"Now that I have," he continued doggedly, "I'll admit that I still can't figure the woman out—at least not completely. I've already talked to each of you separately. Now I'm hoping that by bringing all of us together we can resolve some of the contradictions that keep bothering me. Perhaps each of us has a part of the puzzle, and now we can fit them all together. Tony, for the time being I'm going to address myself only to Nick, Mary and Jim. I'd like you not to comment until the end."
Tony's black eyes narrowed with impatience, but he clamped his mouth shut and sat back on one of the green sofas.
"Now then," Jack said, directing his attention to Nick, Jim and Mary. "All three of you have told me that you believe Lauren Danner applied for a job here because she wanted to spy on us for Philip Whitworth. And all three of you have indicated that she was an extremely intelligent young woman with superior typing and shorthand skills. Right?"
Mary and Jim said yes. Nick nodded curtly.
"Then the next question I would ask is, why would an intelligent, skilled secretary fail every single clerical test she was given and claim that she had never been to college when in fact she has a master's degree from a university, which tells us she's a gifted pianist?" When everyone remained silent, he continued, "And why would an intelligent, educated woman who wants a job so that she can spy, do one of the silliest damned things I've ever seen—write on her application under positions desired the jobs of president and personnel manager?"
Jack looked around at the withdrawn expressions, of his audience. "The obvious answer is that she did not want to get the job. In fact, she did everything in her power to make certain she wouldn't be offered one, didn't she?" No one answered and he sighed, "As I understand it, she was on her way back to her car from the interview when she met Nick, who interceded on her behalf that same night. The next day Jim interviewed her, and in a complete about-face, Miss Danner decided to work for Sinco and accepted Jim's job offer. Why?"
Jim leaned his head back against the sofa. "I've already told you and Nick what Lauren told me. She said she met Nick that night, and she accepted the job because she wanted to work near him. She said she thought he was an ordinary engineer who worked for Global."
"And you believed her?" Jack asked.
"Why wouldn't I?" Jim sighed disgustedly. "I saw her crying when she found out who he really was. I'm the same idiot who also believed that Whitworth was a relative of hers, and that even though he had asked her to spy on us, she wouldn't do it."
"Actually," Jack said, his mouth twisting with grim amusement, "Whitworth is her relative. I checked it out, and according to the Whitworth family tree, which was traced about thirteen years ago and recorded in a book used mostly by society snobs, the Danners are seventh or eighth cousins of the Whitworths."
The uncontrollable spurt of joy that Nick experienced was instantly quashed. Cousins or not, Lauren was still his stepfather's mistress.
"I understand," Jack said, massaging his temple as if he had a headache, "that Miss Danner did not request to be assigned to you, Nick. In fact, I understand from Weatherby that she was adamantly opposed to the idea."
"She was," Nick gritted. He couldn't stand much more of this. Talking about her was twisting his gut into knots.
"If she truly wanted to spy for Whitworth," Jack persisted, "why would she argue against being assigned to you, when working for you would have given her much better access to confidential information?"
Nick picked up a file on his desk and began reading it. "She didn't want to work for me because we'd quarreled about a personal matter." She didn't want to sleep with me, Nick added silently.
"That doesn't make sense," Jack said firmly. "If you'd quarreled, she should have relished the opportunity to retaliate by coming up here and spying on you."
"Nothing about that girl makes sense," Mary said hesitantly. "When I told her about Nick's mother, she turned as white as a—"
"I don't have the time for this!" Nick cut in curtly. "I'm leaving for Chicago. Jack, I can clear this up in a few sentences. Lauren Danner came to Sinco to spy. She's Whitworth's mistress. She is a consummate liar and a magnificent actress."
