rate keeping pace. All the fantasies she’d struggled to contain surged forward.

“…I’m not proposing a conventional marriage,” Lucas continued, oblivious to her rampant thoughts. “It would be strictly platonic.”

The sudden rush of disappointment unsettled her. Pushing it aside, she focused on rational discussion. “Why me? There must be other women, women you’ve dated who could play the role of wife.”

“They have much more complex lives than you. They’ve been married before, have children, their own homes. You have no strings.”

True enough, but she felt irritation at the dismissive way he summed up her life. Allie shook her head. “Strings or not, I’m not interested in marriage.”

“Look,” Lucas said, reaching across the table to take her hand. She couldn’t suppress a shiver of reaction. “I need a wife, you need money. Agree to marry me and we both get what we want.”

His large hand covered hers, his warm palm nestling against her fingers. The warmth, the power of him seemed to sap her strength, to dissolve her will. Like her autocratic father, this man could swallow her up, diminish her.

Her own mother, a sweet and loving woman, had always seemed to shrink in stature when she was with her husband. French Dickenson barked out an order and Elizabeth complied, even if it turned her own plans upside down. Allie’s mother gave every ounce of her soul to the man she adored, tucking her own needs away time and again. When the cancer took hold, Elizabeth’s physical pain was nothing compared to the agony she had felt in defying French by dying.

Allie was not her mother. She couldn’t live like that.

“No.” She tugged her hand free. “I can’t marry you.”

His jaw tightened and she recognized the hard light in his gray eyes. “Then I can’t loan you the money.”

Allie sat there, stunned. Not that he would turn her down, but that he would coerce her this way. To back her into a corner went beyond arrogance, bordered on cruelty.

“You can’t mean that.”

“I can. It’s my money, Allie.”

She looked around her at the half-full restaurant, at the waiter hovering nearby, out the window at the American River below them. She couldn’t say yes, couldn’t let herself be sucked into Lucas’s control. She faced him again. “Then I’ll get the money somewhere else.”

A faint smile curved his lips. “If you could have borrowed it elsewhere, you wouldn’t have asked me. I’m your last resort.”

Of course he was right, damn him. And he surely knew how desperately she needed the money. Still, the words were impossible to drag out. “If I agreed, how long would we have to stay married?”

The tension in his face eased at her apparent capitulation. “One year, possibly two. However long it takes to finalize the adoption. I’ll have to consult my attorney.”

She nodded, her head suddenly pounding. She felt as if she perched on the lip of a chasm, readying herself to leap it. Would she safely reach the other side? Or fall to be crushed on the rocks below? “Then yes,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I’ll marry you.”

Triumph lit his eyes—triumph and something else. Relief? “Good then. Fine.” He picked up his water glass to sip; she could swear his hand trembled slightly. “A month enough time for you? To pack up your apartment and move to my estate?”

The enormity of what she’d agreed to swamped her. “Move? Why can’t I keep my own place?”

“Social services performs home visitations for prospective parents. They’ll expect husband and wife to be living together.”

She imagined herself standing in the river below, the swift currents below the surface taking her feet out from under her, sweeping her away. She tried to grasp for some measure of self-control. “When can you give me the money?”

He gestured peremptorily to the waiter. “After we’re married.”

“No,” she said, grateful for the opportunity to take a stand, no matter how weak. “I need the money now.”

“That’s acceptable.” He opened the menu, effectively dismissing her now that he had her concession. “I’ll wire the money to your account tomorrow.”

He ordered for them both, scarcely pausing to ask her approval of his choice. Shaken by what had transpired in the past several minutes, she realized she would have to strengthen her resolve if she hoped to survive this…this…agreement with Lucas with her self-esteem intact.

When her salad arrived, she dove into it, suddenly ravenous. She’d been so anxious about her upcoming discussion with Lucas, she’d eaten almost nothing at lunch. Now, with a little food in her stomach, she could wrest some control back from Lucas.

“Where shall we have the ceremony?” she asked.

