Читать книгу The Boss's Baby Surprise - Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy - Страница 10

“We should get back to work,” Nick muttered, after a couple of minutes—or maybe a couple of lifetimes.

Celie felt a little firmer in his arms, now, thank heaven, and a little firmer on her feet. He was no longer afraid she might just crumple into a heap on the floor, as he’d been a minute ago. She’d seemed completely boneless, as if she wasn’t quite real, as if a formless wraith had invaded her body. He loosened his arms cautiously, and was relieved when she didn’t crumple against him.

Still, he was reluctant to let her go.

She felt amazingly good.

Too good.

And different.

Surprising.

He didn’t want an executive assistant who surprised him, and yet every sense told him that this was good. She felt far softer than she looked in her crisp suits. Warmer, too. As warm as if he’d just climbed into bed with her on a winter morning, or as if she’d been toasting herself in front of an open fire moments earlier.

As for the way she smelled…Faintly rose-scented, like soap and shampoo lingering on clean skin and hair. There were some other scents in there, too, but he couldn’t pick them. Good scents. Spring scents. Classic. Not astringent and artificial, but soft.

His face had never lingered this close to her neck before. Who knew that his efficient, unsurprising and utterly reliable executive assistant would feel and smell so warm and soft and sweet in his arms?

Nick let her go at last, stepped back and looked at her, still standing close. She had a fuzzy look around her gray-blue eyes and a new fullness to her mouth, which changed her whole face.

He’d never considered that there might be this side to Celie. Somehow, if he ever broke his own rules and thought about her private life or the deepest emotions of her heart, he always assumed a level of…safety, or something. Secretarial efficiency, even in her heart. Neatly packaged emotions. Cautious affections. Suitable, unthreatening relationships.

After her first month in the job, he’d congratulated himself on getting such a great assistant, and he’d been determined to do everything he could to keep her. She’d probably marry eventually, he’d calculated. Some local man, with a local career. He wanted her still here at Delaney’s when she had pictures of her grandchildren on her desk, her hair still pulled back in its efficient knot, but gray.

He’d always thought her intelligent, capable and practical, but he’d never considered that she might be a deeply passionate person as well. He wondered if she knew this about herself. It seemed possible that she didn’t. So new to him, the hint of this unsuspected passion around her eyes and mouth stirred him to an extent that shocked him, and tilted his balance. He didn’t like it, and he definitely didn’t want it to upset the status quo.

She smiled at him carefully. “Getting there,” she said.

He could almost sense the way her blood beat in her veins. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, and her breathing went in and out steady and strong, as if she had to work hard to get it to happen at all.

I’m watching her body, he realized.

He was watching the way her lower lip had dropped open, and the way her breasts moved when she breathed. In eight months he’d never thought about her breasts. Her suits tended to tailor them out of visible existence, but the softer top she wore today above her straight navy skirt hugged her shape much more closely. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, even though he knew it wasn’t right.

In another second she would notice, and of course she wasn’t thinking about anything like that. She was thinking about her mother, and her disturbing, clairvoyant dream.

Nick didn’t believe in psychic dreams, himself. He’d learned early on to believe only in the things he could see and touch and feel for himself. His adoptive parents were practical, rational people who’d worked very hard to rescue him and Sam from the darkness of their early years, and he had enormous respect for their attitude.

His dad had retired a few years ago, and they wintered in Florida, now, so he saw less of them. He still felt they were close, however, and still shared many of their beliefs. Even those he didn’t share, he respected.

From the beginning, his mom and dad had encouraged their boys to respond to the tangible proof of their care—things like home-cooked meals and bedtime stories—and not to go stirring up the murky memories that lay beneath, by reading anything into the bad dreams they’d sometimes had.

No, like Mom and Dad, he definitely didn’t believe in the significance of dreams.

But he could see how upset Celie was, both by what had happened and by the fact that she thought her dream had warned her of it in advance. Of course she was upset!

“Sit,” he urged her, emotional himself, worried about her, thrown off balance. “I’m going to ask Kyla to get you some hot tea and something from the cafeteria. Then we’ll talk about how much time you’ll need. Your mother’s here in Columbus, right?”

“Yes. In Clintonville. They’re taking her to Riverside.” She didn’t sit, she just stood there, leaning her left hand heavily on her desk. Her fingers splayed out fine and neat and long.

