From Boss to Bridegroom (13 page)

 

“Are you for-sure I can't ride it?” Max was referring to the sculpture in Rand's entryway that swung like a pendulum.

“I'm absolutely sure. You cannot ride it,” Lucy
answered for what seemed like the hundredth time since her son and Sadie had arrived. She herded the little boy back into the living room where Sadie and Rand were having after-dinner coffee.

When he got there Max stopped dead in his tracks in front of an abstract painting. “When I color like that, Miss Vanessa says to stop and start over and make it look like something. She says stuff like that's just a mess.”

“Next time she tells you that, tell her she's inhibiting your creativity,” Rand advised.

“She doesn't hit me,” the little boy contradicted, either hearing wrong or giving
inhibiting
his own meaning because he didn't understand the word.

Rand and Sadie laughed.

“Inhibiting means she's keeping you from doing something,” Lucy explained. “It isn't hitting.”

But Max was on to a sculpture in the corner that looked like an abstract interpretation of a naked female torso.

“Shouldn't this lady have some clothes on?”

Apparently it hadn't been abstract enough.

“Would you like to see my fish, Max?” Rand said, obviously trying to distract him. “I also came across something I thought you might like to have. Come on in the bedroom and you can look at the fish while I dig out your surprise.”

Max didn't have to be asked twice. “Where's the bedroom?” he demanded as he charged out of the living room and across the entryway again, making
sure to give the pendulum sculpture a nudge to put it into motion as he passed it.

“I'm a nervous wreck having Max in a place like this,” Lucy confessed to her aunt when Max and Rand were out of earshot.

“Rand doesn't seem too worried so you shouldn't be,” Sadie responded, glancing in the direction they'd gone. Then she added, “Rand is good with Max.”

“I know.”

“He seems to genuinely like our boy.”

“Luckily, since Max is crazy about him.”

“So is Max's mom, isn't she?” Sadie asked slyly.

“Rand is a good man but that's all there is to it. I wouldn't be staying to work tonight except the case is one he's doing for a good cause. The Turnenbill case?”

“Mmm. He took that just before I left. For free,” Sadie said as if Lucy might not know that. “He does a lot of that—donating his time, his expertise. You could do worse than a man like him, you know.”

“I'm not
doing
anything but working. We're too different for any kind of personal relationship.”

Sadie merely cast her a knowing look and took the coffee cups into the kitchen.

“Look-it, Mom!” Max said as he ran back into the room the way he'd run out of it. “Soldiers to fight the dinosaurs!”

Lucy looked into the shoebox full of plastic soldiers and toy tanks that her son was showing her.

“Rand says they were his when he was a kid, and
since he doesn't play with them anymore, I can have them. If it's okay with you. Is it okay with you?”

Lucy looked to Rand, who had followed Max into the living room again. “You don't want to keep them for your own son, whenever you have one?”

“I might never have one,” he answered as if it were the farthest thing from his mind and his plans.

Coming right after her brief exchange with Sadie, his words seemed to have a message in them. As if he were letting her know that although he might be good with Max he wasn't at all interested in parenting Max or any other child.

Take heed, Lucy,
she told herself.

Sadie returned just then, carrying her coat and Max's too. “I think we ought to go home and let your mom and Rand get back to work.”

“Na-aaww,” Max moaned.

“It's almost your bedtime,” Lucy pointed out. “I want you to get a good night's sleep and we'll have all day tomorrow together.”

“With Rand?”

“No, not with Rand. Just you and me,” she said, helping her son with his coat. “Did you say thank you for the soldiers?”

“Thank you for the soldiers,” Max parroted.

“And thank you for dinner,” Lucy coached.

“And thank you for dinner. And I like your fishes but I still think that naked lady needs some clothes,” the little boy added with a giggle to let the adults know they hadn't fooled him.

“You're welcome for everything,” Rand said with a laugh as they all headed for the door.

A round of good-nights and Lucy giving Max a kiss concluded the small dinner party and left Lucy and Rand alone again.

“What do you think?” Rand asked as soon as the door was closed behind Sadie and Max. “Are you getting what we need off the computer or should we take this to the office?”

Back to business without preamble, Lucy thought, feeling somewhat disheartened. But she went along with it, reminding herself it was for the best.

“I have a few things to check out through that law reference program you have. Let me see how far I can get on that. For now it looks promising and we may not need to leave here.”

“Great,” he said with more enthusiasm than she understood.

In the end they didn't have to go to the office, but it took until nearly midnight for Lucy to accumulate the material Rand needed. And even then what she considered the coup de grace required some arguing on her part to get him to see it.

“I'm telling you, if you present it like this, it will be very effective,” she insisted, giving him her interpretation of an obscure Supreme Court ruling in a 1971 case.

Rand shot out of his chair at the second computer to see the ruling for himself on her monitor when she was finished with her argument.

“Wow, your back must be a lot better,” she commented, surprised to see him move with such speed and agility.

His smile was slightly sheepish. “Oh. Yeah, it is,” he said as if he'd been caught at something.

But he didn't offer any more than that, instead reading the Supreme Court ruling over her shoulder.

“You could be right,” he finally admitted after giving it some thought.

By then Lucy's mind was more occupied with the intoxicating scent of his aftershave than with legal precedent, and she had to force herself to concentrate.

“Actually I think you have a good point,” he was saying. “If I use your angle, I think I can make it work for us. Print that out and let's celebrate.”

“By calling it a day?” she said hopefully.

“I was thinking more along the lines of opening a bottle of wine.”

It was a tempting idea. But with thoughts of leaving him to the supermodel the day before dancing through her head along with the full day and evening of his aloof attitude, she managed some restraint.