He seemed surprised by her question. “The county courthouse. Or Tahoe. It doesn’t matter.”

She tipped her chin up stubbornly. “It does to me. I want my family there. They’d never forgive me if I didn’t invite them.”

“It isn’t a real wedding, Allie. We don’t need your family there.”

He was right, of course. There was no real commitment between them other than expediency. But she felt a compulsion to include her family. “I need them.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want this turning into a circus.”

“Not a circus, Lucas. Just my sister, brother and their spouses.”

His gaze narrowed on her and she got the sense he was only now realizing he may have underestimated her. She felt a brief flare of satisfaction. Then he dipped his head in acquiescence. “Fine. We’ll include your family.”

She ought to be content with that victory, but she pushed on. “And I want the ceremony in a church, not the courthouse.”

She expected exasperation. Instead she got cold, tightly leashed anger. “Not a church. The courthouse or my own backyard. I won’t say the vows in a church.”

The bitterness in his tone, the bleak rage in his eyes shocked her. “The courthouse, then,” she said softly.

Even as he retreated behind his habitual arrogant mask, Allie wondered about the true self hidden beneath the layers of control, wondered if there was anything more to Lucas Taylor than the overbearing persona he showed the world.

Maybe not. Maybe some men, like Lucas, like her own father, only knew one way—power, control, dominance. Give and take, compromise didn’t exist in their universe. In all the years and all the battles with her father, Allie would have given anything for a truce. But in her father’s eyes, truce meant surrender and surrender meant defeat.

In the end, his own body had defeated him. As his lucent moments became scarcer, her father might never realize the way his daughter had sacrificed her own freedom on his behalf.

Leaning back as the waiter came to take away their salad plates, Allie felt the significance of her agreement with Lucas settle on her, a nearly unbearable weight. The delectable broiled salmon the waiter set before her a few moments later could have been sawdust for all the appeal it held for her roiling stomach. As she made a show of cutting a bite of the succulent fish, she glanced over at Lucas.

He sat motionless, looking out the window, his expression distant, his face emotionless. While she struggled to come to terms with the prospect of marriage, Lucas seemed to have already compartmentalized it as another finalized business decision. It meant no more to him than that.

Her gaze dropped to the table and saw a different story in Lucas’s hands. Resting on either side of his plate of swordfish, they gripped his fork and knife so fiercely she wondered if he would bend them in his agitation. Tension popped the tendons out in the backs of his hands, set his shoulders into a stiff, rigid line.

“Lucas.” She reached out, lightly touched his hand.

He jerked back from her, dropping the silverware. “Excuse me.” Tossing his napkin on the table, he rose and strode off toward the men’s room.

Allie watched him go, a thousand questions whirling in her mind. She ate a few bites of her salmon, a little of the fresh broccoli beside it on the plate, all the while forcing herself to sit still and wait for Lucas.

When he returned, he’d gathered his businesslike shroud around him again. “We can have the ceremony at a church, if you like.” He said it as if it mattered little to him, as if his vehement objection earlier had never happened. “I’ll leave it to you to pick the church.”

He dug into his swordfish then, finishing it off methodically. No explanation of why he’d left the table, no further discussion of the wedding. Allie could scarcely take another bite, he had her so off-balance.

Later, when he escorted her to her car, he opened the door for her and waited until she’d climbed inside. “Last Saturday in September,” he said. “The afternoon is fine.”

She might as well have been scheduling a business trip for him. “Have you considered what we should tell people at work?”

He shrugged. “They know how closely we’ve worked together the past two years. We’ll announce we’ve decided to marry. They’ll draw their own conclusions.”

It might be that easy for him. Most of TaylorMade’s employees were too intimidated to ask Lucas any personal questions. But she had a half dozen friends at the office who would grill her mercilessly when they found out.

He gazed down at her, his expression inscrutable. “That’s it, then.”

