just a chance comment at the time. It never occurred to me that she’d spread the word or that anyone else had made anything of it.”
That didn’t stop her from sputtering. “But Mitch, it still couldn’t have been you.”
A billion women on the planet, and he had to fall for the one who used his masculine ego for machete practice? “Trust me. It was.”
“But I always thought you didn’t even like me—”
“Um, Nik, that’s not remotely true.”
Instead of that comment reassuring her, it seemed to cause more mental wheels to spin in her mind. She seemed to sink even deeper in that office chair. A flush of guilt splashed her cheeks with color. “Oh, God. Look, I have to face this, so I just you want you to be honest with me. What did I do? Throw myself at you at that party? Put you in a position where you couldn’t say no because I was the boss?”
“Nicole, that’s not at all how it happened.”
“Then how did it happen? And why didn’t you ever say anything to me long before this?”
Mitch rubbed an exasperated hand at the back of his neck. For almost three months, he’d have given gold for those questions to come up. He’d had to battle every grain in his character to shut up, when his nature was to charge into a problem and confront it head-on. It was only for her sake—ever—that he’d been silent.
Now, though, blurting out the plain truth wasn’t that simple. He was painfully conscious that how he handled the situation could either open doors—for her, for him, for the two of them—or permanently close them. Somehow, he had to buy himself some thinking time.
Slowly he stood up. “I’m not ducking those questions, Nik—I want to answer them. But it’s after hours. You look beat. And I don’t think the office is the best place to discuss this. I’m guessing you’d like to go home, put your feet up, get a chance to catch your breath. How about if I pick up some Chinese—or whatever you feel like for dinner—and we meet up at your place?”
“I don’t know...” She started shaking her head.
“I understand—you just had all this sprung on you. And I don’t want you to feel put on the spot. About anything. But before you start making plans about the baby, I think you need to know what happened that night. I’m part of this, too...and it doesn’t matter to me whether we talk at my place or yours, but I assume you’d be more comfortable on your turf.”
She agreed—not, Mitch suspected, because she willingly wanted more time with him, but because she really, really wanted to know what happened that night. After that, they both went in motion. She locked the office; he called ahead to order dinner, and they separated in the parking lot. A half hour later, he’d picked up the Chinese takeout and was swinging his red Miata into her drive.
Juggling the overfull bag of Chinese food cartons, he climbed out of the car and hip-slammed the door with his gaze riveted on her house. He’d only seen it once—the night of the Christmas party. And one look was all it took for him to recall that night in Technicolor and surround-sound detail... but remembering his redhead naked and her warm, willing body and those lethally vulnerable eyes of hers was trouble. At the time, he thought he was waking up Sleeping Beauty. In fact, he could have sworn that was exactly what happened...except that the princess failing to remember a damn thing had totally screwed up the end on the fairy tale.
But the question was what to do now. He stood a moment longer, studying her place, willing answers about Nicole to come to him from her choice of home.
Nik picked up clients from the spray of Oregon tourist towns up and down the coast—Florence and Newport and Reedsport—but her property was between those splashes of civilization, off the beaten path. Once upon a time, it had probably been someone’s summer beach house. The outside was ramshackle, but ramshackle with character. The house was two sturdy stories, with clapboard siding that showed off years of weathering winds. A wraparound porch circled the bottom story, where balconies jutted off bedrooms on the second floor. The yard was an overgrown garden of willowy ornamental grasses like sea oats and sweet grass, a shade spot created by a gnarled old cypress tree. The steps leading down to the bluff edge of the sea were beat-up boards.
Maybe an artist had built the place, because it had that bohemian I - don’t - give - a - damn - what - anyone - else - thinks kind of character. And the first time Mitch saw it, he’d fallen in love. It seemed so right for Nik. The house capsulized the secret romantic and wild free spirit he’d always sensed in her.
In the office, she was so contained. Right from the start, her quicksilver mind had ransomed his heart, but she was a different woman at work, always worrying about doing the right thing, behaving the right way with the team. There was no reason she couldn’t laugh and loosen up—except in her own mind—but from the day he met her, he wondered where she’d learned all that control, what life lessons had taught her all that worry. He’d seen loneliness in her eyes. He’d seen her start to laugh, then cut it off. He’d seen her passionate zest for life a million times when she was brainstorming ideas, but that exuberance got clipped with ruthless scissors around people. Her choice of house reflected both the mystery and challenge that Mitch had always seen in Nik. There was a warm, sensual life-lover under the surface—if the right lover could just coax her to set it free.
Once upon a time, he’d even been arrogant enough to think that lover could be him.
The screen door suddenly clapped open. “Mitch? I thought I heard your car. Come on in.”
He didn’t want to go in. Given a choice, what he really wanted to do was drop the food, grab her, and try kissing her senseless. Just looking at her had always made his hormones stand up and bay like a mournful, lonesome hound, and right now she was damn well breathtaking. A west wind had scuttled away the afternoon’s blustery clouds, and the evening was turning clear as glass. Her hair caught the sunset flame, made her skin glow with a sensual, soft, pearl luminescence.
Still, he cut the juice on the electric charge in his pulse. Kissing her senseless might be an inspiring idea but could too easily end up a disastrous one. And as he hiked toward the house, he discovered they had a new and interesting problem. “You’d better be hungry. I brought enough Chinese to feed a platoon.”
“I can see that,” she said wryly. Swiftly she took the food cartons when he stepped in, but her eyes flashed on his face and then skittered away. Nik wasn’t a skitterer. She’d take on a tiger and not look back for something she wanted to win. So, he mused, she’d done some thinking. And maybe she didn’t remember that night, but it was pretty obvious she was suddenly aware of him in a whole different way. He’d metamorphosed from a nice, safe, tame employee into an unknown quantity of lover.
He liked those nerves. It evened things up. He’d suffered sexual tension all these months alone, when God knew he was more than willing to share. Of course, unanswered questions suddenly hung in the air between them like grenades, but Mitch figured one thing at a time. “If you tell me where the plates are, I’ll help put the dinner on,” he offered.
“You don’t have to help. It won’t take me a second. Can I get you a drink first?”
“Yeah, water—which I’ll get for myself. I didn’t suggest dinner so you could wait on me, Nik. The idea was to give you a chance to relax.”
That plan worked on a par with peace talks in the Middle East. They settled in her blue-tiled kitchen. He watched her poke at her egg roll, fork down a little sweet and sour shrimp, sample some of the war
