by Rachel Lee
Wyatt wanted to sink as his dad turned to him. “Think I didn’t remember, son? Of course I did. You were sweet on this lady.” Then he looked at Amber. “Didn’t you want to date him?”
Wyatt wanted to strangle his father. But Amber smiled faintly. “Very much, Earl,” she answered. “But he thought I was too young for him.”
“Funny,” said Earl, “how that matters less as we get older. How much longer until dinner?”
* * *
Amber really liked Earl. She could easily see how he might annoy Wyatt no end sometimes, but he obviously loved his son. Coming from that place, he could be forgiven a great deal, not that he’d really done anything wrong yet. And she could see where Wyatt had gotten much of his remarkable personality. Not all of it, of course, but quite a bit of it.
She wished she’d had a father like Earl, so involved in protecting his child. Her own father had been rather distant and had measured her by her achievements. Earl, while pushing about this election, seemed to want only what was truly best for Wyatt.
Nor had she minded hearing that Earl thought Wyatt had been sweet on her all those years ago. Wyatt probably had, but it made Amber feel good.
During dinner, which was delicious, she asked, “Did you always want Wyatt to be a judge?”
“I wouldn’t have cared if he wanted to do something besides the law, though I have to admit I often talked to him about joining my practice. But if that was my dream and not his, that was okay by me.”
Wyatt spoke. “Then why are you so wound up about this election?”
“Because you enjoy it, son. You enjoy being a judge even more than you enjoyed practicing law. I see it in you. Hell, you might become a district judge eventually, if that’s what you want. The point here is I’m not going to let that nasty woman ruin something you love. Period.”
Then Earl surprised Wyatt by turning the conversation to the practice of law, comparing notes with Amber. Just two lawyers talking about their work, about the differences between small-town solo practice and working for large firms.
As they ate, Wyatt kept fairly quiet, watching something grow between Amber and Earl. Some kind of connection, although he wasn’t sure what type. But Earl had always been good with people, Wyatt a little less so. As Earl had pointed out more than once, Wyatt could get stubborn when he shouldn’t.
Wyatt acknowledged his own stubborn streak and tried to rein it in, but he was well aware that opposition stiffened him, even if he was wrong. Every time his dad tried to tell him he needed to worry about the election, he got his back up.
Idiot, he told himself. His dad was right—he did love being a judge. Losing the position wouldn’t kill him, but it would disappoint him. Yet here he was, holding the line because he refused to bend about his personal life, because he honestly thought his personal life shouldn’t decide how people voted for him as a judge.
Yet what could he do about it? He couldn’t stop rumors if people wanted to believe them. But he also didn’t want Amber being used in some way. Certainly not as the cover story that Ellie had suggested and which Earl now seemed to be seconding.
He couldn’t say much about it right now, because Earl and Amber were deeply involved in their conversation about being lawyers. Amber appeared to be cheering up a bit, returning from wherever she had been when he came home. Irritated as he might be with his father’s butting in, he was grateful that it helped Amber.
At last Earl seemed to have gotten what he wanted, and as usual skedaddled before the cleanup. That had always amused Wyatt. From the time his mother had passed, Earl had hired someone to do all the cooking and cleaning for him. Earl might do repairs around the house, but he had apparently maintained a very old-fashioned notion of gender roles.
Wyatt didn’t mind, however. He enjoyed cooking, and cleaning was no bother. He had a crew in twice a month to do this monstrosity of a house from top to bottom simply because of the time involved, but he had no objection to doing any of the work himself. Least of all cleaning up after a meal.
Amber offered to help, and rather than make her feel like some kind of burden, he welcomed her. The job was a little more confusing because she didn’t yet know her way around the kitchen, but it gave them an opportunity to talk about the most innocuous things, like how to put the remaining chicken away and did he want to save that little bit of yellow rice. Boring, safe stuff.
But then they were done and the long evening stretched ahead. Instead of leaving her to her own devices, he asked her if she wanted to join him in the office. He had some more work to do, prep for upcoming cases, motions to review. She accepted with alacrity, then asked if there was some way she could hook up her laptop.
Well, of course there was. He soon had her wired in and settled in a deep armchair with an ottoman. Ten minutes after he started reading the motions in front of him, he looked up to see that she had fallen asleep.
He was glad to see her resting, but it made him a bit uncomfortable, too. In the lamplight, he couldn’t fail to notice that as attractive as she had been a decade ago, she had grown even more so.
She was a woman who would have caught his eye if she’d been a stranger. But she was no stranger. She was living under his roof, and he’d better submerge the impulses she was waking in him.
Sitting there while she slept, he could admit that he wanted her. Hell, he’d wanted her all those years ago but felt it would be taking advantage of her. Maybe at some level he’d never stopped wanting her.
So while his body responded, his mind put on the brakes. If he’d thought he would be taking advantage of her all those years ago, the current situation hadn’t improved things. Not while she was so wounded and so dependent on him. It wouldn’t be right.
