by Carly Carson
"Don't think for one minute I'm crying over you! Good riddance to you."
"Very mature," he snapped. "You could have chosen a better way to get rid of me. Do you know how serious the consequences of your behavior will be?"
"My behavior? Do I know about the consequences?" For a long moment, she thought she might go off in hysteria like a nineteenth century maiden. How had she landed in this cliché? Pregnant by a man who not only accepted no responsibility, but who also was furious with her, as if it were entirely her fault. Forget the nineteenth century. She should be thinking of cave man days since she was dealing with a Neanderthal.
"What about you?" she said. "You don't have any responsibility for this mess?"
He jerked up his head to stare at her. "What are you talking about? How in the world could you blame me?"
She burst into laughter. The hysterical note she'd been afraid of echoed through the laugh, but she was helpless to stop. If she'd ever wondered whether a relationship with him were possible, she had her answer now.
"Guess what, Logan?" She stepped closer, and poked a finger into his chest. "I am not one of your prostitutes. We may not have a relationship, but it takes two to tango and you don't get to pretend you had nothing to do with it."
"Are you talking about sex?" He batted away her hand. "This was payback to me? Because I wouldn't have a relationship with you?" He shook his head. "Damn. You women are all the same. I told you right from the beginning that I only wanted sex."
"Guess what? Your fine words don't absolve you now."
"Jesus." He grabbed the laptop and began tapping on the keys. "How is any of this my responsibility?"
An email filled the screen. Logan pointed to it. "A computerized trail is as damning as a paper one."
Amanda frowned. Why were they looking at emails?
"What is this?" Her body felt stiff, as if it were preparing to ward off a blow.
"Your note to Mrs. Molloy," he said curtly. "The one where you tell her we're not interested in pursuing a deal with them due to her disability. I'm sure you haven't forgotten it."
His finger stabbed at the damning words:
Mrs. Molloy, I'm sympathetic to your disability. However, your insistence on remaining in a management role after a purchase convinces us that we should not move forward. We cannot have a seriously ill executive in charge of one of our companies. Daily Eats would need to undergo a significant turnaround to be profitable enough to interest Winter Enterprises, and this would require new management.
Amanda had to stop reading as the ugly words rolled around in her brain. Why did Logan think she'd sent this note?
"You think I wrote that?" Her finger shook as she pointed at the screen. "Is that what you think of me?"
"Look at the email address," he said, with disgust in his tone. "Who's it from?"
She grabbed the monitor. Damn. The note had been sent from her work email account.
Her stomach roiled with nausea. "I never wrote that," she said.
Logan gave her a disgusted look. "Do you know how hard I've worked to build my company? Do you know how close you've come to destroying it all?" He held up his hand, with all five fingers extended.
She shook her head numbly, but he ignored the motion.
"Number one." He folded in his thumb. "My public offering was canceled."
Amanda sucked in a sharp breath. She hadn't given another thought to the dinner that Josh had told her had been canceled last night. No wonder Logan was furious.
"Number two." Logan's forefinger joined the thumb. "Since the public sale didn't take place, my good friend didn't get the money he needed, and which I promised to him."
"Number three." His middle finger toppled. "Now I'm forced to try to get a loan to help my friend save his home."
"Number four." His ring finger folded down. "The Molloys are furious, and rightly so. They've filed a discrimination lawsuit against me. I can scarcely blame them."
"Stop." Amanda held up her own hand, unable to listen to any more. Even worse, she'd just had a terrible realization. He hadn't heard about the pregnancy. Number five was the disaster he didn't know about yet.
"Stop?" He glared at her. "You don't want to hear the consequences of your actions? Too damn bad."
"You're pretty quick to judge me," she said.
"The evidence speaks for itself!"
"What evidence? I did not send that note."
"Should I say nice try?" Logan shook his head. "You can plainly see that you're the author." He gestured to the screen.
