He stalked over to the windows, where he stared blindly down at the parking lot. In two more days he’d be a married man. Son of a bitch. Everything inside him rebelled, everything except the moral code he’d been raised with that told him a man didn’t abandon his kid, even a kid he didn’t want.
The idea of this kind of permanence made him feel as if he were strangling. Permanence was for after his career, for the time when was too damned old to throw a ball, not for now, while he was still in his prime. He’d do his duty by this kid, but Dr. Jane Darlington was going to pay the price for manipulating his life. He didn’t let anybody push him around. Never had and never would.
He ground out the words. “I want her punished for this, Brian. Find out everything you can about her.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“I want to know where she’s vulnerable.”
Delgado was still young, but he had the eyes of a shark, and Cal knew he was the right man for the job. Delgado had been representing Cal for the past five years. He was smart, aggressive, and no leaks had ever come out of his office. Sometimes Delgado could be overeager in his desire to please his most valuable client—a few times he’d gone off half-cocked—but Cal figured there were worse faults. So far he’d handled this mess with speed and efficiency, and Cal didn’t doubt that he’d handle the rest of it equally well.
“She’s not going to get away with this, Brian. I’m marrying her because I have to, but that’s not the end of it. She’s going to discover she picked the wrong man to push around.”
Delgado looked thoughtful as he tapped the prenup with the top of his pen. “She seems to lead a quiet life. I don’t imagine I’ll find too many skeletons.”
“Then find out what’s important to her and bring her down that way. Put your best people on it. Investigate her work life and her professional life. Find out what matters most to her. Once we know that, we’ll know exactly what we’re going to take away.”
Cal could almost see the wheels turning in Delgado’s mind as he sifted through the challenges of the job he’d been given. Another less aggressive attorney might have balked at an assignment like this, but not Brian. He was the sort who enjoyed feasting on a kill.
As Cal left the office, he made up his mind to protect the people he most cared about from what Jane Darlington had done. His family still mourned the deaths of Cherry and Jamie, and he wouldn’t add to their wounds. As for the baby… People’d been calling him a tough son of a bitch for as long as he could remember, but he was also fair, and he wouldn’t let the kid be punished for its mother’s sins.
He shied away from thinking any more about the baby. He’d deal with those responsibilities later. For now, all he cared about was revenge. It might take a while, but he was going to hurt her, and he’d do it in a way she’d never forget.
The night before the wedding, Jane was so full of dread she couldn’t eat or sleep, but, as it turned out, the actual ceremony proved to be anticlimactic. It took place at the office of a Wisconsin judge and lasted less than ten minutes. There were no flowers, no friends, and no kiss.
At the end of the ceremony, Brian Delgado, Cal’s attorney, told her that Cal would be returning to North Carolina in another week and that Delgado would handle any necessary communications. Other than his brusquely delivered wedding vows, Cal didn’t speak to her at all.
They left the ceremony in separate cars just as they had arrived, and by the time she got home, Jane was light-headed with relief. It was over. She wouldn’t have to face him again for months.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t counted on the Chicago Tribune. Two days after the ceremony, a Tribune sports writer, acting on a tip he received from an anonymous Wisconsin county clerk, broke the story of the secret marriage of the city’s most famous quarterback to Dr. Jane Darlington, a distinguished professor of physics at Newberry College.
The media circus began.
Chapter Six
I’ll never forgive you for this,” Jane hissed as she snatched up the two halves of her seat belt and shoved them together.
“Just remember who showed up with a bow around her neck.” Cal jabbed the stubs from their boarding passes into the pocket of his sport coat and settled into the seat beside her. He bristled with hostility, and she couldn’t remember ever being in the presence of such naked hatred.
It was Monday, only five days since their makeshift wedding ceremony, but everything had changed. The flight attendant serving the first-class passengers stopped beside their seats, calling a temporary halt to the bitter verbal battle that had been going on between them in one form or another since the Trib story had been published three days earlier. She held out a tray with two glasses of champagne.
“Congratulations! The crew’s so excited about having both of you on board today. We’re all big Stars’ fans, and we’re thrilled about your marriage.”
Jane forced a smile as she took the champagne. “Thank you.”
Cal said nothing.
The flight attendant’s gaze slipped over Jane, assessing the woman who had managed to snag the city’s most prominent bachelor. Jane was beginning to grow accustomed to the flicker of surprise on people’s faces when they saw her for the first time. They undoubtedly expected Cal Bonner’s wife to look and dress like a Victoria’s Secret model, but Jane’s well-cut tweed jacket, camel trousers, and bronze silk shell fell short of the mark. All of her clothes were of good quality, but conservative. The classic styles suited her, and she had no desire to make herself over into a fashion butterfly.
She’d arranged her hair in a loose French twist, a style she had always liked because it was neat and timeless. Her friend Caroline said it was too stuffy, but she’d also admitted it did a good job of setting off Jane’s rather delicate bone structure. Her jewelry was minimal, small gold knots in her ears and the plain gold wedding band Cal’s attorney had purchased for the ceremony. It looked strange on her finger, and she pretended it wasn’t there.
