SUSAN ANDERSEN
Baby, DON’T
Go
This is dedicated, with love
To Jen,
for saving my bacon just when
I thought it was fried but good
To Mom, Mimi, Toni, Aunt Thelma, Elaine,
Vernetta, Winnie, and Margaret,
for years of support and the
world’s fastest sell-out booksigning
And to the Methow Valley gang,
for good food, great skiing,
and a whole lotta laughs
Life doesn’t get much better than this
—Susie
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Daisy Parker gave a sigh of pleasure as the weight…
1
Daisy hadn’t even cleared the office door before she caught…
2
Late that afternoon, Daisy boarded a bus for Nick’s. Staring…
3
“Holy shit, Daisy!” Nick pushed up on an elbow and…
4
Daisy awoke to find Nick squatting next to the couch,…
5
An accident and men working on a gas main tangled…
6
They stopped for lunch, then drove to Nick’s final appointment…
7
He froze for an instant in sheer surprise and the…
8
“You did what? Hang on a minute.” J. Fitzgerald cupped his…
9
Nick welcomed the sudden darkness. He was so visual that…
10
Daisy awoke slowly. She rolled onto her back, draping her…
11
“What?” For a moment Daisy stared blankly at the blood…
12
Nick lay sprawled on top of Daisy, telling himself he…
13
J. Fitzgerald allowed the very young patrolman plenty of time to…
14
“Okay. Daisy,” Reggie said the instant the door closed behind…
15
Daisy gazed around the sumptuous green and white room. “I…
16
“Did you know there’s a phone in the bathroom?” Briskly…
17
They were less than a mile from the carriage house…
18
Nick slept like the dead and awakened disoriented, but strangely…
19
Daisy jumped a foot when the doorbell rang shortly after…
20
“Nice function.” Sipping a Napa Valley merlot, Mo looked around…
21
Nice viewed the ballroom through the lens of his camera,…
22
Blowing out a quiet breath, Nick turned to Daisy. “Could…
23
Reggie opened his door, took one look at Daisy, and…
24
Daisy turned the corner just in time to see the…
25
Daisy awoke to the sound of Nick’s voice requesting a…
26
Daisy didn’t quite know what to do with herself once…
EPILOGUE
Nick pressed Daisy up against the door and kissed her…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER ROMANCES
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PROLOGUE
nine years ago
DAISY Parker gave a sigh of pleasure as the weight of Nick Coltrane’s naked body pressed her into the mattress. Sweat bonded their bodies together, while his muscular arms held her tight. She could hardly believe she’d just surrendered her virginity to him—let alone with such enthusiasm. As he pressed kisses into the side of her neck, her body hummed with little aftershocks of satisfaction. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she stretched with voluptuous delight.
To think she almost hadn’t attended Mo’s wedding reception—which was still in full swing ten floors below. Two years ago, she’d tried to sever all ties with the Coltranes. She’d detested Nick and Maureen’s father for the cold premeditation with which he’d ended his marriage to her mother, not to mention the way he’d arranged to have Mama’s name smeared all over the tabloids. She’d seen no point in staying in touch with any of them.
But Mo had refused to let the connection lapse. She’d sent occasional notes that would have been rude to ignore, since Daisy’s beef had never been with her stepsister. So Daisy had written back, and every now and then they’d gotten together for a lunch or dinner. When the invitation to Mo’s nuptials had arrived, Daisy hadn’t been able to resist.
The wedding at Grace Cathedral had been like something out of a fairy tale to Daisy’s nineteen-year-old eyes, and Mo and her handsome groom had looked deliriously happy. But when Daisy arrived at the reception at the Mark Hopkins Hotel a few hours ago, she’d had second thoughts about the wisdom of attending.
She didn’t belong with the throng of San Francisco’s elite that crowded the Peacock Court—she never had. Being thrust into their company again had driven home the fact, and she’d planned to leave as soon as she paid her respects to the bride and groom.
Until Nick had swept her off her feet and blown all rational thought clear out of her mind.
She still couldn’t believe he’d greeted her like a long-lost friend and ditched the reception line to squire her around. He’d always done such an excellent job of ignoring her that the sudden attention had been like grabbing hold of the business end of a live wire—hot, terrifying, and excitingly disorienting.
There’d been a look in his eyes that she hadn’t been able to define: a sense of displacement maybe, an impression of recklessness, for sure. But he’d charmed her and kept her so off balance with his touch—a guiding hand in the small of her back here, long, warm fingers wrapped around her forearm or brushing her bare shoulder there—that she’d told herself it didn’t matter. He was a golden-skinned god with flashing white teeth and streaky brown hair, dancing attendance on her, snapping pictures of her from the camera around his neck, leaving her breathless, exhilarated, dizzy.
And that was before the dancing began and she got a taste of being in his arms.