“What would you like to eat?”

“Oh, I…I’m not really hungry.” She waved away the idea of food with a graceful right hand that looked limp with shock.

“No, you should,” he urged again. “Even just a muffin.”

“Okay, a muffin.”

“Because I’m not letting you drive like this.”

“Drive?”

“Don’t you want to try and see her before she goes into surgery?”

Her face cleared, leaving her brow wide and smooth, and bracketed softly by the hair she’d left loose this morning. “Yes, of course. Oh, could I? Can you spare me right away? Can Kyla handle the rest of the meeting? I have the files laid out on—”

“Don’t worry about it, Celie. Between us, we’ll manage. Take as much time as you need. A couple of weeks, if you have to.”

“Thank you, Mr. Delaney!” She smiled again.

Celie had a gorgeous smile. He’d noticed it very early on, when she’d just started working for him, and he remembered thinking it was such a huge professional asset it was a shame she couldn’t list it on her resume. Today, the smile was wide and soft and wobbly, far more heartfelt than he’d ever seen it look before. She couldn’t keep it in place, and it faded at once.

“Please save the Mr. Delaney stuff for executive meetings,” he said. “I’m just Nick. How many times have I told you that?”

He took her arm, led her to her ergonomic chair and pushed her gently into it, then called Kyla from the phone on Celie’s desk because he didn’t quite trust what his executive assistant would do if he left her alone, even for a moment. If she thought she had to clear her desk, leave memos, check her e-mail before she departed…It would be typical of her to think that.

“You’re still a lot shakier than you realize,” he told her.

“No, I’m not,” Celie answered. She added more firmly, in order to clear the ambiguity, “I mean, I do realize. How shaky I am. Now. Thanks. The tea will help.”

She watched Nick take the tea and a blueberry muffin from Kyla a few minutes later. “Thank you,” he said. He clicked his tongue at Sam’s assistant, curled his fingers around the disposable cup and cradled the paper muffin plate in the opposite palm.

Something had happened just now. She and Nick hadn’t kissed, hadn’t come close to that, but it was the most potent hug that Celie had ever experienced. She could still feel Nick’s body against hers, and smell his scent—clean male, mixed with professional laundry—on her skin. She could feel the throb of secret places inside her.

He’d felt so solid and strong and steady, and she’d needed that, after the shock of the prescient dream and her mother’s pain. She’d made no attempt to let him go, even when her dizzying weakness began to ebb.

And then he’d told her she was free to go to her mother right away. She’d never needed time off at short notice before, and wouldn’t necessarily have expected such care from him. She knew how driven he was. A lot of men as successful as he was would have been far more ruthless with their staff’s personal time. It turned out he didn’t have total tunnel vision, however.

She remembered how she’d let her head rest against his chest, listening to his breathing and his heart, and how she’d wrapped her arms around him as close and tight as they would reach. She’d felt the prickle of his belt buckle against her stomach, and the squashy nudge of her breasts against his ribs. While it was happening, she’d felt too shocked about her mom to react as a woman, but as she relived the moment now, in a slightly calmer state, her skin began to tingle.

“Okay. So,” Nick said. “Do you need extra cash? I’ll write you a check.”

“I don’t need it, Nick,” she answered. “I just need the time. You’re giving me that, and I’m grateful.”

“Don’t come back too soon.”

“No, I won’t. Thank you again. So much.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just take care of your mom.”

Celie didn’t see Nick for a week.

She barely saw her apartment, either, as her mom needed a lot of time, at first in the hospital and then at home. After a week, her mom still wasn’t too confident on her crutches, but by this time Celie’s sister, Veronica, had organized to come up from Kentucky, with baby Lizzie, for as long as she was needed, which meant that Celie could go home and back to work.

The apartment sent out its silent “Good to see you” message, the moment she walked through the door. The clock on the side table had stopped, the air was a little stale and surfaces needed dusting. On the windowsill, Celie found a torn shred of white broderie anglaise fabric, left there like a message on a Post-It note.

A message for her.

She had no doubt of that.

But where had it come from, who could have put it there, and what did it mean?

“Hey, what’s going on here? Why are you doing this to me? I’m not the right person for it,” she said aloud to the room, and when she turned, she almost expected to see the woman fixing her hat in front of the mirror, wearing a broderie anglaise blouse.

