Zane appeared unfazed by her complaint. “We’ve got one of the best IT departments in the country. If any data happened to get lost just now, they can restore it. And if, for some reason, they can’t, Meyer Stanley can. Meyer could probably find and restore the lost city of Atlantis if he set his mind to it. So stop worrying about company matters and worry about yourself for a change,” he admonished. And then he offered what appeared to be a hint of a smile. “Now let’s go,” Zane urged.
Mirabella still felt uncertain about the fate of the data on her computer. It represented a great deal of work that had been done on her part. But she wasn’t very well in a position to argue with Zane, so she nodded her head, giving in.
“You’re right,” she murmured.
His hand on the doorknob, Zane paused to look at the younger woman.
“Of course I’m right. I’m the boss,” he told her, watching her expression carefully as he tried to get her to smile a little.
Though he gave no outward indication of it, inside, he was seething. Not at Mirabella, but at the complete waste of human flesh who was behind this unfounded, malicious gossip. There wasn’t so much as an iota of truth to it.
Nor was there anything to base it on. Until his impromptu suggestion about having dinner together, they had never gone out socially together, or so much as attended a party where they were both separately invited.
Yes, there were times—a lot of times, actually—that they’d worked long hours together, but that was exactly all it had been: work. There’d been no secret, stolen moments together, no moments together of any kind that didn’t include deadlines or security matters.
He’d be lying if he said he didn’t find Mirabella attractive. He did. More than just passably so. With hair the color of subdued flame, light brown eyes and a porcelain complexion, Mirabella Freeman was a very beautiful woman.
But he wasn’t the type to mix business and pleasure for precisely the reason that had reared its ugly head just now. Zane wanted to take no chances on being compromised. That meant keeping his reputation beyond reproach so his father would always feel he could trust him.
And just where had all of that sterling behavior gotten him? Zane silently mocked himself now. He was being publicly accused of fathering a child he hadn’t even known about a couple of days ago. Not just fathering it, but actually stealing funds out of his father’s bank account in order to pay the baby’s mother—his own administrative assistant—hush money.
It didn’t get any crazier than that, he thought, looking at Mirabella.
The whole gaggle of lies were so reprehensible, he didn’t know where to start to dismantle them.
But what he did know was issuing a rebuttal to the spiteful email and branding it for the lie it was would only make people more convinced than ever it wasn’t a lie and they would go right on maliciously believing it.
And while he found all of that irritating and difficult to put up with, he knew he wasn’t suffering nearly as much as Mirabella was. It was going to take a long time for him to scrub the image of her face from his mind.
She had looked absolutely stricken when he’d walked into the room. No one should be put through what she was enduring.
He held his office door opened for her. Mirabella passed over the threshold into the hallway without a word. But she could only keep quiet for so long.
“Isn’t this like running away?” Mirabella asked him as they arrived at the bank of elevators and he pressed the down button.
“No,” he replied patiently, “this is giving everyone who just read that ridiculous email post a chance to cool off and come to their senses. Because once they do, they’ll realize whoever wrote that was just hurling mindless insults around. Vicious insults that are completely baseless,” he added vehemently.
He was being too optimistic in his viewpoint, she thought. People loved taking other people down because, for some reason, that somehow raised them up higher. Or so the theory went.
“But...” Mirabella began to protest.
Zane cut her short. “I thought you weren’t going to argue with me,” he reminded her. “After all, I am the boss.”
One of the people in charge of a different division within his security department was walking by just then. The woman, Gloria Winters, had obviously overheard the latter part of his exchange with his administrative assistant and was shaking her head as she frowned in response to what he’d said.
Zane caught the look on the woman’s face out of the corner of his eye. “Something wrong, Gloria?” he asked pointedly.
Gloria Winters hadn’t realized she’d been so blatant in her censure of her boss and the woman she assumed he was consorting with. Caught and embarrassed, Gloria vigorously shook her head, her voice going up half an octave as she declared, “No, nothing’s wrong, Mr. Colton.”
“You’re sure?” he pressed, his dark eyes growing more so as he pinned her with a look.
The dark-haired woman squirmed, visibly uncomfortable under his close scrutiny.
“Yes, sir, I’m sure.”
With that, Gloria picked up her pace and quickly hurried on her way.
Turning back around, Zane saw the look of distress pass over Mirabella’s face just as the elevator arrived. He ushered her into the car and then followed behind. Through no fault of her own, she’d wound up a victim in this.
His first inclination was to protect her.
“Don’t let it get to you,” he advised in a hushed voice.
Mirabella raised her eyes to his just as the elevator door closed.
“How can I not let it get to me?” Mirabella wanted to know. “Gloria was condemning me. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me. I’ve known her for two years,” she underscored. “How can she be so willing to believe something so awful about me? About us?” Mirabella added, growing increasingly agitated. Her own words came echoing back to her and she realized what that had to imply. “I mean, there is no ‘us,’ but—” Mirabella stumbled, at a loss as to how to correct what she’d accidentally said. Helpless, she looked up at him. “You know what I mean, Mr. Colton.”
