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“Dix is a friend, but yeah, he’s been working for me.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Helping me find you. I’ve been trying to do that for months.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes. You tried so hard.”
“I called. You never called back.”
“How could I forget? A month after climbing out of my bed, you did get around to leaving a message on my answering machine.”
“I was out of town. You knew I had to leave the next morning. And I left several messages, dammit, not just one!”
Eventually, yes. He’d called three times. It had been too little, too late. “If you’d really wanted to talk to me, you knew where I was—until last month, at least.”
“Yeah.” His voice was flat. “Right there in my father’s office, pretending to be his loyal assistant while you sold him out to the Kellys.”
“So I’m slime.” She stared straight ahead, determined not to cry. “You’d decided I wasn’t worth the trouble long before you found out what I’d done.”
He shifted, looking away. “It wasn’t like that.”
Right. She didn’t want to hear whatever version of “you’re just not my type” he’d cooked up to explain himself. She knew very well how little they had in common, aside from some combustible hormones. She’d known it all along.
And still she’d made a fool of herself with him. Tension knotted her jaw and neck. She took a deep breath, trying to relax those muscles. It didn’t help. “How did you find me?”
“You used your mother’s social security number at that dive I just rescued you from.”
“Rescue? Is that what you want to call it?” Temper warmed her. She shoved his coat down into her lap. “And how would you know what number I used?”
He shrugged. “Dix can find pretty much anything that’s in any computer file, anywhere.”
“He’s a hacker, you mean.” She shook her head. Rafe never made sense. Why would a computer systems analyst who specialized in corporate security have a hacker friend?
“One of the best. I asked him to check the social security records of the family members listed in your personnel file at Connelly Corporation. Earnings have been recently reported under your mother’s number—pretty amazing, considering she passed away nine years ago.”
If Rafe could track her that way, so could others. Suddenly she wasn’t warm anymore. “Maybe I’d better not go back to my apartment.” That made two apartments she’d had to abandon.
“Congratulations. That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said tonight.”
But where would she go? She had only her tip money in her pocket; the rest was in her backpack, back at Hole-in-the-Wall. She needed to go back and get it, but two hundred and thirteen dollars wouldn’t go far.
God. She was practically a street person. She knew what she had to do, but she hated it. Hated it. “I don’t like to ask,” she said, her throat tight, “but could you loan me some money? I don’t have enough to get another place to stay.”
Rafe didn’t think he’d ever been this angry. Or this scared. He didn’t like either feeling, but he especially hated the cramped, cold feeling in his chest he got when he thought about how close she had come to being hit by that car earlier.
Hell, he thought, dragging a hand through his hair. At the moment, he didn’t like much of anything—not her, not himself and for damned sure not what he had to do about their situation.
There was one small consolation. She wasn’t going to like the next part, either. “No, I won’t loan you any damned money.” He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
Her voice stopped just short of shrill. “What are you doing?”
“I used to think you were fairly bright. Figure it out.”
Good thing he’d kept an eye on her as well as the traffic. He managed to snag her arm and jerk her back before she could get the door open. “Uh-uh. Jumping out of a moving vehicle is not allowed.”
He let go of her arm, but continued to divide his attention between her and the road. She might try it again when they stopped for a light. “Put your seat belt on.”
Already she was taking deep breaths, getting herself back under control. Dammit. He wished he didn’t enjoy it so much when she ruffled up like an outraged hen then carefully smoothed each bristly feather back into place. Perverse of him, and showed a sad lack of judgment. The woman was a liar and a crook, or at least in the pay of crooks. She’d betrayed his father. He needed to remember that.
“Rafe, I have to get my backpack before it’s stolen,” she said in that reasonable tone that always made him want to unbutton something. Not that she had any buttons showing right now, but she used to wear a lot of prim, buttoned-to-the-throat silk blouses to work. No doubt she’d thought covering everything up would keep the men she worked with from turning into ravening beasts.
Foolish of her. But Rafe had figured out long ago that most women had no idea how little it took to turn a man’s thoughts to sex. Her prim blouses had just made him notice the way the silk shined and shifted over those soft, round, gorgeous breasts…breasts whose shape and texture he knew now.
He shook his head and tried to banish the memory. “Forget your backpack. I’ll buy you another one.”
“I don’t want you to buy me anything. I want my backpack.”
He eased to a stop at the light. “Listen, Charlie, someone tried to kill you on the way to your job. You can’t go back there.”
“Don’t call me Charlie.”
Her rebuke was automatic, he felt sure. As automatic as the way the nickname had slipped out. How many times had he called her that in the past two years, since she took over as his father’s executive assistant?
He’d called her Charlie when he’d come inside her, too.
“All right, Charlotte,” he said, hating the name and halfway hating her, too. “Put your seat belt on. It’s not safe for the baby if you ride without one, and I’m not letting you make any escape attempts.”
She scowled, scooped his coat out of her lap and twisted around to deposit it in the back seat. Either she was warm enough now, or she didn’t want anything of his touching her. Or she didn’t want anything slowing her down when she made her break for freedom. He tapped the steering wheel with one hand, ready to grab her with the other.
