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The next morning, Jackie entered the forest-green, cream and golden oak lobby of La Torchére with both dread and anticipation. She had gone upstairs last night still reeling from the shock of the news that she had helped produce a child, and still shaking from her encounter with Steven Rollins. She had had few close relationships with men over the years, and had never had a good one. She no longer even wanted to try, so coming into close contact with a man who sent her senses spinning out of control and who, of all men, had reason to dislike her, was more than disconcerting.
She really didn’t want to see him again. But there was no way she was giving up this opportunity.
Jackie wondered what Steven Rollins would think of the simple plan she had formulated in the wee hours of the night as she lay tossing and turning.
Whatever he thought, it wouldn’t be something positive. Ducking into a deserted alcove, she pulled out a small mirror from her purse to make sure she looked composed. She did. Her dark hair was in place, her eyes gave nothing away.
A changeling child, her blond gorgeous mother had once called Jackie with disgust. Plain, nondescript, unnoticeable, her looks had simply emphasized how she had never fit in. But today she hoped that her unremarkable, restrained exterior would stand her in good stead. She needed to be firm, to appear unshakeable.
She would be, Jackie decided, and satisfied that she had managed to erase her emotions from her expression, she took a deep breath and headed for her office to wait for another disturbing encounter.
This time she would not let him get to her. She wouldn’t even think of him as a man, but only as the doorway to an opportunity to make a few memories with a sweet little child.
“Jackie.” Merry’s imperious voice stopped Jackie in her tracks. She turned and looked at the elegant but fading woman.
“Did you need me, Merry?”
“Not exactly, but you might need me if you’re looking for Mr. Rollins. I’ve set him and his papers up at a shaded table in view of the beach. I thought the atmosphere might make your business more pleasant.” The woman tried a smile, but it was clear that she wasn’t usually the cheerful type. That was okay. Merry had been more than accommodating to Hammond Events. Perhaps too accommodating, Jackie suddenly thought.
The last thing she wanted was to sit with Steven Rollins in a secluded, romantic setting. But she wanted to get this over with quickly, to get past it so she could see the baby she had helped bring into the world.
“Thank you, Merry.” She nodded.
Merry tilted her head. “I’ll lead you to him.”
There was nothing to do but follow and hope that she could retain her cool and calm.
But when Jackie came to the end of the path, she nearly balked when she realized that Merry had led her to one of the bowers at the edge of the beach. Surrounded by palm trees, exotic foliage and blossoms, the bower enclosed a small shelter complete with a linen-covered table for two and a convenient double hammock. The scent of flowers drifted in, setting the stage for those who were looking for romance. A waiter appeared with a golden tray of cold drinks in sparkling crystal.
Jackie blinked.
“A person can’t conduct business on a hot day without something to slake her thirst can she?” Merry mused as the waiter approached the table.
But Jackie had moved on to other thoughts. Steven Rollins had risen to his feet at their approach. He nodded to the waiter and to Merry, who withdrew. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt tucked into jeans that molded to his thighs. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing strong tanned arms.
“Ms. Hammond,” he said with a slight nod of his head as he held out his hand.
She hesitated, noting that his fingers were long and brown, his palm callused. He was a rancher, wasn’t he? And though he had every reason to hate her his manners would never show that.
Old fashioned, she thought, and then she resisted the urge to close her eyes as she slid her hand into his, feeling the warmth and strength of his grip for one short second before he released her.
“Mr. Rollins.” She sat, and he followed suit.
“I was wondering if you were going to actually go through with this,” he began.
“Hoping I wouldn’t, I think you mean,” she countered.
He shrugged and kept his direct gaze on her. “I’d like to keep this simple.”
A small bit of hope crept in. “Then we agree on something. I want to keep things as simple and easy as possible, too.”
“You said you wanted to meet my daughter. I won’t pretend to like that, but I’ve decided that I’ll agree to it. I suppose I can bring her here next week, arrange for a few hours together.”
His tone was uncompromising, though his voice wasn’t nearly as harsh as it had been yesterday.
She wondered what he would say to her suggestion. He wouldn’t like it. She knew that much, just as she knew that she might lose her courage if she didn’t just plunge in.
“I want two weeks,” she said, her voice breaking only slightly.
The long silence that followed was heavy, laced with unmistakable anger. Steven Rollins’s eyes were like dark smoldering flames.
