Читать книгу A Billionaire and a Baby - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 9

For one heartbeat, there was nothing but silence within the elevator. Sin-Jin stared at the only other occupant in the car as if she had lost her mind. He wondered if she was dangerous in any sense of the word.

“Who are you?”

Sherry was ready for him. Opening her purse, she took out the press card that she’d carefully laid on top just before entering the multiwinged building that bore Adair’s name. This was not the time to fumble through the various paraphernalia that she deemed indispensable and always dragged along with her.

She held her identification card aloft for Adair’s perusal. And watched a transformation.

The unfriendly look on his face turned to something that, in a different era and country, would have reduced pagan worshipers to quivering masses of fear had Adair been their emperor, or, more probably regarded as their god. She felt a little unnerved herself.

Sherry shook herself loose from the hypnotic effect and squared her shoulders. Fierce expression or not, he wasn’t about to make her back down.

Adair’s glare was hot enough to melt the plastic on her ID. “You’re a reporter?” It sounded like an offense second only to being a serial killer.

Damn, but she could see how he could strike fear into the hearts of those around him. She reminded herself that she wasn’t afraid of anything except a magnitude-seven earthquake.

“Investigative,” she informed him crisply, as if that fact took her out of the general pool that merited his disdain and elevated her to a higher plateau.

It didn’t. Electric-blue eyes nearly disappeared into small, darkly lashed slits. “All right, then go investigate something.”

The growled order only had her stiffening her backbone. She met him on his own battlefield, smiling sweetly. “I am. You.”

“The hell you are.” He reached past her to press the elevator release button only to have her hit the red stop button again. Stunned, he glared at her. “You will stop doing that.” It was a command, brooking no disobedience, no dissent.

Her smile never faltered as she met his words with a condition. “I will if you promise to answer a few questions for me.”

Mrs. Farley had pleaded with him to take on a bodyguard. Had even gone so far as to line up several for him to interview, but he’d then refused flatly, thinking it a waste. Now he wasn’t all that sure. At least bodyguards would keep annoying reporters where they belonged. Away.

“I never make promises I have no intention of keeping.” Again he pushed the button to restart the elevator and again she stopped it. “Look, lady—Mrs. Campbell—” he amended, exasperation evaporating the very air in his lungs.

“Right in the first place, wrong in the second,” she informed him cheerfully, then suggested, “Why not just Sherry?”

She didn’t think it possible, but his dark expression darkened even more.

“Because, ‘just Sherry,’ I don’t intend to get that friendly with you.” He hit the release button and the elevator made it to another floor before she abruptly halted it with a counterpunch. “You keep this up and the cable’s liable to break. We’ll wind up free-falling the rest of the way. That might be on your agenda, ‘just Sherry,’ but it’s not on mine.”

The glare he shot her bordered on filleting her nerves. She could see his underlings scattering and running for cover like so many Disney mice before the villainous cat in Cinderella. The thought did a lot to calm her nerves and made it difficult for her not to grin.

Sin-Jin’s eyes slid to her belly. “Are you even pregnant?” It could have been a ruse used to allow her to gain access to his floor. In his experience, reporters were capable of all sorts of devious deceptions.

She surprised him by taking his hand and placing it on her distended abdomen. “Most definitely.”

As if burned, Sin-Jin pulled his hand back. Although not soon enough. He’d felt the stirrings of new life beneath his palm. The child she was carrying had moved—probably on cue, he thought cynically.

What was a pregnant reporter doing here, lying in wait for him? He thought of the meeting he’d just left. “If this is about the Marconi merger—”

Sherry cut him short. “It’s not,” she told him. Raising her eyes to his face, she dug up all the charm she could muster. “It’s about you.”

Suspicion entered his eyes. He’d never had any use for reporters, feeding off the misery of others for their own ends. “What about me?”

“That’s exactly what I want to find out. What about you? Nobody knows anything about Darth Vader, the Corporate Raider.”

He winced inwardly at the label. If it was meant to flatter him, it missed its mark by a country mile. The limelight had never meant anything to him. Sin-Jin didn’t do what he did for any sort of recognition. He did it because he was good at it, good at trimming fat off selected businesses and getting them to run more efficiently. Once he accomplished what he set out to do and the businesses were running at their maximum peak, he grew bored with them, selling them off to other corporations while he turned his attention to something else.

