Jennifer Greene - Prince Charming's Child

Through these years, though, there had never been a spare second to think of babies or a private life. If the right man had popped into her life, who knew, maybe she’d have rethought having a baby. But that was precisely the point. There’d been no right men, no wrong men, no any men.

Nicole had never exactly planned to turn into a celibate saint, but there were darn good reasons why she’d chosen the life-style of a workaholic hermit.

Her stomach suddenly clenched with nerves. Old nerves. Old, scary, ghost-nerves that hadn’t peeked out of her emotional closet in years. She’d grown up taking every wrong road there was to take. She’d known trouble from the inside out. Cripes, she’d been trouble from the inside out. But a cop named Sam had helped her around seventeen years ago. She’d started a new life in a new place and done her best not to look back.

She was ashamed of where she’d been—but, finally, proud of the woman she was becoming. There’d been no irresponsible, impulsive mistakes. None. Not even little ones. She’d turned herself into a completely different kind of woman than the hellion teenager she’d been growing up as.

Or so she’d believed. Until the pregnancy test this afternoon had turned out positive.

Minutes later, she parked in front of the stone-and-glass office building and barreled inside, away from the devil wind, hiking past John. Mitch. Wilma. Rafe.

Her office was at the far end, a sanctuary with blue silk walls and thick, silencing carpet and windows that overlooked a cliff edge view of the Pacific. Waves thundered and pounded the rocks below, looking wild and lonely. Exactly how she felt. With her pulse racing faster than a frantic battery, she plunked down in the chair behind her gleaming pecan desk and squeezed her eyes closed.

The faces of her staff again chased through her mind. John, Mitch, Wilma, Rafe. And yes, of course she remembered holding an office party two days before Christmas last year. It was the only social event she’d been remotely part of in a blue moon.

And long before today, she’d realized that parts of that evening were hazy in her memory—but that never seemed remotely strange, simply because she’d been so dead tired that night. She’d hosted the party at her house for a number of reasons. She wanted the staff to indulge in all the champagne they wanted, and at home, she had spare rooms for anyone to sleep over so no one had to worry about drinking and driving. There’d been so much to organize and plan. She’d had lobsters brought in, oysters on the half shell, chocolate-covered strawberries—every luxury she could think of, because her team had an unbeatably successful year and deserved being spoiled.

Nicole suddenly rubbed two fingers on her temples. The staff had had a blast, which was exactly what she’d wanted to happen—she recalled moments from the party with crystal clarity. But until now, she’d forgotten how they’d teased her about not drinking. They were always ribbing her about being too formal, never letting down her hair and loosening up.

It was never a good idea to let down her hair. Ever. She had too much past history she wanted buried good and deep. The staff respected her, and she’d done her absolutely damnedest to earn that respect. Besides that, she couldn’t handle liquor—which heaven knew she’d learned the hard way years before.

But Nicole suddenly remembered a glass of champagne being thrust in her hands that night. At least one glass. Possibly two.

Holy cripes, could she have had three?

Because suddenly she realized that was precisely the part of the evening when her memory turned as murky as an ocean cave. That hadn’t mattered before. But unless she’d become pregnant via immaculate conception—which unfortunately was a stretch, even for a woman who made a living on her creative imagination—suddenly the part of the evening she didn’t remember mattered a whole bunch.

Restlessly she swung out of the desk and paced to the open door. Each employee had an individual office, but the central area was organized with tables and drafting boards and a video setup. Developing models and layups took space, and often the staff worked together on projects.

John was sprawled with his feet on a table, working with a sketch pad on his lap. From the doorway, she could see the smooth dome of his head, his Mickey Mouse tie, the concentration furrow in the middle of his brow. John handled the advertising and marketing. He was forty-two and growing a little couch-potato pooch and wonderful at his job. When his wife left him the year before, Nicole had been afraid he’d never climb back from a pit-awful depression. She thought the absolute world of John, and if he really needed something, she knew she’d go the long mile to come through for him—but John was like a brother, as comfortable to be with as an old shoe. Even if she’d guzzled an entire winery worth of champagne, she simply could not imagine getting naked with him.

Rafe ambled by, carrying a fresh mug of coffee, and plunked down in front of a drafting board. Rafe was thirty-four, single like John, and originally Nicole almost hadn’t hired him. He had the exact engineering background she was looking for, but between the dark hair, dark eyes, and husky muscular build, he was a cut-and-dried hunk. She’d worried those good looks could be asking for trouble—but she’d been wrong. Rafe could get impatient and tempermental with the rest of the staff, but he was smart and ambitious and unbeatably capable at his job.

Nicole’s gaze lasered on his back for a second longer. Yeah, he was an eyeful. And anyone’s deprived hormones could be stirred up with alcohol. But unlike the rest of the team, Rafe never talked about his private life—he’d openly admitted losing a job before because of mixing business and pleasure, and he felt adamant about never making that mistake again. He’d never told her an off-color joke, never looked at her sideways. Even if he were attracted, she couldn’t imagine him initiating a pass. It was just impossible. It could never have happened.