“No. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I don’t, generally. I—”
He held up one hand. “I’m not even going to discuss this. This is my daughter you’re talking about.”
“I know that.” And this time her voice wasn’t calm or cool or any of the things she wanted it to be. “I know that,” she said again, trying to bring the emotion down a notch. “And I understand what you’re thinking. You want me to sign away my right to Suzy forever and you want me to do it now. Well, I’m prepared to do that. I’ll sign this very minute. I’ll agree to disappear completely when we’re done, but first I want the right to spend just a short time with her. Two weeks is such a small amount of time, and it’s all I’m asking for. I have the right to ask, you know.”
“I could fight you in court.”
“You could, but someone would have to explain how those eggs ended up in the wrong place. That could take lots of time. This could drag out. You give me my two weeks, and I’m gone for good. It’s over, and you and Suzy can get on with your lives without me.”
He scrubbed one hand back through his dark hair. “Why are you doing this? You didn’t even know she existed before yesterday. She can’t mean anything to you.”
And she obviously meant everything to this man. Jackie knew that. She honored it, but…
She took a moment to gather her thoughts. She raised her chin, her hair falling back as she gazed way up into Steven’s eyes. “I’m doing this because I gave up a child once before. I freely donated the eggs that time, and there was no question of me ever having time alone with the baby when she was born. I didn’t think it would matter, but it did. Giving a child life, and her mother hope, has been one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, but also one of the most painful. Chloe can never know about me, at least not until she’s much older. Her mother, Trish, and I are cousins, and it would only complicate things to tell her child that I’m her biological mother. I know that, and I accept it. I chose it, so I don’t have a problem with the situation.
“But this time is different. My eggs were used without my permission, and I’m incensed about that. Somewhere on your ranch is a little girl who started out as a part of me, however much you dislike that fact. This time I get the chance to do things differently. I get the chance to be a part, however small, of her life. And it can work because she’s young enough that she’ll never remember me. You’ll never remember much of me, but I’ll have something to hold in my heart forever. I’ll walk away, Mr. Rollins. You’ll have my word and my legal, unbreakable signature before witnesses as a guarantee. Just don’t ask me to sign Suzy away without ever having seen her. Don’t be that cruel. Would you simply walk away if someone had told you that she was out there and that you had fathered her?”
Steven opened his mouth to speak, but then he closed it again. “Is this how you get people to donate expensive artwork to your auctions, Ms. Hammond? By blackmailing them?”
Heat and anger rolled through Jackie, but she subdued them. The man was testing her, and she wouldn’t be tested. She’d jumped through hoops for her father, and later for Garret, a man who had claimed to love her for a time. She’d given up her own wishes too many times and all to no avail. “You came to me, not the other way around,” she reminded the man.
As the seconds ticked by they stared at each other, a silent standoff. Then he held out his hands, palms out.
“You’re a hard woman, Ms. Hammond.”
His comment caught Jackie off guard. She had been called many things in her lifetime—invisible, shy, maternal, sweet, a marshmallow, a leaf blowing in the wind, a pushover. But then she had never had anyone come to her with this kind of news before. And she had never faced the prospect of giving away her baby without ever having the chance to see her face even once. She rather liked being hard in this instance. This was a situation that called for hard and pushy, and for the first time in her life she was rising to the occasion.
“After we sign the papers, you’ll bring Suzy here?” she asked.
“No. Not here. You’ll come to my home, and that is something I’m not budging on, Ms. Hammond. I have a ranch, and I’m needed there. I can’t just run off for two weeks, and I won’t let Suzy go anywhere unless I’m there. My ranch or nothing.”
Jackie blanched inside, but she refused to allow herself to think. “All right, your ranch, but we go right away. I’m ready.”
Steven gave her a long, lingering once-over—from the tip of her shiny sedate hairstyle, past her pale cream dress, to the bottom of her sensible pumps. She almost thought he was going to smile. “You don’t look like you’re ready for a ranch,” he mused.
She wasn’t, not really. The thought of horses and cows and bulls and who knew what else scared her to death. “I’ll go wherever your child is,” she said firmly. “For two weeks I’ll be there and then I’ll return here where I belong. I’ll vanish like mist in the sunlight, and you won’t have to worry about me ever again.”