Tony opened his mouth to argue, and Nick said in a low, thunderous voice, "Don't defend her to me, dammit! She let me introduce her to my own mother and stepfather! She stood there letting me make an ass of myself by introducing her to her accomplices, one of whom is her lover! She betrayed all of us; not just me. She told Whitworth about Rossi and had Whitworth's people swarming all over Casano looking for him. She provided bidding information to Whitworth that is going to cost Sinco a fortune in profits. She—"
"She wasn't Whitworth's mistress," Jack interrupted when Tony leaped to his feet to protest. "I know that's what my investigator told you, but the truth is that, although Whitworth does own the apartment, he only visited her there once, on the night she arrived, for perhaps thirty minutes."
"My stepfather's age must be impairing his—"
"You stop talking about Laurie like this!" Tony spat out furiously. "I—"
"Save your breath, Tony," Nick snapped.
"I got plenty of breath to spare, and now I'm going to have my say! Dominic and I heard what Whitworth said to her the day they had lunch at my place. Laurie told him right off that you and her were getting married, and she told him that she was going to tell you she was related to him. As soon as she said that, Whitworth started talking about how you might think she was his mistress and that you might think she told him about this Casano. Laurie got upset and told him she didn't say nothing about Casano, and she wasn't his mistress. Then she asked him right out if he was trying to blackmail her. He said he was bargaining with her. He said he'd keep quiet if she would give him information—"
"Which she did," Nick snapped. "Within an hour! She did it because she intended to keep right on lying to me until Whitworth finally put us out of business."
"No!" Tony shouted. "She told him she would die before she'd do anything to hurt you. She—"
Nick's hand slammed down on the desk as he surged to his feet. "She's a treacherous bitch and she's a liar. That's all I need to know. Now all of you get out of here!"
"I'm going!" Tony almost shouted, stomping across the office. "But there's one more thing you need to know. What you did to her hurt her worse than I've ever seen anybody hurt. You threw her out with no coat, no money, no nothing, and does she call Whitworth? No, she walks eight blocks in the cold and rain to collapse in my arms. So I'm tellin' you now—" Tony drew himself up to his most impressive height and slapped his hat on his head "—from now on you're off my list, Nick. If you wanna eat in my restaurant, you better bring Laurie with you!"
21
« ^ »
"Mr. Sinclair." The secretary in Chicago bent down beside Nick, her voice lowered to a whisper to avoid disturbing the seven other major U.S. industrialists seated around the conference table discussing the final details of an international trade agreement. "I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but there's a Mr. James Williams on the phone for you…"
Nick nodded and slid his chair back. Seven men glanced up and looked at him with irritated accusation. Except in matters of extreme emergency, none of them was taking calls. During the last meeting and now this one, only Nick had received an urgent call, and the last time the meeting had to be aborted and rescheduled because he had abruptly walked out on them.
Nick strode from the conference room, gripped by the memory of the last time Jim's call had interrupted him in this meeting. That time Jim had fabricated some silly damned excuse for calling, so that he could say that Lauren had resigned. "Yes, what is it?" Nick said, angry at the memory of her, angry at the pain that thinking of her always evoked.
"There's quite a celebration going on over in the engineering department," Jim began, his voice hesitant and confused. "Nick, even though Lauren gave Whitworth copies of our four bids, we have just been awarded two of the four contracts. The low bidders on the other two contracts still haven't been
announced." He paused, evidently waiting for Nick to answer. "I can't figure it out—what do you think?"
"I think," Nick snarled, "that the stupid bastard isn't smart enough to win a poker hand with a deck of marked cards."
"Whitworth is conniving and wily and anything but stupid," Jim argued. "I think I'll get the file from Jack Collins in security and go over the figures that Lauren—"
"I told you what I wanted you to do," Nick interrupted in a low, deadly voice. "Regardless of who gets the remaining two contracts, I want Sinco to bid on every job that Whitworth bids on, and I want you to bid it below our cost if necessary. I want that bastard out of business in one year!"
Nick slammed the phone down and stalked back into the conference room. The chairman looked at him with ill-concealed reproof for the interruption. "Now, may we resume?"
