Loe raamatut: «Prince Charming's Child»

One

Since Nicole hadn’t been near a man’s bed in four years, she chuckled when she heard the results of the pregnancy test.

“I’m sure someone’ll be happy to hear that, but it can’t be me. Trust me—you’re either looking at another patient’s file or the test results are wrong.”

Conceivably the nurse practitioner had heard words of denial from her patients before, because her prompt answer sounded prepared. “There’s always a margin for error with the tests, but that’s why we back them up with a physical. You’re about two and a half months along, Ms. Stewart, and I can see that you obviously weren’t expecting this pregnancy. If you need to talk to someone about your options—”

Nicole’s smile disappeared faster than smoke when she realized the nurse was serious. “I’m thirty-two, not some irresponsible sixteen-year-old. I know what my options are—and my responsibilities. You don’t understand. This isn’t a matter of being surprised by an unexpected pregnancy. It’s that I can’t be pregnant at all. I haven’t been with anyone.”

“Well, miracles do happen, but I’ve never heard of one on this subject The last I knew, it always takes two to tango.”

Nicole understood the woman’s wry teasing was an effort to help her relax, but this was no humorous matter. Not to her. “I realize you think I’m joking, but I swear I’m not. I haven’t tangoed with anyone! The tests simply have to be wrong. I only came in because I thought I had the flu, for Pete’s sake.”

The nurse practitioner patiently spent another fifteen minutes with her. It didn’t help. Nicole left the women’s clinic feeling shell-shocked, carrying prescriptions for vitamins and morning sickness, her mind buzzing with information on the symptoms she could expect for the next six and a half months.

Pregnant. The word kept reeling through her mind as she pushed open the door. Outside, a blustery damp wind tore straight through her ivory silk blouse and clawed at her auburn hair. She should have known better than to leave her suit jacket at the office. Two hours before, the day had been balmy warm, but weather on the Oregon coast was typically capricious—if not downright mean—in early March.

Hurrying to her white Taurus, she climbed inside, but her fingers were so shaky she could hardly fit in the ignition key, much less punch the buttons for the heater. This was just so crazy! If she were almost three months pregnant right now, that meant the baby had to be conceived around the Christmas holidays.

And that was impossible. Not a little impossible. 100% impossible.

She swung onto the coastal highway and leveled her foot on the accelerator. Work By Design, her business, was only a ten-minute drive from the women’s clinic, ample time for the last few years to flash in front of her eyes.

Long ago she’d discovered a talent for design, but there was a crowded abundance of competition in the interior decorating field. The psychology of work environments was new then. Employers were just catching on that an ergonomic, efficient office space could provably increase worker productivity and job satisfaction. She’d seen the niche. More relevant for her personally, she’d needed to do something that made a positive difference in others’ lives. She did the artsy stuff from the start, but it took finding the right engineer and architect to really make Work By Design come together. After four years—and her specifically devoting sixteen-hour days—the business was not only cooking, but bubbling over with potential growth now.

Through these years, though, there had never been a spare second to think of babies or a private life. If the right man had popped into her life, who knew, maybe she’d have rethought having a baby. But that was precisely the point. There’d been no right men, no wrong men, no any men.

Nicole had never exactly planned to turn into a celibate saint, but there were darn good reasons why she’d chosen the life-style of a workaholic hermit.

Her stomach suddenly clenched with nerves. Old nerves. Old, scary, ghost-nerves that hadn’t peeked out of her emotional closet in years. She’d grown up taking every wrong road there was to take. She’d known trouble from the inside out. Cripes, she’d been trouble from the inside out. But a cop named Sam had helped her around seventeen years ago. She’d started a new life in a new place and done her best not to look back.

She was ashamed of where she’d been—but, finally, proud of the woman she was becoming. There’d been no irresponsible, impulsive mistakes. None. Not even little ones. She’d turned herself into a completely different kind of woman than the hellion teenager she’d been growing up as.

Or so she’d believed. Until the pregnancy test this afternoon had turned out positive.

Minutes later, she parked in front of the stone-and-glass office building and barreled inside, away from the devil wind, hiking past John. Mitch. Wilma. Rafe.