Rather than just turn it into a joke or shrug it off, Zane felt for her.
“I know exactly what you mean and I know exactly what you’re feeling,” he assured her. “But this will blow over eventually.”
Mirabella let out a breath. “I know that,” she answered as they got off on the basement level. “People always find something else to talk about eventually. But the amount of damage that can be done between now and ‘eventually...’”
Her voice trailed off, leaving it up to him to fill in the blanks.
Reaching his car, Zane pressed the button that simultaneously unlocked all the doors and then held the passenger door open for her.
“Give it a couple of days,” he told Mirabella. Getting in on his side, he continued. “Just ignore the snide remarks.”
“And what if, after a couple of days, it just continues or even gets worse?” she asked. “What then?”
“Then I’ll think of something,” Zane promised, putting his key into the ignition. The vehicle rumbled to life.
Listening to his advice, Mirabella nodded her head stoically and just stared straight ahead as he drove out of the parking garage and onto the street.
“I tried to be discreet,” she said, beginning to speak quietly, as if she were just thinking out loud. “I mean, I couldn’t help being sick all the time, but I’d always make sure there was no one else in the ladies’ room to overhear me whenever I went in. And I didn’t tell a soul about the baby,” she said, lowering her voice to almost a whisper. “The only one who knew about it was my doctor.”
Zane spared her a quizzical glance. She’d forgotten someone—hadn’t she? “How about the baby’s father? Didn’t you tell him?”
The laugh he heard didn’t seem to belong to her. “Oh, I told him, all right. Trust me, he wouldn’t have told anyone. He didn’t even want to hear about it himself,” she added bitter
ly. And then she shrugged. “Anyway, a couple of weeks after I told him, it wasn’t an issue.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, trying to make some sense out of the confusing comment. “Why wouldn’t it be an issue?” When she made no effort to answer him, Zane made a guess. “Did he get married?”
She took a breath before answering. “Please, I really don’t want to talk about it. It’s over and I want to put it all behind me. The only thing you need to know is the baby’s father isn’t your stepfather. Beyond that, no disrespect intended, it’s not any of your business.”
“None taken,” he replied, giving no indication how any of her rather anger-filled statement affected him.
Mirabella let out a shaky breath and ran her hand over her face as if that somehow helped pull herself together. She wasn’t normally the type of person to have an outburst, or tell her boss to, in effect, back off.
She felt as if she was coming unglued.
“I’m sorry, sir, it’s just been that kind of a day.” She turned to look at him, clearly haunted by what was going on. “Why would whoever wrote that awful email even think that you, that I—that we would be sleeping together? You’ve never even looked at me like that and I’ve certainly never made any advances toward you. How could someone fabricate something like that completely out of nothing?” she wondered, feeling totally bewildered, not to mention helpless.
“Who knows what goes through someone’s head?” he said with a dismissive shrug. “You’ll make yourself crazy if you try to figure it out,” he warned. “If you turn this around and somehow think you’re responsible in some way for making this happen, you’ll just be playing into that person’s hands.
“Whoever did send that email was trying to get back at one of us, or stain our reputations for some reason that only he or she knows. The best way to make this go away is to just ignore it,” he told her.
For once in her life, she wasn’t that hopeful. What he was suggesting wasn’t easy.
“What if it doesn’t go away? What if it just gets worse?” Because she had this uneasy feeling it would.
“Then I’ll handle it,” he said again. “Just as I said I would. Nobody’s going to hurt you, Belle. I won’t let them,” he promised.
She pressed her lips together, wishing she could believe that. Wishing she could take all of this as stoically as he did.
But she couldn’t.
She wasn’t the type to put blinders on and hold her head up while people around her hurled rocks and insults at her.
What she wanted to do was pick up those rocks and throw them right back at whoever had thrown them in the first place.
And then, after the dust settled and everyone had gone away, she’d burst into tears. But she’d do it privately, not where anyone could see her crying.
Struggling to get into Zane’s frame of mind, Mirabella clenched her hands in her lap.
Zane pulled his vehicle up in front of Diego’s, a family-owned Mexican restaurant he favored.
The establishment had been in the same location for the last twenty-three years and the building itself was sadly in need of a fresh coat of paint and a few minor repairs. But every dime of profit made was put back into the restaurant itself, into finding ways to make it even better than it already was.
The ingredients were always top quality and the food was always excellent.
Small, the restaurant was far off the beaten path, but its clientele was loyal and growing. And he was among them.
Zane wasn’t sure just what had made him bring Mirabella here tonight, but he thought she might welcome the privacy and he was convinced she would enjoy the food.
“This is it,” he announced, turning off his engine. “Let’s go in.”
Getting out, he rounded the hood and came around to her side.
He opened the passenger-side door for her, but instead of getting out, Mirabella just remained sitting in the passenger seat, looking at the restaurant. She noticed one of the lights on the far end, to her right, was out.
All she could think was this could pass for a secret hideaway in someone’s estimation.
She looked at Zane. He was too smart not to realize that. “Isn’t this doing just what that email implied we were doing?”
