She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Not if you’re buying.”
Rafe looked at her as if she’d just impugned his integrity. “I’m the man.”
His answer made her smile. Greer began to relax a little. “That doesn’t automatically mean anything anymore.”
His gaze swept over her from head to foot, as if he were taking full measure of her. She could almost feel it as it passed over her. Again, her breath insisted on lodging itself in her throat. The condition was threatening to become a permanent one.
“It does to me.”
She’d come to consider that way of thinking as Neanderthal. Why did hearing him espouse it fill her with a sense of sweetness now?
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she think straight? Why was he scrambling all of her circuits so badly? He was just a man. A being comprised of tissues and bones and blood vessels…
Yes, but those tissues and bones and blood vessels all seemed to be so beautifully arranged, a small voice within her whispered.
Somehow, she managed to find her tongue. “I take it you’re the old-fashioned type.”
Although that wasn’t strictly true, she realized. An old-fashioned male wouldn’t diaper a baby or concern himself with all the details involved with making a baby comfortable the way he did. And an old-fashioned male wouldn’t be trying to secure single-parent custody.
His frown dismissed the label. “Old-fashioned, new-fashioned, only one fashion as far as I’m concerned. The right fashion.” Still holding her hand, something she was acutely aware of, he drew her toward the doorway. “Now, let’s go.”
For the first time since she’d met him, genuine amusement began to edge its way forward for Greer. “Whatever you say, ‘fiancé.’”
His eyes met hers. She could almost feel his smile as it slowly slipped along his lips, curving them. “As long as we’re clear about that.”
She found herself staring at the back of his head, fighting the urge to run her fingers through his hair, as he led the way.
But their exit was blocked by the tall, rangy man who suddenly materialized out of nowhere and stood in the doorway. Surprised, Greer took a step back. Though she didn’t know everyone who worked at the clinic by name, part of her job was to coordinate all the different departments, so she knew most of them by sight.
She didn’t know this man.
The look the stranger gave her was polite, curious. As an afterthought, he nodded at Rafe, but his words were addressed to Greer. “Excuse me, are you Greer Lawford?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rafe saw Greer transformed again. Gone was the uncertain young woman, to be replaced by someone who was all business.
“Yes?”
The stranger entered the room without waiting for an invitation. “They told me to come to see you about the job. My name’s Mick Hanon.”
Chapter 8
Greer shook her head at the man who was standing just inside the room.
“I’m afraid someone misinformed you, Mr. Hanon,” she told him. “I don’t handle the hiring for the clinic. You need to see—”
He cut her off. “Not a job, the job.” The dark-haired man laughed easily. “Sorry, I guess I’m not making myself clear. I’m already hired. I’m working at the construction site,” he added, in case that wasn’t obvious from the jeans and work shirt he had on or the hard hat he was holding in his hand. “But the foreman said I was just supposed to check in with you before I got started.” He jerked a thumb toward the western end of the building, beyond which the new wing was going up. “Something about a form to sign?”
Rafe’s sudden appearance on what she considered to be her territory had really disoriented her, Greer thought with disgust. There was no other explanation for forgetting the fact that Mrs. Maitland had her keeping a running file on all the people brought in to work on the new west wing. It had to do with the paperwork required by worker’s compensation in case any of them were injured while on the job.
Greer’s mouth curved in an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m afraid things are a little hectic around here right now.” Reaching over to her desk, she extracted a folder that had doubled in size since the first of the month. She flipped it open and pulled out a fresh form. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Mick Hanon. Two n’s separated by an o.” As he spelled it for her, he made no attempt to hide the fact that he was looking Rafe over and taking the measure of him the way one man did of another when on uncertain ground. Mick Hanon had his own reasons for taking this job and lack of funds was not among them.
“Now, if you’ll just sign this.” Greer turned the single page around on her desk to face him and offered Mick a pen.
Taking it, he scanned the page quickly, then wrote his signature in the appropriate place.
She turned the page back around, jotted a couple of notes down beneath Mick’s name, then closed the folder. She made a mental note to transcribe everything onto the computer when she returned as a backup.
Finished, she glanced up at Mick. “There, painless.”
Mick nodded politely. Hopefully, that was a prophesy, he thought.
Donning his hard hat, he began to back out of the office. “Okay, then, I’d better get back to work. Maybe we’ll see each other again,” he added as he tipped his hat to her.
Greer suddenly became aware that Rafe had slipped his hand to her shoulder in a manner that could only be called proprietary. As if he was staking his claim lest the other man get any ideas.
He was playing this charade to the hilt, she thought, trying to squelch the sliver of a thrill she felt when he touched her.
This was a game, nothing more. Getting carried away would only be dangerous.
The silent warning fell several feet short of its mark.
“You ready now?” There was just a shade of impatience in Rafe’s voice as he asked the question.
There was something else she wanted to note down, she realized, but it would keep. It was certainly not important enough to make Rafe wait any longer. Especially when he seemed to be impatient to get going.
