by Linda Turner
“Dammit, Mary, right now I’m madder than hell! Didn’t you hear what I said? She won’t marry me. She won’t even consider it.”
“So?”
“So?” he echoed, outraged. “What do you mean, so? That’s my baby she’s carrying, and I’ve got a right to be a part of its life. But will she listen to reason? Hell, no!”
Roaming around the office like a bear with a thorn in its paw, he grumbled and raged and just barely resisted the urge to throw something. “She’s got this crazy idea that I only proposed out of guilt and that I’m still in love with Jan. Can you believe that? I told her that was ridiculous, of course, but she claimed that I didn’t even like who and what she was. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Just because I want her to give up flying? There’s a baby involved, for God’s sake! My baby. Of course I want her on the ground! Is that such an unreasonable request from the father of her baby?”
“That depends on if it was a request or an order.”
“Well, of course it was a request,” he began indignantly, only to remember his exact phrasing. Color tinged his cheeks. “I think.”
Mary grinned knowingly. “I’ve seen you when you start throwing your weight around, Lucas Greywolf. It’s not a pretty sight. No wonder Rocky turned you down flat—I would have done the same thing.”
That stopped him in his tracks. He turned on her, his brows snapping into a scowl at the sight of her smile. “Dammit, Mary, this isn’t funny! I’ve got a right to take care of my own kid and its mother.”
Undaunted, she only shook her head at him. “How you got to the age of thirty-five without learning a darn thing about women, I’ll never know. When you ask a woman to marry you, Lucas, she doesn’t want to hear about what a responsibility she is.”
“But she’s pregnant! And I don’t care if she and her family have more money than God, she needs me by her side during this.”
“I agree,” she retorted easily. “But if you said that sort of thing when you asked her to marry you, she probably thought you were doing it out of a sense of duty, not because you really wanted to be with her and the baby. She needs to know you care, Lucas. That means hearts and flowers and romance, not a logical list of reasons to get married. Pregnant or not, a woman’s got a right to expect those kinds of things when a man is asking her to spend the rest of her life with him.”
Feeling like a man who had just been hit over the head with a sledgehammer, Lucas swore under his breath, cursing his own stupidity. She was right. All he’d been thinking about was the need to do the responsible thing and get his ring on her finger so that his baby would carry his name. He hadn’t once stopped to think how that would sound to Rocky.
“Damn,” he said softly, sinking into one of the waiting room chairs. “I think I blew it. I was so concerned about protecting her from her own recklessness that I didn’t even kiss her. She said some jerk tried to control her once before and she’d never get in that kind of situation again. I didn’t care for the comparison.”
Mary grinned. “I don’t imagine you did.”
“All right, so I acted like an idiot. But hearts and flowers wouldn’t have worked anyway. She doesn’t love me.”
An eternal optimist, Mary brushed that little problem aside with a wave of her hand. “Maybe right now she doesn’t, but she must have feelings for you—she’s pregnant with your baby. And I’ve seen the way you look at her. You’re not exactly indifferent to her yourself.”
That struck a little too close to the bone. “We’re not talking about me,” he growled.
“Of course we are,” she retorted, grinning. “And don’t give me that steely-eyed look of yours. You asked for my advice, and you’re going to get it.” Blithely ignoring the fact that he really hadn’t done any such thing, she proceeded to speak her mind. “You might not think you’re ever going to let yourself love anyone again, but you haven’t got any say-so in the matter. Especially where Rocky Fortune is concerned. The lady’s already under your skin, and you’re under hers. Now all you have to do is fan the flames a little hotter, and nature will take care of itself.”
“Nature’s not going to take care of anything. In case you missed the news flash, the lady turned my proposal down flat.”
“So you’re going to give up? Just like that? Without a fight?”
“She’s pregnant, Mary. What else am I supposed to do? I can’t pressure her now….”
