“Today’s work and tomorrow’s, too,” he answered wryly.
“Here again?”
Rand didn’t answer immediately. But after a moment he said, “Here. I don’t think I can make it to the office yet.”
“Okay.”
“I just realized this will be the first night this week that we haven’t spent together,” he said then, making it sound as if they’d done something much more intimate than working late or having dinner at her aunt’s house.
“You’re on your own, all right. Think you can handle it?”
“If I say no, will you stay?” he asked in a hopeful tone.
“No, I’d just give Frank a call. He said last night that if you needed a man Friday he was willing to do it.”
“What do you have planned for tonight? A hot date?” he asked then, sounding more interested than she thought he should be.
“A really hot date,” she confirmed.
“With anyone over three-and-a-half feet tall?”
“Height is no measure of the man. It’s what’s inside that counts.”
“Is what’s inside a whole lot of peanut butter and jelly?”
Lucy wondered if he was just teasing her with what sounded like a hint of proprietorship or if he had more than a passing interest in how she might be spending her off-hours. And the mischievous side of her was tempted to let him think she might actually have a hot date with someone other than her son just to see if it got a rise out of him. But she refrained.
“What’s inside the man I’m keeping company with tonight is not only peanut butter and jelly, but ketchup, too.”
Rand groaned. “Max eats ketchup on peanut butter and jelly?”
“He won’t have it any other way.” Lucy paused a moment but couldn’t resist a little probing of her own, just in case. “What about you? Are you really spending the evening alone?”
“Why do you make that sound so implausible?”
Maybe because she’d seen his personal Rolodex and the names of women outnumbered the names of men six to one.
Lucy shrugged. “You just don’t strike me as somebody who’s good at being alone.”
“I’m good at everything,” he countered with a voice full of lascivious innuendo.
“Oh, excuse me,” she joked.
“I thought about calling someone to come over,” he said then. “But I’m having a little trouble in the female companionship area.”
“Ha! Be careful who you’re talking to. Remember I answer your phone. There are four women you owe calls to just since yesterday and I’m sure any one of them would rush right over at the snap of your fingers.”
“No, the trouble isn’t in finding company. The trouble is that I’ve suddenly developed a lack of interest in any of them.”
Was she imagining the underlying message in that statement?
“Since when?” she heard herself ask before she’d considered the wisdom and the fact that she was volleying his flirtation in a way she shouldn’t have been.
“Since…” He pretended to count back the days since they’d met and then, instead, said, “Since you walked through my office door.”
It was difficult to tell if he was joking because he made that sound as if he might be. As if he was just having fun with her.
So Lucy played along. “Well, don’t worry about it. I have that effect on every man. It’s a power I try to contain but sometimes I’m just not successful at it.”
“You? Not successful at something? I don’t believe it.”
“My powers are a curse I’ve just had to learn to live with.”
They’d made a loop through the park and now came out where they’d gone in, with Rand’s building just across the street and Lucy’s car parked in front of it.
“Now you’re going to tell me that’s it for today, aren’t you?” he said, with a glance at her station wagon.
“It’s about five.”
“And you’re going to leave me for another man,” he said melodramatically.
“It’s the appeal of the dinosaur trivia. You just can’t compete.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
That brought a flash of rubbing ointment into Rand’s back the previous evening, just before she’d left. Just before he’d kissed her and she’d left.
It wasn’t a thought that helped keep her equilibrium.
Lucy checked for oncoming traffic as Rand seemed more intent on looking at her and they headed across the street.
By the time they reached her car he was more serious again. “I really appreciate all you did today.” Then he chuckled slightly. “I’m beginning to sound like a broken record.”
“It’s nice to be appreciated,” she answered flippantly because she was still fighting the memory of rubbing his naked back and kissing him.
She unlocked her car door and opened it, stepping into the lee of it but not getting in.
Rand stood on the outside of the panel, carefully raising his arms to rest on the top of the window frame.
“Can I do something before you go?” he asked.
She could see the glint of devilishness in his blue eyes but she was too intrigued—and yes, maybe too hopeful that what he was going to do was kiss her again—to refuse him.
“What do you want to do?”
“This,” he said, reaching around to unclip her hair so that it fell freely to her shoulders on a soft gust of autumn breeze. “I’ve been itching to do that since I met you. I just had to see what it looked like.”
“And?” she said, hating herself for the need to know if he approved.
“And it’s just as beautiful as I thought it would be,” he answered simply, his voice quiet, his gaze caressing her hair in a way she could almost feel.
“I should go,” she whispered, sensing that they had somehow once again stepped over that imaginary line from a work relationship to a personal one.
But Rand ignored the statement and let his eyes drift to hers, holding her gaze in a warm embrace for a moment before that same hand that had taken her hair down came to the back of her head again. Only this time it was to bring her closer so he could kiss her. Right there on the street.