Nick nodded curtly. He voted carefully on the next three issues, but as the morning drifted into afternoon, and afternoon darkened into early evening, it became more and more impossible to think of anything but Lauren. Snow fell outside the windows of the Chicago skyscraper as the meeting continued, and Tony's outraged voice played through his mind… "You threw her out with no coat, no money, no nothing, and does she call Whitworth? No! She walks eight blocks in the cold and rain, to collapse in my arms."
Eight blocks! Why hadn't the guards let her stop to get her coat? He remembered the thin blouse she'd been wearing, because he had unbuttoned it himself with every intention of exposing and degrading her, exactly as he had. He remembered the sheer perfection of her creamy breasts; the incredible silkiness of her skin; the exquisite taste of her lips; the way she had kissed him and held him to her…
"Nick," the chairman said sharply, "I assume you are in favor of this proposal?"
Nick dragged his gaze from the windows. He had no idea what proposal was being discussed. "I'd like to hear more about it before I decide," he prevaricated.
Seven surprised faces turned toward him. "It's your proposal, Nick," the chairman scowled. "You wrote it."
"Then naturally I'm in favor of it," he informed them coolly.
The committee dined as a group in one of Chicago's most elegant restaurants. The moment their meal was over, Nick abruptly excused himself to return to his hotel. Snow fell in thick flakes, dusting his tan cashmere overcoat and clinging to his bare head as he strolled down Chicago's Michigan Avenue, glancing disinterestedly into exclusive shops whose brightly lit windows were decorated for Christmas.
He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, mentally cursing Jim for calling him this morning about Lauren, and cursing Lauren for walking into his life. Why hadn't she called Whitworth to come and get her when the guards forcibly removed her from the Global building? Why in God's name had she walked eight blocks in freezing weather to go to Tony?
After he had hurt and degraded her, why had she wept at his feet like a heartbroken angel? Nick paused to take a cigarette out of his pack and put it in his mouth. Bending his head, he cupped his hands over the flame and lit it. Lauren's voice drifted through his mind, choked with racking sobs. "I love you so much," she had wept. "Please listen to me… Please don't do this to us…"
Fury and pain blazed through him. He could not take Lauren back, he reminded himself forcefully. He would never take her back.
He was willing to believe that Whitworth had blackmailed her into giving him the bids. He was even willing to believe that Lauren hadn't told Whitworth about the Rossi project. After all, if she had, Whitworth's men wouldn't have been swarming all over the village asking questions about Nick's activities—they'd have been asking about Rossi. Apparently they didn't even know the chemist's name. Even if they found out, it wouldn't matter. The lab tests had proved Rossi's formula to be only a fraction as effective as he'd claimed it was, besides being a skin and eye irritant.
Nick stopped at the light on the corner, where a man in a bright red Santa Claus costume was standing beside a black iron pot and ringing a bell. Christmas had never been particularly pleasant to Nick. It was a holiday that invariably called to mind the visit he had paid to his mother as a boy; in fact, he never thought of her except at Christmas time.
Cars glided past him, their tires crunching in the fresh snow. This Christmas could have been different; it could have been a beginning. He would have taken Lauren to Switzerland. No—he would have spent it at home with her. He would have built a roaring fire in the fireplace, and they could have started their own traditions. He would have made love to her in front of the fire, with the lights from the Christmas tree glowing on her satin skin…
Nick angrily jerked his mind away from those thoughts and stalked across the street, ignoring the horns that blared their protest and the headlights flying toward him. There would be no Christmases with Lauren. He wanted her badly enough to forgive her for almost anything, but he could not, would not, forgive or forget the fact that she had betrayed him to his mother and stepfather. Perhaps in time he could have forgiven her for conspiring against him, but not with the Whitworths. Never with them.
Nick inserted his key into the double doors of his penthouse suite. "Where the hell have you been?" Jim Williams demanded from the Queen Anne sofa where he was lounging with his feet propped on an antique coffee table. "I've come to talk about the bids Lauren gave Whitworth."
