by Sandra Hyatt
“You’re angry?” He fell into step beside her and reached for her hand.
“Yes.”
He interlaced their fingers. “Are you going to yell?”
Their shoulders brushed. “Maybe. If you bring it up again.”
It was another minute before he spoke again. “Would we get to have angry sex?”
She bit her lip. This was not funny. She would not laugh. She caught a faint trace of his cologne. He tugged her a little closer. “Maybe angry sex after I’ve yelled at you.”
“You could yell during.”
“This isn’t a joke, Max.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
Max stepped into Rafe’s office, passing Chase Larsen on his way out. William Tanner, the CFO, was already seated across from Rafe’s desk and, judging by the seriousness of the expressions on the two men’s faces, something was up.
“Shut the door behind you,” Rafe said. Another bad sign. Rafe always kept his door open.
Max pushed the door closed and took a seat. “What’s wrong?”
Rafe nodded at Will, who turned to Max. “I can’t be certain just yet but we thought I should give you a heads up.” Max waited.
“I’ve only just come back from the New York office so I’ve only had a preliminary look through the Worth Industries accounts but it appears that there are some…discrepancies.”
“What do you mean?”
“Funds that aren’t correctly accounted for,” Will said. “Accounts that look unnecessarily…padded, figures that don’t quite add up.”
This was bad. “You’re saying…”
“There are two obvious possibilities. The first is that it could be due to clerical and system errors. They implemented some company-wide, accounting policy changes six months ago. So it could be they haven’t been handled consistently. In which case the money will still be in the company, just not attributed to the right places.”
“And the second possibility?” Max asked.
“Someone’s helping themselves to a little extra on the company.” Will’s expression hardened.
“An inside job?” Max considered the implications.
Will nodded.
“Who and how much?”
“It’s too early to answer either of those questions. There are a limited number of people with the necessary access to the accounts to achieve something like this but I don’t want to go pointing the finger till we know for certain that it’s fraud, and if it is, till I know for certain who could have done it.”
Max let the seriousness of the potential ramifications sink in.
Rafe leaned forward. “We’ve brought you in at this stage because—”
“Because if it is fraud, and that knowledge gets out into the public, as it inevitably will, the PR implications for the company are huge.” The press, including Gillian, would have a field day with it.
The two other men nodded, faces solemn.
“Looks like I’d better start working on a crisis management plan. Give me your worst-case scenario.”
Max sat across the table from his son that evening, watching him eat. But tonight his thoughts weren’t totally on Ethan or even Gillian. They were back with Cameron Enterprises. He had never met a crisis he couldn’t work through, and usually he loved the challenge of it. But this was different. Someone stealing from the company—the thought appalled him.
Gillian stood mixing something at the sink, swaying gently to the pop tune on the radio. She’d feel the same. She turned. Caught him watching. “Is everything okay?”
“Great.”
Only it wasn’t. And part of the “not” okay was the fact that he couldn’t talk about this with Gillian. Not tonight, or tomorrow. Not until if and when it became necessary to make the knowledge public.
And that should have been okay. If this had happened last month he wouldn’t have had Gillian to talk through ideas with. So why did it matter now that he not only couldn’t talk it through with her, he had to hide it from her, something that was going to consume a lot of his mental energies until it was sorted?
After Ethan was in bed Max went to his room and opened up the laptop on the desk. He wasn’t sleeping in here anymore—Gillian’s bed had so much more to offer, a warm willing body, her laughter and her loving—but he used this room if he had to work from home.
Home?
He knew the power of words. And he knew that this house with its precious inhabitants had already become more of a home than he’d allowed himself in his adult life.
The thought ought to worry him. He ought to stop it.
He looked up at the sound of a tap on the door. Gillian stood with her head tilted to one side. It was her figuring things out look. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” Other than his endless longing for her.
Her olive-green, scoop-neck T-shirt hugged her curves, revealing just the start of the swell of her breasts.
“You seemed a little distracted this evening.”
“There’s a lot of stuff happening with work.” He shut down the screen on the laptop. Knew she saw him do it, knew she knew the reason, that there were things there he didn’t want her to see.
“Oh.” There it was. The barrier between them. “I had thought I might come in and…” Her gaze flicked to the bed. “But you’re busy. I’ll—”
“Don’t.” He wanted, more than anything, for her to stay. He pushed away from the desk and crossed to her. “I hate that there are things I can’t share with you.”
“It’s okay. I understand.”
“I know you do. Doesn’t mean I like it.”
“Don’t bring up the job thing again, my resigning from the Gazette.”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t going to.” She’d convinced him of its importance to her. He slid his hands beneath the hem of her T-shirt, rested his palms against the warmth of her waist. He wasn’t certain, but he thought her waist, the soft feminine curve of it, might just be his favorite part of her body. The concave curve that had once swollen with his child. He loved that he was free to touch her, felt a fierce pride in how willingly she came to him, how quickly she responded to him.