Her office was at the far end, a sanctuary with blue silk walls and thick, silencing carpet and windows that overlooked a cliff edge view of the Pacific. Waves thundered and pounded the rocks below, looking wild and lonely. Exactly how she felt. With her pulse racing faster than a frantic battery, she plunked down in the chair behind her gleaming pecan desk and squeezed her eyes closed.

The faces of her staff again chased through her mind. John, Mitch, Wilma, Rafe. And yes, of course she remembered holding an office party two days before Christmas last year. It was the only social event she’d been remotely part of in a blue moon.

And long before today, she’d realized that parts of that evening were hazy in her memory—but that never seemed remotely strange, simply because she’d been so dead tired that night. She’d hosted the party at her house for a number of reasons. She wanted the staff to indulge in all the champagne they wanted, and at home, she had spare rooms for anyone to sleep over so no one had to worry about drinking and driving. There’d been so much to organize and plan. She’d had lobsters brought in, oysters on the half shell, chocolate-covered strawberries—every luxury she could think of, because her team had an unbeatably successful year and deserved being spoiled.

Nicole suddenly rubbed two fingers on her temples. The staff had had a blast, which was exactly what she’d wanted to happen—she recalled moments from the party with crystal clarity. But until now, she’d forgotten how they’d teased her about not drinking. They were always ribbing her about being too formal, never letting down her hair and loosening up.

It was never a good idea to let down her hair. Ever. She had too much past history she wanted buried good and deep. The staff respected her, and she’d done her absolutely damnedest to earn that respect. Besides that, she couldn’t handle liquor—which heaven knew she’d learned the hard way years before.

But Nicole suddenly remembered a glass of champagne being thrust in her hands that night. At least one glass. Possibly two.

Holy cripes, could she have had three?

Because suddenly she realized that was precisely the part of the evening when her memory turned as murky as an ocean cave. That hadn’t mattered before. But unless she’d become pregnant via immaculate conception—which unfortunately was a stretch, even for a woman who made a living on her creative imagination—suddenly the part of the evening she didn’t remember mattered a whole bunch.

Restlessly she swung out of the desk and paced to the open door. Each employee had an individual office, but the central area was organized with tables and drafting boards and a video setup. Developing models and layups took space, and often the staff worked together on projects.

John was sprawled with his feet on a table, working with a sketch pad on his lap. From the doorway, she could see the smooth dome of his head, his Mickey Mouse tie, the concentration furrow in the middle of his brow. John handled the advertising and marketing. He was forty-two and growing a little couch-potato pooch and wonderful at his job. When his wife left him the year before, Nicole had been afraid he’d never climb back from a pit-awful depression. She thought the absolute world of John, and if he really needed something, she knew she’d go the long mile to come through for him—but John was like a brother, as comfortable to be with as an old shoe. Even if she’d guzzled an entire winery worth of champagne, she simply could not imagine getting naked with him.

Rafe ambled by, carrying a fresh mug of coffee, and plunked down in front of a drafting board. Rafe was thirty-four, single like John, and originally Nicole almost hadn’t hired him. He had the exact engineering background she was looking for, but between the dark hair, dark eyes, and husky muscular build, he was a cut-and-dried hunk. She’d worried those good looks could be asking for trouble—but she’d been wrong. Rafe could get impatient and tempermental with the rest of the staff, but he was smart and ambitious and unbeatably capable at his job.

Nicole’s gaze lasered on his back for a second longer. Yeah, he was an eyeful. And anyone’s deprived hormones could be stirred up with alcohol. But unlike the rest of the team, Rafe never talked about his private life—he’d openly admitted losing a job before because of mixing business and pleasure, and he felt adamant about never making that mistake again. He’d never told her an off-color joke, never looked at her sideways. Even if he were attracted, she couldn’t imagine him initiating a pass. It was just impossible. It could never have happened.

Wilma streaked past, shuffling a sheath of papers, pausing only long enough to bounce a kiss on John’s balding crown. Wilma was twenty-eight, a brown-eyed brunette with a centerfold figure and the nature of an incurable flirt. She was openly affectionate with all the guys. Discussing the antics of her exuberant love life was a ritual over morning coffee. The boys inhaled every wild detail. Nicole had never tried to rein her in. Wilma managed the office and bookkeeping side of things and kept the whole place pumping.

