Jennifer Greene - Prince Charming's Child

“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 sui gui. Mostly she gulped water and charged down conversational roads like religion and politics—gutsy stuff to argue about, but nothing remotely related to anything on either of their minds.

Mitch didn’t mind her stalling; he thought she needed the unwind time. But typically Nik never cut herself any slack, and as if she realized how long she’d been chitchatting, she suddenly set down her fork. “We’re not getting it done,” she said impatiently.

“Getting what done?”

“Both of us are avoiding the subject of babies like it’d bite us. And it’s my fault. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it. I do. But somehow I can’t figure out what to say, how to start...”

“There’s nothing to be blaming yourself for. You’re uncomfortable with me—”

“No, of course not. We’ve worked together for months, for heaven’s sakes. Even when we don’t see eye to eye, we trade insults and bicker like old friends. We’ve never really had a problem talking together.”

But there was a difference, Mitch thought, and that difference was her thinking of him as a lover instead of an employee. He pushed back his chair. “Look, how about if we try getting out of the house, take a walk on the beach?”

Her eyes immediately brightened. “Yeah. Fresh air sounds good.” But then she glanced down at her business suit.

“I’ll do the dishes. That’ll give you a chance to change into something warmer and more comfortable than work clothes.”

“You don’t have to do the dishes—”

“It’s nothing, Nik. Go on.”

She hesitated, but then said okay and disappeared upstairs to change. Mitch leveled the dishes in two minutes flat, then wandered into her living room. The night of the Christmas party, the inside of her house had fascinated him as much as the outside—but for entirely different reasons.

The open staircase led to three bedrooms and two baths on the second story. Downstairs, the front door opened onto a massive living area with big bay windows overlooking the ocean bluff. The blue-tiled kitchen was chunked down in the middle, leading down two steps to a dining and sunroom that both faced east. Tucked on like an afterthought was a small wing that contained an office study and bathroom.

The layout was fine—it was the decor that confounded Mitch. At work, he and Nik were a natural team. With his architectural background, he was at home with beams and studs, where she was the pro at color and style and all that female stuff. Hell, she’d built up a thriving business from scratch because her perception was so sharp. Meet a client and right off she tuned into the individual’s personality and all the internal decor ingredients that worked for that person. Get her going on the Feng Shui concepts about balance and harmony and it was tough to shut her up.

Yet the decor in her own place was perplexingly horrible. He wandered around, hands in his pockets, just looking. She’d obviously put time and money into it, but the decorating style was stark minimalist—unrelenting neutrals, taupe carpet, taupe couches, taupe walls. A pale oak table displayed coffee-table art books. Appropriate, pricey pictures hung on the walls. Nobody could criticize a single furnishing. It was all textbook perfect. They’d had clients who’d probably orgasm to achieve the same look, but they weren’t Nik. There were no splashes of colors, no hint of her vibrant creativity or independent spirit.

The living room—the whole inside decor—made him think of a trapped soul. He saw that side of her at work, too. Nik was always proper, hyper about doing the right thing, no bending on standards. Gutsy in her business, but sleeping through life. Restlessly Mitch jingled the change in his pocket, thinking that if he hadn’t glimpsed the other side of Nik, he’d never have this damn fool convoluted problem of being gut-deep in love with her.

But he bad. Memories stirred of another room in her house—the only room where she hadn’t bleached out every stamp of her personality. Her bedroom. He remembered all of it. The thick, soft rose carpeting. The antique sleigh bed. The old-fashioned dressing table with a needlepoint seat, pearls dripping from a crystal bowl, vials of perfume and cosmetic pots and a cloisonné dish heaped with earrings.

The room reflected the Nik he’d always sensed under the surface, exuberantly female, a free-flow of rich textures and sensual colors. But it wasn’t the furnishings in that bedroom that had kidnapped a niche on his soul the night of the Christmas party. It was Sleeping Beauty coming awake in his arms, coming alive, the rigidly careful Nik forgetting all that control in the dark...but abruptly Mitch heard footsteps.

He spun around to see Nicole bounding down the stairs, dressed in skinny jeans and old sneakers and a voluminous threadbare black sweatshirt.