But no one was there.

I’m talking to my apartment, she realized. How weird is that?

At least the solution to this problem was obvious, and within her control.

Don’t do it.

Celie hadn’t had any memorable dreams while at her mom’s, but tonight they again cut through her sleep. The baby cried. Or was it a doll? She kept seeing strange figures and forms, some of them reassuringly like people, others just the suggestion of a human shape. What were they made of? Plaster? Metal? None of the images stayed long enough for her to identify them. Bright lights flashed, startling and dazzling her, and she thought there must have been an explosion.

Where was the baby in all of this? Was it in danger?

She jumped out of bed and rushed to look for it.

No, not it.

Him.

Nick’s baby was a boy. Hadn’t the woman in front of the mirror said so, last week? Celie sniffed the air, in search of the acrid, firecracker smell of explosives but, thank goodness, couldn’t detect it anywhere.

Couldn’t find the baby, either. His cries still shrilled in her ears. Why didn’t Nick go to him tonight? His inaction distressed her. The baby was his. The woman had implied it, and Celie somehow knew it herself, in any case.

The baby belonged to Nick, only tonight Nick didn’t seem to be around.

“He doesn’t know,” she told the woman frantically. “Nick doesn’t know the baby’s crying. He doesn’t know about the baby at all.”

“He will,” she answered, with the calm smile that made Celie feel as if everything was all right. “He’ll find out. You can tell him, if you want.”

“And the explosion?”

“It’s not an explosion. The baby is miles from there, anyhow, on the other side of town. No one’s in that kind of danger.”

And this meant that Celie could sleep, so she did. This was very easy, because of course she’d been asleep all along. None of this was real.

In the morning, it felt great to be back at work, and even better to be busy—back the way life used to be, in this job, very safe and structured and efficient, with no time to think of Nick Delaney as anything except Celie’s driven, demanding employer. She wore her severest navy pinstripe suit and rocketed through the tasks Nick had given her with barely a pause to sip her coffee.

He had scheduled a long day. Meetings and conference calls ran until five, ahead of tomorrow’s demonstration of proposed new menu items by the resident team of Delaney’s food scientists and chefs. Delaney’s rotated its menu seasonally, four times a year, and although Ohio was currently clothed in spring colors, the new offerings for the coming fall were already in planning.

Celie wasn’t surprised, midafternoon, when Nick announced, “I’m going to go visit a couple of the restaurants tonight, check out the atmosphere.”

Nine years ago, there had only been one Delaney’s, and Nick and Sam had been able to check out the atmosphere in that establishment for sixteen hours of every day. Now, with ninety-eight existing locations and twelve more planned to open this year, the chain was so large and so successful that they risked losing touch with the ambiance they’d worked so hard to build. It must be more than seven years, Celie guessed, since Nick had personally thrown a steak on a Delaney’s grill, or poured a Delaney’s beer.

“You want to take notes?” she asked him. “You want me to come along?”

“I’d like you to come along. I don’t know if we’ll need to take notes. I just want to get the feel. Sam’s doing the same with Kyla, over near his place, at Delaney’s Franklin Street.”

Nick didn’t mention Sam’s gorgeous red-haired wife, Marisa. He rarely did, these days, and Celie had always gotten the impression that he didn’t like her. Celie had trouble with the woman’s snobbish attitude and social climbing instincts, herself.

They left Delaney’s company headquarters at just after five, and drove to Delaney’s Mill Run in Nick’s very average-looking American car instead of the chauffeur-driven limo, with Nick himself at the wheel. Celie suspected that he kept the car especially for times like this. He hated to be recognized as co-owner of the corporation when he dropped in at one of the restaurants. Getting any kind of special treatment would defeat the whole point of the exercise.

A perky college student showed them to a booth in the bar section, and as Nick had hoped, she had no idea who he was.

Although it was only midweek, the place already had a Friday-night mood, with groups and couples laughing and talking over appetizers, cocktails and beer. The decor was fresh and clean, and diners could choose booths or tables, lounge chairs or bar stools. In towns and cities all across America, Delaney’s was the kind of place where a man could bring a woman, confident that she would like the atmosphere and he would like the beer.