That this sort of thing attracted a great deal of attention and generated an almost obscene amount of money was without question. But it was never about the money. It never had been, perhaps because there’d always been so much of it when he was growing up. Every movement he’d ever made had been cushioned in it, as if somehow money could take the place of everything else that was deemed important in life. Like parental love and warm memories to draw on when things became difficult.

He’d had the best upbringing that money could buy. All needs taken care of, everything done in a utilitarian fashion. It was the kind of upbringing that could have produced an emotional robot, which was what his enemies had accused him of being.

If no one knew anything about him, it was for a reason. Because he wanted it like that. “And it’s going to remain that way,” he informed her.

As he reached to bring the elevator back to life, she moved to block his access. “Why?”

For just the smallest second, he almost forgot that they were stuck, suspended between the eighth and ninth floor like a yo-yo that had gotten tangled in its own string. The annoying woman who kept insisting on getting into his face had eyes that were probably the deepest shade of blue he’d ever seen. Undoubtedly, she used that to her advantage, just as she used her present condition.

“Does the word privacy mean anything to you?” he demanded. “Or is that particular term missing from the lexicon distributed to the ignoble fourth estate?”

“Ouch, they weren’t kidding when they said you could fillet a person at ten paces with just your tongue.”

“No,” he informed her tersely, “they weren’t.”

But rather than take offense at his words, she smiled, her face lighting up as if he’d just given her a ten-carat diamond instead of an insult.

She probably saw it as a challenge. He supposed he could relate to that. Challenges were what he responded to himself. The harder something was to obtain, the more he wanted to secure possession.

Somewhere in the back of his mind a question crept forward. How difficult would it be to possess the woman crowding him in the elevator?

The next instant Sin-Jin blanketed the thought, smothering it. She was someone else’s wife or at the very least, someone’s significant other. And unlike his father who reveled in it, he didn’t poach on another man’s land or try to win another man’s woman if she captured his attention.

Satisfied that the verbal duel was over, Sin-Jin pressed the release button on the keypad only to have her reach for it again. The high school physics assurance that for every action there was a reaction teased his brain. Mr. Harris would have been happy that he’d come away with something from his class, he thought.

Rather than allow the annoying woman to bring the elevator to yet another teeth-jarring stop, Sin-Jin caught her by the wrist and held on tightly.

“The game is over.”

Sherry raised her chin. The look in her eyes told him that she wasn’t intimidated. He realized with a jolt that he found it arousing.

Man does not live by bread alone. Or, in his case, by corporate takeovers, he thought. Maybe it was time he got out a little instead of burning the midnight oil.

“What are you hiding, Mr. Adair?” Sherry wanted to know. Anyone so secretive had to have something he didn’t want revealed. She felt her curiosity climbing. “What are you afraid of?”

Sin-Jin realized that he was still holding her wrist. Tentatively he released it, ready to grab it again if she tried to stop the elevator’s descent. “Being on trial for justifiable homicide.”

Humor, she liked that. Even if it was a little dark. Sherry smiled in response, aware that it threw him off. She liked that, too.

“Then I’ll just have to make sure you don’t do away with me, at least not until I get my story.”

He edged closer to the doors, blocking any access she might have to the keypad in case she decided to make a lunge for it. “Tempting as the trade might be, I’m not prepared to give you a story in exchange for your fading out of my life.”

The elevator came to a stop. “When will you be prepared?”

The doors opened. He saw the security guard sitting at the desk in the lobby. If this hounding reporter gave him any more trouble, he could turn her over to the man. “There’s an old song, ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ I suggest you take your cue from the title.”

With that, Sin-Jin got off.

Just as she began to follow Adair, the baby kicked. Hard. It momentarily took her breath away. Long enough for Adair to get far enough ahead of her.

“You can run, Adair, but you can’t hide,” she called after him.

Sin-Jin never broke stride and didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. But his words hung in the air as he made his exit through the revolving doors.

“Watch me.”

The glove had clearly been thrown down. Owen had been right. This was a definite challenge. Exhilaration filled her.

“I intend to do more than that, Adair,” she murmured with a grin.

Two hours later, drained, Sherry flirted with the thought of just going home and crawling into her queen-size bed. By her count, she was down some ten hours of sleep in the past five days because her baby insisted on kickboxing for hours on end.

But tonight was her weekly Lamaze class and she hated to miss that. If nothing else, she could definitely use the camaraderie. Not to mention the fact that Rusty, her former cameraman and present coach, would be there. She could pick his brain about Adair. The man had a way of ferreting things out. If Rusty Thomas didn’t know about something, it didn’t bear knowing.

