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“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.”
“Me?”
“I know. Really impossible.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, at least for that second showing an honest spark of humor. “You and I rub against each other like a snake and a mongoose. Maybe that’s why I suddenly spilled all this—not that I meant to vent on you, Mitch—but because I was so sure you have no interest in me that way. And that’s one of the things that’s confused me. Why the man never said anything. And no one has. All I can think is that he must really have felt put on the spot and regret that night really badly—”
“Hey, I don’t think you should just assume that. There could be all kinds of reasons why he kept quiet.”
“Well, whatever the reasons, I have to figure out who it is.” She was back to pacing again, hips swinging, hands in constant motion. “First I thought...John. Like out of kindness, because he’s still having a rough time getting on his feet after that divorce. Maybe he turned to me and I just couldn’t see a way to say no? Because of not wanting to be another woman who crushed his ego? But I’ve thought and thought about that, and the truth is, I keep trying, but I just can’t imagine kissing him, much less—”
The lump dissolved. He found his voice. “Hey, you don’t need to be thinking about John that way. In fact, forget John. Nicole—”
“Well, I could forget John, but that leaves Rafe. Only Mitch, he’s made such a point of never talking about his personal life. You know how Wilma flirts. He never bites. He’s just violent on not combining business with his private life, so if something happened with him, it’s really the worse kind of harassment. He could have been put in a position where he didn’t feel he could say no because of his job. But he is an attractive man. It’s not like I can’t imagine any circumstance where—”
“Forget Rafe. Forget imagining him that way, too. Nicole—”
“There’s no point in my considering Wilma, because she couldn’t have gotten me pregnant,” she said with another dry attempt at humor. “I have to know who it is. And it’s so frustrating that I can’t remember. Somehow I have to make this right for the man involved, but I don’t even know how to start. I’m just so ashamed and disgusted with myself that I could have put someone in this position. I care about all of you. This is just so wrong. Wrong of me—”
“Nicole,” Mitch said for the third time—this time loud enough to wake the dead, which was what it seemed to take to catch her attention.
“What?”
“You can quit thinking about the other guys in that context. It wasn’t any of them. It was me. I’m the father of your baby.”
Two
“Oh, no! You couldn’t be the father, Mitch! You just couldn’t be!”
Mitch didn’t wince, but he wanted to. Although Nik might not appreciate it, his mind was racing from shock, no different than hers. Obviously he was aware they’d taken a risk the night they made love, but there’d been no tip that night had repercussions until this instant. That she seemed stunned at his admitting paternity was bad enough, but she also threw herself in her office chair as if she lacked the strength to face such appalling news.
At thirty-two, naturally Mitch had taken a few slices in his masculine ego—but nothing that knifed his male esteem quite so fast or lethally.
Way, way back—in the era before Nicole had upended his entire life—he vaguely remembered a pleasant historical time when women actually liked him. One even told him he was a creatively inspired lover. Several had chased him downright ruthlessly. Amazing as it seemed now, he’d never had a complaint about his prowess or talent between the sheets. Until Nik, no woman had ever felt obligated to completely block all memory of sleeping with him. And until now, he’d never taken up with a woman who looked aghast at the idea of him in her bed.
Any second now, Mitch figured the letter of resignation burning a hole in his pocket would strike his sense of irony. Quitting was obviously out of the question now. A baby in the picture changed everything.
Only it was hard to imagine how an impossible situation could possibly have become even more disastrous. Mitch had learned the hard, bloody way that he had a problem with tenacity. Sensible people turned off when they saw a dead-end road sign. Not him. If there was something he wanted or valued, he stubbornly persisted in charging forward long past the hopeless point. He hated giving up on anything. But this afternoon, he thought he’d finally gotten smarter and was doing the rational, practical thing by resigning. Getting out of her life. Removing himself from the hopeless temptation of Nicole altogether.
Only this afternoon wasn’t going precisely like he planned. Under any other circumstances, that would have been great news. He never wanted to get out of her life. He never wanted to quit a job he loved. Hell, as soon as he recovered from the life-threatening shock that he’d fathered a child, he was likely gonna spin high on the baby news, too. Unfortunately, one teensy small detail hadn’t changed from the original core problem.
Nicole still couldn’t see him for dust.
And she was still facing him with that aghast expression.