But if anyone passed by or looked on, Lucy wasn’t aware of it. She wasn’t aware of anything but the feel of his mouth over hers, the wonderful return of what she’d been unconsciously craving since the moment his mouth abandoned hers the night before.
His lips parted and this time so did hers, without urging, and when his tongue traced the bare inner edge of them, they parted even more, inviting what she knew she shouldn’t.
Rand accepted the invitation, sending his tongue to test the tips of her teeth, to greet her tongue before he enticed it to play, before he explored her mouth, before he deepened that kiss to such an extent that her car door between them seemed like a brick wall she wished would crumble away so she could be fully in his arms.
She wanted his hands on her body. Everywhere on her body, not just fingering her hair as if it were fine silk. She longed to shed coats and clothes, to feel his strong, powerful hands stroking her back, her arms, capturing her breasts in the warm hollow of his palm. She longed to feel his nimble fingers circling her nipples, squeezing them into even tighter knots than they already were.
And she’d do just as much touching of him as he did of her. Retracing those honed muscles of his back the way she had the night before, filling her own palms with his pectorals, trailing a path down his flat stomach, all the way down to the greatness she could only imagine.
One quick phone call, a little voice in the back of her mind said. One quick phone call and Sadie will pick up Max. One quick phone call from upstairs. From inside his apartment. From beside his bed—
“Rand? Is that you?”
It took a moment for the female voice to penetrate Lucy’s thoughts. In fact it took a second, more insistent “Rand?”
But when it did, it was a bucket of cold water thrown on Lucy.
The kiss ended abruptly and both
Rand and Lucy looked at the strikingly beautiful woman standing only a few feet away.
“Shelley,” Rand said, his voice husky and almost disoriented as he eased himself up straighter, releasing what hold he’d had on Lucy.
He regained his equanimity quicker than she did, introducing her to the tall blonde with the face Lucy had seen often on the covers of women’s magazines and in makeup ads.
It took her slightly longer to come out of the haze that kiss had left her in, to actually say hello.
But the woman didn’t seem to notice. In fact she barely seemed to notice Lucy at all, never taking her eyes off Rand to even look at her.
And Lucy felt awkward and out of place, and as if she’d been caught at something she should be ashamed of.
“I’d better get going,” she announced, too loudly, she thought.
Then she got into her car without waiting for another word from Rand and closed the door.
She started the engine, seeing him only peripherally as he peered into the car and tried to say something to her. But she pretended she hadn’t noticed and pulled away from the curb without so much as a wave goodbye.
What had she been thinking? she mentally shrieked at herself once she was on her way. Had she actually been thinking about not picking up Max? About going upstairs with Rand?
“Oh Lord,” she lamented.
How could it be so easy to lose sight of everything? To forget herself? To forget everything she’d sworn to herself just that morning?
But she had. And if that other woman hadn’t interrupted them?
Lucy didn’t even want to think about where she might be at that very moment.
And yet she still said out loud, “You’d probably be where that other woman is.”
That other woman…
Jealousy—hot and hard and hideous—struck Lucy and nearly knocked the wind out of her.
But other women were a reality in the world of Rand Colton, and she had better not lose sight of that fact, she reminded herself sternly.
So maybe Shelley Whatever-Her-Last-Name-Was showing up had been a good thing. Maybe it had been a protective reminder fate had sent.
Because not only had the other woman arrived in the nick of time, but she was also a glaring example of the difference between the life Lucy led and the life Rand led. A glaring example to remind Lucy that she was going home to a four-year-old whose visions of grandeur were a dinosaur movie and Vienna sausages cut up into his macaroni and cheese, while Rand was no doubt riding the elevator to his art-strewn apartment with a supermodel.
And as much as it might hurt for Lucy to admit to herself that she was only one among many women enamoured of Rand Colton, as much as it might hurt to admit that two such completely opposite lives could not be melded into one, it was nowhere near as much as it would hurt to have to recall those same things after she’d done what she’d been so tempted to do while he was kissing her.
“So thank you, Shelley Whozits, for saving me from myself,” Lucy said with gusto as she pulled into the day care’s parking lot to fetch Max.
But somehow she just didn’t feel all that grateful.
Seven
Facing himself in the mirror the next morning wasn’t the easiest thing Rand had ever done. In a way he was playing possum and it ate at him.
The spasms in his back had stopped and there was no reason he couldn’t go into the office to work.
But had he called Lucy and told her that? Had he canceled their plans to work out of his apartment again?
No, he hadn’t.
Because he’d liked having her in the more intimate setting of his home. Because as much as he’d enjoyed working with her every other day in the city, working with her at home had made him feel as if he had her all to himself. And he’d liked that too much to give it up today. He’d liked it so much it had made falling off the ladder and getting hurt seem worth it.
He rolled his eyes at his own reflection as he lathered his face for a shave. It was pretty bad when he was willing to play sick to get a woman to his apartment.
