From Boss to Bridegroom

by Victoria Pade

  Then he took a deep breath, sighed it out and said, “All right. You drive a hard bargain.”

  “I’m worth it.”

  That made him laugh again, as if he were genuinely enjoying this.

  “So if everything is settled, do you want to do some work now, while you’re here?” she offered.

  He shook his head as if that were the last thing on his mind. “I didn’t bring anything with me or I’d say yes. But we may need to work tomorrow night to make up.”

  Making up was what it seemed like they were doing now. From a lover’s quarrel.

  But of course that was crazy.

  Rand glanced around again. “You’re renting this place from Sadie?” he said then, making yet another quick change into interested guest.

  “We have an arrangement, yes.”

  “And she owns the other two in this section of row houses, unless I’m mistaken, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good investment.”

  “Yes,” Lucy answered yet again, trying to regroup and not being as fast at it as he was.

  Putting some effort into it, though, she said, “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  Lucy finally rounded the chair and sat down just as Rand said, “Where is Max’s father?”

  That tightened every muscle in her body again. “He’s out of the picture,” she said curtly.

  Rand reared back as if she’d struck out at him. “Sore subject and you don’t want to talk about it,” he guessed.

  “There’s nothing to talk about. He’s out of the picture,” she repeated firmly.

  “Max is quite a kid.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Have you had his IQ tested? I’ve never met another kid as sharp as he is.”

  She shook her head. “I know he’s bright, but I just figured it would be dealt with when he gets into school.”

  “I can tell you’ve given him a lot of time and attention. It shows.”

  “I try to.”

  “That’s why you want to get into only freelance work, isn’t it? So you can be with him.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “What about when he goes to school all day? Will you go back into office work then?”

  “No. I’ll use the hours he’s in school to work at home and try to finish before he gets out in the afternoons.”

  Rand’s smile this time was sheepish. “Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said, apparently having been fishing for a way to get her permanently onboard.

  Lucy couldn’t help cracking a smile of her own finally. It was flattering that he was so pleased with the job she’d done for him but there was also a part of her that hoped there was more to it than that. A part of her that she tamped down on before it got out of hand by thinking: Deidre, Bunny and Veronica…

  “We flustered poor Sadie tonight,” he informed her then, finding it amusing. “It was the first time in all the years I’ve known her that I’ve seen that. I thought she was unflappable.”

  “She usually is.”

  “I take it you didn’t let her know you’d kept me in the dark about Max?”

  “I wasn’t proud of it. He’s not something I hide in the closet.”

  Rand pointed a long, accusing index finger at her, narrowed his eyes and said victoriously, “Hiding him in the closet—that means you were lying not omitting.”

  “Semantics,” she countered, unwilling to concede the point.

  It only made Rand laugh. “I know where Max gets his brains but I hope he’s not as stubborn as you are.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Lucy said, pretending to take offense but laughing along with him just the same.

  What was left of the tension between them seemed diffused and for a moment they sat there looking at each other the way two equally matched contenders might.

  But then Rand stood. “I better let you get some sleep. I’m working your tail off tomorrow.”

  “Will you be in the office or out all day again like today?” she asked as they both headed for the front door again. She hated that it was so important to her that he’d say he was going to be in the office. Hated that the day without him there today had seemed so empty.

  “I have a few court appearances in the afternoon but we can work in the car on the way into town and through the morning. Then again tomorrow night—don’t forget that,” he said. But the way he said it sounded more like he was reminding her of a date and this time Lucy didn’t think she was just imagining it. There was definitely a more personal tone in his voice.

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” she answered him, hearing the same sort of note in her own tone, although it hadn’t been intentional.

  Rand reached for the door handle when they arrived in the entryway and turned it but he didn’t open the door. Instead he stood there looking down at her for a moment with eyes so warm they heated her to the core.

  “I hope you know I don’t put up with this much from anyone else,” he said, his voice teasing but intimate, too. An intimacy that was very intoxicating.

  “I hope you know I don’t put up with this much from anyone either,” she answered the same way.

  Again he smiled and chuckled just a little, as if she never said what he expected her to.

  And tonight when thoughts of him kissing her sprang to life in her mind, Lucy couldn’t believe they were only in her mind. Not when his eyelids dropped slightly to aim his gaze at her lips. Not when he actually leaned forward just a bit. Not when he reached out and took her arm in a strong hand that set off lightning bolts in her bloodstream…

  But in the end he only gave her arm an affectionate, playful squeeze and said, “No more omissions, okay? Be straight with me.”

  Lucy only agreed with yet another raise of her chin.

  Or maybe she raised her chin in response to the lingering idea that he might kiss her after all. In response to the lingering wish that he would.

  But he didn’t.

  He merely said, “See you in the morning.” Then he opened the door and left.

  Lucy rested against the door after he’d closed it, telling herself it was a good thing he hadn’t kissed her, that it would have been totally inappropriate.

  But deep down she couldn’t ignore the disappointment.