“Rafe, I agreed to talk with you. I did not agree to be abducted.”
“Tough. You haven’t done such a great job of protecting yourself and our baby, so I’m taking over.”
“If you’re thinking about—about the incident today, it may not mean anything. Heaven knows Chicago has plenty of bad drivers.”
“I’ve always admired that tidy brain of yours. I wonder why you aren’t using it. Maybe you don’t think I can use my brain. Yeah, that’s probably it. You think you can persuade me there’s no connection between people trying to run over you, and people shooting at you.” The light changed and he accelerated. “That’s too much of a stretch for me, I’m afraid.”
Her hands made small, frustrated fists in her lap. “Take me back to Hole-in-the-Wall.”
“No.”
Her tongue darted out nervously to lick her lips. “If you’re thinking of taking me to the police, please don’t. The other time—when I was shot at—that happened as I was leaving police headquarters. I think someone in the department tipped them off. I don’t want to go in a safe house. I don’t think I’d be safe.”
“Amazing. We agree about something. Now put your seat belt on, or I’ll reach over and put it on you.” For a supposedly sensible woman, she sure wasn’t paying attention to sensible precautions. “My apartment’s in the Buck-town area. We’ll probably run across any number of bad drivers on the way there.”
“Your what? No.” She shook her head so hard her hair flew into her face. “No, I am not going to your apartment.”
“You don’t have any choice. God knows I don’t have much choice, either.” He took a deep breath. Might as well get it said. “You’re carrying my baby. We’ll get married.”
“That’s not funny.”
He gave a short bark of laughter. “You think I’m joking? If so, the joke’s on me.” Humor faded, settling into grim determination. “I hope you don’t have your heart set on a big wedding, because we can’t go that route. We’d be issuing an invitation to the hit man along with the guests. He’s been remarkably unlucky so far, but we can’t count on his bad luck continuing.”
She looked stunned—and not with joy, either. At least she wasn’t trying to leap out of the moving car.
“No comment? Good. We’ll get the blood tests tomorrow.”
“You don’t want to marry me!” she burst out. “You don’t want to get married at all.” She rubbed the back of her neck as if her head might be hurting. “If this is some kind of noble gesture, all right, then. You’ve made it. I hereby let you off the hook.”
“I want my child.”
She closed her eyes, sighed and leaned her head against the headrest. “I want you to be part of the baby’s life. You don’t have to marry me for that.”
“I don’t want a weekend now and then. I want my child. I want it all—3:00 a.m. feedings and diaper rash, school dances and college entrance exams.” He shook his head. “Weird, isn’t it? I had no idea I’d feel this way, so I can’t blame you for being surprised. But there it is. I want to be a full-time daddy, so we have to get married.”
The hand that had been rubbing her neck fell into her lap. “And if I refuse to marry you, what will you do? Will you try to take the baby away from me?”
He shot her an irritated glance. “You think I’m some kind of monster? The last thing I want is a custody battle. That’s why I’m proposing. Look, you need me.”
“I don’t need anyone. And you don’t want me. I mean, you don’t want to marry me.”
His eyebrows lifted. Did she think he didn’t want her now? Wrong, but interesting. Maybe useful. “You’re right about me not wanting to get married. I don’t. But I wasn’t raised to duck my responsibilities.” Of course, his parents hadn’t raised him to have unprotected sex, either. He still didn’t understand how he could have been that careless.
He realized he was scowling and tried to lighten up. “If you’re worried about the sex part, don’t. We can make things work out there just fine.”
Her stony expression suggested just the opposite. “I don’t suppose it’s necessary for you to actually like a woman to go to bed with her. I’m a little pickier. I’m not marrying a man who despises me.”
He hadn’t expected this to be easy. Charlie was nothing if not stubborn. “Whether you like it or not, you do need me right now. You’re running from some pretty big bad guys, and you lack the resources to do it right. If I could find you at that dive, they can, too. It looks as if they already have.”
She chewed on her lip. It was a small enough sign of nerves, but welcome. He was getting to her. Good.
Rafe switched tactics slightly. Let her think she’d won a compromise from him. Women were crazy about compromises. “Look, you don’t have to say yes or no about marriage right away. Stay at my place, though. Let me protect you. Don’t endanger my baby out of pride.”
Silence descended for long moments.
“All right,” she said abruptly. “I won’t marry you, but I’ll stay in your apartment for now.”
It was more than he’d expected from her this quickly. He frowned, chewing over her capitulation in his mind. Maybe she was a lot more scared than she’d admitted—but there was no point in asking her. You could put Charlie in a cage of tigers and she’d insist she was fine. Or else she had some plan in mind. Something devious.
It was probably a sign of depravity that he was looking forward to figuring out her scheme. And stopping her.
Rafe considered himself a simple man. Computers were the one place he enjoyed knots and puzzles. He worked hard because he liked his work, and, he admitted, because he had his share of Connelly ambition. He played hard, too, when he was in the mood, but he also relaxed just as completely. He got more complexity than he needed from his big, maddening, high-profile family. When it came to his personal life, he kept things simple.
