by Arlene James
“Thanks,” Ponce said, and to Charly’s shock, the boy bounced up and kissed Darren on the cheek. Darren ruffled Ponce’s curly hair and smiled. Only then did he see her standing there. His smile broadened as he rose to his full height.
“All set? Pat’s waiting out front with the engine running.”
“You didn’t bring the limo!”
Darren winked at Delphina and said, “Hey, I cracked a bottle of champagne earlier. You wouldn’t want me to drink and drive, would you?”
“You like being ostentatious,” Charly accused without the least heat.
He didn’t deny it. She placed the tulips on the mantel and gave them a final tweak. Delphina chuckled. Charly hugged Ponce and kissed him, told him to be a good boy and not to play too roughly with Kental. She instructed Delphina to apologize for her for not waiting to greet Kental’s parents when they dropped him off, then finally allowed an impatient Darren to usher her out of the house.
“Where are we going for dinner?” she asked as he handed her down into the car.
“That depends on you,” he told her, sliding in beside her. “My personal preference would be my place. I make a mean stir fry.”
Her pulse sped up and not because of the stir fry. It was a pity she had to decline. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Nodding resignedly, he sat forward to instruct the driver to take them to a Chinese restaurant in Addison. “You do like Chinese, don’t you?”
“Love it.”
“Then you ought to like this place.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you own it.”
He laughed and said, “I’ve never even been there, but it comes highly recommended.”
“Oh.”
The conversation didn’t lag. He immediately said, “Your grandmother is one sharp old tack.”
“The sharpest.”
“As soon as you left the room, she said to me, ‘So you’re the rich dog whose been sniffing around my granddaughter.”’
Charly gasped, her face flaming. “She didn’t!”
“You know she did,” he replied, grinning.
Charly groaned and asked warily, “What did you say?”
“I said that I’d be doing more than sniffing if I could get away with it.”
“Darren!”
“Hey, I believe in the value of the truth.”
Charly’s face burned hotly. “Did Ponce hear any of this?”
“Yeah. He laughed. That boy knows a lot more than he should, and yet he’s somehow untouched by it.”
“You’re right,” she said pensively. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Can I kiss you now or are you going to make me wait?” he asked suddenly, sliding his arm about her shoulders.
“Has anyone ever made you wait for anything?” she asked wryly.
“Only you,” he said, leaning his forehead against hers, “but for you I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
Heart pounding, she slipped her arms around his neck. “Just a kiss,” she warned.
“Just a kiss,” he promised.
That man could make a kiss a full-body experience. The sensations were so extreme that they were almost painful. By the time the car pulled up in front of the restaurant, need throbbed embarrassingly in the most sensitive and private parts of her body.
Darren sat back and rubbed a hand over his face, huffing great breaths of air. He swallowed, slid an incredulous look in her direction and asked pointedly, “You’re sure you don’t want me to cook for you?”
She laid a hand over her pounding heart and got enough breath in her lungs to say, “I’m sure I’d never get dinner if I set foot in a place any more private than this with you.”
Grinning, he reached for her again, pulling her close. “You are absolutely right, but then you usually are. I want you so badly it hurts, but it isn’t just physical, you know. I want you. All of you.”
She melted inside. “Darren. Thank you. That’s…that’s so incredible. But…”
“Ponce, I know. He’s a great kid, and you’re a wonderful mother, but he needs, deserves, a dad, too.”
She pulled away from him in shock. “Darren?”
“Single mothers raise great kids all the time, and you’re one of the best. I know that. But wouldn’t it be easier, better, for everyone, if he could have two parents, if you had a husband, a partner?”
She had to close her mouth before she could stammer, “Darren, a-are you asking me t-to…”
He cupped her chin in the curve of his fingers. “All I’m asking you to do right now is think about it. I have been. A lot.”
She was speechless, thrilled, a little frightened. Thrilled was dominant. Instinctively she lifted her mouth to his. His arms clasped her tight, his tongue sweeping into her mouth possessively. A car door slammed somewhere nearby, and Darren groaned, pulling back incrementally.