Nick jerked off his coat, furious at having his suite invaded, his privacy infringed upon and particularly at being forced—even for the moment it was going to take to get Jim out of here—to talk about Lauren again. "I told you," he said in a low, deadly voice, "that I wanted Whitworth out of business and I told you how I wanted it done. When you explained your part in Lauren's complicity, I excused it, but I will not—"
"You don't have to put Whitworth out of business," Jim interrupted quietly as Nick stalked toward him. "Lauren is doing it for you." From the sofa beside him, Jim picked up copies of the original bids and the altered copies that Lauren had made to give Whitworth. "She changed the figures, Nick," he said somberly.
The meeting of the committee on international trade reconvened at precisely nine o'clock the following morning. The chairman of the committee looked at the six men seated around the conference table. "Nick Sinclair will not be present today," he informed the thunderous-looking group. "He asked me to express his regrets and to explain that he was called away on an urgent matter."
In unison, six outraged faces turned to glare with impotent hostility at the vacant chair of their missing member. "Last time it was a labor relations problem. What the hell is Sinclair's problem this time?" a jowly man demanded unsympathetically.
"A merger," the chairman answered. "He said he is going to try to negotiate the most important merger of his life."
22
« ^
Fenster, Missouri, was blanketed with a fresh carpet of snow. With Christmas decorations hanging at all the town's intersections, Fenster had a Norman Rockwell quaintness about it that reminded Nick rather poignantly of Lauren's initial primness about sex.
Aided by the directions a taciturn old man had given him a few minutes before, Nick had no trouble finding the quiet little street where Lauren had grown up. He pulled to a stop in front of a modest white frame house with a swing on the porch and an enormous oak tree in the front yard, and turned off the ignition of the car he'd rented at the airport five long hours ago.
The slow, treacherous drive across snow-covered roads had been the easy part; facing Lauren was going to be the difficult part.
His knock was answered immediately by a wiry young man in his mid-twenties. Nick's heart sank. Never in his worst imaginings during the drive down here had he considered the possibility that Lauren might have another man with her. "My name is Nick Sinclair," he said, and watched the young man's curious smile change to open animosity. "I would like to see Lauren."
"I'm Lauren's brother," the young man retorted, "and she doesn't want to see you."
Her brother! Nick's momentary relief was followed by an absurd impulse to
smash the younger man's face for stealing Lauren's allowances when she was a little girl. "I've come to see her," Nick stated implacably, "and if I have to walk over you to get to her, I will."
"I believe he means it, Leonard," Lauren's father said, stepping into the hallway, his finger in a closed book he had been reading.
For a long moment, Robert Danner studied the tall, indomitable man in the doorway, his penetrating blue eyes observing the lines of strain and tension etched deeply into his visitor's features. A faint, unwilling smile softened the stern line of Mr. Danner's mouth. "Leonard," he said quietly, "why don't we give Mr. Sinclair five minutes with Lauren to see if he can change her mind. She's in the living room," he added, inclining his head over his shoulder in the direction of the Christmas carols playing on the stereo.
"Five minutes, and that's all," Leonard grumbled, following right on Nick's heels.
Nick turned to him. "Alone," he said determinedly.
Leonard opened his mouth to argue, but his father intervened. "Alone, Leonard."
Nick silently closed the door to the cheerful little living room, took two steps forward and stopped, his heart hammering uncontrollably in his chest.
Lauren was standing on a stepladder, hanging tinsel on the upper branches of a Christmas tree. She looked heartbreakingly young in her trim jeans and bright green sweater and poignantly, vulnerably beautiful with her hair tumbling in burnished honey waves over her shoulders and back.
He ached to pull her off the ladder and into his arms, to carry her over to the sofa and lose himself in her, to kiss and hold and caress her, to heal her pain with his body and hands and mouth.
Double Standards Page 22