He gave her a short, slow nod. “I’ll hold you to that,” he said, “and if you ever try to break our bargain, I will come after you with every weapon I possess. Anyone who tries to steal my daughter had better run, and run fast.”
But Jackie was pretty sure that no one would ever be able to run fast enough if Steven Rollins wanted to catch them. She had a feeling that she had just bitten off a lot more than she could chew. Steven Rollins was more man than she had ever tackled.
The very thought of tackling or tangling with him was…
“Frightening,” she said out loud, later in her room. But in her mind, she heard another word.
Exhilarating.
She had never felt so alive as she had yesterday and today, arguing with this man who clearly wished she would disappear in a puff of blue smoke.
And she had just agreed to go live on a ranch with that same, too-handsome man who hated her. How on earth was she going to survive for the next fourteen days? She’d done all right here in this environment where she felt at home, but what weapons would she possess once she was out of her element and alone with him?
“What do you mean, you’re leaving me in charge?” Jackie’s sister, Parris, was clearly not happy about Jackie’s decision. “You can’t just pack up and go off to some ranch and leave me to do all the work.”
Jackie tactfully refrained from mentioning that Parris had done very little of the work regarding the company thus far. Not that that was surprising. Parris had never had to work for anything. When Jackie’s father had divorced her mother and remarried Parris’s mom, Jackie had worked extra hard to secure her father’s attention. But it never seemed to make a bit of difference. He didn’t want to be with Jackie. He had found another daughter, and his oldest child’s efforts didn’t matter all that much. And three years ago, when Jackie had imagined herself in love with Garret Brickwater, she had done her best to make the relationship work, but Garret had taken one look at Parris’s beauty and had no use for her older sister anymore.
That was just the way it was. Jackie had never fit with anyone. Even her own mother had resented her existence, claiming that having a baby had caused her to lose her figure and thus, her husband. Jackie had always been the outsider, the ugly duckling with no real place to call her own.
She certainly didn’t belong on a ranch with Steven Rollins, but she was going anyway. And the truth was that, if she and Parris were ever going to make a go of this company, Parris was going to have to take part in the operation.
“You’ll be just fine,” Jackie told her sister. “And I’ll only be a phone call away.”
“Jackie, you’re going to a ranch, for heaven’s sake, with cows and cow-related things and…and manure. It may only be a phone call away, but it’s also the edge of the world. And what if something comes up that’s too complicated to handle? What do I do if another someone wants to take back a donation?”
Jackie sighed. “Do your best to be gracious and charming, Parris. Remember that this business is all we have. It’s what we live on.”
“So why are you leaving? You’ve never even met that baby.”
She had explained the details to Parris already. “I want something this business can’t give me,” she told her sister.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. I just know I have to do this. And anyway, I’ll only be gone two weeks. How wrong can things go in that time?”
She and Parris exchanged a look. Things were going wrong every day. The whole operation could collapse. She really wanted to bring Suzy here.
But somehow she knew that even a court wouldn’t insist that Steven rip his child from her home on a forced visit to an egg donor. She wasn’t even sure the courts would give her any rights. Obviously this was shaky ground all the way around, or he wouldn’t have let her have her way at all. Neither of them wanted to risk the legal system.
“I’ll check in all the time,” Jackie promised. “If someone is being especially difficult, I’ll call them or we’ll arrange a conference call or even a video connection. Somehow we’ll keep the business alive.”
“All right, if there’s no other way.”
There wasn’t. If there was any way she could avoid going to stay in Steven Rollins’s home—where he would be around every day watching her every move, making her remember how it had felt to have him touch her hand—she would have jumped at it. But there wasn’t.
Somehow she was just going to have to learn how to stay out of the man’s way. What she needed was a plan.
“Do you think this will work?” Merry asked Lissa.
“Do I think they’re attracted? Of course they are. He’s a very masculine man and she’s very sweet with lovely eyes. They’re attracted, but do I think they’ll fall in love?” Lissa frowned.
“You’re right. I’ve thoroughly checked into both of their pasts. Steven was forced to give up his dream of a football career and then his dream of a fulfilling marriage, so now he’s through with anything vaguely romantic. And he doesn’t want her, or any woman, on his ranch or near his child. As for Jackie, she doesn’t want to go near a man, and the ranch thing…”
Merry suddenly looked at her godmother with stricken eyes. “It’s not going to work, is it?”
