Читать книгу Colton Baby Conspiracy - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 16

“All right, let’s get down to business,” Marlowe said, sitting down on her sofa and approaching this new problem logically. “Who would want you dead?”

Her blunt question threw Bowie. He’d thought that she had asked him here to talk about what they were going to do about the condition she suddenly found herself in. That and perhaps even touch on the night they had spent together, when he had gotten to see a completely different Marlowe Colton than the one the rest of the world—including him, up until then—was acquainted with.

But since she was asking about the attempts on his life, he was willing to address that first. Bowie sat down on the other end of the sofa. He had been giving his own dilemma a great deal of thought since he had confronted Marlowe in her office earlier. As a result, he had come to a new conclusion about it, a totally different one from the one that Marlowe was suggesting.

He started out treading lightly. “While it’s true that I have made some enemies in my energy dealings, so have you,” he pointed out.

“No argument there,” Marlowe acknowledged.

But before she could continue, Bowie advanced his theory a little further, getting to the heart of what he believed.

“I think that this would-be killer is somehow connected to you or maybe to Colton Oil.”

Marlowe’s face clouded up. “So we’re back to you thinking I hired someone to kill you? Is that what you’re saying?” she asked incredulously.

“No,” he corrected her, “what I’m saying is that these attempts on my life somehow have something to do with you, because someone started targeting me only after I spent the night with you.”

“You mean you think that someone’s watching me?” Marlowe demanded, clearly doing her best not to show Bowie how much the very idea of what he was suggesting unnerved her.

Bowie shrugged. “I honestly don’t know,” he admitted. “But it does make sense in a way. All I do know is that no one took a shot at me or tried to run me over before you and I spent the night together.”

Marlowe thought of the anonymous email that had been sent to all six members of the board. Was that somehow connected to these attempts that had been made on Bowie’s life?

Maybe Bowie was onto something, she thought, although she was not about to tell him about that. She had absolutely no intention of divulging anything about what was going on in the company unless it turned out to be absolutely necessary.

For now, she just shrugged, doing her best to seem casual. “Maybe you were just lucky before.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he agreed, although it was obvious from his tone that he didn’t really subscribe to that theory. “All right, then why don’t we get down to it and talk about the elephant in the room?” he proposed.

Marlowe stiffened, instantly knowing what he was referring to. She felt heat rising up her neck to her face, inevitably turning it to a reddish hue. She was far more comfortable talking about gunmen, hired or crazed, than she was talking about something that was so utterly personal.

But she had been the one to initially blurt out the news to him, so she couldn’t very well just fluff Bowie off or shut him down now.

“What about it?” she asked stiffly, her voice devoid of all emotion.

“What do you want to do about...it?” he asked her point-blank.

“You mean you don’t have any suggestions?” Marlowe asked sarcastically. After all, she would have thought that an opinionated man, such as he was, would try to impose his will on her, especially since the child was half his. Or at least she assumed that was the way he would think of it.

“Oh, I have plenty of suggestions,” Bowie assured her.

Big surprise. “I thought so,” Marlowe retorted.

She’d pegged him right, she thought. But for some reason, she didn’t find that nearly as satisfying as she would have thought she would. As a matter of fact, as she examined her feeling, she was rather disappointed that he was like that.

“But,” Bowie went on to say, “it’s your body. So ultimately, the decision is yours.”

That he was capable of that sort of thinking caught Marlowe totally off guard. Was she actually wrong about him?

“Then you don’t care what I do about this baby?” Marlowe asked, trying to get a handle on how he really felt.

“I didn’t say that,” Bowie pointed out. The fact of the matter was that he clearly did care. Cared a great deal, Bowie thought. “But I’m not the one who has to go through this.”

Bowie meant the pregnancy and birthing part, but Marlowe immediately jumped on a different interpretation entirely.

“You’re damn right you don’t.” She couldn’t begin to think about everything that was involved, the huge changes that she was going to have to make in her life. Her head began to swirl. “I don’t know the first thing about being a mother—” she began in exasperation.