“What? Eating?” he asked.
Maybe he didn’t realize it. Maybe, because he didn’t think this way himself, he was too close to all this to see the implications. “No, sneaking around.”
“We’re not ‘sneaking around,’” he contradicted. “We’re here in what was broad daylight when we started out.” He nodded toward the restaurant. “Diego’s isn’t exactly on the beaten path, but it’s not some secret den of iniquity, either.” He didn’t want her thinking he was deliberately trying to cut her off from people and bring her here for his own purposes. “I thought after what you’ve been through today, all of it,” he emphasized, not minimizing his own part in it, “you deserve a little privacy and some really good food.”
Maybe she was being hypersensitive and overreacting, Mirabella thought. Zane was just being considerate. She shouldn’t be giving him a hard time over this.
It wasn’t his fault the people in the office liked to gossip and if there was nothing to gossip about, they went out of their way to blow something out of proportion.
“Yes to the first part,” she told him, letting him know she was grateful for some privacy, “but as for the second part, I’m not sure I can keep anything down except maybe crackers.”
He took her protest in stride. “They’re not on the menu, but I’m sure I can persuade Diego to just give you the taco shell without the ingredients that usually go inside.” Then he smiled at her. “Diego’s wife gave him six kids. If anyone knows about morning sickness, he does,” he assured her.
Zane put his hand out to her. He was waiting for her to take it so he could help her out of the car if she needed it. But he didn’t want her to feel pressured, so he waited in silence.
After a moment, Mirabella curled her fingers around his and allowed him to help her out of the vehicle. “Why are you being so nice?”
He had to remind himself to let go of her hand. It felt so natural in his, for a second he forgot he was holding it.
“I’m always nice,” he quipped.
Mirabella inclined her head. “I mean, to me.”
About to walk up to the entrance, he stopped and looked at her for a moment. She made it sound as if this behavior on his part was something new. “I don’t recall having beaten you lately.”
“You could have just told me not to worry about those awful emails and then gone home instead of bringing me here.”
He didn’t see it that way. “I accused you of some pretty awful things and no sooner do we clear that up and get it out of the way than you’re bushwhacked by that email. You deserved a break and I owed you one,” he told her simply.
Pausing, Zane offered her his arm. After a moment’s hesitation, Mirabella took it.
And, with that one simple action, she lost her heart to him.
She sincerely doubted he realized it. She took great pains to appear totally unaffected by his gallant gesture. But kindness was not something she had ever taken for granted and she wasn’t about to start now. While Mirabella wanted to believe the best of everyone, she was still enough of a realist—especially after being so unceremoniously abandoned by Kyle when he learned she was carrying his baby—to know evil existed out there.
And if, for some reason, that little fact would ever slip her mind in the future, all she had to do was recall that first awful, blistering email and she would most assuredly be reminded of that simple, unadorned fact of life.
Even if she didn’t want to be.
Chapter 9
As she walked into the restaurant, Mirabella felt as if she were on the receiving end of a warm embrace delivered by her beloved grandmother. She couldn’t quite explain why, but she could feel her tension leaving her body and slipping away. The homey atmosphere made her feel re
laxed and at ease, the complete antithesis of what she’d felt during that last hour in the office.
A middle-aged woman—the owner’s wife, Mirabella guessed—crossed to them, a genuinely welcoming smile on her kind, round face. Her dark eyes seemed to literally sparkle as she approached and regarded them.
Her hands outstretched, she shook Zane’s hand between her own.
“Welcome back, Mr. Colton. It is always so good to see you here.” Still smiling, the woman’s expressive eyes shifted from Zane to his companion. “And you have brought someone new, I see.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as her smile widened, this time focused entirely on Mirabella. “Welcome to Diego’s, my dear,” the woman said to her. “As it so happens, Mr. Colton, your usual table is free.”
With that, the woman turned and led the way to a booth that was located toward the back of the room, off to one side. The older woman’s ample hips swayed rhythmically as she walked ahead of them.
Stopping at the booth, she deposited two menus on the table and gestured for them to take their seats. “Dolores will be here in a moment to take your orders—unless you need some extra time,” she qualified, addressing her words to Mirabella. “Mr. Colton, he knows the menu by heart,” she added proudly.
“Thank you, Rita. We might need a few minutes,” Zane responded.
The hostess nodded. “I will tell Dolores to take her time,” she promised. Then, pausing for a moment, she looked at Zane with compassion in her dark eyes. “They will find him, Mr. Colton,” she assured him with confidence. Then, flashing an encouraging smile at Mirabella, Rita withdrew.
“I guess you really do come here a lot,” Mirabella commented.
Zane nodded. “I tend to stick with something I like,” he replied.
Opening the rust-colored menu, Mirabella glanced over the two pages quickly. There were a number of dishes listed, but they all seemed to merge together before her eyes. The words hot, spicy and fiery seemed to spring up at her.
With a sigh, she closed the menu again, putting it back down on the table.
Zane raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”
The Pregnant Colton Bride Page 8