The practical side of attending her class was that she was a little more than a month away from her due date. A minor sense of panic was beginning to set in at the peripheral level. She needed all the preparation for the big event she could get.

Stopping home for a small dinner and a large pillow, Sherry changed her clothes to something even looser and more comfortable. Fifteen minutes later she was on the road again, driving to Blair Memorial where the classes were being held in one of the hospital’s outlying facilities.

The cheerfully painted room was built to accommodate a hundred. Twenty couples had signed up. They were down to thirteen after the instructor, Lori O’Neill, had shown the birthing movie. Apparently there were miracles that were a little too graphic for some people to bear. Sherry liked the extra space. It made the gathering seem more like a club than a class.

Entering the class, her pillow tucked under her arm, Sherry looked around the area. Almost everyone was here. She nodded at couples she recognized by sight, if not by name. They were a cross section of life, she thought, being brought together by their mutual condition. In the group there was an independent film producer, a lawyer, three teachers, a doctor and an FBI agent, not to mention an assortment of other people.

She looked around for her group, two women she’d gotten close to in the last few weeks. Spotting Chris Jones and Joanna Prescott, Sherry made her way over to them. They had all been introduced to one another by Lori. The incredibly perky instructor had felt that the three women would form a strong bond, given that they were all single moms for one reason or another. Lori referred to them as The Mom Squad. Sherry rather liked that label.

“So, how was your week?” Joanna asked the moment Sherry came within earshot. Of the two of them, it was Joanna who could relate more closely to the woman she recognized as the former anchorwoman of the nightly news. Joanna, a high school English teacher, had lost her job for the same reason that had seen Sherry out the door of her studio. An unmarried pregnant woman was the elephant in the living room as far as the board of education was concerned. Rather than cause problems and be in the middle of an ugly trial that might affect her students, all of whom had rallied around her, Joanna had agreed to leave.

She knew the frustration that Sherry had dealt with.

“Don’t ask.” Sherry sighed the answer as she did her best to sink down gracefully. It wasn’t an easy accomplishment. Of the three, Sherry was the furthest along.

And the largest, she thought ruefully. These days Sherry felt as if she was all stomach and very little else.

“The Mom Squad’s all here, I see.” Walking up to them, Lori placed an affectionate hand on Sherry’s shoulder. She nodded at the two coaches who accompanied the other two women. “Hi, Sherry, where’s your coach?”

Sherry glanced toward the doorway. Two couples came in, but no Rusty.

“He’ll be along,” she assured Lori. “Punctuality was never Rusty’s strong suit.”

“Well then, for your sake, I hope this baby turns out to be late,” Lori teased.

Lori shifted, trying not to look too obvious. Her back was aching. And with good reason. She hadn’t told the others yet but she’d found herself in the same delicate condition that they were in. Five months along, she wasn’t showing too much yet. With any luck, she’d be one of those rare women who could hide inside of moderately loose clothing and never show.

The noise at the door had her turning to look. “Oh, more arrivals.” About to go off and greet the newcomers, she paused for a final word with the trio. “We still on for ice cream after class, ladies?”

Chris and Sherry nodded. “Try and stop me,” Joanna laughed. “I’ve been fantasizing about a mound of mint-chip ice cream all day.”

“See you later,” Lori promised before she hurried away.

Sherry glanced at her watch, wondering what was keeping Rusty. Class was almost starting. Thinking about what she wanted to ask her former cameraman, she leaned over toward Chris. Blond and vibrant, Chris Jones was not the kind of woman who came to mind when someone said FBI agent, but that was exactly what she was, having been part of the Bureau for over six years now.

“Chris, what do you know about St. John Adair?”

“If you’re asking if the man has an FBI dossier, I wouldn’t be able to answer that—” And then Chris smiled. “If he did.”

Sherry made the natural assumption. “Which means he doesn’t.”

“Ruthless takeovers aren’t a crime in themselves, except perhaps to the people who lose their jobs because of them.” Chris cocked her head as if curious. One by one they’d each spilled their stories over various mounds of ice cream at Josie’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor. “Why do you want to know?”

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Sherry pressed her hand to the small of her back, wondering if the perpetual ache she felt there was ever going to be a thing of the past. “My editor wants me to do an in-depth piece on him. I actually cornered the man in his elevator today.”

“And?” Joanna pressed.

