me, I wanted to. But everything after that started getting complicated. To begin with, I left in the morning while you were still sleeping. The last thing I wanted to do was leave you, but you’d told me there were cleaning people coming first thing in the morning to clear up after the party. And I just didn’t think you’d be comfortable, people coming in, a man in your house that way....”
“I wouldn’t have been,” she admitted.
“And I called you later that day. But right off, you brought up business, a problem with a client we’d been having...which was fine...except that it seemed real obvious to me you were deliberately avoiding any mention of our night together.”
“I wasn’t deliberately avoiding anything, I swear! I honestly didn’t remember.”
He nodded. “So you’re telling me now. But it never occurred to me that you didn’t remember then. I had no reason to know that, no reason to guess that. I assumed you knew, and that your ducking any mention of it was a choice. You closed up like a clam, and I was struggling to understand why. I knew perfectly well that you always had a hyper thing about not getting personally involved with the people who worked for you—”
“Because it risks sexual harassment. Any boss is in a power position whether she wants to be or not. It just makes any personal relationship wrong—”
“Nik, I know all the laws,” he said impatiently. “And I always respected you for being so careful—but none of that applied to you and me. I’d told you about my background. I don’t need the job. Not financially or in any other sense. You have no power over me like in a regular employer /employee situation. And since we’d talked about that, I figured that wasn’t the problem. It had to be something else. The only conclusion I could draw was that our making love had upset you, and you needed some time to think about it. So I shut up, too. As I saw it, that was what you wanted. And my feeling was just...to wait. Keep working together. See how you felt as time passed. I didn’t want to push or pressure you into something you didn’t want or weren’t ready for. But...”
“But?” she echoed when he didn’t immediately finish his comment.
He stopped, with the moonlit surf behind him, making his hair looked brushed with silver and the strong, angular bones in his face appear carved in stone. Only his eyes looked liquid, and his gaze focused on her face with the intensity of a caress. “But I also thought you knew, Nik. How incredible that night was. What kind of chemistry we’d created together. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about the risk of babies. I was thinking that you’d been scared off by another kind of risk entirely—the way we’d come together like thunder and lightning. Because I never expected that kind of passionate explosion between us either.”
Her throat went bone dry. So they were back to sex again. And not just sex, but incredible sex. How the evening had unfolded, why he’d stayed quiet later, thinking it was for her sake—she believed Mitch completely about those parts of the story. She trusted his integrity. He’d proven it a hundred times at work. Heaven knew, he could be tactful with a client, but he was the first one to leap in with sharp, blunt honesty when the going got rough. And truth to tell, she could easily imagine Mitch creating thunder and lightning as a lover. It was her. Being hot like that. Sexy like that. Nothing like he described had ever happened to her.
Possibly she’d chosen to be celibate for a blue moon, but she was no virgin. Her first forays into sexuality, though, all stemmed from the era when she’d been rebellious, reckless and painfully young. She hadn’t known what she was doing, any more than the boys she’d experimented with. Whatever sensuality was in her nature...it wasn’t a matter of hiding it. She always wanted to explore that with the right man. But she’d had mistakes to bury and atone for and fix, and it had taken every ounce of her time to make a new life for herself. She’d put her hormones up in a mental attic.
Or she thought she had.
“Am I making you uncomfortable, talking about this?” he asked her.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m uncomfortable or not. I needed to know the truth.” But now she could barely look at him without feeling heat climb her throat in a heart-slamming rush.
“Yeah, I agree. Knowing what happened is a critical ingredient to your deciding what you want to do next. And that’s what we got together to talk about, isn’t it?”
“Sex?” Tarnation. Doubtless the word slipped out because it was in block letters at the tip of her mind.
But Mitch responded with a slow teasing grin. It was obviously beyond him to be a gentleman and let the slip pass. “Hey, I’m always up for talking about sex...but I was pretty sure what you wanted to discuss was babies.”
“Of course I want to talk about babies,” Nicole rapidly assured him. “The baby is the only subject on my mind. Completely. Totally.”
“Now, don’t start getting nervous again—”
“I’m not nervous,” she immediately denied...but she was. Once the blasted man had put pictures of their making love in her mind, it was harder to get them out than rousting a stubborn sliver. There were a dozen dead serious concerns troubling her, yet her thoughts kept straying down sexual fantasy roads with him playing the lead. She was appalled at herself, but even a brickload of guilt couldn’t seem to dig out that sliver.
“Okay, you’re not nervous,” he said gently. “But, um, before you charge down the beach for another mile at the same breakneck pace...we’ve really hiked a long way? And you’ve had a tiring day. Don’t you think it’s about time to turn around and head back?”
She turned around. Promptly. And because she’d mastered the fine art of proper behavior, she didn’t smack him. There wasn’t an ounce of sarcasm in his voice, but that was exactly why the thought of punching him was so tempting. He could get sharp with other people. With her, he used that low, whiskey-gentle voice—even when she was wrong. Hells bells, especially when she was wrong. It was just infuriating. “I was just going to suggest that we turn around.”
“I’m sure you were,” he agreed. “And in the meantime... we may have covered how we got in this predicament—but not what either of us wants to do about it. And I have an idea on the subject of babies I’d like you to consider.”
“What?”
“The old traditional one that couples have been trying since the beginning of time when a pregnancy showed up unexpectedly—marriage.”
For the first time all day she relaxed. A chuckle bubbled from her throat and emerged in a peal of laughter. Nothing was funny about her situation, nothing humorous in this whole encounter with Mitch. But her nerves had been strung so tight, and his joke just hit her as natural comic relief. “Thanks, Sir Galahad. That was sweet.”
“Uh, Nik? I wasn’t being ‘sweet’. It was a serious of fer.”
Her laughter died, but not her smile. “Come on, I know you don’t mean it. We’re not living in the dark ages. Nobody has to get married anymore. Women alone are raising kids all over the place.”
“So...there’s no question in your mind about having this child?” he asked swiftly. “I know you said earlier that you wanted the baby. But that was also just a few short minutes after you found out you were pregnant.”
She sobered quickly then. “Are you asking me whether I changed my mind, might be thinking about an abortion?”
“Yeah,