And that left Mitch...the only staff member who Nicole couldn’t see from the doorway, but she could hear him yell something to Rate with that distinctly whiskey baritone. Mitch was thirty-two, her own age. The guys called him “Stretch” because he was a lanky six feet three inches, with hair the color of sun-bleached sand and eyes bluer than sky. Sexy enough, if a woman’s taste ran to overtall bean-poles—which Nicole’s never personally had.

Mitch was the newest team member, she’d only hired him six months ago. Originally Janice had been the group’s architect, and she’d done so well that her leaving for a job in New York had left a precarious hole. Nicole expected the employee search to be worrisome, and instead had a plum drop in her lap. Mitch’s background surpassed even what Janice had offered them.

Ironically, he’d rubbed Nicole personally wrong from the beginning, and she admitted it. Heck, so did he—they even joked about it together sometimes. The dam man had a gift for getting along with everyone. He was in his element with the men’s men contractor types, yet he never lost patience with the creative design types on the team. From the start, he’d leaped into touchy situations that had everyone else running for cover. The whole team loved him. Objectively, so did she—there was simply no explaining why they scraped against each other’s nerves. Nicole had quit fretting the why of it. She just gave Mitch an extra wide berth and let him do his job. Everyone was critical in a small business this size, but Mitch was damn near irreplaceable.

Even if he weren’t irreplaceable—even if there wasn’t that strange prickly edginess between them—there was another reason why Nicole would never touch a hair on his head. More than once, he’d mentioned a woman friend. A solid woman friend. Nicole had forgotten her name—Susan, maybe? Regardless, he was already involved. Nicole couldn’t imagine any circumstance in the universe where she’d poach on another woman’s territory—which meant there was zero possibility of her sleeping with Mitch.

Abruptly she pressed a protective hand on her abdomen. Her stomach was increasingly queasy, her heart starting to gallop with anxiety. She simply had to try and calm down. It’s not like all this thinking was getting her anywhere.

Every mental road led her to the same place. The only men in her life were the guys in the office. There was no occasion anything could have happened except the night of that Christmas party. But party or no party, champagne or no champagne, she simply would never have let anything happen with any of her guys. It went against her whole moral and character grain. And a woman didn’t forget making love with a man, for heaven’s sake. And surely the man would have said something if anything like that had occurred. And she’d wakened the morning after the party in her own bed, alone.

Nicole kept trying to add two and two, but the sum just refused to be four.

She couldn’t be pregnant.

Yet she was.

“Nicole? You have a free minute?”

Mitch Landers had been waiting all afternoon for a chance to catch the boss in and alone. The envelope in his hand contained a letter of resignation. He had no illusions this was going to be an easy conversation, but he’d postponed it for days. He needed a moment when the rest of the team were solidly occupied and the phone wasn’t ringing and there was a chance of him catching some uninterrupted time with her. A quarter to five seemed his best shot. And Mitch had quit kidding himself that this didn’t have to be done.

That was the plan. But she was standing at the window when he knocked, and the instant she heard his voice, she promptly spun around. And he saw her face. “Sure, come on in. What’s the problem? The Llewellyn account?”

“No, nothing like that. I just need to talk to you about something, but...look, are you feeling okay?”

She produced an instant smile, but it was as fake as a politican’s promises. “To tell you the truth, I’ve had better afternoons, but I’m fine, really, just a little distracted. Sit down, tell me what the problem is.”

One look at her face, and Mitch knew his plan was going to hell in a handbasket. But he sat in one of her prissy blue office chairs and stretched out his long, lanky legs. Everything about her office always made him feel like an ox in a boudoir. Restlessly he batted the envelope on his knee, then just as restlessly pocketed it out of sight.

He couldn’t tell whether his boss was sick, scared or somebody just killed her dog. But something was wrong. And for Nicole Stewart to look fragile as a cotton puff was so out of character that something had to be “bad” wrong.

It only took a second to catalog her features head to toe—but at least this once, he had a judiciously altruistic motive. His pulse could rev from zero to sixty with a single glance at her, and had from the day they met. On the surface, nothing looked particularly different. Her silky cream blouse and mannish green suit were pretty typical office attire. Not much figure. On a scale of one to ten, the legs got a ten-plus, but the rest of the package maxed out at three. No boobs. No hips. She was built long on angles and short on curves...but the way she moved those angles had inspired his hormones to great feats of imagination from the beginning—and would now, if the look on her face wasn’t worrying him.

