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She would stay just long enough to bang her head against the nearest post. The only thing she’d found out for sure tonight was that there was nothing “former” about her feelings for the man she was supposed to be doing an exposé on.
And it scared the hell out of her.
Chapter Three
His navy pinstripe suit coat bunched at his shoulders and his dark blue silk tie uncharacteristically loosened, Alex stared at the pile of papers that had accumulated on his desk since he’d last been at McCoy Enterprises headquarters.
Morning sunshine flooded his big corner office on the fourteenth floor, making all the leather and mahogany furnishings he occasionally found oppressive radiate warmth and luxury. The cup of freshly brewed coffee Peggy had just brought in and set within easy reach filled the air with rich aroma.
A dark, gloomy day and a shot of throat-stinging whiskey would have been more appropriate to his mood than a scene straight from a Maxwell House commercial.
He’d tried like hell since the night of the party to beat this funk that had overtaken him, to move past the lies, to come to grips with them. But no matter how far or fast he rode or how long he brooded in his suite of rooms, the fact remained that his entire sense of self had been shaken to the very root.
He pushed aside the pile of papers that needed his attention, planted his elbows on the huge mahogany desk and buried his hands in his hair to support his head. So much for work distracting him enough to get him through the day.
The only thing—or more accurately, person—to distract him for so much as a moment had been a beautiful blonde with blue eyes so pale they reminded him of the most expensive aquamarines. A woman he’d never quite been able to forget, even knowing she’d dated him to get Joseph to help her land a high-profile job suited to a former beauty queen.
Entertainment news. Give me a break.
Now that his head was full of images of her in the moonlight, her beaded dress catching the glow and hugging her curves like a red silk sheet and her eyes brimming with compassion, she would haunt him forever at some level.
The hinges on the door to his office creaked in the way a door only creaks when someone is trying to open it silently. Lifting just his gaze, he watched the oversize mahogany door inch open.
Man, he hoped he hadn’t scared Peggy when she’d brought his coffee in. The ability to engage in pleasantries seemed beyond him lately.
Hopefully those outside the family-secrets loop would continue to assume Marcus’s death was the cause of Alex’s unusual behavior. The excuse wouldn’t last forever, though. If only he knew what to do to get back to as close to normal as possible.
A face finally appeared around the door to his office, but it wasn’t his personal assistant’s sharply angular one, which was in such opposition to her gentle nature yet perfectly matched her detail-oriented efficiency. Instead, the gleaming blond hair, softly rounded chin and jaw, full mouth, slender nose and arresting light blue eyes belonged to a woman considered worthy of representing a whole section of the country.
The very woman he’d just been thinking of.
Maddy Monroe was letting herself in.
Unannounced.
Uninvited.
Definitely unwelcome.
Her pale blue gaze landed on his, and after a heartbeat’s hesitation, during which he almost believed he saw trepidation, she smiled her glossy TV smile. “Alex! Got a minute?”
She was in reporter mode. Even if she wasn’t and she tempted him to think of her as a friend—or more than a friend—as she had the other night with her tender, understanding eyes and soothing voice, he had to resist talking to her. He couldn’t talk to anyone because no one could possibly understand what he was going through.
He lifted his head from his hands and slumped back in his chair. “No. I don’t.”
She slipped through the door and closed it behind her anyway. Her pastel pink blouse and white slacks weren’t as camera-ready as the jackets and skirts she usually wore, but they had probably allowed her to slip unnoticed onto the top executive floor. “This will be quick, I swear.”
He smoothed a hand down his dark blue tie to straighten it against his shirt. “Yes, it will. Because you’re leaving.” He gestured at the door she was inching away from.
“Just a couple of questions, Alex. Please,” she begged prettily, but there was a quaver to her voice. He halted in the middle of reaching for his coffee cup.
Unwisely wondering what was going on with her, he ran his gaze over her more carefully. For the most part, she appeared as polished as usual, though she’d used a little more makeup beneath her eyes and her sleek blond hair looked as if she’d shoved her hands through it. Nothing particularly telling, but nonetheless noteworthy for the perfectly groomed woman he’d known.
He picked up his coffee cup and held it between his fingertips, staring into the black liquid. He could see her in his mind’s eye, smell her even with the aroma of strong coffee right under his nose.
Great. Ignoring her wouldn’t work. He’d have to drive her away.