Up in a high corner across from their booth, a big television showed news and sports, but it didn’t dominate. Nick took a seat with his back to it, and didn’t even spare it a glance. Celie knew what he must be thinking. How many people in here? What was the gender balance? The age mix? The ethnicity? How many people ate in the bar section, and how many had one drink here, first, before moving to their table in the restaurant itself?

The Delaney’s marketing division had facts like these at their fingertips, but Nick liked to sample the data in a more personal way. He and Sam both believed that this was the way to pick up on trends and apply them successfully.

“Who’s watching the TV?” he asked Celie, when her club soda and his light beer had arrived. “I don’t want to turn ’round and stare.”

“Three guys. No, four. There’s news coming on, now.”

“TV in a bar is a real guy thing, isn’t it? Figures show a significant difference in the demographics we get when the layout of the restaurant is—”

He stopped. Celie tried to smile, to encourage him to go on by showing him that she was listening, but she couldn’t. All at once, the image on the television screen had her vision and her concentration in a tight lock.

Reporters were jostling to get close to a politician so they could ask questions. Cameras flashed, lighting up the screen like explosions.

Camera flashes.

She’d seen camera flashes in her dream about Nick’s baby in Cleveland last night. She’d interpreted them wrongly until this moment, but she knew they were significant all the same.

“Cleveland,” she said aloud. The baby was in Cleveland.

She stood up automatically, as if the cameras were flashing in her own face and the reporters wanted to interview her, wanted to put her picture in the newspaper. Then she sat again, just as abruptly, as the strength drained from her legs. That message about Cleveland and Nick’s baby was suddenly so clear—far more clear than she liked. She didn’t want this to be happening to her. She wanted her life, and her subconscious, to stay just the way they were.

“Cleveland?” Nick asked. His voice came from far away, and he shot a quick look behind him, toward the television screen, following the direction of Celie’s gaze. “No, that’s Washington, D.C. Some political scandal. What’s the matter, Celie?”

“I—had a dream last night, with cameras flashing in it,” she answered, her gesture at the television as limp as a wet rag. “I didn’t realize until now that that’s what they were. I thought they were explosions. They mean something. They’re important, somehow. And the dream has something to do with Cleveland.”

Your baby is in Cleveland, Nick.

Should she tell him this?

Or would he think she was as crazy as she feared she might be?

“Well, we’re going there next week.” He frowned. “We have the art museum opening.”

“That’s right. I’d forgotten.”

As part of its corporate philanthropy, Delaney’s was sponsoring a major sculpture exhibition, which would be seen in only four U.S. cities during its world tour. Cleveland was one of them. Celie had been extensively involved in liaising with the Great Lakes Museum of Art during the planning stages of the tour, but most of the details had been finalized months ago.

With her mother’s accident, she’d forgotten the opening was so close. Nick had meetings in Cleveland that day, and she’d already booked hotel rooms for an overnight stay after the event. She’d been looking forward to the glamorous occasion, and had bought a new dress—simple, black, appropriate but glamorous all the same. Now she wondered, with a sick, sinking feeling, if she ought to be dreading the evening instead.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Nick said. “Here take a sip of your drink. No, hang on…”

He slid out from his side of the booth and came to hers. Resting his upturned hand on the table, he coaxed her head forward and down so that his palm cradled her forehead. His other hand stroked the nape of her neck for a moment, then slid lower, to rest on her back.

“Take some deep breaths,” he said. “Are you going to get sick?”

“No.”

“When you can sit up, take a drink and then tell me what’s wrong. This is the second time I’ve seen you like this in a week.”

He stroked her back. His touch was firm enough that she could feel the weight and warmth of his hand, but light enough that it caressed her skin through the thin knit fabric of her top like running water. It wove a net of sensation all around her—a net that she could have cocooned herself in for the rest of her life.

When she sat up, a little too soon, his face blurred in her vision but she could still perceive the depth of his concern, and it disturbed her.

She’d never needed him in this way before, and now, as he’d said, it had happened twice in a week. She didn’t want to need him, didn’t want to have a reason to need him. She wanted her life fully under control, and she was sure he’d feel the same. They both took pride in their professional boundaries, and in how much they could handle on their own.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, right,” he drawled. “Sure you’re fine.” He brushed her hair behind her ear, touched her shoulder lightly, frowned at her. He narrowed his eyes, and his lips parted. Celie stared down, and heard the hiss of his breath, very close. “Are you still worried about your mother, Celie? Did you come back to work too soon? You look like you’re falling apart.”

