From Boss to Bridegroom

by Victoria Pade

  And the facts were that Lucy Lowry was off-limits.

  To Lucy there only seemed to be one explanation for the return of the aloof, arrogant Rand: that he’d spent the previous evening—maybe the whole night—with Shelley the supermodel, and as a result, now he wanted to distance himself from his temporary secretary and whatever it was that had been happening between them.

  Well, that was fine. It was actually just what she needed. After all, she knew better than to have kissed him again yesterday. But she’d done it anyway.

  She knew better than to have relived that kiss over and over again the whole night, taking it even further in her mind and working herself up into such a yearning, burning desire for him that she hadn’t been able to sleep. But she’d done it anyway.

  She knew better than to have gotten up this morning and primped and preened, put on her tightest jeans and a sweater that would play peek-a-boo with her midriff. She knew better than to have worn her hair down just to please—okay, and yes, to entice him and compete with the exquisite Shelley. But she’d done all of that anyway.

  And most of all, she knew better than to foster any kind of flirtation with Rand or any other man when she’d made her decision to put that part of her life on hold until Max was grown. But knowing better hadn’t stopped her from doing it anyway.

  So if Rand could be aloof and distant and businesslike, so could she. Maybe that would finally put a stop to doing what she knew better than to do and was doing anyway.

  Aloof, distant, businesslike—that was exactly how the day went. Rand never stepped out of boss-mode and Lucy never stepped out of secretary-mode. And not a single line was crossed all day long.

  By four-forty-five Rand decreed them finished and Lucy closed down the computer with one eye on the clock, determined to leave at the stroke of five whether he suggested a walk in the park or not. She was anticipating a whole Rand-free weekend to get her wayward thoughts and desires under control, and nothing was going to stop that from beginning at five on the dot.

  That was all that was on her mind when the doorman called up to announce a messenger.

  She gave permission to send the messenger up, thinking that whatever was being delivered couldn’t possibly pertain to work so late on a Friday afternoon.

  But she’d underestimated someone, and when Rand opened the envelope he’d signed for and read the contents, he threw the documents on the desk and said, “Dirty son-of-a—”

  “What is it?” Lucy asked before he could get the rest of his angry epithet out.

  “The Turnenbill case.”

  “I haven’t come across that this week.”

  “Believe me, that’s a fluke. I’ve put more hours into that case than anything I’m billing for.”

  “You’re doing it pro bono?”

  “I do do that occasionally,” he said defensively.

  She hadn’t doubted it, she just wished it weren’t true because his handling cases for free was only one more aspect that made the man appealing. But rather than go into it she prompted, “The Turnenbill case?”

  “Liz Turnenbill. Thirty-eight, mother of three small kids. She’s crippled with arthritis and can’t work. She was married to Tom Turnenbill, one of the heirs to an oil fortune. Six months ago he was killed in a car accident. Up until then they lived on dividends from a trust fund his family established for him and, surprisingly, didn’t revoke when he married Liz.”

  “The Turnenbills didn’t like Liz?”

  “Bingo. She’s not the debutante the family wanted Tom to marry. They said they would never accept her and they didn’t. They haven’t ever even met their grandchildren.”

  “Amazing.”

  “It gets worse. Tom had a will, leaving the income from the trust fund and his future inheritance to Liz and the kids. But when he died, his family revoked the trust. Liz and the kids were left penniless.”

  “And no doubt her in-laws changed their own wills and she won’t inherit what her late husband would have inherited, either.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And since she can’t work because of the arthritis—”

  “They’re destitute. In fact they were living in a house the grandmother had owned and the family even had Liz and the kids evicted. This—” he nodded toward the papers that had just been delivered “—is the latest response to our last go-round. I can’t do anything to keep them from changing their wills so that Liz and the kids inherit what Tom would have. But I’m trying to get a ruling that bars them from revoking the trust, which is enough to leave Liz and the kids with enough to live comfortably, as well as to provide college educations.”

  “Sounds like a worthy cause.”

  “But the bottom line is that I need to do some fancy footwork in the form of research before the hearing they’ve pulled strings to schedule for first thing Monday morning or I may lose this case. If I do, Liz and those kids will never get what they rightfully deserve.”

  “And you want me to work tonight,” Lucy concluded.

  Rand cracked a smile for the first time all day. “I really didn’t plan this. But if you stay and we do the research tonight I can use the weekend to prepare for the hearing.”

  He held up a hand to stop words she hadn’t even opened her mouth to say. “I know. Max. So what if we call and ask Sadie to bring Max here? The four of us can have dinner. We’ll order Max’s favorite food no matter what it is. You can spend some time with him and then Sadie can take him home to bed while we finish working.”

  “It just isn’t possible to keep normal hours with you, is it? No wonder my aunt didn’t want to come back to work even temporarily.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and his eyebrows at once. “Nothing I can do about this. It’s part of the other side’s strategy to try catching me off-guard. But I’m not going to let them win this. There’s too much at stake for Liz and her kids.”

  That struck a note with Lucy and she knew that even though another late night with Rand was inadvisable she was still going to end up doing it.