“Nobody said anything about pressuring her. And just because she isn’t ready to marry you, it doesn’t mean you can’t be a part of her life. Just be there for her. Take care of her. Baby her. Before she knows it, she won’t be able to imagine how she ever got along without you.”
The bell on the front door rang then with the arrival of the first patient. Within minutes the waiting room was filling up and there was no time for anything but work. But all morning long, as Lucas treated colds and flu and bronchitis, Mary’s advice rumbled around in his head, nagging him, distracting him with images of ways he could pamper Rocky. By noon, he knew what he was going to do.
Morning sickness. Rocky had barely climbed out of bed when it came out of nowhere to send her rushing to the bathroom, where she had, to put it bluntly, tossed her cookies. After that, she hadn’t dared touch breakfast. She knew she had to eat—the baby needed it—but her stomach seemed to turn over just at the thought of her putting food in it. So lunchtime came and went and she still put off going into town to the café for something hot.
“You go ahead,” she told Charlie, who usually went with her to lunch. “I don’t think I want anything.”
Pulling on his jacket, he shoved his hands into his pockets and studied her suspiciously. “You okay? You haven’t said two words since you got here, and then you looked like death warmed over. Something wrong?”
“Not a thing.” Deliberately avoiding his too-sharp gaze, she kept her attention on the ad she’d been working on all morning, which she wanted to place in a popular hunting magazine. She knew she would have to tell him sooner or later about the baby, but she wasn’t up to it now. As chauvinistic as Lucas, he would probably agree that she had no business flying, and that wasn’t an argument she was ready to repeat anytime soon. “I had a big breakfast,” she fibbed. “I’ll get something later. Go on. I’ll hold down the fort.”
He went, but not without warning her that he was bringing her back some chicken soup—any day she didn’t eat, she had to be sick as a dog, and if she wouldn’t look after herself, then he would. Rocky was still smiling over his gruff concern when the door slammed shut behind him.
When it opened again almost immediately, she looked up, ready to tease him about worrying over her worse than a mother hen. But the tall, broad-shouldered man filling the doorway to her office wasn’t Charlie. It was Lucas. And with a will of its own, her heart jumped into a crazy rhythm at the sight of him.
Irritated, she turned her attention back to the ad, though she couldn’t for the life of her have said what it said. “If you’ve come to pick up where we left off last night, you’ve wasted your time,” she said coolly, without sparing him a glance. “My answer is no, and it’s going to stay no.”
She braced for an argument that never materialized. Instead, he said easily, “Whatever you say. Have you had lunch?”
“No, but—”
“Good, because I packed us a picnic.”
“A picnic? Are you kidding? It’s freezing outside!”
“Then we’ll eat in here.” Setting a wicker picnic basket on the chair angled in front of her desk, he opened it and pulled out a red gingham table cloth. “Give me a hand with this, will you? We don’t want to mess up the stuff on your desk. What are you working on, anyway?”
He didn’t give her time to think, let alone answer, and in the time it took for her to remember that she didn’t want to put so much as a drop of water in her sensitive stomach, he had a complete picnic—with everything from paper plates and potato salad to fried chicken—set up on her desk. The smell of th
e food alone would have been enough to tempt the devil himself.
Her mouth watering in spite of the memory of that morning’s dry heaves, she eyed the little scene warily. Just who did he think he was fooling? He hadn’t given up on convincing her to marry him—he was just trying another tactic. Now he was going to try seducing her into what he wanted, and she wanted no part of it. Or him.
But, Lord, that chicken smelled good!
“I’m not hungry,” she said hoarsely.
“You sure? I’ve got all sorts of tasty stuff here. You like pickled beets?”
She loved anything sweet-and-sour, but she had no intention of telling him that. Narrowing her eyes at him, she said, “I know what you’re doing and it’s not going to work.”
He didn’t deny he was up to something, but simply shrugged easily. “Okay, you caught me. But you still have to eat. Try a bite.” Scooping a beet out of a decorative jar with a small plastic fork, he held it up to her mouth and grinned down into her eyes. “C’mon, just a little one.”
