And then she knew nothing at all.
He was a man of reason, given to doing things for definite, concrete reasons that at times made sense only to him. But he wasn’t entirely sure just why he was kissing her, or what had brought him to this juncture.
He just knew he had to kiss her.
When it came to Sherry Campbell, fledgling ace reporter, he wasn’t sure of anything, not his actions, not his thoughts. What he was sure of was that he was reacting to her despite all the self-imposed restraints that had been put in place over the years. The fact astonished Sin-Jin.
At a very young age he’d promised himself never to emulate either of his parents. He would never go from mate to mate, investing his soul only to be disappointed. Love, to him, was far too important a thing to tarnish, and so it was kept under wraps, hidden, never to venture out into the light of day. Or the soft, seductive rays of moonlight.
To that end he made himself far too busy to risk entanglements or to waste any time on relationships that were guaranteed an ignoble death by the law of averages he’d observed while growing up.
But there was something about this woman that made him curious, that made him want to put himself at risk. Just a little.
If he pushed aside the circumstances that surrounded their interactions, he’d have to admit that she had stirred him, twisting his gut and waking desire even from the very first.
She tightened her hands on his arms, bracing herself. Her bones were melting, and it wouldn’t do to sink down here on her front stoop.
Bells, she was hearing bells. No, wait, that was a cell phone ringing.
Blinking, struggling out of her dazed state, she looked up at Sin-Jin. The words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Is that your phone?”
He found he had to swallow before answering, taking care not to lose his tongue. He wasn’t sure exactly what had just happened here, only that it had never happened before.
Sin-Jin cleared his throat. “No, I believe that’s yours.” Releasing her, he touched his pocket to make sure. “Mine’s on vibrate.”
Sherry blew out a breath, feeling completely unsteady. Locking her knees rigidly to keep from embarrassing herself, she tossed her hair over her shoulder, praying for nonchalance.
“That’s one way to get a thrill. Must be mine, then.” Hoping that her hands wouldn’t shake, she took out her phone and flipped it open. “Campbell.”
“When are you going to call for me to pick you up?”
She closed her eyes and sighed. Saved by the cavalry. Just as well. One more second and she would have permanently forgotten how to breathe.
She dragged her hand through her hair. She saw Sin-Jin looking at her, his dark eyes curious. It took effort to stop the shiver that wanted to shimmy up her spine in its tracks.
“I’m already home, Dad. Just look out the window.”
When the light-gray drapes at the front window moved back, she waved. Her father, she mused, looked as if he could be knocked over with a feather.
The next moment the front door was opening. Connor Campbell filled the entry, somehow giving the impression, at five-eight of being larger than life.
“Need any help?”
It wasn’t completely clear if her father was addressing the question to her or to the man standing beside her, but Sherry was the one who answered.
“No, we’re fine.” And then, because it was awkward not to, Sherry began to make introductions. “Dad, this is—”
“St. John Adair, yes, I know,” he told Sherry pointedly.
She turned toward Sin-Jin. “Mr. Adair, this is—”
Sin-Jin extended his hand to her father. When the latter grasped it, they shook with the solemnity of two chieftains meeting on the moors. “Connor Campbell, I’ve read your byline.”
Sherry shrugged haplessly. The awkwardness of the moment wouldn’t abate. She’d just been kissed by St. John Adair. And she’d kissed him back.
“Well, I’m certainly superfluous here,” she murmured to herself.
Sin-Jin dropped his hand to his side as he looked at her. He could still taste her on his lips. “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
Connor looked from the tycoon to his daughter. In typical fashion, he made his assessment rapidly. He was rarely wrong.
“Why don’t you come in?” He opened the door wider. “The crib’s finished—”
“No thanks to your father,” Sheila Connor called out, joining them at the door. Sherry was surprised her mother had held out this long. Consuming curiosity was far from an unknown factor in her mother’s life. “The least handy man I’ve ever met.” She smiled warmly at the man standing beside Sherry. “He’s all thumbs.”
Connor wrapped a proprietary arm around his wife’s shoulders. She fitted neatly against his side. “Didn’t hear you complaining last night.”
Sherry made a show of covering her ears as she rolled her eyes. “I don’t need to hear this.”
“Of course you do, girl,” Sheila told her with a laugh that was almost identical to her daughter’s. “How else are you going to know that there are good relationships out there and that not all men are like that scum who deserted you?”
The last remark had been for Sin-Jin’s benefit, Sherry thought with a sinking feeling inside her. It was a mistake to bring him here, and now she was paying for it.
She wet her lips, feeling oddly nervous. It wasn’t a feeling she was accustomed to.
“Sorry about this, Mr.—” She caught herself and could feel a flush creeping up her neck. She prayed that he was farsighted only. “Under the circumstances I guess I’d better call you St. John.”
Connor gave the man the once-over. “Huh,” he snorted. “Never knew a man to live up to the title of saint.” His voice had the ability to be both booming and intimate at the same time, making the listener feel as if he had become an instant friend and been welcomed into Connor’s inner circle. “What do your friends call you?”