As she resettled her glasses, she considered Cal’s well-known partiality for very young women. He would undoubtedly have been much happier if she’d shown up in a miniskirt and rhinestone bra. She wondered what would happen when he discovered how old she really was.
Just looking at the belligerent thrust of that hard, square jaw unnerved her. If the man had ever held an elevated thought in his head, he concealed it. Sitting next to him, she felt like a detonated smart bomb.
“Drink this.” She passed her champagne glass over to him as the flight attendant moved away.
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m pregnant, and I can’t. Or do you want everybody to know about that, too?”
He glared at her, downed the contents, and thrust the empty glass back at her. “Next thing, you’ll turn me into a damned alcoholic.”
“Since you’ve had a drink in your hand most of the times I’ve been with you, I doubt you have far to go.”
“You don’t know crap.”
“Charming vocabulary. Pungent.”
“At least I don’t sound like I swallowed a dictionary. How much longer do you figure it’ll take you to finish burpin’ up all them big words?”
“I’m not certain. But if I do it slowly enough, maybe you’ll be able to understand a few of them.”
She knew that sparring with him like this was infantile, but it was better than the hostile silences that left her nerves ragged and her eyes searching for the nearest exit. Instead of reassuring her, the fact that he had been making an obvious effort to avoid the slightest physical contact between them left her feeling as if he didn’t trust himself to hold back if he ever got his hands on her. She didn’t like being frightened, especially when she knew she was so very much in the wrong, and she’d made up her mind to meet his belligerence aggressively. No matter what, she wouldn’t let him suspect she was afraid.
Her emotional upheaval was only one of the changes that the catastrophic events of the past few days had produced. She’d arr
ived at Newberry on Friday morning, two days after their wedding, to find an army of reporters shouting questions at her and shoving microphones in her face. She’d pushed through the crowd and made a mad dash for her office, where Marie had met her with an awestruck look and an enormous stack of phone messages, including one from Cal.
She’d reached him at his home, but he cut off her questions with a snarl, then read her the press release his attorney had written. It stated that the two of them had been introduced by mutual friends several months ago, and that their decision to marry had been sudden. It listed her academic credentials and described his pride in her professional accomplishments, a sentiment he’d accompanied with a derisive snort. Then it announced that the couple would be spending the next few months honeymooning in Cal’s hometown of Salvation, North Carolina.
Jane had erupted. “That’s impossible! I have classes to teach, and I’m not going anywhere.”
His sneer carried over the phone line. “As of five o’clock today, you’re taking one of them—what do you call ’em?—a temporary leave of absence.”
“I certainly will not be.”
“Your college says different.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask your boss.” He slammed the phone down.
She’d immediately marched into the office of Dr. William Davenport, head of Newberry’s Physics Department, where she discovered Cal was giving the college a major endowment as a token of his appreciation for their flexibility regarding her work schedule in the upcoming months. She’d felt impotent and humiliated. With nothing more than the stroke of a pen over his checkbook, he’d taken control of her life.
The flight attendant stopped to pick up their glasses. As soon as the woman disappeared, she vented her smoldering resentment on Cal. “You had no right to interfere in my career.”
“Get off it, Professor. I bought you a few extra months vacation. You should be thanking me. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have all this free time to do research for that lab you work for.”
He knew far too much about her, and she didn’t like it. It was true that being temporarily relieved of her teaching schedule would benefit her research for Preeze, although she wasn’t going to admit that to him. Her computer equipment was already en route to North Carolina, and with the aid of a modem, the change in location wouldn’t affect her work. Under other circumstances, she would have been delighted with three months free time, but not when she hadn’t arranged for it herself, and not when she had to spend any part of it with Calvin Bonner.
“I could do my research a lot better in my office at home.”
“Not with a whole army of reporters camped out on your doorstep asking why the city’s most famous newlyweds are livin’ in two different states.” His eyes flicked over her as if she were debris. “I go to Salvation this time every year and stay until training camp starts in July. Maybe that giant brain of yours can come up with a convincing excuse for not bringing my brand-new bride along, but I can’t seem to think of anything.”
“I don’t understand how you can perpetrate a fraud like this on your family. Why don’t you just tell them the truth?”
“Because, unlike you, nobody in my family’s a good liar. It’d be all over town before long, and then the whole world would have the details. Do you really want the kid to grow up knowing how we met?”
She sighed. “No. And stop calling her ’the kid.’ ” Once again she wondered if the baby would be a boy or a girl. She hadn’t made up her mind whether she’d let them tell her after she’d had her ultrasound.
“Besides, my family’s been through enough in the past year, and I’m not puttin’ them through any more.”
She remembered Jodie mentioning the death of Cal’s sister-in-law and nephew. “I’m truly sorry about that. But whenever they see us together, they’ll know something’s wrong.”