“Yes.” She stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind them. The lock clicked into place. “By the way, where’s the light of your life? Bethany,” she explained when Rafe didn’t respond right away.
He was still trying to figure out why he’d felt so territorial when Hanon had looked at Greer. There certainly hadn’t been anything insulting about the man’s manner. What the hell was wrong with him? Annoyed with himself, Rafe shook off the mood.
“At the day-care center.” He thought it rather poetic to have one on the premises, seeing as how the clinic was mainly concerned with pregnant women. “Megan thought it might be a good idea to have Bethany around other kids near her own age.”
Greer noticed that he’d referred to his aunt by only her first name. It was probably going to take him some time to think of the woman as his aunt. How long would it take for Rafe to adjust to the idea that he had a half brother and sister he’d never known anything about?
Maybe it was her imagination, but he didn’t seem as resentful or cynical when he mentioned family members as he had been at first. Maybe things were slowly working themselves out.
She found herself being glad for him.
Though he valued his privacy, the silence that accompanied them as they walked out of the building was a shade too quiet for Rafe. He found himself hunting around for a topic.
“So you’re a big wheel around here,” he finally commented as he led the way to the car Greer had arranged for him to rent. When he’d pulled into the lot earlier, a car in the very first row was just leaving, so the walk was short.
“No, I’m the assistant to the big wheel,” Greer corrected him. Attention made her as uncomfortable as flattery did. She worked best behind the scenes, in someone else’s shadow, free in her anonymity to do what was necessary. “I’m just there to make sure it’s properly greased and running.”
There was nothing conceited about her, Rafe thought. A lot of people with far less important positions strutted around as if the world wouldn’t rotate on its axis without their help. He had the feeling that had never been the case with Greer. He’d never given humbleness any thought one way or another, but on Greer he had to admit it looked good. He’d never had any patience with the pompous asses of the world.
Rounding the hood, he flipped the car’s locks and got in. “Looks like more than that to me.”
Greer buckled herself in and shrugged. “There are a great many details that go into running the clinic. I try to make that easier for Mrs. Maitland. Coordinating events, fund-raisers, keeping tabs on insurance issues, things like that.”
She made it sound like nothing, but he had a hunch it was one hell of a juggling act. Rafe thought of what had initially brought her into his life.
“What about the Christmas reunion? Seems to me that doesn’t have anything to do with running the actual clinic.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask where they were going, but she let the question go for now. If he’d wanted her to know, he would have told her. Maybe it was a surprise.
The next moment, she laughed at herself for giving the moment qualities that only existed between people when they cared about each other. If she wasn’t careful, she really was going to start buying into the illusion they were attempting to create.
Greer redirected her thoughts to the conversation. “Sure it does. It keeps the head of the clinic and the board happy.”
She’d lost him. “The board?”
“Of the clinic,” she clarified. “Most of it’s comprised of the family—R.J., Anna, Abby—” Greer stopped before she wound up naming all the members of the family. “And the others.”
He spared her a glance before turning the steering wheel to the right. He’d studied a map before he’d gone to seek her out, something he knew the others at the ranch back home would have laughed at him for. But he didn’t want to look like some hick visiting the “big city” for the first time.
“Any nonfamily members on the board?”
“A few.” She knew the names would mean nothing to him if she repeated them. “New blood to keep Maitland Maternity at the apex of medicine as it applies to pregnancies, infertilities and babies.”
The clinic was strictly a nonprofit organization, but that didn’t mean it had to fall behind the new strides being made. Quite the opposite. Maitland Maternity was considered to be on the cutting edge as far as infertility research and treatments were concerned.
They stopped at a light. “And how do you fit into all this?”
She looked at him oddly. He already knew the answer to that. It had been the first thing out of her mouth when she’d introduced herself to him in Nevada. They’d just talked about it in the office. “I’m Mrs. Maitland’s assistant.”
Taking his foot off the brake, he shook his head. “No, I mean in this atmosphere of babies, born, unborn and wished for.”
She sat up a little straighter. “You mean because I’m not married and don’t have my own family?”
She seemed so cloistered to him, so removed from the very idea of children. Hell, she hadn’t even known how to hold Bethany when he’d first handed the little girl to her. At first glance, he would have said she seemed like a fish out of water.
“Something like that.”
That seemed a slightly narrow-minded judgment from where she sat. Luckily Mrs. Maitland hadn’t thought like him or else she would have missed out on what she viewed as the best opportunity of her life.
“I don’t have to be a pilot to appreciate a plane ride,” she pointed out. “I like the work that’s being done here. I’ve worked in the corporate world, and frankly, the killer instinct is not pleasant to be around.”
She watched familiar places pass by. Where was he taking her? Was he lost? She forced herself to bite back the question. She might not know much about men, but she knew they hated being given directions. She supposed that insulted some basic pathfinder instinct they all thought they were created with.
