He’d clasped her hand to offer support, but there was nothing intimate in that simple act of kindness. She was so nervous that her slim white hand was trembling like a leaf in a high wind. But her dress rustled against his thigh. And her scent drifted to his nostrils, some perfume that vaguely reminded him of spring daffodils, illusive and sweet. And he saw a silvery pale curl sneaking down behind the veil, escaping a hairpin, coiling on the pale white column of her neck. Mac wasn’t sure why his pulse suddenly bucked—possibly because it hit him with the slam of a freight train that he didn’t know her. At all.
But the ring stuck on her knuckle, and then he pushed it past.
“With this ring...” The minister said, and then waited.
Kelly nudged him with her foot. “With this ring,” Mac repeated loudly and clearly.
“I thee wed...”
She didn’t have to nudge him this time. “I thee wed.”
“I promise to love, honor and cherish...”
Normally telling lies would have bothered him. But not for this. The integrity of a man was measured in honor—an antiquated value that Mac happened to believe was the judge of a man’s life. But the truth of this moment was between him and Kelly, and a bunch of words said in public had nothing to do with that.
Still, the fibs obviously didn’t come so easily for her. When it was her turn to put a ring on his finger, she fumbled and flustered and almost dropped it. “With this ring,” she started reciting.
Her voice barely managed the volume of a whisper. She had trouble pushing the ring onto his finger, and Mac could sense how uneasy she was about touching him. She couldn’t or wouldn’t meet his eyes when it was done, but again they were close. He could see the sweep of velvet-soft eyelashes shading her cheeks, the faint spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
God, she was young. It wasn’t the age difference between thirty-eight and twenty-seven that separated them half so much as the light-years of experience. In spite of her protruding tummy being obvious proof to the contrary, she still had a look of innocence. There were those freckles. And those shy, sky-soft blue eyes. And that silky fine hair that normally bounced on her shoulders and never looked brushed. She was a half foot shorter than him—squirt size—and her oval face was set with delicate, fine features, but there was nothing elegant or delicate about the way she ran around the company. Hell, he’d heard her giggling in Kate’s office more than once, and she chased around with this radiant, exuberance zest for life that made the sun seem low-voltage by comparison. She was a grown-up, intelligent woman, and she handled a bundle of responsibilities for Kate, but nothing had ever sobered that so-young cheeky smile of hers. Until Chad took off and left her.
Mac mentally damned his younger brother—not for the first time in the last few months. Chad could charm a woman into bed faster than a bee could smell honey. He also had a gift for disappearing from sight whenever there was music to face. Truth to tell, Chad hadn’t known about the pregnancy when he disappeared this time, but he’d paid his way out of a paternity suit before. Maybe if Mac had listened earlier to gossip, he’d have heard about Chad giving Kelly a rush and done something about it—but maybe not. Over the years, he’d tried counseling, tried yelling, tried bailing Chad out of countless scrapes, but nothing seemed to root a sense of responsibility or honor in his younger brother. Initially Mad had tried to locate him when the situation took a serious nose dive, but Chad had cut and run for parts unknown—par for his course. Eventually, he was findable. With enough money, anyone was findable. But the problem of Kelly required immediate action, and Mac had lost all faith that his brother would step up to the plate even if he were in the ball park.
Kelly suddenly raised her eyes and looked at him. She was obviously trying to communicate something, but damned if he could read the message in her eyes. Hell, for a minute he couldn’t even think.
His mind spun back two weeks ago—to the night when she’d been attacked in the parking lot on the way to her car. He’d known she was pregnant long before then. He’d known she was wildly in love with his brother, and that Chad was unquestionably responsible for the pregnancy. And those factors added up to a problem that involved family—but not a problem that directly affected him until that night.
She’d stayed late, finishing up something for Kate—so late the parking lot had been pitch-dark and deserted, so late there were only a handful of people in the whole building when she’d escaped her attacker and raced inside looking for help.
Mac just happened to be the first body she saw, and those moments were still carved in his memory with indelible black ink. He’d known Kelly for years, but their contact had only been peripheral; she was either running around, doing something for Kate or with Kate. They had few reasons to directly cross paths. Recently he’d tried to catch a closer look at her because the family was having such a royal cow about Chad and the pregnancy, but that was tough to do—invariably she skittered around him or ducked from sight. Mac couldn’t do his job, not well, and fuss whether he was winning popularity contests. He was so used to people being uncomfortable around him that Kelly’s response didn’t bother him one way or the other. That night, though, Mac doubted that Kelly knew or cared who he was. He could have been saint or sinner, God or the janitor—it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference to Kelly.
She came chasing through the glass doors of the lobby, running hell-bent for leather. There was a receptionist/ guard at the front desk, but she didn’t even seem to see him. Her hair was all tumbled, no coat even though it was subzero outside; her cheek was scraped, a stocking ripped and her right knee bloody. She was crying and hiccuping and damn near hysterical and she hurled straight for the nearest body with the ballast of a missile. She’d almost knocked him over—and Mac was no powder puff.
Her missing coat was how she’d escaped the son of a bitch. There had been some point in the struggle when the SOB had grabbed her and only got a handful of coat, which enabled her to shimmy loose from the garment and run. Right then, it was tough to get even that much out of her, because she had no interest whatsoever in talking about her attacker. She’d fallen, and was petrified something had happened to her baby.
Faster than ten minutes, Mac had both the cops and a doctor there. He’d left her with a woman employee and the doctor, but the whole time he was with the police, Mac could feel the tension coiling in his stomach. As he could have guessed, the cops could find no clues to the identity or motivation of her assailant. It could have been a gardenvariety purse snatcher; it could have been some nut-case psychopath. But Kelly’s involvement with Chad had been spread in the press early on in their relationship, simply because anything the Fortunes did was news. And that meant, unfortunately, that it was public knowledge that she was carrying a Fortune child.
There had been kidnappings in the family before. Kidnappings, threats, blackmail attempts; thieves—hell, there was no limit to the criminal element hot to prey on a family with money like his.
Later that evening, he’d taken Kelly to her home, sat with her until she calmed down, poured her a glass of milk and himself a bourbon—it was the only alcohol drink she had in her apartment—and proposed marriage. It was the first time he’d heard her even try to laugh that evening. And when she realized he was serious, she got another case of hiccups.
Marrying a woman because she was pregnant would never necessarily have aroused Mac’s sense of honor. Hell, you couldn’t solve one disaster by compounding it with another. But that happened to be his nephew growing in her womb. A Fortune child. And whether she’d volunteered for the problems that came with being a Fortune when she fell for his scoundrel of a brother, there was no escaping them now. The baby had the best chance of being protected from within the family circle—the Fortune name, the Fortune power, the Fortune
