The bottom line was that she couldn’t allow her heart to go there, couldn’t let herself dream and hope. She refused to live beyond the moment when it came to Rick.
Getting out of her car, she noticed that the Mercedes was parked beside the Mustang. Rick was home.
Once, when he’d had her over while his parents were away in Europe, the garage had been filled to capacity with his father’s collection of automobiles. His father had always loved displays that touted his wealth, his importance.
The collection was all but gone now. Three of the vehicles had found their way to Florida, his father’s other residence, and two were still here for when he lived on the west coast, but for the most part, the car collection had been given to charity. That, she knew, had been Rick’s doing. She’d heard from Mrs. Rutledge that Howard Masters now believed that there were more important things than money.
Would wonders never cease?
Too bad he hadn’t felt that way eight years ago.
She closed her door, looking at her own small foreign car. Rick had had it brought over last week. It looked completely out of place here amid the other cars. Like a poor relation allowed to eat at the table because it was Christmas.
Kind of the way she probably would have felt if she’d married Rick, she thought.
She supposed she could see his parents’ side of it, why they had balked at having a daughter-in-law whose parents hadn’t even bothered to get married, much less been able to have their lineage traced back through noble bloodlines.
The years had brought her insight she fervently wished she didn’t have.
In the absolute sense, his parents were right. Rick had a great future before him. He needed “his own kind” as his mother had put it, beside him, not someone who was a bastard in the old sense of the word. A man should be proud of his wife, not embarrassed by her.
And that was what she would have been to him. An embarrassment.
“Did you run into a problem?”
The sound of Rick’s voice coming from the entrance to the garage startled her. Joanna turned around. The sun was behind him, framing him in golden rays as if he were the Chosen One.
She couldn’t help smiling. Maybe he was at that, she thought.
The Chosen One, but not chosen for her. He’d assumed the helm of his family’s business with ease. And in that time, he’d only become better-looking. She’d thought of him as beautiful to start with, but the years had tempered that beauty with a ruggedness that was almost irresistible. She couldn’t help wondering why he wasn’t married by now. What had happened to the woman his mother had chosen for him? The one she’d stepped aside for?
Didn’t matter. That wasn’t her concern. She banked down her thoughts and responded to his question. “No, why?”
“I heard the car.” Crossing to her, he nodded at her vehicle. “When you didn’t come in, I thought maybe something was wrong. You were frowning.”
She dismissed his observation. “Just thinking.”
Taking her chin in his hand, he tilted back her head. His eyes searched hers for a clue. She’d become a great deal more closed-mouth than she’d been when they had been together. “About?”
“Thoughts. And to answer your question, nothing’s wrong. The school board told me that, after reviewing the matter, they’re willing to have me come back.”
She wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. He slipped his arm around her shoulders, beginning to usher her toward the house. “Very gracious of them. Maybe they don’t like facing the possibility of a lawsuit.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “Why would they think I’d sue them?”
There was a note in her voice that warned him to keep his part in this under wraps a while longer. “Everyone sues these days.”
Joanna stopped walking and shrugged his arm away from her shoulders.
“Did you have something to do with this?” Now that she thought about it, Mrs. Raleigh had looked a little uneasy. All things considered, the woman had seemed a little too eager to reinstate her.
“I didn’t talk to anyone there.”
She knew him. He was being deliberately evasive, deliberately telling her small truths to fabricate a larger lie. He hadn’t talked to anyone there, which meant that he had talked to someone somewhere about her situation.
Joanna felt her temper emerging. “Who did you talk to?”
Rick’s shrug was charmingly noncommittal, but she was in no mood for charm. “I talk to a great many people every day.”
He was playing games. She pinned him with specifics. “About me.”
He waved his hand in the air, tossing her a diversion. “I asked Mrs. Rutledge—”
Joanna fisted her hands on her hips. “Rick!”
He wasn’t about to lie outright to her. Besides, he wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done. It was all very reasonable, all very aboveboard. It was the school district who had been in the wrong, not him. “I had my lawyer talk to them.”
She should have known. Angry, she curbed the urge to slug him. Given his physique, he wouldn’t have felt it and it might have even injured her knuckles. But that didn’t negate the desire.
“Damn it, Rick, how could you?”
Why was she getting so angry? He tried to appeal to her logic. “Joanna, it’s discrimination. In this day and age, an unmarried pregnant woman—”
“—can fight her own battles.” Didn’t he get it yet? His mother had been an independent woman. Did he think that was only a trait reserved for the rich? “I wanted to fight my own battles. Win my own battles.” She blew out a breath. “Now I can’t go back.”
He didn’t see the connection. “Why? Because I did what you were going to?”
How dense was he? Or was he just patronizing her? “Because you did it for me.”
He studied her for a moment. “Since when did ego become such a big thing with you?”