When the lights went low and the music turned slow and torchy, she’d been a goner. He’d held her so closely she’d felt him from chest to knees, and he’d been warm, hard, and very happy to see her, as the old saw went. The next thing she remembered, they were in the hotel elevator and he was kissing her; then they were in this room, on this bed, and her heart was pounding, pounding, pounding, her pulse throbbing in places she hadn’t dreamed had a pulse; and he’d been on top of her, inside of her; and just as the slight sting of her hymen rupturing pierced her consciousness, his slow hands and urgent hips had driven her to a place of screaming release.
And all Mama’s talk about love finally made sense.
She breathed in his scent as he slowly pushed up on his elbows. He looked down at her.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She was more than all right. She felt stupendous.
“Good.” He rolled off her and climbed to his feet, and Daisy propped her head in her hand to admire the play of lamplight across his naked flesh. He was so gorgeous.
That wasn’t the most masculine word in the world, she supposed, but it suited him to a T. And no one in their right mind would ever deny he was masculine. Consummately, incomparably masculine. His shoulders were wide, his biceps hard, and lean, strapping muscle defined his chest. Body hair that looked silky and soft grew in a tree-of-life pattern, a fine fan that spread over his pectorals, then dwindled into a narrow trunk that ran down rigidly defined stomach muscles to disappear into the waistband of the tuxedo slacks he’d pulled up his hard flanks.
She blinked. He was dressing? “What are you doi
ng?”
“I’ve got to go.”
A moment ago she’d felt supremely confident in her nudity; now she suddenly felt exposed. Looking around for her dress, she blushed to see it dangling from the bedside lampshade where it had snagged by a strap. Plucking a couple of tissues out of the box on the table, she dabbed surreptitiously at the smear of blood on her inner thighs and shot him a glance. “Why?”
She watched as Nick pulled on his shirt and his jacket but didn’t bother to fasten them up. He scooped the handful of shirt studs into his palm and dropped them in his pocket. Tie dangling, hands stuffed deep in his pants pockets, he looked over at her. His blue eyes softened, the corner of his mouth crooked up, and he took a step toward the bed.
Then, just as she was sure he was going to reach for her again, he pulled himself up short and squared his shoulders. “I’ve got an appointment in the morning,” he said lightly. “This has been great, but a guy needs his sleep.”
“But, I don’t understand. What about…what you said?” What about when you said you loved me?
He stared at her and just for a moment she could have sworn his eyes reflected tenderness and longing…regret. Then he shrugged and the moment was gone. “You really are young, aren’t you, Blondie? You know how the game is played—people’ll say anything in the heat of the moment.”
She hadn’t known, hadn’t even realized it was a game, and she could only stare at him in humiliated misery as he bent down, gave her a friendly peck on the cheek, and murmured for her to take care. Then the door swung closed behind Nick’s back.
And Daisy was left all alone in a room high atop the Mark Hopkins to contemplate her passage into adulthood.
1
monday
DAISY hadn’t even cleared the office door before she caught a load of grief.
Her secretary screeched and stared at her in horror. “Please tell me you don’t actually plan on wearing that,” he said.
Stopping short, Daisy glanced down at her gold wool blazer with the crest on its breast pocket, and the navy and gold plaid kilt it topped. She shut the door behind her. “What’s wrong with it? You’re the one who told me to wear a skirt.”
Reggie rolled his eyes and smoothed his own dapper suit as if to reassure himself that one of them at least was blessed with fashion sense. “I didn’t tell you to dress like Mary Catherine Parochial meets GI Jane.”
“What, the boots, you mean?” She gazed down the navy-nyloned length of her legs to her lace-up boots and the bit of scrunched socks that topped them. “They’re navy; they go.”
“Sure, if you’re bucking for the Best Dressed Combat Soldier Who Ever Rolled a Schoolgirl award. Why don’t you just throw on a set of cammies and be done with it? I can probably scrounge up some green and brown eye shadow; we’ll camouflage your face, too.”
Daisy scowled at him. “You said put on a skirt; I stopped at home and put on a skirt. I’m sorry if it isn’t up to your high standards of sartorial elegance, but I’m a security specialist, not a debutante. I don’t wear heels, Reg, so you can just forget it. I’d be useless if I needed to run.”
“It’s my fondest hope that the only running you’ll need to do is straight to the bank to deposit this new client’s check.” Reggie gave her outfit a final disparaging glance before he turned back to his computer, muttering, “That’s if he gives us a check once he gets a gander at your idea of professional attire.”
Knowing it made him crazy to be loomed over, Daisy slapped her hands down on his desk and leaned her weight on them. “Maybe, unlike most men,” she said between her teeth, “he’ll actually have half a brain in his head and realize this is professional. Granted, it’s not banker pinstripes, but it’s eminently suitable for a woman he’d like to guard his ass.”
Reggie was clearly unimpressed, and she straightened. “For crying out loud, Reg. Who is this guy, anyway—the crown prince of England?”
“Close,” said a cool voice from the doorway behind her.