  Four

  When Rand’s phone rang at seven the next morning he was already showered, shaved and dressed for the day. He was just putting papers in his briefcase and trying to concentrate on the work he had ahead of him.

  Trying but not succeeding.

  His thoughts were really on Lucy.

  He always screened his calls and while he waited for the phone to ring four times and the message to play, he felt a tight clench in his stomach at the thought that Lucy might be his caller. That after the end of the last evening she’d realized he had almost kissed her and now that she’d thought about it, about how out of line that would have been, she would let him know she didn’t think it was a good idea for her to continue working with him.

  It would serve him right, he told himself. What the hell had been going through his mind? She was his secretary. And she was a single mother on top of it. He didn’t mix business with pleasure. Ever. And he certainly didn’t have time for the complications of a woman with a child.

  It was just that there they’d both been, standing at her door after sharing a conversation that had left him feeling as if they’d been on a date. She’d looked so soft, so alluring, so fantastic. And he’d been so tempted….

  But after the fourth ring and the message, it wasn’t Lucy’s voice that came through his answering machine.

  It was the voice of his adopted sister, Emily Blair Colton.

  Shock froze Rand for a split second before he lunged for the phone as if it were a lifeline. Which it might very well have been, since Emily had been kidnapped out of her house in late September.

  “Emily?” Rand nearly shouted into the receiver. “Is that you?”
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  “Hi,” the young woman said tentatively.

  “Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “I’m okay,” she answered, sounding it. “I know everyone believes I was kidnapped but I wasn’t.”

  That shocked Rand as much as hearing her voice had. “What do you mean? What’s going on, Em?”

  “Rand, somebody tried to kill me,” she said as if the information had been building and building inside her and just had to come out. “The night I left. A man was right there in my bedroom. I barely got away and when I did, well, I knew I’d only be safe away from the ranch. Away from that woman who claims to be your mother,” Emily finished in a derisive tone.

  “Oh, Emily,” Rand sighed, beginning to relax.

  He knew what his sister was referring to. Since the car accident she and their mother had been in when Emily was eleven, Emily had never stopped insisting that their mother was not the same person. Just after the accident she’d sworn there had been “two mommies” at the scene—a “bad mommy” and a “good mommy,” that the “bad mommy” was who had come home with her afterward. It was a claim she’d never wavered from, a nightmare Rand knew she was still plagued by.

  “Where are you, Em?” he asked patiently.

  “I don’t want to tell you. But I’m okay. I’ve been in contact with Liza—”

  “Liza knows where you are and that you weren’t kidnapped?”

  Liza Colton was Rand’s cousin and another child his parents had basically raised, having spent more time at his house than her own. She and Emily had always been close.

  “I had to get hold of Liza right after it happened,” Emily explained. “She believes that woman is an imposter just the way I do, and I was afraid that put her in the same kind of danger I was in. That that woman would want Liza dead, too, so there wouldn’t be anyone left to question who she is. I had to warn her.”

  “Is Liza okay?”

  “Yeah. But she’s been telling me to call you, and I finally decided she was right. She said if anyone would help us prove that woman isn’t who she says she is it would be you.”

  Emily’s voice echoed with such confidence in him that Rand didn’t have the heart to let her know he didn’t believe the woman he knew as his mother was an imposter.

  “Tell me where you are, Emily,” he said then.

  “I won’t tell you exactly where I am but I will tell you what state I’m in if you promise you won’t tell anyone else. I’m even worried that woman might have bugged your phone, figuring I’d call you sooner or later. And if she finds out exactly where I am, she could send that man to try to kill me again.”

  Promising not to tell anyone where Emily was was tough. He knew his father was out of his mind with worry over her. Rand himself had spent more sleepless nights than he could count since her disappearance, imagining the worst.

  But he also knew that if he didn’t make the promise to Emily she was likely to hang up without going any further and be lost again. He didn’t want that.

  “I promise,” he said, albeit reluctantly.

  “I hitched a ride with a truck driver,” she confessed. Then, before Rand could comment on the perils in that, she added, “I know, it was a dangerous, crazy thing to do. But I didn’t have a choice. I had to get away. And I figured if I was in danger in my own house, how much more danger could I be in hitchhiking? Besides, the man who picked me up was nice. Wonderful, in fact. He gave me the lecture himself about not doing what I was doing. Then he said he was going to Wyoming. Wyoming, Rand. Where Dad grew up. It seemed like a sign that someone was watching over me.”

  Rand closed his eyes against the thoughts of how naive this reasoning was. But now wasn’t the time to get into that.

  “Just tell me you’re all right,” he reiterated.

  “I am. I’m fine. But will you help us?”

  “You mean help you and Liza prove there’s an imposter mother at the ranch?”

  “Yes. Will you do it?”

  “I don’t doubt that someone tried to hurt you, Em. But what makes you think it wasn’t an attack by a random someone who broke into the house to kidnap you?”