“In another minute even this may be too private,” he muttered against her cheek. His hand fumbled behind him for the door handle, found it and yanked. The door swung open. “Come on,” he growled, sliding away from her, his hand clasping hers.
Charly bit her lip as she slipped out of the car and into the crook of his arm. By the time they reached the restaurant, an odd, almost hysterical happiness had gripped her. She was still too stunned to really do as he’d asked and think about the possibility of…partnership? The word marriage hovered just out of reach on the periphery of her mind, and she dared not beckon it closer. Yet.
It was enough for the moment to feel his arm curled protectively about her waist, his hand resting lightly against the curve of her hip, scalding her with its possessive heat. It was enough to see the desire in his eyes, the hope. It was almost too much, this reveling in, this contemplating of love.
Love with Darren Rudd.
Sitting around with a stupid grin on his face was getting very damned little work done, and Darren couldn’t even seem to care. Marketing called to report that California sales figures had fallen two full percentage points, and Darren chuckled. The director on the other end of the line was so shocked that he didn’t speak for at least twenty seconds. Darren cleared his throat and said quite authoritatively that a dramatic rise in sales in Arizona, Texas and the Carolinas would more than make up for any declines. He could still feel the poor bean counter’s shock when he hung up a few moments later, but how could he be concerned about a minuscule drop in sales in a single state when he was in love, planning to be married and about to become a father?
Oh, she hadn’t said yes. In point of fact, he hadn’t asked yet. But he’d shown his hand, and she hadn’t folded hers and walked away from the table. What she had done was turn him inside out. His blood still sizzled with the heat of their good-night kisses, and though he’d spent the remainder of the night pondering how to get her to the altar quickest, he felt positively bubbling today. Very soon now he was going to sit her down and clear up this identity thing, but first maybe he ought to go shopping for a diamond ring.
He was weighing the obvious merits of confessing his little deception with a diamond in his palm when his secretary buzzed. He lifted the receiver and heard, without any preamble, “Can you see Mr. Anselm? He says it’s urgent.”
A mild wave of surprise rolled through him. “Walt’s here?”
“He’s on his way in, Mr. Rudell. I’m sorry.”
Before he could tell her not to worry about it, the door to his office opened and Walter Anselm strode through it. Darren hung up the telephone receiver and sat back in his high, leather chair, surprise swelling into disquiet. “Walt, what’s going on?”
A tall, slender, athletic man with thick, prematurely graying hair, a killer golf swing and buckets of oozing charm, Anselm’s usual sang-froid seemed to have deserted him at the moment. His hands brushed back the sides of his charcoal-gray suit coat and landed at his waist.
“What have I told you?” he barked. “How many times have I warned you that your tomcatting was going to cost
you one day?”
Darren relaxed and smiled. “Well, you’ll be happy to know you can stow that particular lecture for good, my friend.”
“Stow it?” Walt erupted. Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a sheaf of folded papers and slapped them onto Darren’s desk. “I don’t think so.”
Darren frowned at the blue-backed papers. “What’s this?”
“This,” Walt said, pointing an accusing finger at the papers, “is fifteen million dollars.”
“What?”
“In the form of a palimony suit,” the attorney enunciated precisely, “or what passes for it in Texas.”
“Palimony! That’s nuts!”
“Filed by one Ms. Tawny Beekman,” Walt said, forging on doggedly. Leaning forward, he planted both palms against the edge of the desk and finished with, “of your address.”
The word that Darren blurted out then put as grim an expression on Walt Anselm’s narrow face as if he actually smelled the matter called to mind. “Fifteen million dollars worth of it,” the attorney confirmed flatly.
Darren shook his head in disgust, wondering how catastrophic it might be if Charly and Ponce were to learn about Tawny Beekman. Why now? Why did this have to happen now? Tawny couldn’t have timed it worse. “Damn her! I do not need this!”
