was watching him now as he ascended. She wore a severely tailored suit and her hair no longer floated in an auburn cloud around her shoulders. He couldn’t read her expression—the glass was mottled with reflections of rainbows with happy hands and moons wearing nightcaps. He was struck, though, by how completely still her stance was, rigid and cold, the antithesis of the warm fuzzy chaos below her. She looked like a mannequin that had wandered away from the Armani store across the street.
When he hit the last step, she met him at the door.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. She extended her hand and when he took it he could tell it was stiff, too. He glanced at her left hand and saw that she’d substituted a small ruby ring for the diamonds that should have been there.
“I needed to be at the office,” she went on, clearly just talking to fill the space. “I had a lot of things to catch up on. Preparations for the wedding ate up a lot of my time for the past several weeks.”
Thank goodness the pink frothing had stopped at the door of the office, replaced by calming beige and brown with blue accents. He felt his guts relax.
“No problem.”
She made her way to the chair behind her desk while he took the seat she offered him, its back to the window. He crossed his legs and waited for her to begin the questions she must be burning to ask.
He decided not to mention how absurd her opening statement had been. A lot to catch up on? If Lincoln Gray had shown up today, she would still have been over at the Revere, dancing and eating cake. And then, according to his P.I., she would have spent the next two weeks in Dublin making love and buying extravagant presents for her insatiable new husband.
But why rub it in? Let her save a little face.
“You were going to tell me about your sister.” She put a hand up to her hair, checking the braid that dove straight as an arrow down her back. It was so tight he wondered if it made her temples ache.
“Yes. My sister, Tracy. Well, the story is sad but simple. She’s five years older than I am. Last year, while I was out of the country, she met Lincoln Gray at a local fund-raiser. Apparently he swept her off her feet, because she married him two weeks later, without a prenup. A month after that, he disappeared. So did a lot of her money.”
Her lips parted and her brows tightened. She met his gaze for a few seconds, but as she took in the full implications of his speech, her eyes darkened.
She squared off some papers on her desk. Finally, she looked up, and her eyes were less revealing.
“Look, Mr. Travers. It’s not that I think you’re lying—”
“Call me Mark. After all, we were nearly in-laws.” He smiled. “Or something.”
She clearly didn’t like the joke. But too bad. This whole thing was a classic bedroom farce, and she now had a leading role. So did he. And Tracy. They all just had to get used to it.
“Mark,” she amended politely but without warmth. “I do have to tell you that I find it…difficult to believe that Lincoln—that he would really—”
“I thought you might.” He opened his jacket and pulled a sheaf of legal papers from his breast pocket. “I brought these, to help make it more concrete.”
She took the papers and read them carefully, her lips pursed as if she needed to double-check every word for some kind of trick. She kept her back ramrod straight and he could see under the desk that her knees were locked, her brown pumps lined up, toes and heels touching in military precision.
This tailored look didn’t suit her. She wasn’t the Armani type, however much she might wish she were. Her features were too rounded and girlish, and she needed her clouds of hair to keep from looking like a lost kitten. The brown suit washed out her cheeks and dimmed her green eyes to an uninteresting hazel.
Though she was pretty, she wasn’t beautiful. His sister, Tracy, wasn’t, either. That was apparently how Lincoln Gray liked it. He picked nice-enough-looking women so that it wasn’t a chore to bed them. But not true glamour queens, who might forget to be awed by his own golden charms.
Still, Allison Cabot had looked far more sexy and alive this afternoon, wearing her tilting pearl tiara and creamy wedding gown. Not beautiful, even then, but quite nice. Intensely female. Vulnerable. And strangely enticing, considering Mark was almost as allergic to brides as he was to babies.
She set the papers down on the desk. “The existence of a marriage certificate does not necessarily prove anything. There might be a divorce decree somewhere, as well.”
“There might be,” he agreed. “But there isn’t.”
“Mr. Travers—I mean, Mark.” She took a deep breath. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that I was about to—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “That if the wedding had gone as planned today, I would be married to a bigamist?”
“Yes.” A little blunt, perhaps, but he didn’t think it would help to sugarcoat the truth. Still, he did hope she wouldn’t start crying. He’d dried a million of Tracy’s tears in the past months and he’d run out of patience. And clean handkerchiefs.
To her credit, the Armani and the tight braid seemed to be doing the trick. Her eyes were bright, but she had no intention of falling apart.
“It’s—” Again she had to regroup and start over. “I just find it so impossible to—”
She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry. I’m practically incoherent here. I must sound like a fool.” That made her flush, which brought out a few freckles she’d tried very hard to hide with makeup. “On the other hand, if what you say is true, I guess I am a fool.”
“It’s not that simple. My sister is an intelligent woman, but she fell for Lincoln Gray, too. She married him. She put his name on all her bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes.” He shook his head. “Apparently, the man is quite good at what he does.”
She looked down again. “Yes,” she said. “He is.”
“He picks his targets shrewdly, too. My sister is thirty-eight. She’s already been through one divorce and suffered two miscarriages. Her most recent relationship had ended badly, just weeks before Lincoln arrived on the scene, and I was out of the country. A lonely time for her. I also think her biological clock is ticking pretty loudly.”
He smiled. “Any of that sound familiar?”
Allison shrugged, but the pink hadn’t left her cheeks. “I’m afraid it does, a bit. My father died a few months ago. He was my only family.” She lifted one hand, palm up. “And, of course, we all have biological clocks.”
That interested Mark. Allison was at least ten years younger than Tracy. Was it possible that a woman in her twenties was already so desperate for a baby that she’d marry a jerk like Lincoln Gray just for the pretty blond genes?
He laughed inwardly at his own naïveté. Of course it was possible. He knew firsthand how baby-lust could trump common sense, self-preservation and even love.
“Did you love him?”
He could tell the question shocked her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. With effort, she arranged her