Not just any woman, though. Any other woman he knew would willingly come home with him—like Shelley the day before. He’d nearly had to be rude to keep her from coming upstairs.
But it wasn’t any other woman he wanted in his apartment. It was only Lucy.
He was definitely having trouble in the female companionship arena the way he’d told her yesterday. More trouble than he’d realized if he was even willing to pretend his back was still on the blink to get Lucy up there.
But why? he asked himself.
All right, sure, Lucy was beautiful. Especially with her hair down—all those spirals of shiny mahogany. And of course there was that ivory complexion and those big blue eyes and those long legs and those full breasts. But he knew a dozen women equally as beautiful and not one of them could light his fire the way Lucy could.
It didn’t help that she had brains to go along with the beauty. And a sense of humor. And warmth and compassion and understanding to spare.
But again, he knew several women with those same attributes.
They just weren’t Lucy. Only Lucy could make his heart go light with nothing but a laugh. Only Lucy made his skin sizzle every time she touched him, no matter how innocently. Only having Lucy around made even the biggest problems seem more manageable, the air seem more pungent, food taste more delicious, music sound more incredible, life seem more worth living…
“You’ve got it bad,” he muttered to himself as he raised his chin so he could shave his neck.
He definitely had it bad. But for the wrong woman. And that was what he really needed to focus on.
Okay, she wouldn’t be his secretary forever, so his rule about not mixing business with pleasure would be a moot point before long. But that didn’t alter the fact that she was still a single mother.
And that was the real problem. That was what made beautiful, kind, compassionate Lucy Lowry off-limits to him.
Not that he didn’t think Max was a great kid. He did. He got a big kick out of him.
But he was still a kid. A child who needed and deserved to be his mother’s first priority and the priority of any man she brought into their lives. A child who didn’t deserve to be shuffled into the deck of fourteen-hour workdays and business dinners and business trips and all-night research sessions and long, absorbing court preparations and the trials themselves. He didn’t deserve to be reduced to the footnote of an adult’s too-busy life.
Which was what Rand was convinced a relationship between himself and Lucy would do.
And that wasn’t fair.
“So call Frank,” Rand told his reflection. “Have him bring the car to take us into the city to work today and keep this thing in line.”
But once he’d rinsed his face he didn’t call for his car and driver. He couldn’t make himself do it. Any more than he could make himself let Lucy go home an hour early the day before, the way he should have, the way he would have let any other secretary who had put in long hours all week and finished for the day.
But what had he done instead? He’d trumped up that take-a-walk ploy so he could have that last hour with her. So he could work up to kissing her again.
To kissing Max’s mother…
But each time he’d kissed Lucy the last thing on his mind had been that she was anybody’s mother. She’d just been Lucy. Lovely, lovely Lucy who smelled like spring breezes and felt like warm perfection and tasted like heaven…
“I’m here.”
The lilting tones of her voice carried to him just then like an extension of his thoughts, of his daydream, and it took a moment for Rand to realize he wasn’t just imagining it, that she had called to him from his front door as she’d let herself in.
“I’ll be right out,” he called back, shrugging into a chambray shirt he usually only wore when he was at the family ranch in California, tucking it into the jeans he also ordinarily saved for that same rustic environment.
He co
uld still go out and tell her they were relocating to the office downtown, he told himself. Nothing was keeping him from putting on a suit, from telling her to go home and change—if she needed to—that he and Frank would pick her up there in half an hour. And then they’d be back in the more formal surroundings of his downtown office where maybe he’d have more luck keeping in mind that he should practice decorum rather than the subtle seduction he kept slipping into unwittingly around here.
But did he do that either?
No, he didn’t. He left on the jeans and the chambray shirt and instead went in search of Lucy.
He found her in the kitchen and stopped short just inside the doorway to drink in the sight of her. She was dressed in jeans, too, and a cropped, rolled-neck sweater that let him see the way the jeans cupped her terrific rear end. She’d left her hair down—not completely free because she had a headband holding it away from her face, but down nevertheless in loose curls that danced against her shoulders and made him want to smooth them aside so he could press his lips to her neck.
And he just couldn’t refuse himself at least having her alone there for this one more day, Max’s mother or not Max’s mother.
“How’s your back?” she asked when she caught sight of him.
“Better. Much better. Almost as good as new,” he admitted because he didn’t want to out-and-out lie to her.
“We have a ton of work to do today. We should get started,” he said more gruffly than he’d intended, overcompensating to cover the things that were going through his mind.
He saw her back straighten slightly, her chin raise a scant fraction of an inch and he knew he’d been too gruff. But all she said was a cool, “Of course. Yesterday’s work and today’s, too.”
And then she left the kitchen and headed for the office portion of the apartment and Rand wanted to kick himself for starting their day off on that note.
But what could he do? he asked himself. He had to keep this strictly business, even if he was indulging himself in working at home for one more day.
Because no matter how much he indulged himself, it didn’t change the facts.
From Boss to Bridegroom Page 11