“I keep having dreams with messages in them,” she told him, pressing her hands together in her lap. “Last week, I dreamed about my mom breaking her leg. I have cameras flashing in my face as if they’re telling me something. I hear your—I hear a baby crying, and the crying is a message.”

“I’m not sure that I believe in dreams like that,” Nick answered slowly. “In fact, I know I don’t.”

“I never used to, either.” She looked up at him again and tried to smile. “Until I started having them. I don’t want to believe in them. But how can I help it, when they come true? If you could talk me out of believing them, Nick, trust me, I’d be grateful.”

She reached to pick up her glass, and gulped a mouthful of her drink. The dry fizz stung in her mouth. A loud burst of laughter came from a nearby booth, and a party of new arrivals trooped past to the group of low chairs in the far corner. Delaney’s was filling up, and getting noisier.

“Let’s get out of here,” Nick said. “I want to put a good meal into you, and I want to talk about this. But not here, where I’m thinking about Delaney’s and trends and the next advertising campaign. Let’s go somewhere quiet, where nothing else is going to impinge.”

Celie didn’t argue.

Nick flung some cash on the table and they left immediately. Celie paid no attention to where they were going until he parked in front of one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants. Salt was the kind of place where most people needed a reservation, even on a weeknight. Nick Delaney didn’t, because unlike the college-student waitress at his own restaurant, the deferential maitre d’ at this establishment knew at once exactly who he was.

“Better?” Nick said, as soon as they were seated.

Only a few tables were filled as yet, and the clientele was well-dressed and very well-behaved. So were the staff. The waiters skimmed back and forth on silent feet, and even the sounds that came occasionally from the kitchen were muted against a background of soft, smoky music.

With effort, Celie created a smile. “Are you saying you don’t like your own restaurants?”

“I love our restaurants. Tonight, this place seemed like a better idea. Somewhere more discreet, where we can relax. With staff who’ll protect our privacy. I want to hear about the dreams, Celie.”

She told him about the image of her mother lying on the kitchen floor, and the image of cameras flashing, somehow telling her Cleveland. She didn’t tell him what she knew about the crying baby yet, but she did tell him about the hat pin, the woman in front of the mirror and the scrap of torn broderie anglaise.

Since she still had the hat pin in her purse, she took it out and showed it to him.

“You’re right. It has to be the renovations upstairs,” Nick said. He ran a fingertip along the gray metal toward the point, and for half a second Celie could almost feel the touch of his finger on her own skin.

His confident tone reassured her, but she pushed at the issue, all the same. “Renovations give people dreams that come true?”

“Renovations could give someone a hat pin on their windowsill.” He looked up. “Isn’t that what you thought, yourself?”

“I’m not so sure, anymore.”

“And, yes, renovations are stressful and unsettling. People dream more when they’re unsettled. The dreams themselves can be explained.”

“Then do it, Nick, please. I want explanations for this.”

“You were already concerned about your mother, right?”

“She’s elderly. Her bones aren’t strong, and she takes risks without thinking about them. I’ve been responsible for her since my father died, eleven years ago, and she’s never regained the ground she lost when she lost him. Part of her just…left…and I’ve had to pick up the slack.”

“You don’t talk much about all that.”

“There’s no need. It’s under control and it’s not your concern. I love Mom, and I’m happy to help her. But, yes, I do worry.”

“So there you go. Both your conscious and your subconscious mind feared an accident, and it happened.”

“And the flashing cameras? What do they mean? Why are they saying Cleveland to me?”

“The exhibition opening next Tuesday night is a big deal. You know that. The press will be there. No surprise if we get cameras flashing in our faces. Subconsciously, you must be a little nervous about it.”

Celie pretended that he’d convinced her. She wanted him to have convinced her, but he hadn’t. Not really. The dreams remained too vivid in her mind for that. They threatened her own sense of who she was.

As she’d just told Nick she’d run her mother’s life, and her own, from the age of seventeen. She didn’t have a mystic, intuitive streak. She had responsibilities. She couldn’t afford to have dreams that competed with reality in her mind.

Their waiter brought menus and they both ordered. Celie chose a fennel bisque soup and grilled chicken, while Nick decided on shrimp and beef. “Would you like some wine?” he asked.