It wasn’t about ego. It was about self-esteem. Apparently he couldn’t distinguish the difference between the two. “Since I wanted to be my own person.” She wanted him to understand. She wasn’t being ungrateful, she was being herself. She didn’t want to lose that sense of self, not even for him. It carried too big a price.
Her voice softened a little as she told him, “I can’t have someone else charging into battle for me, I can’t start relying on that.”
It didn’t make any sense to him. “Why?”
She closed her eyes for a second, gathering strength together. He really didn’t see, did he? She spelled it out for him.
“Because when you lean on something and that support suddenly crumbles, then what happens? You fall flat on your face. You fall hard enough and you’re not going to get up again.”
She was talking about herself, he realized. Funny, they’d grown apart, grown in different directions, and yet, they shared this. The fear of abandonment. He would have preferred being able to share something else.
“Not you, Joey.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, the way he used to do. And she shook it loose, the way she used to do. A smile curved his lips. “You always get up again. It’s one of the things I liked about you.” She’d been soft, but she’d never clung. She didn’t need him to be strong constantly. But he found himself wanting her to need him a little. “I also liked the fact that you used to let me do things for you once in a while.” He framed her face with his hands, trying to secure her complete attention. “People need to be needed, Joey, just as much as they need to feel invincible.”
Placing her hands over his, she slowly removed them from her face. “I don’t want to feel invincible, Rick, I just want to stand up on my own two feet.”
“And you are.” A touch of exasperation filled his voice. “I wasn’t threatening the board, trying to make them take back a shoddy teacher, I was trying to make them see the error of their ways and take back a wonderful teacher.” Couldn’t she see the difference?
He was just saying that, she thought. That hadn’t been his
reasoning then. People in high positions get accustomed to having their wishes obeyed without question.
“How do you know I’m a wonderful teacher?” she challenged. “You’ve never even heard me teach.”
“Because you’re a wonderful everything else.” His gaze washed over her, making her feel warm all over. She felt herself losing the thread of the argument. “I figured why should teaching be any different?”
She wanted to remain angry, to make him understand, but it wasn’t easy. “You’re making it hard to argue.”
His grin teased her. “That was my intent.”
She had to make him understand why it was important to her. “But I want to argue. Don’t you see—”
He slipped his hands around her waist. “Do you know, trite as it sounds, that you’re beautiful when you’re angry?”
She sighed, knowing she was tottering on the edge of defeat. “Rick—”
“Of course,” he said philosophically, “you’re beautiful when you’re laughing so I suppose that’s not much of an accomplishment.”
The man was utterly impossible. And incredibly irresistible. She could feel the heat of his body traveling through hers. “Rick—”
He shook his head, then kissed her forehead. “Sorry, you’re not going to make me apologize for doing what’s right.”
Backing away from him, she threw her hands up. “You’ve got to stop doing this, Rick. Stop buying me things, being my bully—”
“Bully?” Now there was something no one had ever called him before. He paused, pretending to roll the image over in his mind. “I’ve never thought of myself as a bully. I’m more of the Sir Lancelot type, don’t you think?”
If he was the first knight of the realm, where did he see her in all this? “And I’m Guinevere?”
He smiled into her eyes, drawing her to him again. “Yes.”
But she shook her head. “I don’t want to be Guinevere, the romance ended very badly.”
He thought it over for a second. “Well, you’re too pretty to be Merlin and if you’re King Arthur, that takes this relationship into a whole other realm that I’m not prepared even to consider.” For a moment, they were back in the past, sitting on her mother’s porch, fantasizing. He grinned at her. “Okay, who would you like to be?”
“Me, Rick,” she insisted, and then her voice softened. “Just me.”
He nodded. “A very good choice. I vote for that, too.” His hand around her waist, he began to usher her toward the inner garage door. “Now come into the house, I have something for you.”
She sighed, exasperated. “Aren’t you listening? I just told you I don’t want you spending any more money on me.”
“I swear, you are the hardest woman to shower with things. But don’t worry, this didn’t cost anything.” For good measure, he crossed his heart, the way he used to.
It was like experiencing déjà vu. She shut the feeling and its accompanying sensations of nostalgia away. “You stole it?” she scoffed.
He thought of the box in his room. “No, I unearthed it.” He opened the door leading into the house and waited for her to walk in first.
Now he had her curious. But first, she wanted to look in on her daughter. She’d discovered that being away from Rachel for more than a couple of hours at a time filled her with a sense of longing. It was going to be difficult once she went back to work—one aspect of independence she wasn’t looking forward to.
“Let me just go in and check on Rachel first before you start ‘showering.”’
He laughed. “Why don’t we do it together? See the baby I mean, not shower—although—”
This time she did hit him, but she laughed as she did it. “You know, this isn’t over with yet.”
“I sincerely hope not.” There was a look in his eyes that completely unsettled her.
She looked at him pointedly. “I mean this discussion.”
Mrs. Rutledge came out to greet them the moment they entered the house. Her proximity to the inner door had allowed her to hear almost everything.