“What you need, randy buddy of mine,” Walt pointed out, tapping an index finger against the polished desktop, “are the top guns in this particularly nasty field of litigation. Unless you’re willing to settle, that is.”
Darren squirmed in frustration. If he settled, it would be as good as an admission of guilt. If he didn’t and lost, he would come off even worse, a complete cad and selfish into the bargain. He only had one option, to fight and win. Everything he knew about Charly told him that she would need that much corroboration. “It’s bunk, Walt,” he told his friend and trusted advisor. “I can’t settle, and not just because I’d prefer to send myself into the poor house fighting it before I’d willingly give that conniving she-wolf a cent.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Walt muttered, scraping a hand through his hair. “That’s why I called my friend Alvin Dennis of Bellows, Cartere, Dennis and Pratt. He’s pulling together a team of lawyers to help us fight this, preferably one with a woman on it. Believe me, it looks a lot better to a jury and judge if it’s a woman asking the tough, personal questions of the plaintiff that this kind of litigation always requires.”
Darren had made the complete transition from shock to pure anger now. “Whatever, whoever it takes,” he stated emphatically, even knowing that he’d have to tell Charly. Eventually. First things first, however. Once he got the ball rolling on his defense, he’d sit Charly down and tell her in unequivocal terms about his feelings and intentions toward her. Then he’d confess the truth about himself and his identity. After that he’d propose, and finally he’d tell her about Tawny and this absurd lawsuit. It seemed like a good plan.
He couldn’t have conceived how it was all set to blow up in his face.
Charly, or Charlene as she was known around the office, made a face. “Richard,” she said, as unemotionally as her repugnance would allow, “you know how I hate these sleazy sexual harassment cases.”
“It’s not a sex har,” Richard Pratt, her least favorite of the partners and immediate supervisor, said. “It’s a palimony.”
Charly barely refrained from rolling her eyes. “Well, forgive me if it’s not politically correct, but I don’t have much compassion for kept women.”
“We’re not defending her,” he snapped. “We’re defending him.”
“Oh, swell, let’s defend the user.”
Pratt parked himself on the corner of Charly’s desk and regarded her owlishly over the rims of his reading glasses. “Look, Charlene, Dennis himself assigned you to the team. I don’t give a rat’s small behind where your compassion falls on this, you’ll take the cross or you’ll polish your résumé. Those are your options.”
Dennis was the most senior partner. Shaken, Charly sat back. They weren’t giving her any choice, and they expected her to grill the female plaintiff! The client must be somebody important. “Somebody with deep pockets,” she mumbled.
“Very deep,” Richard Pratt confirmed. “The obvious plus for you is that it wipes out the deficit you’ve dealt this firm with your excessive pro bono work. With this one, you could turn up our top earner for the year.”
Charly gritted her teeth at the term excessive, but she managed to keep her tone civil. “So I help some mega-rich sugar daddy walk away from the woman he’s used and suddenly I’m the firm’s fair-haired girl.”
Pratt smiled smugly. “Shouldn’t be too difficult. The ‘poor used’ woman is an exotic dancer. Stripper, if you want to be blunt about it.”
“So naturally she’s incapable of being misused and foolish enough to give us all the ammunition we need to savage her after the fact,” Charly said, not bothering to rein in her sarcasm.
Pratt shifted off the desk and rose to his feet. “It must be genetic with you Bellamys,” he said condescendingly. “You just naturally try to sniff out the underdogs and line up with them. Well, once you speak to our boy, I think you’ll find that this case isn’t quite what you expect. Even if he’s not telling us the whole truth—and who does?—this is little more than an extortion attempt on her part.”
Charly sighed. That would be the company line, of course, but what difference did it make? Why was she even fighting it? Steeling herself against the inevitable, she asked, “So who is our client?”
Pratt smiled smugly, never having doubted her capitulation, as if he’d given her the option. “None other than D. K. Rudell, mastermind behind RuCom Electronics.”
Charly’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting,” she muttered.