  “I just know, that’s all, Rand. I know. And he wasn’t there to kidnap me, he was there to kill me,” she insisted. “Me. Because I know that woman isn’t who she wants everyone to think she is.”

  “There was a ransom note.”

  “I don’t care. I know this wasn’t an attempted kidnapping. I know that that woman who has everyone thinking she’s Mom is evil, Rand. Please believe me and help prove she isn’t who she says she is.”

  Rand heard the desperation in Emily’s voice and it wasn’t something he could ignore, even if he couldn’t buy into Emily’s imposter theory. But how could he convince Emily unless he agreed to do what he could to check out his own mother?

  Besides, if he did as Emily asked, he reasoned, he could prove to her that she was wrong. That their mother was their mother and that the “two mommies” Emily was so sure she’d seen at the accident had only been a part of the trauma of the accident itself. Something that had festered in her mind as time had passed. Something that now had such power she believed it was the reason behind other, totally unrelated things that happened to her.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Rand finally told his sister.

  “Oh, thank you!” Emily said on a gust of breath, her relief flooding through the wires of the phone. “I know if anybody can find the truth you can.”

  “In the meantime, why don’t you come here, Em? Stay with me.”

  “I can’t,” Emily said without thinking about it. “Then you’d be in danger, too. Just the way Liza is.”

  He heard the fear—no, the terror—in Emily’s tone and he backed down. “What about money, then? Do you need that?”

  “I only need your help, Rand. That’s all I need. For you to find the truth and stop what’s going on.”

  “Will you at least give me a phone number where I can reach you?”

  “No. I’m in a phone booth now. I’ll give you some time to look into things and then I’ll call you.”

  “I want a promise from you in return for my promise to do this,” he said then. “I want you to agree that if I don’t turn up anything suspicious you’ll go home.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a long time before Emily said, “I know you’ll turn up something because I know that woman isn’t who she says she is.”

  “Promise me, Em.”

  “If you can prove without a shadow of a doubt that that woman is your real mother, then okay. I’ll go home,” Emily vowed but clearly without believing that was going to happen.

  “You’ll let me know if you need anything,” Rand said then, an order not an offer. “And, Em, I’ll get on the first plane to Wyoming if you say the word. To be with you there or to take you home to Prosperino, or to bring you here. You know that.”

  “I know. But there’s enough of us in danger already. As it is, I’m putting you at risk just doing this. If your phone is tapped and she finds out you’re going to help me expose her, she could send someone to hurt you, too.”

  “You just think about yourself and be careful. Let me worry about me.”

  “But you’ll start looking into this right away?” Emily said hopefully.

  “As soon as I figure out where to start, yes. Believe me, I want you home and this whole thing over with as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you,” Emily said, reminding him of the little girl who had become part of his family so long ago. “I have to go. Someone is waiting to use this phone.”

  “Take care of yourself,” he said, not wanting to end their connection, worrying that it might be their last.

  But there was no stopping it.

  Emily said, “You take care of yourself, too,” and hung up.

  “The brachiosaurus is like the dinosaur giraffe only way, way, wa-aay bigger. Forty whole feet tall with a long, lo-oong neck with a little bitty head that weighs eighty tons.”r />
  “The brachiosaurus’s head weighs eighty tons?” Rand asked, winking conspiratorially at Lucy as she looked on.

  It was nearly eight o’clock that night and, good to his word, Rand had been patient with her son’s interruptions of the work they were trying to finish up for the day.

  “No, his head doesn’t weigh eighty tons,” Max answered as if Rand was just being silly. “His body weighs eighty tons. But his head has huge nose holes—”

  “Nostrils,” Lucy supplied.

  “—high up on his head to keep him from getting too hot.”

  “And when did he live?” Rand asked.

  “At the end of the Jurassic time.”

  “The Jurassic period,” Lucy amended.

  “Nostrils at the end of the Jurassic period,” Max repeated to let them know he’d made note of both of his mother’s corrections.

  “And that’s it for tonight’s dinosaur lecture,” Lucy said before her son could get started again. “Time for bed.”

  Max put up his usual fuss but finally gave in with a warm good-night to Rand.

  Rand ruffled up Max’s hair and answered the good-night with one of his own, leaving the little boy beaming as if Rand had bestowed the medal of honor rather than a simple hair mussing.

  “I’ll be right back,” Lucy told her boss, appreciating his kind treatment of her son, who was obviously even more enamored by the man than he’d been the previous evening.

  Max was already in his pajamas, having been dispatched to put them on earlier, so when Lucy got him upstairs she oversaw him brushing his teeth, read him a quick story and tucked him in.

  “Can Rand come back tomorrow night, too?” the little boy asked as she kissed his forehead.

  “I don’t know. That depends on whether we’ll still have work to do.”

  “He could just come to play if you don’t have work to do,” Max suggested.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Lucy hedged, wishing the idea of having Rand over just to play didn’t have an appeal for her, too. “You just think about going to sleep now.”

  “’Night,” Max said, wiggling around in his bed with one arm around his bear. “Bart says ’night, too.”