“Just a glass.”

Even one glass turned out to be a mistake. It loosened her tongue just that little bit more, and as they ate she found herself telling him, “There’s another dream I’ve been having, too, Nick, repeated night after night. It makes even less sense than the others.”

“More predictions? Do I want to hear this? I’m trying to help you get your feet back on the ground, Celie.”

“Are you?”

“For the best of reasons. You’re getting too stressed over this. It’s eating at you more than it should. Look at the way you’re frowning at me.”

“You’re right. I am.” She squeezed out a smile and touched her forehead with her fingers, trying to smooth the frown away. “I—I don’t know if the dream is a prediction. But it gets a little clearer, each time. Maybe you can tell me, because I do think that there’s a message in it, and the message is for you.”

She took a breath, and twirled the hat pin between her finger and thumb. Its rounded, pearly end gleamed in the leaping golden light from the candle in the center of their table. Nick’s china-blue gaze was fixed on her face, and she felt as if she was swimming in the deep pools of his eyes.

“Tell me, Celie,” he said. “Don’t hedge it, or qualify it, just tell me.”

“Okay, then, here it is. Is there any chance, Nick, that somewhere in this world—” Cleveland, let’s say “—you have a baby you don’t know about?”

“A what?” Nick almost yelled the words.

“A baby,” Celie repeated.

She leaned forward and captured Nick’s big, firm hand in hers without even realizing she’d done it. It felt warm and dry and strong—even stronger when he twisted it out of her grasp and closed his fingers over her knuckles. He squeezed them and looked down, drawing her attention to the body contact. “Pick up your spoon, Celie,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” She slid her hand away at once, and continued, “It’s a little boy. I hear him crying, and I get up to go to him, and then there’s a woman who tells me it’s all right, I don’t have to, because you’ll go. And the crying stops, and I feel a sense of peace because I know you’re there, holding him, belonging with him. Only last night, you didn’t go.”

“I…didn’t…go.”

“To the baby. And I realized it was because you didn’t know that he exists. Believe me, as I’ve said, I’m not happy about these dreams, and I know this one sounds—”

“He doesn’t exist, Celie. The dream is nonsense.” He frowned. “Boy or girl, I’ve never fathered a child.”

“But I’m wondering if that’s true,” she persisted, still caught in the strong, sticky web of the dreams, forgetting her allotted place in Nick Delaney’s life, overlooking her own doubts. “You know, sometimes a woman gets pregnant and she has reasons for not wanting to tell the father. It happens. I don’t want to trespass into your personal life, but if you think back, look through your diary, isn’t there someone who could have gotten careless with—?”

“No.” The flat of his hand came down hard on the table. “I’m telling you, it’s not possible, Celie, and you need to believe me on this. I really hope you’re not suggesting that I give you a list of the women I’ve slept with.”

“No, of course not.”

“And that I should call them up and ask?”

He looked angry now.

Of course he did! This whole conversation was an affront to his privacy, to the boundaries they both believed in and to their whole working relationship. Celie should have seen it, but even if she had, would the dreams have prompted too strongly for her to resist? She needed to understand what was going on.

Her fingers slipped, and the hat pin pricked the ball of her thumb, as if to taunt her, “Gee, didn’t you handle this well?”

She dropped the hat pin on the table, beside the remains of her meal. She had no appetite left for it, now. The restaurant had filled, and the few couples who’d been here when she and Nick first arrived had reached coffee and dessert. If Nick didn’t want to listen to this, then it was time to go.

“Just how long do you think such a list would be, if you don’t mind my asking?” Nick said, his voice deceptively quiet and controlled, this time. His blue eyes sparked.

“I’m sorry,” she answered quickly. “I thought I should tell you about what the dream seemed to be saying. That’s all. Since it was so vivid. And so real. Of course I’m not suggesting you keep a—a list.”

“But you’re suggesting there’d be some names on it if I did? That there’s a woman out there from my past—and this is an infant we’re talking about, so you think it’s my recent past—who’s been pregnant with my child over this past year and I haven’t known? That I could have been that careless, that casual, and not even thought to follow up on it?”

She gaped at him, her cheeks on fire. “I’m sorry,” she said again. It sounded terrible when he said it like that. What was happening to her? How could a few dreams have taken such a strong hold on her imagination?