“I should say so. He’s known as one of the great playboys of our age. The gossip columns are always speculating about who he’s sleeping with now. Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing anything about him recently. Must have a new playmate stashed away someplace private.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Charly told him ruefully. “It’s just that I happen to know someone who works for RuCom, two someones actually.” She bit her lip, pondering, and finally added carefully, “One of them has to know him personally.”
“Small world,” Pratt commented. “Who are they? We may need to gather some background.”
Charly shrugged. “My ex-husband for one. He can’t tell you anything. He’s pretty far down the corporate ladder, a retail manager. The other, though…” She hesitated before admitting, “I’m not even sure of his job title, but judging from his income, I’d say he’s well up that ladder.”
Sensing a juicy bit of gossip here, Pratt leaned across the desk. “And who would he be, hmm, this top-runger?”
Charly sat far back in her chair, as far from Richard Pratt as she could get. “Just someone I’m…a friend, just a friend.”
Speculation danced in Pratt’s avid little eyes. Though a tall, broad, good-looking man, some innate ingredient in Richard Pratt’s makeup permanently fixed him in the category of “small.” He was a fine attorney and evidently well respected if not well liked. Perhaps it was the something distasteful that lurked about his eyes, a hint of corruption.
“So the ice princess has a sex life, after all,” he purred.
Disgust slammed through Charly. “She has a friend,” Charly snapped, “a fine gentleman friend.”
Pratt laughed. “A heterosexual gentleman, one presumes,” he quipped, turning toward the door. He opened it and paused, looking over his shoulder at her. “That means he says please as he’s putting it to you and thank you as he’s walking away after.”
“You really are a skunk,” Charly said evenly.
“Client meeting tomorrow at eleven,” Pratt told her, pointing to the desk and the stack of briefs and law books he’d carried into her office earlier—a starting point, as he’d called it. “I suggest you bone up.”
Charly
snatched up a sheet of notepaper, wadded it and threw it as hard as she could at the closing door, imagining that it was a rock bouncing off Richard Pratt’s broad back. He thought he knew so much, thought all the world was as smarmy and unprincipled as he was, but he didn’t know her, and he didn’t know Darren Rudd.
Pratt couldn’t begin to fathom a man like Darren. Richard believed that she was a freak of nature, a goody-two-shoes ruled by female emotion rather than reasoned compassion. He could never understand how a handsome, successful, sexy man like Darren could also be good and caring and generous. Pratt could never even imagine the basic decency that was such a part of Darren. It was so foreign to him that he wouldn’t see it even if she rubbed his nose in it. He lacked the capacity to understand what Charly knew instinctively. Darren cared for others because he was compelled to do so, and in her heart she knew that she had found her soul mate in him. Even Ponce realized that he was no threat, liked him, even.
She would do what she had to for their client, give him the best defense that she possibly could, but as far as she was concerned, no matter how uncharitable it might be, the Richard Pratts and D. K. Rudells of this world could just go hang.
Chapter Nine
She was late. Charly slung her handbag onto her desk, grabbed a heavy book, shouldered her bulging briefcase by the strap and swung out of her office again in a heartbeat. She passed the secretarial pool in the center of the spacious reception area at a jarring clip, slowing only slightly as her friend and favorite assistant, Helen, rose from her desk.
“Have you seen this morning’s papers?”
Charly shook her head as she hurried toward the conference room. “No time. Overslept. Stayed up all night reading case law.”
“You’ll want to take a look,” Helen warned her, falling in behind with a steno pad and pen.
Charly nodded, dismissing the thought almost instantly, and shoved through the heavy door. Shoulders squared, she put on her best no-nonsense smile. Three of the four partners were already present, Bellows, Dennis and Pratt, arranged on two sides of the rectangular table. She nodded apologetically to each as she dumped her burden in front of a free chair. “Sorry. Busy night, but I think I’ve got the bases covered.” She turned to Helen. “I need everything you can find on Hartley versus Brite and Texas common law marriage.”