  But before she fully agreed, she said, “You want Max here? He’ll be like a bull in a china shop. This place isn’t exactly kid-proof.”

  “I’m not worried about it. He can swing from the rafters if he wants to.”

  Lucy gave Rand her most dubious look but finally said, “You’ll have to call Sadie and ask her. I’m embarrassed to impose on her again.”

  “No problem. She loves me,” he said with the debonair confidence of a man who knew his charms and the power they had. “While I do that, you can hit the books. Correction—you can hit the computer. See how much research you can do that way and if you can’t find what we need we’ll go into the office after Sadie and Max leave. I need whatever case law you can find on wills and trust funds, preferably something more recent than ‘62.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” she said with a salute, rebooting the computer and hoping the businesslike tone of the day could withstand the dark of night.

  “Are you for-sure I can’t ride it?” Max was referring to the sculpture in Rand’s entryway that swung like a pendulum.

  “I’m absolutely sure. You cannot ride it,” Lucy answered for what seemed like the hundredth time since her son and Sadie had arrived. She herded the little boy back into the living room where Sadie and Rand were having after-dinner coffee.

  When he got there Max stopped dead in his tracks in front of an abstract painting. “When I color like that, Miss Vanessa says to stop and start over and make it look like something. She says stuff like that’s just a mess.”

  “Next time she tells you that, tell her she’s inhibiting your creativity,” Rand advised.

  “She doesn’t hit me,” the little boy contradicted, either hearing wrong or giving inhibiting his own meaning because he didn’t understand the word.

  Rand and Sadie laughed.

  “Inhibiting means she’s keeping you from doing something,” Lucy explained. “It isn’t hitting.”

  But Max was on to a sculpture
in the corner that looked like an abstract interpretation of a naked female torso.

  “Shouldn’t this lady have some clothes on?”

  Apparently it hadn’t been abstract enough.

  “Would you like to see my fish, Max?” Rand said, obviously trying to distract him. “I also came across something I thought you might like to have. Come on in the bedroom and you can look at the fish while I dig out your surprise.”

  Max didn’t have to be asked twice. “Where’s the bedroom?” he demanded as he charged out of the living room and across the entryway again, making sure to give the pendulum sculpture a nudge to put it into motion as he passed it.

  “I’m a nervous wreck having Max in a place like this,” Lucy confessed to her aunt when Max and Rand were out of earshot.

  “Rand doesn’t seem too worried so you shouldn’t be,” Sadie responded, glancing in the direction they’d gone. Then she added, “Rand is good with Max.”

  “I know.”

  “He seems to genuinely like our boy.”

  “Luckily, since Max is crazy about him.”

  “So is Max’s mom, isn’t she?” Sadie asked slyly.

  “Rand is a good man but that’s all there is to it. I wouldn’t be staying to work tonight except the case is one he’s doing for a good cause. The Turnenbill case?”

  “Mmm. He took that just before I left. For free,” Sadie said as if Lucy might not know that. “He does a lot of that—donating his time, his expertise. You could do worse than a man like him, you know.”

  “I’m not doing anything but working. We’re too different for any kind of personal relationship.”

  Sadie merely cast her a knowing look and took the coffee cups into the kitchen.

  “Look-it, Mom!” Max said as he ran back into the room the way he’d run out of it. “Soldiers to fight the dinosaurs!”

  Lucy looked into the shoebox full of plastic soldiers and toy tanks that her son was showing her.

  “Rand says they were his when he was a kid, and since he doesn’t play with them anymore, I can have them. If it’s okay with you. Is it okay with you?”

  Lucy looked to Rand, who had followed Max into the living room again. “You don’t want to keep them for your own son, whenever you have one?”

  “I might never have one,” he answered as if it were the farthest thing from his mind and his plans.

  Coming right after her brief exchange with Sadie, his words seemed to have a message in them. As if he were letting her know that although he might be good with Max he wasn’t at all interested in parenting Max or any other child.

  Take heed, Lucy, she told herself.

  Sadie returned just then, carrying her coat and Max’s too. “I think we ought to go home and let your mom and Rand get back to work.”

  “Na-aaww,” Max moaned.

  “It’s almost your bedtime,” Lucy pointed out. “I want you to get a good night’s sleep and we’ll have all day tomorrow together.”

  “With Rand?”

  “No, not with Rand. Just you and me,” she said, helping her son with his coat. “Did you say thank you for the soldiers?”

  “Thank you for the soldiers,” Max parroted.

  “And thank you for dinner,” Lucy coached.

  “And thank you for dinner. And I like your fishes but I still think that naked lady needs some clothes,” the little boy added with a giggle to let the adults know they hadn’t fooled him.

  “You’re welcome for everything,” Rand said with a laugh as they all headed for the door.

  A round of good-nights and Lucy giving Max a kiss concluded the small dinner party and left Lucy and Rand alone again.

  “What do you think?” Rand asked as soon as the door was closed behind Sadie and Max. “Are you getting what we need off the computer or should we take this to the office?”

  Back to business without preamble, Lucy thought, feeling somewhat disheartened. But she went along with it, reminding herself it was for the best.