He raised his gaze to hers as casually as possible and asked, “Being granted the exclusive right to cover Joseph McCoy’s birthday party wasn’t enough for you?”
They’d only offered ETE access to the party to better control media coverage of the event. Whether she’d figured that out or not shouldn’t matter to her when the deal had benefited her and her show so much. Plus, granting the exclusive had saved his family from having to put up with her reporting from a helicopter over their heads. The woman was nothing if not tenacious.
He added, “Considering the guest list, I would think your producers would be damn near giddy with the job you did.”
She slid into one of the comfortable round-backed, mahogany-and-leather chairs facing his desk. “Oh, they’re pleased, all right.” She didn’t appear particularly excited to have made her bosses happy. She steadily met his gaze. “But I’m not done here yet. I still need to talk to you.”
She held up a hand to stop him before he could open his mouth to say forget it. “I know you prefer to be the ‘behind the scenes guy,’ staying mostly out of the public eye. Which is why I came without Dan Gurtings, my cameraman, or a recorder or my notebook.”
She spread her hands wide as if to offer proof that there were no unusual lumps or bumps on her person. With the way her silky blouse and flat-front slacks fit her curves, he’d already noticed.
He snorted at her concession and set his coffee back down untasted. “Funny how that also made it easier for you to slip past security.”
One corner of her lightly glossed mouth twitched upward before she visibly schooled her features. “Joseph has given me an interview, albeit a short one, and Cooper Anders called me to set up a meeting….”
Alex did his damnedest not to react. Heaven help them if Cooper had spoken to Maddy before Sara had convinced him with good old-fashioned love to give up his quest for revenge against the McCoys.
But if Cooper had revealed anything negative, Maddy wouldn’t be fishing so hard. Cooper would have also warned them, especially now that he and Sara were engaged.
When Alex continued to do nothing more than impassively watch her despite the tension slow to leave his body, her delicate nostrils flared slightly in exasperation and she continued. “But I’d really like to talk to you about…everything that has happened to your family as a result of Marcus’s death.”
“I thought I’d made myself pretty clear the other night—”
“I know there is more going on here, Alex. I know it in my gut just from looking at you. You’re not yourself.”
Lord, there was a truth if he’d ever heard one. Everything he’d based his sense of self on had been a lie. Just as in the stable, the temptation to open up and confide in her about his confusion, his heartache, pulled at him with remarkable strength.
She had been so easy to talk to all those years ago, always willing to simply listen rather than trying to impress him in some way. Madeline Monroe had been the first woman he’d met who appealed to him physically but at the same time had made him feel so at ease.
After she took the on-air reporter job with Entertainment This Evening, he’d tried to convince himself that her approachability, her understanding, had all been an act to get closer to Joseph. The eldest McCoy’s influential ties to the media far exceeded his own, but a huge part of him had wanted to believe better of her.
Now was not the time to risk testing her sincerity.
He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and tented his fingers in front of him. “As you said the other night, people change.”
“Not without cause,” she protested.
He lobbed the argument right back to her court. “And what caused you to change?”
“Nothing. I—we’re not discussing me. We’re discussing you.”
“No, we’re not, Maddy. You’re leaving.” He leaned forward and reached for the intercom button on his phone. “Peggy?”
“She’s not at her desk,” Maddy interjected.
“She just brought me this coffee—” He stopped himself. “I’m sure she wasn’t at her desk when you arrived, or you would never have been able to slip in. She’s undoubtedly back by now.” He pressed the buzzer that would signal he needed his executive assistant.
Peggy normally let him know if she was stepping away for any amount of time. But thanks to his dark mood this morning, she’d probably figured he’d prefer not being disturbed.
“I doubt it. Seems someone told her that her car alarm had been triggered, and she had to go down to disarm it.” Only a vague smugness could be found in the slight upward curl at the corners of Maddy’s mouth. Otherwise, she was all wide-eyed innocence.
Yeah, right.
“Is it?” he asked.
She nodded. “Funny how those things just keep going off.”
“Is that where your cameraman is? Bumping a certain white BMW?” He automatically cocked his head to listen, despite being fourteen floors up behind a curtain wall of thick tinted glass.
A perfectly arched blond brow twitched higher and she shrugged. The woman had no shame.