"I—"
"Don't try to defend yourself," he interrupted. "I already did that. I was fool enough to think you couldn't have done it. I didn't want to believe you would be so heartless." He paused, and Amanda tensed for the final blow she could see he planned to deliver.
Logan blew out a disgusted breath. "I had one of the IT guys confirm that it came, not just from your email, but from your office computer."
Amanda could only stare. Why would someone have done this to her? More importantly, who had done this to her? She needed to find out. Now.
She looked down at her frumpy sweats. She needed to take a shower, get dressed and head for the office—
A new horror slammed over her. She'd been fired. How had she managed to forget that already? She couldn't go into the office and talk to the IT people, or anyone else who might help her figure out what had happened. Even worse, she'd lost her health insurance, and her paycheck, two things she needed more than ever.
"You can't fire me," she said.
Logan didn't even hesitate over the change in the topic. "Thanks to you," he snarled, "I still own one hundred percent of the company. I can do whatever I want."
She rubbed her forehead, wishing she could think clearly. Too much was coming at her to sort out the critical from the merely awful.
"Wait a minute." She looked up at Logan. "No one would cancel a public offering over a letter like that." She pointed at his computer. "What else happened?"
He pressed his lips together. "That's not the point."
"It certainly is. Two of the four things I'm alleged to have done to ruin you are related to that public offering. What else happened?"
He sat down abruptly on her sofa and pushed a hand through his hair. "If you must know, Phoebe Cattus was running an escort service out of the office. The news broke Friday morning."
Amanda slid bonelessly onto a chair facing him. "Wow."
Something niggled at the back of her brain, but she couldn't tease it out yet. "That was enough to derail the offering?"
A tinge of red appeared on his cheekbones. "There was more, but that was the gist of it."
More? Amanda studied him for a minute before the light went on. Someone had discovered that he used an escort service. Maybe the same one.
"No," he said, "not hers. Give me credit for some taste."
With a big effort, she resisted rolling her eyes. "Sooo…" She drew out the word. "Is it my fault that the use of escort services torpedoed your public offering?"
"Phoebe was clever," he admitted. "She told me she'd get back at me for firing her. She held a press conference at 8 o'clock yesterday morning. Plenty of time for the blogging world to pick up the news before the stock exchange opened."
"When did you find out about the discrimination lawsuit?"
"Those papers were filed Thursday afternoon. We spent all of Thursday night trying to contain the fallout from that."
"Really?" Amanda raised her eyebrows. "You don't think that's too much of a coincidence? Phoebe Cattus is involved in both of the actions that derailed your public offering."
"Don't be paranoid. How would she get access to your computer?"
"I don't know." Amanda sneezed. "But I do know I did not write that note. Think about it. I have a sister disabled from a serious disease. Would I hurt another person with those words? Furthermore, I would never close down any deal on my own authority. Least of all this deal." Her words rolled around in her hea
d, taunting her. "This was the company I wanted to run," she said sadly. "Didn't you know that?"
He shrugged. "I thought you'd changed your mind."
"Why?"
He closed his laptop, as if giving her notice that her time had run out. "Managing Daily Eats would have required a move to Philadelphia," he said. "I thought maybe you'd decided you didn't want to move and figured the best way to eliminate the opportunity would be to sabotage the deal."
"Excuse me," she said carefully. "What made you think I wouldn't want to move?"
He stretched his long legs out in front of him and seemed to study his toes. "Hell. I was a damn fool."
"Yes, we've established that. But I still don't know why you thought I wouldn't move to Philadelphia."
His gaze snapped to her face. "I thought you might have been hoping for a relationship with me."
Her mouth opened. Actually fell open in shock. All this time she'd been thinking she'd hidden her feelings. She was as much of a fool as he was.
Then another thought sideswiped her. The pregnancy. For a few minutes, she'd managed to forget that calamity again.
How was she ever going to tell him about the pregnancy?