“The Gazette is the furthest thing from my mind.” He tugged her closer, kissed the pale skin of her neck, worked his way past her earlobe, along her jaw, till he found her lips. She tasted ever so faintly of the mint chocolate chip ice cream they’d shared for dessert. Only so much better. Far more tempting. Far headier and more decadent.
He walked backward, bringing her with him till he reached the bed.
Gillian looked up into Max’s eyes, saw a heart-stopping, heart-melting warmth in their blue, blue depths. She looped her arms around his neck, wanting, needing to get closer to him, to show him that the world didn’t matter, that it wasn’t something she’d let come between them.
She pressed her body to the length of his, thighs to thighs, hips to hips, feeling his hardness, responding deep within her to his nearness, to the promise of pleasure. His beautiful lips curved into a smile of aching tenderness. And she slid up against him on tiptoe to kiss him. She let her longing for him lace the kiss.
Lips joined, he peeled her T-shirt from her, breaking the kiss only long enough to complete its removal and drop it to the floor. Her bra followed. Still kissing her, he stroked and smoothed his hands all over her as though he wanted to touch and learn each and every inch, skimming up her sides, over her shoulders, paying reverent attention to her breasts, her nipples. His hands lowered, kneaded her behind, pulling her closer as he did so, then he slid his hands between them to unfasten her pants. Together, they pushed them down her hips, and she stepped out of them and then turned her attention to the privilege and delight of getting him equally naked. Of revealing his torso, stripping his pants from his lean hips, down over powerful thighs. Of delighting in his readiness for her.
They fell onto the bed together and lay facing each other. Gillian nudged him with her bottom leg and he lifted his hips enough that she could slip tha
t leg beneath him, fit it below his waist, her other leg completing the circle in which she held him. She angled her hips, needing him to fill her, to become one with her. Slowly, he slipped the hard length of him inside her, filling her exquisitely then withdrawing torturously to then fill her again. And all the while he looked into her eyes, his own darkened and glazed with arousal, his beautiful lips parted.
They made love slowly, languidly, tenderly. It was almost dreamlike—except for the pleasure. The pleasure was intense and real, enthralling her, claiming her, overwhelming her. She touched Max’s face, felt the gentle rasp of his strong jaw against her palm. She could stay like this forever. With the man she loved. That one forbidden thought—love—cut through the sensual magic and then sank again, swamped by bliss.
A bliss that was irresistible. Their rhythm quickened, gathered force, and still the pleasure built till it was almost too much to be borne, escaping in low moans and gasps. Their beautiful rhythm made music that was theirs alone, music that climaxed as she clenched and shattered around him. He followed her completion, burying himself deep within her.
Thirteen
Something had changed with yesterday’s lovemaking. Something Gillian couldn’t quite bring herself to examine. Not yet.
She sat beside Max in the luxury of his car, Ethan in the back as they headed to Beverly Hills and Max’s family. “You okay?” he asked, attuned to her quietness, if not to the reason for it. “We don’t have to do this.”
Gillian pulled her gaze from the window. “We probably do. Your entire family is going to be there, aren’t they?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t mean we can’t pull out if you want to.”
She wasn’t as apprehensive about this, their second meeting, as she had been about their first. Though she knew she’d still be under scrutiny. There would be more questions.
But she’d liked his family that first time. Surely that wouldn’t have changed. And the key difference was her relationship with Max. The first time they’d been there had been the same day they’d gotten married.
She hadn’t known where she stood with him, how their relationship could possibly work.
In the intervening weeks he’d moved into not only her home and her life but into her mind. She couldn’t think about her heart, couldn’t afford to consider the possibility that he was making inroads there, too.
The one facet of the whole arrangement that didn’t give her trouble was the relationship between Ethan and Max. Ethan adored him and the feeling seemed mutual.
“It’s not your family that’s bothering me.”
“What is?”
What she had no gauge of was how he felt about her.
He cherished her, doing little things unasked for her, helping with Ethan, and he thought of her, he said as much each night as he stripped her clothes from her, but it was more than sex, too. It was something deeper. Surely taking her to Tilsby’s book launch had proved that he thought about the things she liked. Surely the tenderness with which they made love… Or was she just desperate that her feelings for him not be totally one-sided?
Like last time. When she’d assumed their relationship was not only strong but going somewhere.
“Us.”
“Us?” She heard his wariness.
“Where’s our relationship going?” It was the dead last thing she should blurt out like that, but that was one of her problems, her tendency to speak what was on her mind.
Max slowed as the area around them became more built up. She didn’t know if she was imagining it or not, but his grip on the wheel looked tighter than before.
“Forget I asked. I know what we have and don’t have. I knew how it would be when I agreed to marry you.”
“But you want more?” he asked.
“No.”
They both knew she was lying.
“Mommy,” Ethan called, a plaintive note to his voice.
She turned in her seat. “We’re nearly there, honey, then you’ll be able to get out and run around, and you’ll see Uncle Jake.” Uncle Jake had made by far the biggest impression on Ethan. “He’s looking a little pale,” she said to Max. “Maybe he’s carsick.”