Sherry looked at him with interest, half expecting the man to say that he had no friends, or, at the very least, that it wasn’t any of her father’s business what they called him.
Instead, he responded, “Sin-Jin.”
Connor cracked a wide smile. “Man named after my favorite liquor can’t be all bad.” He was taking Sin-Jin’s arm and ushering him into the house as if it was his to do so, rather than his daughter’s. “Come on in a spell, rest your feet—” he looked at his daughter significantly “—if not your ears.”
“Sin-Jin has to leave,” Sherry protested.
Sin-Jin looked at Sherry, wondering if she was aware that she’d slid from Mr. Adair to St. John to Sin-Jin without pause. She’d given him his way out. But he had to admit there was something oddly compelling about the couple who stood before him. About them and the daughter they had produced.
And then the small woman who looked like an older version of her daughter robbed him of his escape. “Oh, he’ll stay for a cup of Irish coffee.” She looked up at him brightly. “Won’t you, dear?” Before he could say anything, Sheila had slipped her personality, her Irish lilt and her arm through his and was gently drawing him into the living room.
“I guess I can stay for a few minutes,” Sin-Jin allowed.
Amused, Sherry watched her mother weave her magic on the man. It occurred to her that had she wanted to, her mother would have made an excellent investigative reporter. It was obvious that Sin-Jin hadn’t stood a chance against her.
Maybe her mother could give lessons, she mused, following behind them. She heard her father chuckling beside her and knew he was probably thinking the same thing.
“So that’s the mighty St. John Adair, eh?” Connor commented an hour later as he shut the front door. He turned to look at his daughter. “Seems rather taken with you, missy. I saw the way he was looking at you.”
Oh, no, she wasn’t about to let her father go off on that tangent. Even if he’d seen them kissing, which she was sure he hadn’t, there was no basis to believe that Adair ha
d felt anything but curiosity.
“I think you have your looks confused, Dad. He was blaming me for pulling him into all this.” She fixed her father with a look. “You can be overwhelming, you know.”
Sheila moved to side with her husband, physically as well as verbally. “Say what you will, I like him,” she declared.
Connor laughed. “You’d like Satan if he smiled wide enough.”
Sheila raised her eyes to his face. “As I recall, my father thought you were the devil incarnate when you first started coming around.”
He waved away the story. “Well, we all know your father was always wrong, God-rest-his-soul,” he tagged on mechanically.
“Maybe that one time,” Sheila acquiesced generously. There was a teasing smile playing on her lips.
Feeling suddenly drained, Sherry decided it was time for her to retreat. She stuck her hands into her pockets, about to say good-night, when her fingers came in contact with a crumpled piece of paper. Drawing it out, she remembered the look on Sin-Jin’s face when he handed it to her. His expression had been carefully controlled. This bothered him, she thought.
Impulsively she made up her mind. “Dad, I want you to do me a favor.”
Connor looked away from his wife. “Anything, love.”
She knew how he felt about tabloid journalism. He didn’t like to dirty his hands with it. But this was necessary. “I need a few strings pulled.”
Independent though she’d been since the moment she’d opened her eyes on this world, he’d always made it a point to let her know that he was there, in the background, ready to do anything she needed doing. That’s what made them a family. “You’ve come to the right man. What is it you need done?”
She took a deep breath. “Who do you know on the Bulletin?”
The shaggy eyebrows drew into a scowling, dismissive line. “That rag?” he hooted. “What makes you think I know someone there?”
“Because you know everyone, dear.” Sheila patted his chest with the familiarity of a woman who knew her husband’s every thought even before it occurred to him. “Even people who work on that rag. Like William Kelley, remember?” She turned to Sherry. “Why are you asking, dear?”
Sherry smoothed out the front page, then held it up for both her parents to see at the same time. She saw anger spring like lightning into her father’s eyes. “I want this to be retracted.”
Sheila took the page from her, reading the headline again in disbelief. She turned to her husband. “Oh, my God. Connor, you have to make them print an apology. We can’t have Sherry’s character maligned like this—”
Sherry quickly cut her off. “It’s not my name I’m concerned about, Mother. Sin-Jin saved my son’s life and maybe mine, as well.” She’d begun hemorrhaging shortly after she’d been taken to the hospital. If that had happened while she’d been in the cabin, she might not be having this conversation with her parents now. “This is not the way to pay him back, especially considering how he feels about his privacy.”
Connor plucked the page from his wife. His scowl deepened and he muttered something under his breath that was best left unheard.
“Consider it done, love. The retraction’s going in the day after tomorrow. Sooner if I can get ahold of Blake Andrews,” he said, mentioning the name of the managing editor.
She knew she could count on him. Too bad there were no men out there like her father. “Nice to have connections in low places,” Sherry quipped.
Sin-Jin had always believed that the way to kill a rumor was to ignore it and allow it to die for lack of fuel.
The headline on the Bulletin he’d brought to Sherry’s attention had irritated him, but he’d managed to shrug it off. He fully expected it to die like everything else. He was not about to demand a retraction or an apology. There was no way he was about to dignify the false story with any sort of reaction on his part.