“Mitch...it just couldn’t have been you. The two of us just couldn’t have slept together. I mean, for one thing, I know there’s already a woman in your life, a Suzanne or Susan or something—”
Bewilderment furrowed his brow. For a moment he was completely confounded how Suz could have possibly entered this conversation—but that didn’t stop him from immediately correcting her misconception. “Whoa—there’s no one in my life. Nor would anything have happened between us if someone else had been in the wings. If I’m involved, I believe in doing the loyal-as-a-hound routine. No exceptions. I can’t imagine how you even heard Suz’s name?”
“From Wilma. I’m positive she said—”
Aw, hell. Finally it clicked how she’d made the association. “Yeah, well...before I moved and took the job here, there was a Suz. And when I was first hired on, Wilma came on pretty strong. I didn’t know then that flirting was a life-style with her. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and didn’t want to start a new job with an awkward situation, so I made some comment about there being a Suz in my life. Good grief, I never even thought about it again. It was just a chance comment at the time. It never occurred to me that she’d spread the word or that anyone else had made anything of it.”
That didn’t stop her from sputtering. “But Mitch, it still couldn’t have been you.”
A billion women on the planet, and he had to fall for the one who used his masculine ego for machete practice? “Trust me. It was.”
“But I always thought you didn’t even like me—”
“Um, Nik, that’s not remotely true.”
Instead of that comment reassuring her, it seemed to cause more mental wheels to spin in her mind. She seemed to sink even deeper in that office chair. A flush of guilt splashed her cheeks with color. “Oh, God. Look, I have to face this, so I just you want you to be honest with me. What did I do? Throw myself at you at that party? Put you in a position where you couldn’t say no because I was the boss?”
“Nicole, that’s not at all how it happened.”
“Then how did it happen? And why didn’t you ever say anything to me long before this?”
Mitch rubbed an exasperated hand at the back of his neck. For almost three months, he’d have given gold for those questions to come up. He’d had to battle every grain in his character to shut up, when his nature was to charge into a problem and confront it head-on. It was only for her sake—ever—that he’d been silent.
Now, though, blurting out the plain truth wasn’t that simple. He was painfully conscious that how he handled the situation could either open doors—for her, for him, for the two of them—or permanently close them. Somehow, he had to buy himself some thinking time.
Slowly he stood up. “I’m not ducking those questions, Nik—I want to answer them. But it’s after hours. You look beat. And I don’t think the office is the best place to discuss this. I’m guessing you’d like to go home, put your feet up, get a chance to catch your breath. How about if I pick up some Chinese—or whatever you feel like for dinner—and we meet up at your place?”
“I don’t know...” She started shaking her head.
“I understand—you just had all this sprung on you. And I don’t want you to feel put on the spot. About anything. But before you start making plans about the baby, I think you need to know what happened that night. I’m part of this, too...and it doesn’t matter to me whether we talk at my place or yours, but I assume you’d be more comfortable on your turf.”
She agreed—not, Mitch suspected, because she willingly wanted more time with him, but because she really, really wanted to know what happened that night. After that, they both went in motion. She locked the office; he called ahead to order dinner, and they separated in the parking lot. A half hour later, he’d picked up the Chinese takeout and was swinging his red Miata into her drive.
Juggling the overfull bag of Chinese food cartons, he climbed out of the car and hip-slammed the door with his gaze riveted on her house. He’d only seen it once—the night of the Christmas party. And one look was all it took for him to recall that night in Technicolor and surround-sound detail... but remembering his redhead naked and her warm, willing body and those lethally vulnerable eyes of hers was trouble. At the time, he thought he was waking up Sleeping Beauty. In fact, he could have sworn that was exactly what happened...except that the princess failing to remember a damn thing had totally screwed up the end on the fairy tale.
But the question was what to do now. He stood a moment longer, studying her place, willing answers about Nicole to come to him from her choice of home.
Nik picked up clients from the spray of Oregon tourist towns up and down the coast—Florence and Newport and Reedsport—but her property was between those splashes of civilization, off the beaten path. Once upon a time, it had probably been someone’s summer beach house. The outside was ramshackle, but ramshackle with character. The house was two sturdy stories, with clapboard siding that showed off years of weathering winds. A wraparound porch circled the bottom story, where balconies jutted off bedrooms on the second floor. The yard was an overgrown garden of willowy ornamental grasses like sea oats and sweet grass, a shade spot created by a gnarled old cypress tree. The steps leading down to the bluff edge of the sea were beat-up boards.
Maybe an artist had built the place, because it had that bohemian I - don’t - give - a - damn - what - anyone - else - thinks kind of character. And the first time Mitch saw it, he’d fallen in love. It seemed so right for Nik. The house capsulized the secret romantic and wild free spirit he’d always sensed in her.