“Well, they hardly seem suited,” Lissa began, “and they are moving off the resort, where you won’t have much control.”
“And already days have passed,” Merry said. “I’ve wasted time on them, but I don’t have any new prospects at the moment. That’s it. I’m just going to have to do my best to work a miracle long-distance.” She pulled a cell phone with a screen for color pictures from the pocket of her dress.
“What are you doing, Merry?”
“You know what I’m doing. I’m using what little useful magic I have to watch them.” She could use the phone to watch what happened on Steven’s ranch. “I’m not sure what I can do when I’ll be here and they’re on a ranch, but if I see a promising circumstance, then I’ll…”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll do something. Anything.”
“Careful, Merry. You remember the first time you tried to force two people together who didn’t fit. Both of them vowed never to get involved with anyone again, and they haven’t to this day.”
“I know. That was a mistake. I’m not going to make any mistakes with Jackie and Steven—I hope.”
Chapter Three
The trip to Rollins Acres wasn’t very far, which was a good thing, Steven mused the next day after they had disembarked from the ferry to the mainland. Because if ever two people were less suited to spend time closed up in a truck together it was himself and Jacqueline Hammond. The mere fact that the woman had not balked at riding in a pickup truck was in itself amazing.
She clearly didn’t belong here. Dressed in a dove gray suit that hit just above a very pretty pair of knees, her dark hair pulled back in a low, sleek ponytail with a silver clip, she was the epitome of refinement and primness.
“You ever ride in a pickup truck before?” he caught himself asking, a trace of amusement lifting his lips.
She gave him a look that told him she didn’t like being laughed at. “Well, I usually only ride in golden pumpkins pulled by white horses,” she said, “but don’t worry. I can stifle my inner stuffiness long enough to withstand a ride in a pickup truck. And for the record, Mr. Rollins, I wouldn’t exactly call this a pickup truck in the conventional sense. You’ve got a DVD player, a GPS, more cup holders than one man could possibly use and leather seats. If this were a colder climate, I’ll bet you would have heaters in the seats, too.” She gave him a placid knowing smile.
He couldn’t keep from chuckling. “Touché, Ms. Hammond. I probably had that coming, but my point was…”
She sighed. “I know your point, Mr. Rollins. I don’t belong on a ranch. For the record, I did buy a pair of jeans, and I’ll eventually wear them. I just…it’s just…I’ll be meeting your daughter for the first time and I…”
Her voice trailed off, and suddenly he realized that she was nervous, genuinely nervous about meeting a baby. This self-assured woman who had dared to stand toe-to-toe with him—a six foot one male with a body grown hard from work—was nervous. She hadn’t given an inch, even when he had pushed her and even when it was obvious that he was making her uncomfortable. She’d stood her ground, but now she had dressed to impress a one-year-old child.
“Well, Suzy is pretty partial to gray,” he said, turning to give her a smile, hoping to lighten the mood, “but she’s going to be mighty disappointed that you’re not wearing pearls and white gloves.”
To his surprise, she shook her head and smiled back. Not just a weak, polite smile, either, but a brilliant one that made his breathing stop and sent heat sizzling through his body in a powerful flow. “I was thinking maybe the diamond tiara,” she quipped.
“Just the thing,” he agreed amiably, but inside him a storm was brewing. His sudden reaction to that smile had been a warning for him to stay away from this woman. He was through with anything involving emotional needs of a deep or serious nature. He had lost too much—his football career, nearly his marriage, and then, when he and Michelle had finally put things back together again and he had begun to hope for at least a partially happy ending, he’d lost his wife, too. So, other than an occasional visit to another town and a woman there who, like himself, wanted nothing more than a meaningless physical fling, he kept his distance from women. He hadn’t been tempted so far, and it wasn’t going to happen now, especially with a woman who could only mean trouble and regret.
“Here we are. This is my ranch, Ms. Hammond,” he said, turning in at a gate that declared them to now be on Rollins Acres. “This is where you’ll be spending the next two weeks. I think you can safely leave your tiara in the box.”
He glanced across and ended up gazing right into those beautiful blue eyes. “Maybe you’re right about the tiara,” she said softly. “But, do you think you could call me Jackie for the next two weeks? If we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other…”