She waited for him to back away, to shut the door. Instead, he bent, leaning into the car, brushing his lips against her cheek. Then his hand cupped her chin, turning her toward him. He pressed his lips to hers, softly, his lingering warmth stealing her breath.

She couldn’t help herself, she kissed him back, slanting her mouth against his, raising her hand to his rough cheek. She heard a low sound in his throat, felt his fingers on her chin tighten. Then the briefest stroke of his tongue against the seam of her lips easing her mouth open. She parted her lips, ready to welcome him inside.

He straightened abruptly, backing away from her. “Sorry,” he rasped out before slamming her door. Rounding his car, he wrenched open his door, every movement full of anger. He waited until she’d started her engine and pulled out, but he wouldn’t look her way.

Her entire body shook in the aftermath of his kiss and the anger that followed it. As she navigated the streets back to her apartment, she kept a stranglehold on the steering wheel to keep from veering off the road.

She’d thought she could handle this. She’d thought she could marry Lucas and still keep her sanity. But now she realized it was entirely impossible. His kiss had brought home to her the utter lunacy of the notion.

She’d tell him tomorrow. First thing in the morning, when she walked into his office, she’d tell him she’d changed her mind. She’d just have to scare up another source of money.

Agitated, she missed the turn at Sunrise and had to double back. As she wended her way through the traffic, she tried to rehearse what she would say to Lucas. But despite all her efforts, her mind kept returning to the feel of his lips on hers, the strength of his hand cupping her face.

Lucas shut the front door behind him and tossed his keys on the small table in the spacious entryway. Through sheer will he kept himself from flinging his briefcase across the acres of Berber carpeting his living room. He dropped it under the table, unwilling for the moment to open it and pull out the work he’d brought home.

What the hell had he done? What madness had taken control of him, had driven him to kiss Allie? What had possessed him to suggest marriage in the first place?

He slipped out of his shoes and padded across the glowing oak hardwood of the entryway to the thick living-room carpet. At the far end of the wide room with its high ceilings and expanse of windows overlooking the three-acre lake below stood a fully stocked wet bar. The housekeeper, Mrs. Vasquez, always filled the ice bucket before she left for the day. Lucas pulled down a tumbler and dropped in a handful of ice.

An array of liquor bottles crowded the shelf above. Why did he keep so much alcohol in the house when he never entertained? Some damn test he supposed. To prove he could resist what had destroyed his mother, to refute the potential in his own genetic makeup.

Resolutely, he chose a bottle of tonic water and emptied it into the tumbler. A dish of cut lime waited for him in the small refrigerator under the wet bar. After squeezing a wedge into his glass, he moved to the sofa and sagged into it.

He took a swallow of the tart tonic water then set the tumbler aside. It had all seemed so logical in the moment. He needed a wife, she needed money, just as he’d said. But it was apparent from his lack of control when he walked her to his car that it had been his libido talking, not his brain.

He picked up the glass again, glided it back and forth against his brow. What now? There was really only one course of action—tell Allie he’d changed his mind, that after giving the matter consideration, he’d realized a marriage between them would be untenable. He’d loan her the money as he’d promised and work out an arrangement to deduct payments from her paycheck.

And the solution to his problem—the complete unlikelihood that the county would relent and decide him eligible to adopt? He’d have to find another way, through private agencies or contacts made through his attorney, John. Those prospects were just as bleak for a single father and time was certainly against him. But at least he had the money to pursue that route.

Rising, he walked to the kitchen to check his answering machine. There were two messages, both from John, both since he’d left his office. Without much hope, Lucas picked up his portable phone and headed out the back of the house. This side faced a grove of oak trees and the small vineyard he’d had put in four years ago. Leaning against the porch rail, he speed-dialed his attorney’s home number and waited for him to pick up.

After the greetings were out of the way, John cut to the chase. “Did I ever introduce you to my cousin, Angela?”

Lucas pressed his lips into a grim smile. “I don’t want you fixing me up, John.”