“You can't mix wine with the muscle relaxants for your back, and I have to drive home,” she said.

“Okay, I'll open a bottle of grapefruit juice. But we've earned a reward.
You've
earned a reward,” he said insistently, as if he wouldn't accept no for an answer.

Then he left her to do the printout, returning just as she'd closed down the computer for the second time that day.

He pointed with one glass to the sofa he'd spent the day before lying on and waited until Lucy was sitting there to hand her a glass. Then he joined her, angling so that he was facing her.

“To your hard work,” he said, clinking his glass against hers.

“And to the work you still need to do all weekend,” she countered.

“Yes, but you've made it much easier.”

They sipped grapefruit juice and then Rand said, “Has anyone ever told you you have a sharp legal mind?”

“As a matter of fact, they have.”

The expression on his handsome face let her know he hadn't expected that answer.

“I actually had a year of law school,” she explained. “I wanted to be a lawyer from the time I was about thirteen and had my first debate in civics class.”

“What happened to stop you?”

She'd avoided discussing this subject with him once before, when he'd asked about Max's father. But now—maybe because it was so late and she was tired and less on guard, or maybe because she'd come to know Rand better—she felt more inclined to tell him about it.

“Max is what happened,” she said. “I got pregnant by one of my law professors.”

“The father who's out of the picture,” Rand said, repeating the very words she'd used to him before.

“Mmm. He was much older than I was, very attractive, brilliant. The dashing, serious academic who told me that I was not only beautiful but just as brilliant as he was, that I stimulated his mind
and
his body—”

“That isn't far-fetched, you know,” Rand said in answer to her self-deprecating tone of voice.

“Far-fetched or not, I fell for it.”

“You were young—”

“And naive and gullible and vulnerable and dumb.”

“And you got pregnant,” Rand contributed.

“And I got pregnant. I was so naive and gullible and dumb that I actually thought it might work out. That I'd tell him about the baby and he'd whisk me off to the nearest wedding chapel and we'd live happily-ever-after, Marshall the law professor, me the attorney, and our baby.”

“That didn't appeal to him?”

“Absolutely not. He was appalled by the pregnancy, let alone by any notion I had of us being together permanently. He said being married to one woman and having children were chains that would stifle him. That he was a scholar, not a husband and father. There was no place in his life, in the future he had mapped out for himself, for anything as stultifying, as repressive, as marriage and family. He wanted me to have an abortion,” she ended that quietly.

“And you refused.”

“I refused. He got nasty. He said he would never have anything to do with my bastard—that was what he called the baby. That he would deny being the father, that I would have to force paternity tests to prove it, that I'd never get a dime out of him in child support, even if it meant he had to leave the country to avoid it. Then he did more than threaten me, he told his colleagues that I had seduced him in an attempt to get grades I couldn't earn any other way and he managed to have my scholarship rescinded. It was through the school itself and had an ethics and morals clause attached. That left me without tuition, room or board on top of everything else. There was just no way I could go on with school. Plus I had doctors' bills and then a baby to support, so—”

“You had to give up your dreams.”

“Dreams and romantic fantasies. But I gained Max.”

“Did you go through with establishing paternity and making the SOB pay child support?”

Lucy set her half-empty glass of grapefruit juice on the coffee table. “No, I didn't. After all that, I didn't want anything from Marshall. I didn't want anything to do with him. I didn't want to give him the opportunity to hurt me any more than he already had. Or worse still, the chance to hurt Max.”

“What do you tell Max about his father when he asks?”

“That he lived a different sort of life than we do
and so we couldn't be together. I know later on he'll want to know more than that, but for now he accepts it. I can see that he wonders why his father wouldn't choose him over anything else, but for the most part I don't believe it eats on him. I think he's pretty well-adjusted, pretty happy with just me.”

“And you're very protective of him. Especially when it comes to letting men in.”

Lucy laughed. “Of course. Protecting Max is my number-one job.”

Rand set his glass on the coffee table beside hers and when he settled back again he stretched an arm along the sofa back.

Lucy had been aware of how little distance separated them but now it seemed like even less, and she wasn't sure if his arm running just behind her shoulders was the cause or if he'd actually moved closer.

Then he gave her one of those devilish smiles and said, “I could have used some of that protection yesterday.”

“How so?” she asked, confused.

“You deserted me with Shelley Whitson. That was like throwing me to the wolves.”

“Oh, sure. All men need to be protected from supermodels.”

“Maybe not all men need to be protected from all supermodels, but I needed protection from Shelley. And what did you do? You abandoned me in my time
of need. And me in a weakened condition, too. I'm lucky to be alive to talk about it.”

Clearly he was trying to lighten the serious tone left by the recounting of her disastrous romantic past. But it was working because Lucy couldn't suppress a smile. Or the lightness that came to her heart at the thought that he hadn't been thrilled to be with the supermodel.

“How did you survive?” she asked, playing along.

“Only by my wits, since I wasn't up for any fancy footwork. But it was a close call. She was angling to get up here and when I tried to beg off by saying I'd hurt my back she offered to act as my private nurse.”

“And you didn't let her?”

“No, I didn't let her,” he said as if the very thought was repulsive. “There was only one person I wanted up here and she had just dived into her car and sped off as if she were escaping a mugger.”

“So you were mad at me today,” she concluded, more to herself than to him, thinking that explained the mood that had prevailed all day and into the evening.

“I wouldn't say I was mad. Perturbed, maybe. But I can't seem to even stay perturbed with you for long.” He was looking into her eyes and his voice had gone quiet and extremely deep. “I can't seem to stay any way with you that I know I should be staying.”

She didn't know exactly what that meant, but when
he took a strand of her hair between his fingers, she was hard-pressed to think much about it.