No. Oh, dear God, please; no. Her heart pounding an erratic tattoo against her ribs, Daisy slowly pivoted, hoping against hope that her ears had played a trick on her.
They hadn’t. It was exactly who she’d feared it would be: Nick Coltrane. The last man in the world she wanted to see.
He was as gorgeous as ever, too, damn his blue eyes. That long, beautifully formed body looked as hard and fit as she remembered, even covered by an old pair of jeans and a V-necked sweater that was accessorized by the camera around his neck. Mo used to say that Nick looked like he was born in his tennis whites, and it was true. He had an air of casual sophistication, of belonging, that was as natural to him as breathing.
But then, why shouldn’t he? He did belong; he always had. It was she who had been the outsider.
She watched him look around her office, and seeing it through his eyes, immediately disregarded the inviting butter-cream paint job she and Reggie had given the walls to showcase the bright posters they’d framed and hung up. She didn’t see the glossy six-foot ficus tree, or Reg’s gleaming genuine woodlike desk. Instead she saw only the scuffed linoleum and the two battered wooden chairs with the garage-sale table between them against the window wall.
Then she squared her shoulders. So, big deal, it wasn’t upscale. At least it was all hers. Well, hers and the bank’s, anyway.
Nick gave her a through perusal. “How are you, Blondie? You’re looking good.”
“Don’t”—she took an incensed step forward before she caught herself—” call me Blondie,” she finished with a mildness that burned her gullet. The nickname was a hot button, and he damn well knew it, which was undoubtedly the reason he’d pushed it. She’d been sixteen years old to his twenty-two when he’d first started calling her that, and fish that she was, she never quit rising to the bait. Feeling heat radiating in her cheeks, she drew in another deep breath and held it a moment before easing it out again, perilously close to losing her composure.
She would eat worms before she gave him that satisfaction. And certainly before she’d allow him to see that when he looked at her with those cool, casually amused eyes, she felt the screaming ache of rejection all over again.
Thrusting up her chin, she gazed at him without speaking. He lounged against the door, ankles crossed and hands in his jeans pockets, and looked back at her.
“I take it you two know each other,” Reggie said when the silence had stretched thin.
“My father was married to her mother for a while,” Nick said.
Daisy froze. That was what he saw as their strongest connection? It shouldn’t hurt—not after all the other ways he’d managed to hurt her. Yet it did, and she badly wanted to get in his face and hurt him back, but damned if she’d let him see he still had the power to get to her.
Reg came to attention behind her, giving her a distraction to focus on. “Yeah?” he demanded. “Which marriage was that?”
“Her third,” she said.
“It was my dad’s fifth,” Nick offered.
Reggie, bless him, ignored Nick. “That woulda been the rich guy, then, right? The one who landed your mom on the front page of all the tabloids?”
Daisy narrowed her eyes at Nick, daring him to say one word. If he knew what was good for him he’d keep his mouth shut, because it was his father’s fault her mother had been hounded by those journalistic rags in the first place.
Nick merely gave her a level-eyed gaze, and determined to behave like an adult, she met it with a levelness of her own. “So, what’s it been, Coltrane, six, seven years since we last saw each other?” As if she didn’t know to the minute.
“Nine.”
“That long? My. Time really flies when you’re not being annoyed. What brings you slumming in my neck of the woods?”
“Uh, he’s our two o’clock, Daise.”
Slowly, she turned to look at her secretary. “He’s what?”
Reggie held his palms up in surrender. “When I made the appointment I had no idea he was your s
tep—”
“I am not her brother,” Nick cut in peremptorily, his voice flat.
Daisy turned her attention back to him. “No,” she said, “you certainly never wanted that role, did you?”
He met her angry gaze head-on. “No. I didn’t. And if you haven’t figured out why by now, you’re not half as bright as I always thought you were.”
She felt her face flame again, in remembrance and in shame. “You want to hire me?” she demanded incredulously.
“I don’t want to be within five miles of you.”
She was proud of her reasonable tone when she suggested, “Then go home. I don’t have time for your rich boy games; I’ve got a business to run.”
Nick looked around. “Yeah, I can see you’ve got clients stacked up like cordwood, all right. How do you ever get anything done?”
Please, God, let me hit him just once. Just one little pop and I’ll never ask anything of You again. “Goodbye, Nick.” Her pleated skirt flared out around her thighs as she turned on her heel and stalked to her office.
“Daisy, wait.”
Reluctantly she turned back to face him, aware of Reggie’s acute interest. Great. He’d be all over her the minute Nick left, and this fiasco would never be allowed to die a natural death. Face stony, she looked at Nick.
“I apologize,” he said. “That was uncalled for. I do want to talk to you about hiring your services.”
Damn. The gesture she made toward her door was jerky with nerves, and she blew out a frustrated breath. “Come into my office. Reg, hold my calls.” The phone hadn’t exactly been ringing off the hook lately, but Nick didn’t have to know that.
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