“Shall I stop?”
“How long till we get there?”
“Less than ten.”
“I think he’ll be okay.” Gillian stayed turned in her seat watching Ethan, who seemed, now that he had her full attention, to be fine.
“Huh,” Max said when eventually they slowed and drove through the gates of his parents’ home.
Gillian looked up the driveway and then back at Max. “Seems like a lot of cars.”
“The whole clan is definitely here.”
Laura came out to meet them as they got out of the car. “You made it. Good trip? And how’s my favorite grandson?” She held out her arms to take Ethan from Max.
“I don’t know that he’s feeling so good,” Gillian said.
“Nonsense,” Laura said, reaching for Ethan. “He looks fine.” Various other family members had come out of the house and stood on the front doorstep, watching expectantly. At which point Ethan threw up.
Gillian stood on the back lawn with Max’s sister, Kristan, watching Ethan, who was now fully recovered from his bout of travel sickness and playing happily with Kristan’s six-year-old daughters, Lilly and Nicole. They were taking turns pushing him around the lawn in a bright yellow car.
She and Kristan had hit it off straight away. Kristan winning a place in Gillian’s heart with her calm, efficient help in getting Ethan cleaned up, as well as the stories she’d shared of similar and worse incidents with her girls. Gillian had sat by Kristan during lunch, giving her someone to talk to who wasn’t completely obsessed by baseball.
Ethan’s squeals of laughter drew her attention. And beyond Ethan she saw Max and Laura standing talking, both of them occasionally glancing her way till Max, his jaw tight, left his mother’s side to stand beside Gillian. She should never have asked what she did about their relationship.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Fine.” He lifted a shoulder. “Mom’s given me the CD with the photos on them, that’s all.”
“The photos of Dylan?” Perhaps that was the explanation for his tension. “Can I see them?”
“Here? Now?”
“Yes.” If not now he’d find some other excuse to delay showing them to her. “Ethan’s fine and Kristan and the girls are watching him.”
The muscle in his jaw up by his ear worked. “Sure,” he said with a nonchalance that she didn’t for a minute believe. He led her to a media room at the back of the house and set the CD up to play and started to give her instructions for the remote and the screen.
“You’re going to look at them with me, aren’t you?”
He hesitated.
“Please. I’ll need you to explain them. To tell me about him.”
“They’re annotated.”
She looked at him till finally he shrugged and sat on the couch beside her.
Surprising her, he slipped his arm around her shoulder.
After the things they’d shared and done together it made no sense that that simple gesture, his arm over her shoulders, the two of them close on the couch, should make her heart swell. But it did. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“Whenever,” he said easily, though without enthusiasm.
The slideshow of pictures was in chronological order, starting with a massively pregnant Laura, progressing through photos of two tiny babies in matching blue outfits but with different colored knitted hats. “Identical?” Gillian asked.
He shook his head. “Fraternal, but people outside the family still had trouble telling us apart.”
Through the years the boys grew and changed, becoming more distinct. The photos showed birthdays and Christmases as well as school productions. There were shots of them climbing trees like monkeys, scaling walls and diving from a cliff into a lake. Photos that had Gillian’s heart in her mouth just looking at them. �
�You must have turned your parents gray.”
Max smiled. “We had no fear. We thought we were invincible.” And there were sporting endeavors often culminating in one or both of them holding a trophy.
“Competitive?”
He smiled. “Intensely.”
Then, finally, abruptly, just after one of Max and Dylan with their arms slung about each other, there was a photo of a funeral, and then one of a granite headstone surrounded by flowers. Her heart ached with grief for a boy she’d never known.
They sat in silence and as the screen went blank the room darkened. “I didn’t know what to do with myself after he died,” Max said. “I’d always been half of a pair. I didn’t know who I was anymore.” He stood abruptly, crossed to the drapes.
“How did you cope?” she asked before he pulled them back because that would flood the room with light and she knew it would be easier for him to talk in the darkness.
“I went through all the stages of grief—anger, denial, guilt, over and over. In the end I figured out I was never going to get over it but that I couldn’t let it beat me. I would go on…with the emptiness inside.”
She didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t comprehend the depth of his loss. He opened the drapes and headed for the door. Gillian caught up to him there. He looked at her, almost challenging her with his gaze to say something, undoubtedly the wrong thing. All she could think to do was to reach for his hand and count it a small victory that he kept it in his as they rejoined his family.
Kristan passed Gillian a glass of wine. “Here, you look like you could use this.” She dropped down beside Gillian on the low couch, her own glass carefully balanced. On the floor in front of them, Lilly and Nicole were putting a fairy dress on Ethan.
Max had agreed to Laura’s request that they stay for dinner. Gillian couldn’t help but feel that he’d agreed in order to avoid spending time alone with her.
Had getting him to show her the photos of Dylan been a mistake? Had she pushed him too far? She felt like she was feeling her way blindfolded. The right steps could lead her to safety and the wrong steps could take her over a precipice.