With that wicked, heated gaze of his, he could have charmed her into venturing out on a tight rope without a net. Damn the man, why did he have to be so attractive? Fighting a smile, she opened her mouth.
The tartness of the beet exploded on her tongue, drawing a soft moan from her. She saw Lucas’s grin deepen and punched him in the shoulder. “Damn you, Lucas. If I get sick again—”
“So that’s why you didn’t want to eat, huh?” he murmured as he trailed a finger over the curve of her cheek. “Morning sickness? Why didn’t you say so?”
She stared up into his eyes, her pulse fluttering at his touch. It was all she could do to hang on to the topic of conversation. She wanted to lean into his touch, into him, and lose herself in him. Instead, she forced herself to pull back just the slightest bit, until he was no longer touching her. It helped, but not much. “Because I don’t even want to think about it,” she said huskily. “It was awful. Can I have some more of those beets?”
He laughed and slung a friendly arm around her shoulders to steer her around her desk to the chair behind it. “You can have anything you want. Sit down, and I’ll fix you a plate.”
She should have protested. She had a feeling that when Lucas was at his most charming, he could be impossible to resist, but suddenly she was starving. And what harm could it do to share a meal with him? He could ask until the cows came home, but she wasn’t going to marry him. All she had to do was remember that, and they’d get along just fine.
Settling back, prepared to enjoy a rare moment of being pampered, she watched him fill her plate with all sorts of tempting morsels. “Where’d you get all this stuff? And don’t tell me you made it yourself because I won’t believe you. You’re probably all thumbs in the kitchen.”
“I’ll have you know I can cook a mean steak,” he retorted as he set her plate before her, then began to fix one for himself. “Just don’t ask me to try anything more complicated than that. Most of this came from the deli at Thompson’s store in town. You like it?”
Taking a bite of a deviled egg, Rocky closed her eyes and savored it, the corners of her mouth curling in a satisfied smile. “Mmm… I love it. I can’t remember the last time I was on a picnic.”
“I can,” he said as he dragged up a chair across from her and proceeded to dig into his food like a field hand. “I was in med school, and it was the middle of summer. One of my friends set me up with a blind date—a nursing student whose main goal in life was to marry a doctor. Of course, I didn’t know that, but my friend did. We’d hardly set the food out before she launched herself at me and sent us both tumbling into an ant bed.”
“Oh, no!” Rocky choked, trying not to laugh. “That must have been awful. What’d you do?”
“Rushed her to the hospital—she was allergic.”
“To you or the ants?”
“Cute, Rocky,” he said, grinning. “To the ants, of course. But she was so embarrassed after that that whenever she happened to run into me on campus, she ducked around the corner like I had the plague or something. Needless to say, we never went out on another date.”
“The poor girl probably wanted to crawl into a hole. Did she ever get herself a doctor?”
Laughter danced in his eyes, wicked and enticing. “Yeah. John—the friend who set up the blind date—ended up falling for her like a ton of bricks. Last I heard, they had three kids and were expecting a fourth. He’s working all the time just to feed them and set up college funds for all of them.”
Fascinated by this side of him, Rocky couldn’t help but laugh. “And just think—it could have been you.”
He nodded, grinning. “There but for the grace of God and those ants.” Leaning across the desk, he added another egg to her plate. “Here. Have some more.”
“Lucas! I’m going to be as big as the side of a barn if you keep that up.”
She was laughing when she said it, but it was the wrong thing to say. His eyes took a slow, lazy inventory of her curves, noting the fullness of her breasts beneath the navy turtleneck sweater she wore, the smallness of her waist, the flare of her hips. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t have to. Between one heartbeat and the next, she was hot and breathless, and they were both remembering that night in the mountains when they hadn’t been able to get enough of each other.
“Maybe John has the right idea,” he said thickly. “You’re going to be a beautiful expectant mother. Your skin already has a rosy glow.”