Sherry frowned. “Mr. Adair wasn’t very cooperative. Didn’t even volunteer his name, rank and serial number. I think if he had his druthers, he would have had me up against and wall and shot.”

Joanna nodded at the information. “I’ve never seen anything written up about him. From what I’ve heard, he’s really closemouthed.” She glanced at Chris for confirmation. “Maybe he’s got some skeletons in his closet.”

Why else would someone be that secretive, Sherry wondered, nodding. She glanced again toward the doorway. No Rusty. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Well, if it makes a difference, none of them have gotten there by foul play. At least,” Chris qualified, “not to the Bureau’s knowledge.” She stopped and nodded toward the doorway. “Hey, there’s your coach.”

Without waiting for Sherry to turn around, Chris raised her hand and waved at the short, wiry man until he saw her. Raising a hand in response, he waved back and made his way over to the small, tight group.

Sherry sidled over to make room for him. Jerome Russell Thomas had been the first person to learn about her pregnancy, before her parents, even before Drew. They’d been out on a rare field assignment together, trying to corral a statement from a high-seated judge who had been brought up on bribery charges when she’d had to excuse herself. She’d barely made it to the ladies’ room in time before her lunch, breakfast and whatever might have been left of her dinner the night before came up unceremoniously.

When she’d emerged from the ladies’ room ten minutes later, sweaty and slightly green, Rusty was waiting for her just outside the door. One look at her and he’d asked her how far along she was. Her heated denial was short-lived in the face of his gruff kindness.

“My kid sister was the same shade of green that you are with her first,” he’d told her matter-of-factly. “Couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. Only thing she lived on was mashed potatoes and beef Stroganoff. You might want to try some.”

Rusty had also stood by her when Drew had decided to pull his disappearing act on her and had been there for her when the studio had all but given her the bum’s rush.

Having shown his true colors through the hard times, Rusty had seemed like the logical choice to be her coach. When she’d asked him, Rusty had protested vehemently at first, telling her that she would be far more comfortable if she had a woman as her coach. That he would be far more comfortable if she had a woman as her coach.

But Sherry had remained adamant, insisting she wanted him, and finally, he’d given in and agreed, grumbling all the way. She’d expected nothing less of him.

“Sorry I’m late. Had to fight off a horde of women at my door to get here,” he cracked.

Given the truth of the matter, the only female in his life, other than the ones he worked with, was his dog, Blanca. Sherry didn’t waste any time commenting on his fanciful excuse. Instead, the moment he dropped down beside her, she hit him with her question.

“What do you know about St. John Adair?”

Accustomed to her abrupt, greetingless greetings, Rusty paused to think.

“What everyone else knows. That he’s one of the richest son-of-a-bitches around. I don’t trust a man who looks that comfortable in a suit in ninety degree weather.” Rusty never cracked a smile. “There’s talk he’s the devil. Why?”

She watched Lori work her way to the front of the room. They were getting ready to start. “Owen’s giving me a crack at an investigative story.”

Rusty filled in the blanks. It wasn’t hard. He looked at her stomach, his meaning clear. “Couldn’t he have started you out on something easier? Like finding out where Jimmy Hoffa’s buried?”

Sherry shifted slightly. As if that could hide something. “Easy doesn’t put you on the map.”

He shrugged carelessly. “Neither does coming up to a dead end.”

She didn’t buy that. Although Lori was saying something to the gathering, Sherry lowered her voice, doing her best to appeal to Rusty. “You know everything there is to know about everything, including where all the bodies are buried. Tell me how I can get to him for a few minutes where he can’t get away. Other than an elevator,” she added.

“You always did know how to flatter a guy.” It was a tall order, but not anything he wasn’t up to. There was very little he wouldn’t do for Sherry. In the vernacular of the old-timers who had taught him his trade, he considered Sherry Campbell one hell of a broad. “Okay, I’ll see what I can dig up for you, although it probably won’t be very much.”

Sherry got herself into position, ready to begin. “At this point, I’ll settle for anything. I tried to corner him in the elevator but I couldn’t get anything out of him.”

“Any man who can say no to you just isn’t human.”

Touched, Sherry leaned over and kissed Rusty’s leathery cheek. “Thanks, Rusty. I needed that.”

Rusty tried not to blush. “Shhh.” He pointed to Lori. “Teacher’s talking. You’ll miss something.”

She was still smiling at him. “I’ll always have you to fill me in.”

Rusty’s blush deepened beneath the bronzed, craggy suntan.