He forced his attention back to the papers on his desk, but instead of seeing the motions, he could only see Amber.
In two short days, she seemed to have filled his life.
* * *
Amber awoke slowly, gradually becoming aware of her surroundings. She was still in Wyatt’s office at the rear of the house. Lined in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that held a lot of beautifully bound books, it was warmly lit. A heavy burgundy curtain covered the only window. His desk was large, made of mahogany, the computer on it looking out of place in a room that appeared to have come from a different era. A welcoming room.
Wyatt’s face was illuminated by the glow of his computer screen. Her own computer had been removed from her lap and set on a table beside her, its screen black as it slept.
Wyatt, she thought sleepily, must be verifying the legal references in the motions he was reviewing. The light on his face flickered a bit as he changed pages.
She was curled up in the wing-back chair, quite comfortable, and staring at Wyatt felt pleasant. All those years ago, she’d had a crush on him, hardly admitted it even to herself. Then he’d left and they’d kept in touch only loosely as life had taken her down paths far from his. But she remembered those feelings now and felt their rebirth.
Her eyelids at half-mast, she watched him and wondered. What would it be like to rest her head on his shoulder and inhale his scents? What would it be like to feel his lips on hers, his hands exploring her secrets? A trickle of barely tamped desire began to grow into a river inside her.
Was she losing it? If so, she didn’t care. He’d done not one thing to make her feel she was any more than a lost kitten he’d taken in, a stray. Kind, friendly, allowing her to make claims on a friendship from ages ago as if it had been only yesterday. Despite what Earl had said about Wyatt being sweet on her all those years ago, that didn’t seem to be true now.
Earl’s concerns floated back to her, and she decided that Wyatt might not be making the best decisions for himself. Yes, he’d come riding to her rescue. He’d always been a bit of a white knight in her experience, but he was putting an awful lot at risk. His ex-girlfrien
d apparently still harbored enough of a grudge that she wanted to hurt him, and what better way than by costing him an election?
Wyatt could dismiss those concerns, but Amber discovered she couldn’t. She had dealt with enough clients to know that taking the high road wasn’t always the best solution. In fact, those who were willing to sink to the lowest level often took advantage of those who refused to.
Was he really that unconcerned?
She stirred and discovered that he’d draped a dark blue throw over her legs to keep her warm. He looked up.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
The words popped out without warning. “We should get engaged.”
Under other circumstances she might have enjoyed seeing Wyatt flummoxed. After all, he was always so controlled and in charge of himself. But she heard her own words on the silent air, took in his expression and wondered what devil had possessed her.
“Sheesh,” she said.
The stunned expression on his face began to slip into amusement. “I hope it was a nice dream.”
For some reason that irritated her. “I wasn’t dreaming about you,” she said sharply. Or had she been? Any dream had vanished like a wisp of smoke, whatever it had been. But certainly those words had popped out of her as if they had begun somewhere earlier.
They had begun earlier. With his father. With the feeling she might cost him something very important by staying with him as a friend, especially if people saw her going to the obstetrician. Maybe Earl could get out in front of it, explain that she had left a broken relationship in Chicago and was indeed just visiting for a short while. But how would that help stop the viciousness that Ellie was spreading? While she agreed with Wyatt that it shouldn’t matter to people, she knew that in the real world such things did matter.
“Did Earl get to you?” he asked finally.
“I guess he did.”
“Don’t let him.”
“Actually,” she said, stiffening her spine, “I thought your father made some good points. I saw you in the courtroom. You’re a good judge, Wyatt. Very good. People here are lucky to have a judge like you, and you love it. So it just seemed to me that since I’m going to be here awhile, we could get engaged, turn the gossip around and then break up eventually. It’s not a big deal for me.”
He was silent for a while, steepling his fingers and sitting back in his chair. “I don’t like pretense,” he said finally. “I appreciate your generosity, but...” He shook his head.
All of a sudden she felt scalded by shame. Maybe she was, in a different way, no better than Ellie. Proposing to live a lie? Of course he would object. “I’m sorry. I know you better than that.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said quietly. “You weren’t fully awake, and my father is probably responsible for your thoughts running in that direction. He was sure trying.”
She wished she could hide her face, but she had more backbone than that. “Was he?”
“In an indirect way, yes. It’s okay, Amber. You’re just trying to help, and he was busy planting ideas that you could. He can be subtle, sometimes, but never say he doesn’t understand the human psyche. With a different upbringing he’d probably have been a great con man.”
She gasped. “That’s how you see your father?”
He laughed quietly. “No, but I’ve had a lot of years to get to know him. He’d never con anyone. But he does know how to, um, get people moving in a direction he wants. Not exactly manipulative. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It just comes naturally.”
“It’d be a useful skill with a jury,” she admitted.
“Well, that’s what we lawyers try to do in a trial. Make a jury see the case favorably for our clients. Nothing wrong with that. The other side is working just as hard to make everything look bad for us. So Earl is good at what he does.”