In the office, she was so contained. Right from the start, her quicksilver mind had ransomed his heart, but she was a different woman at work, always worrying about doing the right thing, behaving the right way with the team. There was no reason she couldn’t laugh and loosen up—except in her own mind—but from the day he met her, he wondered where she’d learned all that control, what life lessons had taught her all that worry. He’d seen loneliness in her eyes. He’d seen her start to laugh, then cut it off. He’d seen her passionate zest for life a million times when she was brainstorming ideas, but that exuberance got clipped with ruthless scissors around people. Her choice of house reflected both the mystery and challenge that Mitch had always seen in Nik. There was a warm, sensual life-lover under the surface—if the right lover could just coax her to set it free.
Once upon a time, he’d even been arrogant enough to think that lover could be him.
The screen door suddenly clapped open. “Mitch? I thought I heard your car. Come on in.”
He didn’t want to go in. Given a choice, what he really wanted to do was drop the food, grab her, and try kissing her senseless. Just looking at her had always made his hormones stand up and bay like a mournful, lonesome hound, and right now she was damn well breathtaking. A west wind had scuttled away the afternoon’s blustery clouds, and the evening was turning clear as glass. Her hair caught the sunset flame, made her skin glow with a sensual, soft, pearl luminescence.
Still, he cut the juice on the electric charge in his pulse. Kissing her senseless might be an inspiring idea but could too easily end up a disastrous one. And as he hiked toward the house, he discovered they had a new and interesting problem. “You’d better be hungry. I brought enough Chinese to feed a platoon.”
“I can see that,” she said wryly. Swiftly she took the food cartons when he stepped in, but her eyes flashed on his face and then skittered away. Nik wasn’t a skitterer. She’d take on a tiger and not look back for something she wanted to win. So, he mused, she’d done some thinking. And maybe she didn’t remember that night, but it was pretty obvious she was suddenly aware of him in a whole different way. He’d metamorphosed from a nice, safe, tame employee into an unknown quantity of lover.
He liked those nerves. It evened things up. He’d suffered sexual tension all these months alone, when God knew he was more than willing to share. Of course, unanswered questions suddenly hung in the air between them like grenades, but Mitch figured one thing at a time. “If you tell me where the plates are, I’ll help put the dinner on,” he offered.
“You don’t have to help. It won’t take me a second. Can I get you a drink first?”
“Yeah, water—which I’ll get for myself. I didn’t suggest dinner so you could wait on me, Nik. The idea was to give you a chance to relax.”
That plan worked on a par with peace talks in the Middle East. They settled in her blue-tiled kitchen. He watched her poke at her egg roll, fork down a little sweet and sour shrimp, sample some of the war sui gui. Mostly she gulped water and charged down conversational roads like religion and politics—gutsy stuff to argue about, but nothing remotely related to anything on either of their minds.
Mitch didn’t mind her stalling; he thought she needed the unwind time. But typically Nik never cut herself any slack, and as if she realized how long she’d been chitchatting, she suddenly set down her fork. “We’re not getting it done,” she said impatiently.
“Getting what done?”
“Both of us are avoiding the subject of babies like it’d bite us. And it’s my fault. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. I do. But somehow I can’t figure out what to say, how to start...”
“There’s nothing to be blaming yourself for. You’re uncomfortable with me—”
“No, of course not. We’ve worked together for months, for heaven’s sakes. Even when we don’t see eye to eye, we trade insults and bicker like old friends. We’ve never really had a problem talking together.”
But there was a difference, Mitch thought, and that difference was her thinking of him as a lover instead of an employee. He pushed back his chair. “Look, how about if we try getting out of the house, take a walk on the beach?”
Her eyes immediately brightened. “Yeah. Fresh air sounds good.” But then she glanced down at her business suit.
“I’ll do the dishes. That’ll give you a chance to change into something warmer and more comfortable than work clothes.”
“You don’t have to do the dishes—”
“It’s nothing, Nik. Go on.”
She hesitated, but then said okay and disappeared upstairs to change. Mitch leveled the dishes in two minutes flat, then wandered into her living room. The night of the Christmas party, the inside of her house had fascinated him as much as the outside—but for entirely different reasons.
The open staircase led to three bedrooms and two baths on the second story. Downstairs, the front door opened onto a massive living area with big bay windows overlooking the ocean bluff. The blue-tiled kitchen was chunked down in the middle, leading down two steps to a dining and sunroom that both faced east. Tucked on like an afterthought was a small wing that contained an office study and bathroom.