  “I have a few things to check out through that law reference program you have. Let me see how far I can get on that. For now it looks promising and we may not need to leave here.”

  “Great,” he said with more enthusiasm than she understood.

  In the end they didn’t have to go to the office, but it took until nearly midnight for Lucy to accumulate the material Rand needed. And even then what she considered the coup de grace required some arguing on her part to get him to see it.

  “I’m telling you, if you present it like this, it will be very effective,” she insisted, giving him her interpretation of an obscure Supreme Court ruling in a 1971 case.

  Rand shot out of his chair at the second computer to see the ruling for himself on her monitor when she was finished with her argument.

  “Wow, your back must be a lot better,” she commented, surprised to see him move with such speed and agility.

  His smile was slightly sheepish. “Oh. Yeah, it is,” he said as if he’d been caught at something.

  But he didn’t offer any more than that, instead reading the Supreme Court ruling over her shoulder.

  “You could be right,” he finally admitted after giving it some thought.

  By then Lucy’s mind was more occupied with the intoxicating scent of his aftershave than with legal precedent, and she had to force herself to concentrate.

  “Actually I think you have a good point,” he was saying. “If I use your angle, I think I can make it work for us. Print that out and let’s celebrate.”

  “By calling it a day?” she said hopefully.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of opening a bottle of wine.”

  It was a tempting idea. But with thoughts of leaving him to the supermodel the day before dancing through her head along with the full day and evening of his aloof attitude, she managed some restraint.

  “You can’t mix wine with the muscle relaxants for your back, and I have to drive home,” she said.

  “Okay, I’ll open a bottle of grapefruit juice. But we’ve earned a reward. You’ve earned a reward,” he said insistently, as if he wouldn’t accept no for an answer.

  Then he left her to do the printout, returning just as she’d closed down the computer for the second time that day.

  He pointed with one glass to the sofa he’d spent the day before lying on and waited until Lucy was sitting there to hand her a glass. Then he joined her, angling so that he was facing her.

  “To your hard work,” he said, clinking his glass against hers.

  “And to the work you still need to do all weekend,” she countered.

  “Yes, but you’ve made it much easier.”

  They sipped grapefruit juice and then Rand said, “Has anyone ever told you you have a sharp legal mind?”

  “As a matter of fact, they have.”

  The expression on his handsome face let her know he hadn’t expected that answer.

  “I actually had a year of law school,” she explained. “I wanted to be a lawyer from the time I was about thirteen and had my first debate in civics class.”

  “What happened to stop you?”

  She’d avoided discussing this subject with him once before, when he’d asked about Max’s father. But now—maybe because it was so late and she was tired and less on guard, or maybe because she’d come to know Rand better—she felt more inclined to tell him about it.

  “Max is what happened,” she said. “I got pregnant by one of my law professors.”

  “The father who’s out of the picture,” Rand said, repeating the very words she’d used to him before.

  “Mmm. He was much older than I was, very attractive, brilliant. The dashing, serious academic who told me that I was not only beautiful but just as brilliant as he was, that I stimulated his mind and his body—”

  “That isn’t far-fetched, you know,” Rand said in answer to her self-deprecating tone of voice.

  “Far-fetched or not, I fell for it.”

  “You were young—”
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  “And naive and gullible and vulnerable and dumb.”

  “And you got pregnant,” Rand contributed.

  “And I got pregnant. I was so naive and gullible and dumb that I actually thought it might work out. That I’d tell him about the baby and he’d whisk me off to the nearest wedding chapel and we’d live happily-ever-after, Marshall the law professor, me the attorney, and our baby.”

  “That didn’t appeal to him?”

  “Absolutely not. He was appalled by the pregnancy, let alone by any notion I had of us being together permanently. He said being married to one woman and having children were chains that would stifle him. That he was a scholar, not a husband and father. There was no place in his life, in the future he had mapped out for himself, for anything as stultifying, as repressive, as marriage and family. He wanted me to have an abortion,” she ended that quietly.

  “And you refused.”

  “I refused. He got nasty. He said he would never have anything to do with my bastard—that was what he called the baby. That he would deny being the father, that I would have to force paternity tests to prove it, that I’d never get a dime out of him in child support, even if it meant he had to leave the country to avoid it. Then he did more than threaten me, he told his colleagues that I had seduced him in an attempt to get grades I couldn’t earn any other way and he managed to have my scholarship rescinded. It was through the school itself and had an ethics and morals clause attached. That left me without tuition, room or board on top of everything else. There was just no way I could go on with school. Plus I had doctors’ bills and then a baby to support, so—”

  “You had to give up your dreams.”

  “Dreams and romantic fantasies. But I gained Max.”

  “Did you go through with establishing paternity and making the SOB pay child support?”

  Lucy set her half-empty glass of grapefruit juice on the coffee table. “No, I didn’t. After all that, I didn’t want anything from Marshall. I didn’t want anything to do with him. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to hurt me any more than he already had. Or worse still, the chance to hurt Max.”

  “What do you tell Max about his father when he asks?”