Wilma streaked past, shuffling a sheath of papers, pausing only long enough to bounce a kiss on John’s balding crown. Wilma was twenty-eight, a brown-eyed brunette with a centerfold figure and the nature of an incurable flirt. She was openly affectionate with all the guys. Discussing the antics of her exuberant love life was a ritual over morning coffee. The boys inhaled every wild detail. Nicole had never tried to rein her in. Wilma managed the office and bookkeeping side of things and kept the whole place pumping.

And that left Mitch...the only staff member who Nicole couldn’t see from the doorway, but she could hear him yell something to Rate with that distinctly whiskey baritone. Mitch was thirty-two, her own age. The guys called him “Stretch” because he was a lanky six feet three inches, with hair the color of sun-bleached sand and eyes bluer than sky. Sexy enough, if a woman’s taste ran to overtall bean-poles—which Nicole’s never personally had.

Mitch was the newest team member, she’d only hired him six months ago. Originally Janice had been the group’s architect, and she’d done so well that her leaving for a job in New York had left a precarious hole. Nicole expected the employee search to be worrisome, and instead had a plum drop in her lap. Mitch’s background surpassed even what Janice had offered them.

Ironically, he’d rubbed Nicole personally wrong from the beginning, and she admitted it. Heck, so did he—they even joked about it together sometimes. The dam man had a gift for getting along with everyone. He was in his element with the men’s men contractor types, yet he never lost patience with the creative design types on the team. From the start, he’d leaped into touchy situations that had everyone else running for cover. The whole team loved him. Objectively, so did she—there was simply no explaining why they scraped against each other’s nerves. Nicole had quit fretting the why of it. She just gave Mitch an extra wide berth and let him do his job. Everyone was critical in a small business this size, but Mitch was damn near irreplaceable.

Even if he weren’t irreplaceable—even if there wasn’t that strange prickly edginess between them—there was another reason why Nicole would never touch a hair on his head. More than once, he’d mentioned a woman friend. A solid woman friend. Nicole had forgotten her name—Susan, maybe? Regardless, he was already involved. Nicole couldn’t imagine any circumstance in the universe where she’d poach on another woman’s territory—which meant there was zero possibility of her sleeping with Mitch.

Abruptly she pressed a protective hand on her abdomen. Her stomach was increasingly queasy, her heart starting to gallop with anxiety. She simply had to try and calm down. It’s not like all this thinking was getting her anywhere.

Every mental road led her to the same place. The only men in her life were the guys in the office. There was no occasion anything could have happened except the night of that Christmas party. But party or no party, champagne or no champagne, she simply would never have let anything happen with any of her guys. It went against her whole moral and character grain. And a woman didn’t forget making love with a man, for heaven’s sake. And surely the man would have said something if anything like that had occurred. And she’d wakened the morning after the party in her own bed, alone.

Nicole kept trying to add two and two, but the sum just refused to be four.

She couldn’t be pregnant.

Yet she was.

“Nicole? You have a free minute?”

Mitch Landers had been waiting all afternoon for a chance to catch the boss in and alone. The envelope in his hand contained a letter of resignation. He had no illusions this was going to be an easy conversation, but he’d postponed it for days. He needed a moment when the rest of the team were solidly occupied and the phone wasn’t ringing and there was a chance of him catching some uninterrupted time with her. A quarter to five seemed his best shot. And Mitch had quit kidding himself that this didn’t have to be done.

That was the plan. But she was standing at the window when he knocked, and the instant she heard his voice, she promptly spun around. And he saw her face. “Sure, come on in. What’s the problem? The Llewellyn account?”

“No, nothing like that. I just need to talk to you about something, but...look, are you feeling okay?”

She produced an instant smile, but it was as fake as a politican’s promises. “To tell you the truth, I’ve had better afternoons, but I’m fine, really, just a little distracted. Sit down, tell me what the problem is.”

One look at her face, and Mitch knew his plan was going to hell in a handbasket. But he sat in one of her prissy blue office chairs and stretched out his long, lanky legs. Everything about her office always made him feel like an ox in a boudoir. Restlessly he batted the envelope on his knee, then just as restlessly pocketed it out of sight.

He couldn’t tell whether his boss was sick, scared or somebody just killed her dog. But something was wrong. And for Nicole Stewart to look fragile as a cotton puff was so out of character that something had to be “bad” wrong.

It only took a second to catalog her features head to toe—but at least this once, he had a judiciously altruistic motive. His pulse could rev from zero to sixty with a single glance at her, and had from the day they met. On the surface, nothing looked particularly different. Her silky cream blouse and mannish green suit were pretty typical office attire. Not much figure. On a scale of one to ten, the legs got a ten-plus, but the rest of the package maxed out at three. No boobs. No hips. She was built long on angles and short on curves...but the way she moved those angles had inspired his hormones to great feats of imagination from the beginning—and would now, if the look on her face wasn’t worrying him.