“That’s not going to be a problem because you won’t be spending a lot of time with them. They’ll meet you, they’ll know who you are, but don’t plan on getting chummy. And one more thing. If anybody asks how old you are, don’t tell ’em you’re twenty-eight. If you get pressed, admit to twenty-five, but no older.”
What was going to happen when he found out she was thirty-four, not twenty-eight? “I’m not going to lie about my age.”
“I don’t see why not. You lied about everything else.”
She fought back another wave of guilt. “Nobody’s going to believe I’m twenty-five. I won’t do it.”
“Professor, I’d seriously advise you not to piss me off any more than you already have. And don’t you have contact lenses or something so you don’t have to wear those damned egghead glasses all the time?”
“They’re actually bifocals.” She took a certain pleasure in pointing that out.
“Bifocals!”
“The kind with an invisible line. There’s no correction at the top, but magnification at the bottom. A lot of middle-aged people wear them.”
Whatever unpleasant response Cal was about to make was cut off as a burly passenger struggling toward the coach section with two large carry-on bags banged one of them into his arm. She stared at the man in fascination. It was fifteen degrees outside, but he was wearing a nylon tank top, presumably so he could show off his muscles.
Cal noticed her interest in the man’s attire and gave her a calculated look. “Where I come from, we call those muscle tops wife-beater shirts.”
He’d obviously forgotten he wasn’t messing with one of his little love bunnies. She smiled sweetly. “And here I thought hillbillies never hit their sisters.”
His eyebrows slammed together. “You don’t have any idea what hillbillies do, Professor, but I suspect you’ll be finding out soon.”
“Hey, sorry to interrupt, Cal, but I was wondering if you’d autograph this for my kid.” A middle-aged businessman thrust a pen at Cal, along with a memo pad that bore the name of a pharmaceutical company. Cal complied, and before long another man appeared. The requests continued until the flight attendants ordered everyone to their seats. Cal was polite to the fans and surprisingly patient.
She took advantage of the interruption to begin reading a journal article written by one of her former colleagues on the decay products of the six-quark H particle, but it was difficult to focus on nonlinear physics with her own world so far out of kilter. She could have refused to go with him to Salvation, but the press would have hounded her and cast a shadow over her child’s future. She simply couldn’t risk it.
No matter what, she had to keep their tawdry story from becoming public knowledge. The humiliation she’d face, as gruesome as that would be, wasn’t nearly as bad as what that information would do to her child growing up. She had promised herself she would base all her decisions on what was best for this baby, and that was why she had finally agreed to go with him.
She pushed her glasses more firmly on her nose and once again began to read. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cal glaring at her, and she decided it was a good thing she didn’t have psychic ability because the last thing she wanted to do was read his mind.
Bifocals! Cal thought. God, how he hated those glasses. He mentally cataloged all that he disliked about the woman sitting next to him and concluded that, even if he set aside the issue of her character, there was a lot to choose from.
Everything about her was too serious. She even had serious hair. Why didn’t she loosen it up from that damned thingamabob? It was a great color, he’d give her that. He’d had a couple of girlfriends with hair that color, but theirs had come out of a bottle, and Jane Darlington’s could only have come from God.
With the exception of that small lock of hair that had escaped its confines to make a silky S behind her ear, this was one serious woman. Serious hair and serious clothes. Pretty skin, though. But he sure as hell didn’t like those big nerdy bifocals. They made her look every one of her twenty-eight years.
He still couldn’t believe he’d married her.
But what else could he have done and still been able to live with himself? Let his kid grow up without a father? With the way he’d been raised, that wasn’t even a possibility.
He tried to feel good about the fact that he’d done the right thing, but all he felt was rage. He didn’t want to be married, damn it! Not to anybody. But especially not to this uptight prig with her liar’s heart.
For days he’d been telling himself she was no more permanent than a temporary live-in girlfriend, but every time he spotted that wedding band on her finger, he felt a sickening premonition. It was as if he were watching the scoreboard clock tick off the final days of his career.
“I can’t imagine buying a car without seeing it first.” Jane gazed around at the interior of the new hunter green Jeep Grand Cherokee that had been waiting for them in the parking lot at the Asheville airport with the key hidden in a magnetic case under the front bumper.
“I hire people to do this kind of thing for me.”
His nonchalance about his wealth made her waspish. “How pretentious.”
“Watch your language, Professor.”
“It means wise,” she lied. “You might try working it into a sentence sometime with a person you really admire. Tell them you think they’re pretentious, and they’ll feel warm and fuzzy all day.”
“Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe I’ll use it next time I’m on TV.”
She regarded him suspiciously, but couldn’t see even a trace of mistrust in his expression. It occurred to her that these last few days were turning her into a bitch.
She stared glumly out the window. Despite the gloom of the chilly, overcast March day, she had to admit the country was beautiful. The mountainous contours of western North Carolina formed a stark contrast to the flat Illinois landscape where she’d grown up.
They crossed the French Broad River, a name that would have made her smile under other circumstances, and headed west on Interstate 40 toward Salvation. Ever since she’d first heard the name of Cal’s hometown, something about it had struck a chord in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t remember what.
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