Given what he'd just said, he would be sure to think she'd tried to trap him.
Logan frowned, as if he'd been listening to her thoughts. "Why were you carrying on about this being my fault?"
"Why did you say you knew why I didn't come into work yesterday?" she countered. "I didn't know about this lawsuit."
"Josh didn't warn you the offering had been pulled?"
"Uh—" At her hesitation, a cynical look entered his eyes.
"He called," she said quickly. "But only to tell me the dinner was off."
"He didn't tell you why? You didn't ask?" Logan shook his head. "Come on, Amanda. You're not stupid."
She couldn't even take comfort from that backhanded compliment. The father of her child didn't think she was dumb, but he despised her.
She took a deep breath, trying to crowd out the dread that crept through every cell of her body. She had to tell him and get it over with. There was no point in thinking he might be more receptive to the news if he were in a better mood, because he was never going to be in a better mood with her.
"I didn't ask Josh for any details because I was in the doctor's office when he called." She swallowed. This was going to be hard, very hard.
"I'm sorry you're sick." The words were perfunctory. He stood up, clearly intending to leave.
"I'm not exactly sick." She heard the note of desperation in her voice. She had to tell him before he left because, in the back of her mind, a plan was forming. He wouldn't fire her if she were pregnant.
Would he?
She had to have that job. Even if Daily Eats were a lost cause, and she would get to the bottom of who'd sent that note if it was the last thing she ever did, she still needed an income and health insurance. Her baby was more important than her pride.
She opened her mouth, and the words finally spilled out. "I'm pregnant."
Chapter 25
Logan collapsed back onto the sofa, closing his eyes as if he couldn't bear even to look at her. For a long moment, there was no sound in the room.
"You know," he said softly, "I suppose on some level I always knew I’d be caught this way."
"Caught?" The word strangled in her throat. "How are you caught?"
He placed his computer back on the table carefully and looked at her, his gray eyes expressionless. "I presume you’re expecting me to marry you."
Amanda gasped. "You presume too much!" She surged to her feet. "I have no intention of marrying you."
His gaze never wavered. "Then what is the point of the big confession?"
"Good question," she snapped. "If I ever figure out why I thought you might be interested in knowing you were going to be a father, I’ll be sure to let you know." Thank you, God, she said, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. She got the whole thing out without a single tremor.
Turning on her heel she walked across the room and yanked open the front door. "Out!"
"Damnit, Amanda—" He stood up and hefted his laptop once more.
She had to say something to get him to leave before she broke down completely. "You can console yourself," she said, "with the fact that the doctor said I wasn't likely to be able to hold onto the pregnancy." It wasn't true. What doctor would say that? But he was a guy. He wouldn't know. If he believed her, he might decide he was well and truly off the hook, and get out of her life. She'd carry on by herself.
***
Before the weekend was over, Logan knew he'd badly bungled his confrontation with Amanda. He wasn't ready to absolve her of guilt in the matter of the Daily Eats email, but that issue was overshadowed by his clumsiness in how he handled the announcement of the pregnancy.
For one critical moment, he'd been terrified at the thought of bringing into the world a child of his own seed who would need his love, a person who would plunge him into the morass of human emotions he had permanently forsworn. He didn’t want any claims on his emotions. Hadn’t he made that clear enough?
But the look in Amanda’s eyes at his response had been a dagger thrown deeply into his heart. He feared it might end up being more painful than the emotional pull of a child.
That didn't mean he was ready to forgive her for her betrayal. No matter how he sifted the news about the pregnancy, he couldn't imagine a scenario where she was innocent. Yeah, they'd had that one unprotected moment. But she'd initiated that encounter, and she'd been the one to slide over him without protection. His blood heated at the memory. But no matter how good the ungloved slide had felt, he hadn't lost his head. He'd been the one to stop and insist on the condom, not her.