Her face had always been the killer. It started with a frame of vibrant auburn hair, chopped off at chin length with spiky bangs. He’d never seen it longer. About every four weeks, she zealously hit a stylist to ruthlessly tame the mop into a nice, sedate, businesswoman’s haircut. Waste of money, Mitch thought personally. Maybe you could beat the wicked out of a sinner, but nobody was gonna tame that thick, curly hair. It bounced around an oval face with all kinds of interesting lines. Sharp little nose. Chin with character. A slash of delicate cheekbones. A too-wide mouth that showed off gorgeous white teeth when she laughed, and could prim up into a straight line when she was serious—which was way too much of the time, as far as Mitch was concerned. But either way, the shape of those soft lips was always going to make a man wonder how she kissed.

Normally when he looked at her face, the way she moved, he saw sass. Spirit. Don’t-mess-with-me-buster character. Maybe she was a five-foot-five-inch welterweight, but he’d bet on her over a bruiser in a dark alley any day. She was a dirty infighter, something he’d always admired in a woman. Her loyalty to the staff was legend. She always stepped in front of staff if there was an aggravating client or a touchy problem, always taking the heat, charging in whenever she smelled trouble. Sometimes too much so. When Nik was on a full-speed charge, she had a tough time backing down. She’d probably take on Goliath—and God knew, lose—but Mitch didn’t doubt Goliath would suffer mightily first. Not from a punch. The blue silk walls in her office were a measure of her pure-female methods. She fought strictly girl fashion, almost never swore, rarely raised her voice—but if a guy crossed her, she went straight for the balls.

As far as Mitch had ever seen, she feared nothing. Which had always concerned and fascinated him both—he didn’t know her background, because she didn’t talk. Not to staff. Not about personal things. But she had to learn to fight that way somewhere. She had guts, will, strength.

But dammit, not today. She was shook up about something. The only real splash of color in that face were her eyes. They were blue-gray, almond shape, too big for that small face. Normal women tattletaled every emotion they were feeling in their eyes. Not her. Her expression just went flat when she was blocking something, and she was good at blocking any damn thing she wanted to. That those eyes revealed panic and vulnerability at the moment made Mitch inclined to call 911 and not waste time hearing the explanation.

“You said you wanted to talk about something,” she prompted him again.

“Yeah, but it’ll wait. Look, you’re real pale. You sure you’re okay? Did something happen this afternoon?”

“Yes. No. I...oh, God.” She sank in the office chair behind her desk, and produced another light smile as if to reassure him—but that smile was as weak as watered-down scotch. “I’m fine. It’s not your problem, Mitch. This just probably isn’t a real good time to talk business, if it’s something that’ll wait until morning.”

He heard voices chattering from the outer office, drawers slamming, Wilma’s throaty laughter. The staff was leaving for the day. So could he. She was obviously asking to be left alone. Only she really looked like a puff of wind could keel her over—and if he left, there’d be nobody in the office to even know she was in trouble.

“I take it whatever happened was personal, not business.”

“Yes. Which is exactly what I meant—it’s not your worry.”

“And you were gone for a couple hours this afternoon.” Wheels start clicking in his head. “You had a doc or dentist appointment? Heard some upsetting health news? Or something in a different direction, like your place was vandalized, or something happened to someone in your family—?”

“Good grief. I didn’t meant to give you the impression there was anything so dire. I was gone for a doctor’s appointment, that’s all. I’m fine, I’m telling you—or will be by tomorrow. It’s just right at this minute, I admit I’m not at my best—”

He received the m.y.o.b. message loud and clear. But her hands were shaky, her voice warbly and that priceless skin was too damn ghostly white. His boss wasn’t always cool in a crisis, but he’d never seen her near shambles. “So what’d the doc say to upset you?”

“Mitch. This just isn’t an appropriate conversation. There is absolutely nothing that should worry you or any of the team. Or the business.”

“Screw the business. We talking tumor, heart, cancer—?”

“Holy spit. Nothing like that.” As if his rapid-fire questions had finally nagged her over the edge, she blurted out, “I’m pregnant.”

Pregnant.