“Well, I’m still sorry. I hope I didn’t offend you.”
He smiled. “I was more worried about trying to find a way to say no that wouldn’t offend you. I know you well enough to be reasonably certain you weren’t thinking of your offer in the way I took it.”
“No,” she admitted, looking down and picking at the blanket over her legs. “Not for a second did I see it as a lie, though obviously it would have been. So I guess you were right when you said I wasn’t fully awake.”
“How did you see it?”
Her blush returned. “Well, the part about being engaged to you sounded pretty good. The part about breaking it off didn’t sound good at all.”
A hearty laugh escaped him. “Thanks for the honesty. I wouldn’t mind being engaged to you, either. If it were real. So there we are.”
Yes, there they were, Amber thought. He turned back to his work, and she reached for her laptop to find something to get her mind to a safe harbor.
Because it was true she wouldn’t mind being engaged to him. She thought she’d like it a whole lot. But there was just one little obstacle to that kind of happiness: another man’s baby.
* * *
After that little scene, Wyatt could no longer concentrate on the legal motions in front of him. He’d had trouble earlier because he was responding to her as a man, and that kind of sexual response was always distracting. People distracted by those urges got themselves into a pickle sometimes, as he saw so often in family court.
But they were still distracting, he still kept feeling a desire to make love with her, and...her suggestion of an engagement had acted like a match in tinder. The man who sat on a bench wearing an impressive robe and looking down at a courtroom full of people while dispensing justice was still just an ordinary man with ordinary needs.
From the moment he had welcomed her to his home with a hug, he’d been uneasily aware that this situation was going to be difficult. In some ways they didn’t know each other very well even after all these years. In others...well, the passion he’d never allowed to blossom with her was still there, like a seedling that had just poked its head up to the sun. It wanted to grow and spread.
He didn’t believe in pretense, but the idea of trying out an engagement with her didn’t repel him. The trying out was different and could be accomplished by that famous old ritual called dating.
Amused by the direction of his thoughts and the constant background hum of desire in his body, he glanced up to see Amber studiously staring at her computer. He’d made her uncomfortable, and while he’d tried to smooth it over for her, he was sure she was still wondering what had possessed her. Experienced lawyers rarely just blurted things.
And while he’d blamed it on his dad in order to make her less embarrassed, the truth was Earl hadn’t in even the slightest way suggested a pretend engagement. He thought Amber should hang around, not leave, said he was going to get out in front of the gossip, but Wyatt knew his dad well enough to be sure the man wouldn’t lie. As for mentioning to Amber that Wyatt had been sweet on her all those years ago... Well, Wyatt honestly believed Earl hadn’t had an ulterior motive. It was probably his father’s attempt to make Amber feel comfortable about staying.
Which was the other thing about Earl. Wyatt didn’t really see him as capable of conning anyone, but he had a good instinct for saying things in a way that would lead others in the direction he wanted.
Still, he hadn’t tried to manipulate anyone today. In fact, it was kind of interesting to see where Amber’s mind had taken their before-dinner discussion. Evidently she felt a need to act, not just sit back and let matters take their own course.
He forced his gaze back to the motions in front of him. He wasn’t going to take advantage of Amber. She was down on her luck and in an awful situation. Nor was he going to let anyone else use her.
He believed his father truly understood that. And if Ellie tried to drag Amber into her gossip war, she was going to be one sorry woman.
Chapter Seven
Amber’s appointment with the obstetrician was at four in the afternoon that Thursday. To her surprise, Wyatt wanted to go with her.
“But...that might cause even more talk!”
He arched a brow at her. “So? You’re staying with me. And if she has any special directions about diet and so on, maybe I need to hear it.”
She threw up a hand, feeling at once frustrated and touched. “You’ll drive me mad, Wyatt. Women do this on their own all the time.”
“I know, and I’m quite sure you can do it all by yourself. But you don’t need to while you’re staying with me, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me in.”
“Let you in?” Confused, she stared at him. They were standing by the front door, ready to go out, and things had just taken a strange turn.
“You’re going to have a baby. I get that single mothers succeed all the time. Women are strong. I’ve seen it, I’ve heard the arguments and... I’m still feeling a responsibility toward you and this child.”
She felt her jaw drop. “To the child? This baby isn’t even yours!”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I can’t take an interest its father won’t take. Or that I don’t feel a responsibility toward it.”
“God, do you feel responsible for everything?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Only for those things I can do something about.”
Realizing that if she climbed into her own car and drove off by herself he’d probably just follow her—this wasn’t the first time she’d seen signs that he could be stubborn—she gave in. As he drove her to the office, she even had to admit there was a tiny bit of comfort in his caring enough to do this.
Her future yawned in front of her like a huge gulf that held nothing. She was having trouble imagining that in about seven months there’d be a baby in her life. She was getting closer to it, but it still seemed...like someone else’s dream. Maybe this visit today would make it feel more real.