So how had he ended up in such a messy relationship with such a complicated woman?
There were her breasts, of course. He stole a sideways glance at her. Truly excellent breasts—not especially large, but beautifully shaped. And Charlie was great fun to tease—she always rose to his bait, but not always in the way he expected. She gave as good as she got, too. But while great breasts and teasing might account for his initial interest, they didn’t explain why he’d taken her to bed the second he’d had the chance. Not when he’d known—dammit, he’d known—that she was a regular porcupine of complications.
She fascinated him. She was so charmingly tidy yet mysterious, keeping her private self tucked out of sight. He supposed a woman like Charlie needed to keep her externals orderly in order to cope with her complicated interior.
Yet in spite of her reserve he’d thought he knew her. Not all of her, maybe, but enough to like her. To trust her. Hell, his father had trusted her, and Grant Connelly was rarely wrong about that sort of thing.
Why had she done it? Why had she betrayed his father’s trust?
He knew damned little. Last Christmas his oldest brother, Daniel, had surprised everyone, including himself, by becoming the heir to the throne of Altaria, the tiny Mediterranean country their mother hailed from. Almost immediately, someone had tried to kill him. Grant Connelly had hired a pair of private detectives—Lucas Starwind and Tom Reynolds—to look into the matter, but neither they nor the police had made much headway. They knew the attempt had been carried out by a pro, and that it was related to Daniel’s new royal status. And that was about all they knew.
In May the Connelly Corporation computers had suffered a major crash. No surprise there. Rafe had been urging his father to upgrade his system for the past two years. At the time, Rafe had been involved with a big project in Phoenix. There had been no way he could take on another job. Charlie had suggested a technician who was familiar with the system and programs used at the corporation, and the tech seemed to have fixed things easily.
He’d fixed things, all right.
There had been no reason to suspect a link between a computer crash and the assassination attempt on Daniel. Not until last month. A connection had turned up then—a dead man.
Someone had murdered Tom Reynolds, one of the private detectives investigating the Connelly troubles. His body had been found in the alley behind the office of the computer tech who had restored the Connelly Corporation’s system after the crash. And shortly before he was killed, Reynolds had called Grant to suggest that the corporate computer system needed to be checked out.
The technician himself had disappeared.
Charlie was the link between the tech and Connelly Corporation, and the police had picked up her up for questioning. At first she’d refused to talk in spite of the fact that Grant Connelly didn’t want charges pressed against her. Then, as she was leaving police headquarters, someone had nearly managed to put a bullet between her eyes.
She’d talked after that—and then she’d vanished. Rafe couldn’t find out much about what she’d told the police. They were being disgustingly closemouthed on that subject. All he knew was that Angie Donahue, the mother of his half-brother Seth, had somehow persuaded Charlie to use that particular technician.
And Angie Donahue was connected to the Kelly crime family.
Now there was a price on Charlie’s head.
It all added up to one big, deadly mess. Rafe had canceled his next job, finished up the last one and flown home as soon as he could. Ever since, he’d been trying to find out what the tech had done to the corporate computers—when he wasn’t trying to find Charlie.
City lights streamed past the windows on one side. On the other side the vast darkness of Lake Michigan was blocked by hotels and office buildings, with an occasional empty space giving a glimpse of the lake, spotted here and there by the running lights of freighters.
He glanced at the woman beside him. She was staring out the windshield as if she’d forgotten he existed. She’d been silent a long time. Dammit, he just knew she was coming up with new complications for him to sort out. “Does it move sometimes?” he asked abruptly.
“What?” She turned toward him, her eyes blank, as if she’d been far away.
“The baby. Do you feel it moving sometimes?”
“Oh.” Her hand pressed her stomach, the fingers spreading as if she already had a big belly to support instead of a little bulge. A smile slipped over her face, changing it, making her look softer than he’d ever seen her. “Yes. She or he is asleep right now, I think, but I’ve been feeling movement for about a month now. It feels…” She shook her head, her expression full of wonder. “I don’t know how to say it.”
“It’s a good feeling, though? It doesn’t hurt or anything?”
Her glance was almost shy. She nodded. “It’s good.”
“Will you tell me the next time you feel it move? I’d sort of like to feel it, too.”
Her cheeks flushed and she tucked her chin down as if he’d asked for something intensely personal. “I guess so.”
“Good.” He thought a minute. Maybe agreeing to let him share the baby before it was born was an intimacy she hadn’t planned on. So he added, “Thank you.”
She nodded and fell silent again.
Oh, she was going to make things difficult, he knew. She probably couldn’t help it—she was a difficult woman. But he had some complications of his own in mind for her.
Charlie didn’t want to marry him, but she had to. For her sake, his sake, and most of all for the sake of the life she was carrying. So he’d persuade her. Rafe knew just how to go about that—the same way he’d gotten himself into this mess.
He’d seduce her.