“I was beginning to wonder if I was supposed to bring out the swords for you two.” She was referring to the two ancient samurai swords that hung over the fireplace in the den. “And a referee.” She looked at Joanna. “Did everything go all right at your meeting with the school board?”
Joanna in turn slanted a look toward Rick. “That depends on who you ask.” She supposed, in his defense, from Rick’s point of view, he was only trying to help. A lot of women would have killed to have someone in their corner. The problem was, he wasn’t in her corner, he was the corner.
“You’ll work it out,” Mrs. Rutledge assured her with unflagging cheerfulness. She saw the two begin to go toward the rear of the house. “I just put the baby down. Mind you don’t wake her.”
Joanna shook her head as the woman walked away. “I’m starting to wonder whose baby this is,” she murmured to Rick.
“She tends to be a little protective,” he told her, and then added as he looked at Joanna, “There’s a lot of that going around.”
Tiptoeing into the nursery, Joanna saw that Rachel really was asleep. She’d been hoping to find her awake. But she didn’t have the heart to rouse her.
Standing here, looking down at her daughter, raw emotions found her. She was still in awe of the fact that she was a mother, that this tiny life had entered hers and that she was responsible for it.
It both humbled her and filled her with a great deal of love.
“She looks like you.”
She felt his breath along her cheek as he spoke and struggled not to shiver. “No, she doesn’t.”
Maybe she’d misunderstood what he meant. “When you were a baby.”
Drawing away from the crib so as not to wake Rachel, she looked at him. “How would you know?”
“I sat up last night, looking through your mother’s albums.” He nodded toward the open door, indicating that they should take the conversation out of the room in case it might wake the baby.
“Why would you do that?”
“I was just curious.” He eased the door closed and followed her into the hallway. “You’re not seriously going to turn the board down because of your pride, are you?”
“My pride?” Stunned, she looked at him. “What does my pride have to do with it?”
“Everything from where I’m standing. For some reason, you feel as if you have to do everything yourself. The world’s not like that, Joanna.”
She’d watched her mother struggle to provide a living for them. There’d never been anyone to help her and she’d never complained. It was just something she did and it was a trait she’d passed on to her.
“It is for me.”
He shook his head. “The world is about networking, about doing favors and having them done for you. You’re being noble in your own way, but you’re also being damn stubborn in a way that only you can be.”
She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
But he only grinned at her. “That’s okay, I like stubborn women.” He kissed her temple. “Now come with me.” He took her hand, threading his fingers through hers. “I still have something to show you.”
Nine
The moment he started walking with her toward the staircase, his cell phone rang.
Joanna looked at his jacket. “I think your pocket wants you.”
Rick sighed, stopping. He wasn’t in the mood for interruptions. “I’m going to have to remember to turn that off when I come home.”
“There’s always the regular phone,” she pointed out. One of the rooms served as his office. “Your fax, e-mail. They’d find you.”
She was right. There was no getting away from responsibility. He hoped that this was something that could be settled quickly. Pulling out his phone, he saw that Joanna was about to walk away, probably to give him some privacy. He held up his finger, indicating that he wanted her to stay.
“Masters.”
Joanna watched his face as he
listened to the person on the other end of the phone. His brows slowly drew together like dark clouds gathering before a storm. “Can’t you handle it, Pierce?”
Whoever Pierce was, Joanna thought, his answer was obviously negative. Rick’s eyebrows almost touched over the bridge of a nose that sculptors had been immortalizing for centuries.
“Fine, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Annoyed, he slapped the lid shut. He was frowning deeply as he replaced his phone in his pocket. The frown faded slightly as he apologized. “I’m going to have to go out for a little while.”
From what she’d seen of him these last few weeks, she wouldn’t have expected anything less. He was in full command of the company, not just his father’s right-hand man. That meant that business would take up most of his time. She was surprised that he could come home early. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
He ran his hands up and down her arms, his eyes on her face. “What this man wants to do is spend the evening with you.” Impulse had him forming plans as he went along. It had been a long time since he’d felt spontaneous within the confines of his own life. “I wanted to take you out and celebrate your rehiring. You haven’t been out since Rachel was born.”
If only he knew. “Far longer than that,” Joanna laughed.
There was something in her voice that made him want to ask her questions, made him want to find out what life had been like for her these years they’d been apart. Had there been anyone else after him? Someone who’d captured her heart? What other men had held her? Had made love with her?
Or had she been like him, alone in her heart if not in reality?
He knew he had no right to ask, but that didn’t change the fact that he wanted to. That he wanted to know.
Taking her hands in his, Rick looked into her eyes, losing himself there for just a moment.
“I won’t be long,” he promised. “When I come back, we’ll go out. Does dinner and dancing sound good to you?”
Joanna grinned. “Right now, a hamburger and a jig sound good to me.” Any place, she thought, as long as it’s with you.
“It’ll be more than that. Maybe this’ll hold you until then. Take it as a retainer.”
A Bachelor and a Baby Page 10