So when Mrs. Farley came into his office two days later with another copy of the Bulletin in her hand, he made no offer to take it from her, even when she waved it at him.
He knew she always had his best interests at heart, but there were times when she took the matter of his honor a little too personally.
“I’m really not interested in a follow-up, Mrs. Farley.” Turning from his computer, he looked up at her. “I don’t know why you bother with something like that.”
Edna drew herself up to her full small stature. “I don’t bother with it.” Her tone was not defensive, just firm. “Joseph Bailey in accounting brought it to my attention. I really think you should look at page two.”
He paused tolerantly. “Now why would I want to do that?”
She placed the paper on his desk, turning it to face him. “So that you can see history in the making. To my knowledge, this has never happened before in the Bulletin.”
Amusement raised one corner of his mouth. He glanced at the headline. “They have exclusive photographs of aliens taking over Alaska?”
“Better.”
When he made no effort to open the paper, Mrs. Farley came around the desk. She opened the tabloid for him. Handling the paper gingerly, as if merely touching it defiled her fingertips, she turned to the second page. Moving it before him again, she jabbed her index finger at the box on the bottom of the page.
“Read.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he joked. The tone of her voice placed them back in time some twenty years or so. He was in her English class again, getting help after hours. She’d been an unrelenting woman then, as she was now.
Placating her, he looked down to where she was pointing.
Amazed, he read the four lines again. And then he raised his eyes up to hers. Mrs. Farley was smiling. She rarely did that. “It’s a retraction,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed triumphantly, taking the paper away again and folding it back into its original position. Victory had momentarily taken away the paper’s taint.
Leaning back in his chair, he scrutinized the older woman. He’d obviously underestimated her. “How did you get them to do this?”
“I didn’t. I just assumed that you did.”
Sin-Jin laughed shortly. “You know better than to think I’d dignify a rag like the Bulletin with a phone call.”
Pencil-thin light-brown eyebrows drew together in confusion as Mrs. Farley mulled over the situation. “Well, if you didn’t, then who did?” She frowned as she dropped the tabloid into the wastepaper basket. “I doubt very much if anyone at that establishment has suddenly gotten a conscience. The people of the fourth estate are born without them.”
The fourth estate.
Campbell.
Sin-Jin thought of the look on Sherry’s face when he’d handed the single sheet to her. She’d looked surprised and then angry.
And, suddenly, he thought he had his answer.
Chapter Nine
Sherry heard the phone ringing from within her house as she put the key into the lock. Hurrying inside, she picked the receiver up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Did you do this?”
“Sin-Jin?” She tossed her purse on the sofa and kicked off her shoes before she sank down on the cushion. Her visit to her gynecologist had been uneventful. According to the woman, she was doing fine and all systems were go. She’d stopped at the hospital next to see her baby, wishing the same could be true of him. “You know, it’s customary to say hello when you call someone.”
“Hello.” She heard something rustling on the other end of the line. “Did you do this?”
“And ‘this’ would be…?” She waited for him to fill in the space. “Don’t forget, I’m good, but I’m not clairvoyant.”
There was a hint of impatience in his voice. The man had to be hell to work for, she decided. “The retraction in the Bulletin. Are you the one behind it?”
Sherry curled her legs under her. She certainly hadn’t expected this kind of reaction. “You make it sound like an assassination plot. If you mean did I have something to do
with having the Bulletin set the record straight, yes I did.”
Unable to bring herself to actually buy the tabloid, she’d asked Rusty to get a copy for her. He’d dropped it by the day after Sin-Jin had given her the front page. The article, full of speculations that were guardedly phrased, had been accompanied by a couple of rather unflattering shots of the two of them, very obviously spliced together from separate sources.
“Why did you bother?”
She frowned. “A simple ‘thank you’ would have sounded better, but if you must know, I did it because I’m a journalist. I deal in the truth, not lies just because they guarantee sales.” There was silence on the other end. “Hello? You still there?”
After a beat, he answered. “I’m still here. I’m just sitting here, trying to imagine your nose growing.”
She didn’t know whether to be insulted or to laugh. “I think you’ve made a mistake. Pinocchio’s nose only grew when he lied. My nose is the same size it’s always been, thank you.”
And it was a lovely nose, Sin-Jin caught himself thinking. Set in an even lovelier face.
He blew out a breath, impatient with himself. What the hell was going on with him? He didn’t have time for this kind of mental drifting.
She shifted the receiver to her other ear. “Have you blown down the three little pigs’ houses yet, or is there some other reason that you’re huffing like the big, bad wolf?”
He frowned, still looking at the retraction. It placed him in a vulnerable position. Far more vulnerable than the original, silly article had. “If you think getting this retraction somehow places me in your debt—”
So that was it, he thought she wanted something from him. It figured. “Debt had nothing to do with it. Besides, if we’re talking debt, I do owe you a favor.” Or six or seven, she added silently. There was no way to repay what he had done for her son. It went far beyond his covering the hospital bills. Those she could well handle herself. Losing the baby was another matter.
He wanted to make his position perfectly clear. “I’m not in the business of exchanging favors.”
A Billionaire and a Baby Page 10