“But I think you two might hit it off,” John persisted. “She’s in her early thirties, absolutely gorgeous and ready to settle down. I told her about you—”

“Not interested, John.” Lucas paused, sipped his drink. “Besides, I’ve already made my own arrangements.”

“What arrangements?”

His hand shaking, Lucas had to set the glass on the porch rail. His decision of a few moments before might as well have never been. “I’ve asked someone to marry me.”

Total silence on the phone line. Lucas waited for John to muster a response. After several seconds, his attorney asked, “Who?”

“Allie Dickenson, my admin assistant.”

“I had no idea there was anything between you and—”

“There isn’t,” Lucas said flatly. “I explained the adoption situation to Allie and she agreed to help me out.”

“Just like that.” John sounded dubious.

“Not entirely. She’s in a financial bind. I promised her some money in exchange.”

It sounded so crass, laid out like that. He didn’t like the negative light Allie’s promise to marry him shed on her.

“I see,” John said. “And how long will your…commitment last?”

Tension tightened in Lucas’s stomach at John’s evasion of the word marriage. “Until the adoption is finalized. I hope things will move faster with the hurdles out of the way.”

“Even with private adoption, that could be a year or two,” John cautioned.

“I told her as much.” A year or two of living with Allie filled Lucas with an unexpected excitement. He paced across the porch, moving from one end of the house to the other.

John’s next statement brought him back to earth. “I assume you’ll want a pre-nup drawn up.”

A prenuptial agreement? Lucas hadn’t even considered that aspect. Something in him balked at the idea of asking Allie to sign a document protecting his assets. It seemed an insult to a woman who had been nothing but honorable as long as he’d known her. “Is that necessary?”

“I highly recommend it,” John said.

Lucas sighed. “How soon can you have it ready?”

“When’s the wedding?”

“Last weekend in September.”

“I’ll have it done by the end of next week.”

His mind working feverishly, Lucas re-crossed the porch. Beyond him, the gnarled branches of his vineyard glowed orange in the last of the setting sun, each vine heavy with grapes, Chardonnay and Zinfandel. He had so much, surely he could spare more than the twenty thousand he’d promised.

“I want to include a sizeable settlement for Allie.” Lucas named an amount, then immediately wondered if he should double it.

“You can’t be serious!” John protested. “Carol didn’t even get that much.”

“There wasn’t as much to give back then. Allie’s sacrificing one or more years of her life. It’s only fair.”

A thought niggled at him that it might have been fairest to simply loan her the money without the commitment of marriage. But he pushed it aside, determined to continue.

After he said his goodbyes to John, he considered calling Allie. He wanted to tell her about the pre-nup, about the additional compensation he was awarding her. He felt an urgency to cement the deal between them.

Pushing open the French doors leading back into the house, he strode to the kitchen cabinet where the phone books were kept. He could boot up his computer and get her home number from the company database, but this would be quicker. He’d found her number and was about to dial it when doubt lapped at him. Maybe he should leave her be tonight. He’d already dumped a mountain of turmoil in her lap, maybe she needed some breathing space.

He set down the phone on the counter and headed for the stairs, pausing only to grab his briefcase. But two hours later, he’d accomplished none of the tasks he’d brought home with him. He could think of nothing but Allie’s face, her lips, the taste and feel of her against his tongue. Just as he thrust aside one sensual image, another rose to take its place.

It was only lust, he told himself, and lust he could control. As long as those baser feelings didn’t give way to other, more intimate, more vulnerable emotions, he would be safe.

So, as he lay in his bed courting sleep, he allowed himself the harmless fantasies. When he finally slept, the eroticism followed him into his dreams. But as morning neared, the sensual haze parted and he saw only Allie’s face, her soft green eyes on him, her lips curved in a smile.

When he woke, he refused to acknowledge the inexplicable ache inside him. But it clung to him, nonetheless, as he dressed, ate a hurried breakfast, drove to TaylorMade headquarters. It eased only when he walked off the elevator and saw Allie waiting for him, a tentative smile on her face.