The layout was fine—it was the decor that confounded Mitch. At work, he and Nik were a natural team. With his architectural background, he was at home with beams and studs, where she was the pro at color and style and all that female stuff. Hell, she’d built up a thriving business from scratch because her perception was so sharp. Meet a client and right off she tuned into the individual’s personality and all the internal decor ingredients that worked for that person. Get her going on the Feng Shui concepts about balance and harmony and it was tough to shut her up.
Yet the decor in her own place was perplexingly horrible. He wandered around, hands in his pockets, just looking. She’d obviously put time and money into it, but the decorating style was stark minimalist—unrelenting neutrals, taupe carpet, taupe couches, taupe walls. A pale oak table displayed coffee-table art books. Appropriate, pricey pictures hung on the walls. Nobody could criticize a single furnishing. It was all textbook perfect. They’d had clients who’d probably orgasm to achieve the same look, but they weren’t Nik. There were no splashes of colors, no hint of her vibrant creativity or independent spirit.
The living room—the whole inside decor—made him think of a trapped soul. He saw that side of her at work, too. Nik was always proper, hyper about doing the right thing, no bending on standards. Gutsy in her business, but sleeping through life. Restlessly Mitch jingled the change in his pocket, thinking that if he hadn’t glimpsed the other side of Nik, he’d never have this damn fool convoluted problem of being gut-deep in love with her.
But he bad. Memories stirred of another room in her house—the only room where she hadn’t bleached out every stamp of her personality. Her bedroom. He remembered all of it. The thick, soft rose carpeting. The antique sleigh bed. The old-fashioned dressing table with a needlepoint seat, pearls dripping from a crystal bowl, vials of perfume and cosmetic pots and a cloisonnе dish heaped with earrings.
The room reflected the Nik he’d always sensed under the surface, exuberantly female, a free-flow of rich textures and sensual colors. But it wasn’t the furnishings in that bedroom that had kidnapped a niche on his soul the night of the Christmas party. It was Sleeping Beauty coming awake in his arms, coming alive, the rigidly careful Nik forgetting all that control in the dark...but abruptly Mitch heard footsteps.
He spun around to see Nicole bounding down the stairs, dressed in skinny jeans and old sneakers and a voluminous threadbare black sweatshirt.
“I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “Who’d have guessed you’d own anything with a frayed collar? I’m impressed.”
“No teasing allowed. It’s a sacred sweatshirt,” she said dryly.
“I understand. I’ve got a sacred tee from college basketball days. When my dad got sick a few years ago, I showed up in the hospital wearing that tee. My mom was disgusted. I didn’t care. I wanted luck for my dad any way I could get it.”
A flash of a smile in her eyes, but then she cocked her head. “Your dad’s okay now?”
“Fit as a fiddle. You ready to head out?”
“I am...but I’m not sure this is such a great idea. You’re still stuck wearing your shoes from work. I’m afraid they’ll get wrecked on the beach. And it’s cold—I could loan you a jacket, but I can’t imagine having anything of mine that’d fit.”
Mitch figured it’d be an uphill job to teach her some selfishness. Typically she was worried about him—even under the circumstances—rather than thinking of herself. But she was also a good head shorter than his six-three. Imagining how he’d fit in anything of hers made him grin. “These loafers have seen sand before. And I’ve got a fleece jacket in the car I’ll grab when we go out.”
“Okay, then. Let’s hit it.”
Outside, the sky had darkened to a deep velvet-blue, the moon just rising to light their way. He fetched his fleece jacket and zipped up, feeling the sharp salt air suck in his lungs, fresh and invigorating. Pale stars illuminated their climb down to the beach from the board steps. The surf was sleepy at high tide. Foam sneaked up the sand, leaving a lacy collar of froth in its wake. Common to this stretch of Oregon’s coast, giant rocks jutted from the water, plunked down like mythical black sculptures of all shapes and sizes. In the darkness they looked like a giant’s play toys.
He let Nicole set the walking pace, which naturally for her was a full-speed charge. They hiked in silence for a bit, both of them savoring the magic of the sea, the night, the fresh air. Striding next to her, he was conscious of his height and her smallness, conscious of how the worn jeans showed off her fanny and long slim legs, conscious that she stole looks at his face...and conscious that no matter how good walking with her felt, it wasn’t getting their talking done.
“I moved here from Seattle,” he said finally.
“I know. I remember from your job application. You were one of the architects for a firm named Strickland’s.”
“I was an architect there, yes. But what I didn’t mention on the ap was that I owned the firm.”
She tilted her face, her eyebrows arched in question. “Why didn’t you say so at the time?”