Ridiculously he found himself liking her spunk and drive, much the way he had all those years ago when they’d dated.
Before he’d found out he’d been a mere stepping stone to get to his father—damn it, his grandfather—for help landing a job. A stab of hurt, surprisingly strong despite the long passage of time, nailed him in the ribs at the thought of how she’d used him.
And he hadn’t even slept with her.
She leaned forward, her gaze intense. “What is going on, Alex?”
His tenuous grip on his control slipped and he slammed his palm down on his desk. “Marcus McCoy was mauled to death by a freakin’ huge bear, and because of that, we found out he had sons out of wedlock. Is that entertaining enough news for you, Maddy?”
She bolted up from the chair and reached over the desk to cover his hand with hers, her eyes glistening. “I know, Alex. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She ran her thumb gently over his. “I should have realized it was grief. I just…Frankly, I didn’t think you and Marcus were that close.”
Alex dropped his gaze to their hands and clenched his jaw against the cutting certainty of how close he and Marcus should have been.
In that soft, caring voice of hers, Maddy continued, “And Joseph has been so overjoyed to have discovered his grandsons…Is he simply hiding his grief?”
The soothing touch of her hand on his jumbled Alex’s emotions further. “No, he really is overjoyed to have Marcus’s children in his life.”
And aside from omitting the fact that Marcus had paid each of their mothers a million dollars to tell no one he was the father, Joseph was willing to let the world learn the truth about them. Only Alex would still be saddled with barbed secrets.
The bitterness from having been lied to for so long seared Alex from the inside out. He slid his hand from beneath Maddy’s, shoved out of his chair and paced toward the floor-to-ceiling window. His head had started to pound again.
From behind him she said, “I only wondered because Joseph—”
He halfway glanced at her over his shoulder. “Look, Madeline, I don’t want to talk about my grandfather, either, okay?”
He turned back to the window and raised a hand to rub his temple. He didn’t want to so much as think about Joseph, Marcus or Helen. How was he supposed to pretend that nothing had changed when everything about his world had changed?
“I knew it,” Maddy almost whispered.
Certain his refusal to talk about Joseph couldn’t be that surprising to her, he faced her. “What—?” Her wide-eyed, slack-jawed expression stopped him cold.
She rose slowly from her chair, musing, “I did the math, and I just couldn’t buy the coincidence. I mean, you’re dang near the same age as the others.”
The hair rose on the back of Alex’s neck. “What are you talking about, Madeline?”
She came closer, her incredible eyes searching his face. “You didn’t know, did you? Oh, my—” She put a hand over her mouth, as if something in his expression confirmed her suspicion.
He did his damnedest to shutter all the hurt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She took her hand from her mouth and touched it to his sleeve. “Alex, you called Joseph your grandfather. You said you didn’t want to talk about your grandfather.”
Alex’s breath was knocked out of him as though he’d just fallen from a galloping horse onto hard-packed earth.
Holy crap.
All this time he’d struggled to break the habit of calling Joseph by what had been a lie, and his subconscious decided now to get it right.
Holy heaping crap.
But maybe that same subconscious had glommed on to the idea of opening up to Madeline, of confessing his burden of pain and a marrow-deep bitterness that scared the hell out of him.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Because mixed in with the sympathy glistening in her eyes, a sympathy he strangely didn’t doubt, was the gleam of triumph that tore through him like a sharp hoof.
He’d handed her the story of a career; the McCoys under glass, stuffed, braised and ready to be torn apart by the media. Now everyone—not just the family and those who’d had to—would find out that Joseph McCoy, an increasingly lone bastion of morality in corporate America, had lied to protect his son.
His only son.
Alex’s stomach pitched. “You misheard me, Maddy.”
Pity, as clear as day, tugged the corners of her mouth downward. “I didn’t, Alex. You know I didn’t.”
“I know no such thing, Miss Monroe.”
Her fingers curled into his coat sleeve, bunching the pinstripes as she tightened her grip. Not a hint of victory remained in her turbulent eyes. But he’d seen the triumph, and he’d never forget the look. “Oh, Alex, don’t.”
He willed himself to turn to stone. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t shut me out.”
He did just that. “Why, exactly, are you here?”
“Because I was certain you were trying to deal with something—”
He sent her a sarcastic smile. “The horrible loss of a family member? And what did you plan to do about this something?”
“I—” She faltered.