He couldn’t be the first man who’d been stunned silent by that particular word, but these circumstances were a tad unusual. His heart quit beating altogether, then seemed to change its mind and start slamming nonstop at a racehorse pace. He wasn’t positive he could budge from that blue silk chair if there’d been a fire.

“Damnation, Landers. I never meant to tell you that.” Nicole never used his last name unless she was ticked off with him—which, come to think of it, happened a couple times a week. But not for something like this. She pushed a hand through her hair in a gesture of impatience. “Since I opened my big mouth, I’m afraid I’m stuck saying a little more. First, I’d appreciate your not saying anything to the rest of the staff. It isn’t a matter of keeping a secret. The pregnancy will be obvious before long. But I just found this out, and I’d like some time to think about what I’m going to do and how I’m going to tell other people before being put on the spot.”

“Don’t be silly. You tell me a confidence, I’d take it to the grave.” He wanted to say something more, but there seemed to be a lump in his throat about the size of Alaska. Not to mention that his heart was pounding so loud in his ears that he could barely think.

She pushed out of her chair again. Up down, up down, like a yo-yo. But he understood. When anxiety was chasing your tail, the inclination was to try and outrun it by staying in motion. She paced over to the window and stared down at the pounding surf below, then yanked the shades to block the view. “I’m afraid there’s a little more to this. In this day and age, there’s nothing that odd about a thirty-two-year-old woman choosing to have a baby without a husband in sight. I mean, a woman can choose the best time for her in terms of biology and health. There’s no stigma about being a single parent anymore. And If I could just sell that story to the staff, I don’t think anyone would blink twice. Unfortunately, there’s no possibility of my selling that fib. Because of the circumstances, the real truth is going to come out whether I want it to or not.”

“You’re saying there’s some complication...like you don’t want the baby?”

“Oh, I want the baby.” Instinctively she pressed a hand on her heart. “I didn’t plan for this right now, and for sure I haven’t had two seconds to make plans about how I’m going to cope. But the baby...I’ll find a way. Whatever I have to do. It wasn’t really finding out I was pregnant that threw me into shock. It was the shame.”

“Shame?”

Again she sighed. Again she raked a hand through her hair, paced away from the window, and leaned back against her tall pecan credenza. “Mitch, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

He knew. She never admitted any private problem to the staff. She had an unbending code about what bosses should and shouldn’t do around employees—and that had always applied doublefold to him. The lump in his throat seemed to be growing to the size of the Northwest Territories. She wasn’t talking by choice, but because she was too shook up to hold it in. “Just spill the rest of it. You’ve gone this far. Get the rest off your chest.”

She whispered, “I don’t know who the father is. How could there be a worse shame than that? And that isn’t even the worst of it.”

Through a mouth dryer than an abandoned well, Mitch said, “So, okay. Let’s hear the worst.”

She gestured wildly with her hands. “I don’t remember. Sleeping with anyone. It’s been years since I was involved—the business took so much time to build up. I just didn’t go out. And there were other reasons that I never...” She clipped off that thought, and zoomed in another direction. “The thing is, it had to have happened the night of the Christmas party. There was no other possible time.”

“The Christmas party,” he echoed.

She seemed to assume something from his change in expression, because she swiftly nodded. “Yes. I know. That means it was someone here. One of the team. That’s what I meant about not being able to lie—someone here unquestionably knows the truth. And on top of everything else, that it could be one of our team makes me guilty of sexual harassment—”

“What?” Hell, the woman kept lobbing grenades at him. He couldn’t keep track what direction she was going to come from next.

“Come on, Mitch. I’m the employer. That puts me in a power position in terms of the law—and that really kills me, because I thought I was always so careful about that. But what it means is that I put one of the guys in a terrible position. Everything’s my fault. I had no right...”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute—” The lump in his throat had grown to the size of a couple of continents now, but he had to get past it. She was beating herself up right and left.

But he couldn’t get a word in. She was way too wound up to even acknowledge the interruption. “...and not being able to remember makes it so unforgivable. The problem was the champagne—and I don’t mean that like an excuse. There is no excuse for drinking when I know it goes straight to my head. But the champagne apparently fogged my memory. And that’s one of the critical things I just don’t know how to deal with—coming to work, facing you all, what I should say about the pregnancy when someone here obviously knows what happened. You’re going to laugh, but I thought it might be you. For two seconds.”