He had to conclude that she wasn't on the pill as she'd said. If she had been, she wouldn't have gotten pregnant even with that one unprotected moment. If she'd lied about the pill, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that she might have been trying to trap him by getting pregnant.
That was an unforgivable betrayal.
He sighed, flipping on the CD player in the limo. A Debussy sonata wrapped around him, and he tried to lose himself in the music. But guilt hammered at him.
No matter how the pregnancy had happened, he had some level of responsibility. Of course, he intended to support the child and be involved in his or her life, but he feared that wouldn't be enough. He really couldn't simply walk away from the child's mother. Amanda was a strong woman, but she didn't seem to have a good support network. Her mother was already dealing with the sick sister and living in Denver, her best friend was in France, and Logan himself had just cut her off from her job and health insurance.
One fact was inescapable. Although she deserved firing for the Daily Eats email, he would have to arrange some kind of a job for her now that she was pregnant. He'd have to have a talk with Letty in HR and see what could be worked out.
With that decision made, he tried to clear his mind and attack Monday's work. He'd wait until mid-morning to call Amanda. She hadn't looked well on Saturday, and he hoped she was sleeping in.
***
Amanda had been up at dawn on Monday morning. By 7, she was in the office, talking to a tech about the email message to the Molloys. She didn't know if Logan would send a security guard to throw her out of the office, but she had to take the chance.
Unfortunately, the tech confirmed what Logan had said. The message had definitely been sent from Amanda's computer. Which meant someone had used her computer to send it.
The pieces of the puzzle swarmed around in her head. Her email would have had to be open. How did the person know what to say to the Molloys? Who knew enough about the Daily Eats deal and also had reason to try to create trouble for her?
She texted Rosie and begged her to come in early and meet her for breakfast.
"It would take balls to sneak into your office and type on your computer," Rosie said after hearing the story about the email.
"But it fe
els like a female thing to do," Amanda argued. "The sneakiness."
"Yeah, it would be easy to be trapped in an office. With the cubicles, you could hear someone coming and simply move on."
"Wait!" Amanda dropped the plastic spoon she was using to eat a carton of plain yogurt. "I surprised Phoebe in my office one day. She—"
"Phoebe!" Rosie slapped her hand on the table. "Who else? She's hated your guts since the first day."
"What did I ever do to her?"
"Attracted the boss," Rosie said wryly. "That's all it took to piss off a conniving bitch like Phoebe."
"I didn't—"Amanda cut herself off. She could hardly argue she hadn't attracted the boss after everything that had happened.
"Right." Rosie grinned. "No point denyin' he's got the hots for you."
"Had," Amanda corrected absently. "I'm fired, by the way."
Rosie gasped. "No way!"
"Yes, way. Hurry up." She waved at Rosie's breakfast. "I need to go confront Phoebe." Her own small appetite had fled.
"Wait!" Rosie waved her hands in the air. "Back up a minute. Why are you fired?"
"Never mind that now. I need to get my job back and the way to do that is to prove that someone else sent that email."
"Ugh." Rosie dropped her bagel onto her plate. "You can't confront Phoebe. She's fired, too."
"What?" Amanda's mind was so focused on what she was going to say to Phoebe, she almost couldn't process the change in direction. "What the heck?" she exclaimed. "Has he got some kind of firing fetish?"
"Say 'hell'," Amanda." Rosie snapped her fingers. "This jerk fired you after hearing you were pregnant with his child? That's insane, not to mention illegal! You should be sayin', 'What the hell is wrong with that man? Has he got some kind of a fucking firing fetish?'"
The 'f' words stumbled all over themselves as giggles bubbled up inside Amanda. She struggled to keep her composure, but when her gaze met Rosie's, they both burst into laughter.
"See, that's why I don't curse," Amanda said. "It sounds so ridiculous unless it's coming from a soldier in the field."
"Have you ever heard a soldier in the field?" Rosie demanded.
"Well, no, but I imagine they have plenty to curse about."