“What I’ve witnessed since I came to work for Maitland Maternity has restored my faith in the basic goodness of human nature,” she told him. “Your aunt will not allow a single pregnant woman to be turned away, whether or not that woman has the means to pay for the services she needs.”
Pressing down on the accelerator, Rafe just made it through a light before it turned red. “So you’ve said.”
She flushed. “I guess I probably sound like a cheering section for your aunt, but I assure you, I’m not alone.”
She wasn’t ashamed of how she felt about her work or about Megan Maitland. It wasn’t every day you found something or someone to believe in.
Just like it wasn’t every day you fell in love.
Where had that come from? she wondered, surprised by the last thought. She was going to have to exercise better control over the way her mind meandered.
“Your aunt and Maitland Maternity have done an incredible amount of good in the last twenty-five years. I feel lucky to be working for her.”
Rafe glanced at her before looking back at the traffic. She sounded completely sincere. It rather amazed him. “Way I see it, she’s lucky to have you.”
That thought had never occurred to her. “Me?”
Her surprise amused him. Didn’t the woman have any sense of what she was? “Sure. How many people are willing to go out on a limb and do what you did just so that their ‘boss’ could get what she wanted?”
He meant the false engagement, Greer realized. “If you’re referring to the charade, I honestly thought you were just testing me.”
He laughed. He hadn’t thought of her as being sharp in that way. “I was. You passed.”
“I mean I didn’t think you were serious.”
“I wasn’t, at first,” he admitted. He smiled in her direction. “I figured it was the fastest way to get rid of you. But you didn’t go.”
The confession made her smile. A lot of people made that mistake with her. “I might look like a pushover, but I’m not.”
The word was demeaning and not one he’d apply to her now that he was getting to know her. The woman was bright, intelligent and efficient. That didn’t spell pushover in his book.
“I don’t think you look like a pushover.”
She remembered the look in his eyes when he’d made the proposition.
“Oh, please, one look at me and you thought you could run over me with one of your smallest horses.” She sighed, her mind drifting back before she could shut the memories out. “But I learned a long time ago to stand up for myself. If I didn’t, there was nobody else to do it.” She dismissed the mood that was overtaking her. “That’s why I like your aunt so much. She stands up for other people, for people who can’t or no longer have the will to stand up for themselves.”
“Pretty altruistic,” he commented, still not certain if he completely bought into it, though he had to admit that the more he got to know his aunt, the more he liked her. A little like with Greer, he mused.
“She said it was because she didn’t want anyone to go through what she once had.”
“And what was that?”
She realized that Rafe knew little about the family he’d suddenly discovered and that the right to explain lay with Megan. But she knew the other woman wouldn’t mind if she did a little of the clarifying herself. Megan would want Rafe to understand. “She had a baby out of wedlock when she was seventeen. A baby boy her father told her died at birth.”
“But he didn’t.” Given her tone, Rafe figured it was a safe guess.
She hadn’t been there for the initial reunion, but she’d heard the story from Megan one afternoon. There’d been tears in the woman’s eyes as she spoke.
“You had dinner with him the other night.” Rafe raised a curious brow as he looked at her. “Connor. You and your siblings aren’t the only ones who’ve been missing from her life. Connor w
as taken away by Mrs. Maitland’s father and secretly sold to the senior Maitland for his daughter.”
That sounded rather melodramatic for this day and age. She was probably exaggerating. “Sold?”
“In effect. Mrs. Maitland’s father was given monetary compensation for the boy.” According to Mrs. Maitland, she’d discovered that her father had done it because he felt she was too young to raise a child alone. The money had been set aside to help her, not because he’d wanted to make a profit on her mistake. “Connor was adopted and no one was the wiser for almost forty-five years.”
He gathered that there had been some sort of a reckoning that had brought all of this to light. “So what happened?”
Since he knew nothing about Connor, he wouldn’t know about his sister’s duplicity in the matter. She had no idea if he was close to Janelle or not. Greer became deliberately evasive.
“I’m afraid it’ll take more than a short luncheon to explain.” She was going to need diplomacy and diplomacy took time.
He picked up on the word. “Why short? You don’t punch a clock, do you?” He didn’t think someone in her position would have to account for her time, especially since he had a feeling that she skipped most of her lunches in deference to her work.
“No, I don’t punch a clock, but there’s always so much to do.” She’d wasted most of this morning and she could ill afford to do that. “I’m never finished.”
Rafe grinned. “That just translates into job security.”
They drove down the next street in silence.
Maybe he was lost and trying to find his way. She glanced at her watch again. “Maybe I should be driving.”
He leaned forward to read a sign, his voice testy. “Why?”
“Because I know the streets better. Are you always this touchy?”
“Pretty much,” he said honestly, “when I’m not in my element.”
She knew he’d drifted around a little before settling at the ranch where he now worked. She had a feeling he felt at home there. That gave him a great deal in common with some of the Maitland men. “And that element would be horses.”
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