The color in her cheeks was nothing but an old-fashioned blush, but Rocky couldn’t find the words to tell him. Her pulse was thundering, her blood was warm, and the dark, secret recesses of her body were pulsing from the memory of his loving. She should have been horrified, but all she could think of was that they were alone and all she had to do was reach out her hand and he would take it. Her fingers itched just at the thought.
The sudden ringing of the phone was like a scream in the heated silence, shattering the tension. She jumped, the hot color in her cheeks turning a fiery red. Lord, she hadn’t blushed so much since she was a teenager! What was the matter with her?
Fumbling for the phone under the tablecloth, she snatched it up with fingers that weren’t anywhere near steady. “Fortune Flying Service,” she said shakily, avoiding Lucas’s penetrating gaze. “This is Rocky. May I help you?”
“I certainly hope so, baby sister,” her brother drawled in her ear. “How’re things going?”
“Adam!” Delighted, she asked him to hang on a minute, then told Luke, “I’m sorry. It’s my brother, and I haven’t talked to him in ages. I’ve got to take it.”
“No problem,” he said, pushing to his feet with the animal grace that never failed to draw her eye. “I need to check with Mary to make sure everything’s quiet at the clinic. Is there another phone around?”
“On Charlie’s desk, out in the work area,” she said. “Just punch 9.” He thoughtfully shut the door behind him, and she quickly turned her attention back to her brother. “Everything’s fine here. How’re the kids?”
“Holy terrors,” he retorted with a chuckle. “God knows how I’m going to control them when they hit their teens. They can scare off a baby-sitter faster than any kids I’ve ever seen. But that’s not why I called.”
Something in his tone had alarm bells going off in her head. Ever since their grandmother had died in that Brazilian rain forest, it seemed like the family had hardly dealt with one crisis before another one hit. Dragging in a calming breath, she braced for the worst. “What is it this time? Another break-in at the lab?”
“Not quite,” he said tersely, then dropped the bombshell. “Dad’s decided to sell some of the family’s stock to Monica.”
“What?”
“I know. It blows the mind, doesn’t it? She’s already bought up everything she can get her hands on, and now for some reason, Dad’s selling her even more.”
“Mother must be livid,” Rocky said, frowning. “Aside from the family, Monica’s already the
majority stockholder. If she gets her hands on enough shares, Dad might as well hand her the keys to the front door. Maybe you should talk to him.”
“Me? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Rocky winced at her brother’s caustic tone and wished there was something she could say to make his relationship with their father easier. But they were both strong, opinionated men who didn’t see eye to eye on hardly anything. Consequently, they’d been alienated for years, and a reconciliation was nowhere in sight. It was positively infuriating.
Still, Rocky had never been able to resist the need to play peacemaker. “If you’d just cut him a little slack—”
“Why should I? He never has me.”
“But—”
“Save it, sis,” he growled. “I’ll never have a relationship with him like you and Allie and Caro. There’s just too much water under the bridge.”
It didn’t have to be that way, but Rocky knew that tone. It was a carbon copy of their father’s when he’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to budge another inch. Fighting a smile, she wondered why the two men couldn’t realize they were just alike. But there was no sense in trying to convince Adam of that. He would never believe it.
“I know you’re not going to want to hear this,” she said, “but we’re just going to have to trust Dad on this. It’s not as if he’s going to do anything to hurt the company. He lives and breathes for it just like Granddad Ben did—which is why Kate left him in charge. And he does own his own shares outright. He can sell them to whoever he wants to and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Except consider having him committed,” he retorted, “because he’s obviously lost his mind.”
Rocky laughed—she didn’t know anyone more in control of his mental facilities than their father. Whatever reason he had for doing this, it wasn’t because he was a couple of bricks shy of a load. “Mother might not be speaking to him right now, but somehow I can’t see her doing that,” she replied in a voice laced with amusement.