“I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “Who’d have guessed you’d own anything with a frayed collar? I’m impressed.”

“No teasing allowed. It’s a sacred sweatshirt,” she said dryly.

“I understand. I’ve got a sacred tee from college basketball days. When my dad got sick a few years ago, I showed up in the hospital wearing that tee. My mom was disgusted. I didn’t care. I wanted luck for my dad any way I could get it.”

A flash of a smile in her eyes, but then she cocked her head. “Your dad’s okay now?”

“Fit as a fiddle. You ready to head out?”

“I am...but I’m not sure this is such a great idea. You’re still stuck wearing your shoes from work. I’m afraid they’ll get wrecked on the beach. And it’s cold—I could loan you a jacket, but I can’t imagine having anything of mine that’d fit.”

Mitch figured it’d be an uphill job to teach her some selfishness. Typically she was worried about him—even under the circumstances—rather than thinking of herself. But she was also a good head shorter than his six-three. Imagining how he’d fit in anything of hers made him grin. “These loafers have seen sand before. And I’ve got a fleece jacket in the car I’ll grab when we go out.”

“Okay, then. Let’s hit it.”

Outside, the sky had darkened to a deep velvet-blue, the moon just rising to light their way. He fetched his fleece jacket and zipped up, feeling the sharp salt air suck in his lungs, fresh and invigorating. Pale stars illuminated their climb down to the beach from the board steps. The surf was sleepy at high tide. Foam sneaked up the sand, leaving a lacy collar of froth in its wake. Common to this stretch of Oregon’s coast, giant rocks jutted from the water, plunked down like mythical black sculptures of all shapes and sizes. In the darkness they looked like a giant’s play toys.

He let Nicole set the walking pace, which naturally for her was a full-speed charge. They hiked in silence for a bit, both of them savoring the magic of the sea, the night, the fresh air. Striding next to her, he was conscious of his height and her smallness, conscious of how the worn jeans showed off her fanny and long slim legs, conscious that she stole looks at his face...and conscious that no matter how good walking with her felt, it wasn’t getting their talking done.

“I moved here from Seattle,” he said finally.

“I know. I remember from your job application. You were one of the architects for a firm named Strickland’s.”

“I was an architect there, yes. But what I didn’t mention on the ap was that I owned the firm.”

She tilted her face, her eyebrows arched in question. “Why didn’t you say so at the time?”

“Because when I started job hunting—for the work I wanted—I got a steady round of turndowns. On paper, I looked overpriced and overqualified. I had no way to make anyone believe from a résumé that the work I was applying for was what I really wanted to do.”

“Obviously there’s more to that story,” she prodded him.

“Yeah, there is.” He picked up a flat stone, and tried skimming it. Three hops before it sank. He was out of practice. “I come from a long line of overachievers. My dad, mom, two brothers—everyone’s good with money, carved out a successful place in the business world. My dad used to say I had the strongest bent for turning a dime into a dollar—which he was proud of me for. I started investing when I was 14, had enough of a nest-egg to buy Strickland’s when I was 24. Of course the business was facing a Chapter Eleven, so anyone could have picked it up for a lick and a song. I was just so young and dumb I didn’t know what I was getting into. As it happened, though, by the time I sold it two years ago, the company had grown from a handful of employees to a staff of sixty and we were making money hand over fist.”

“This was a problem?” she asked wryly.

“For me, it was. I couldn’t control it. The drive. I was—maybe—catching four hours’ sleep a night. Had an ulcer that didn’t want to heal. Lost a woman I really cared for because I neglected her and the relationship both. And the real bug was, my degree was in architecture but all I was doing was management. Maybe I had a talent for the money side of things, but that wasn’t the point. I hated it. I got into architecture because my dream was to build, to create, to make things. I like studs and beams and fighting with contractors, not paperwork. But because the business was going so well, it was hard for me to see it was a personal dead-end road. I was running my life by my family’s expectations—trying to be someone I’m not. And getting nothing done that really mattered to me.”

For an instant her eyes glinted with a curious light. “I know what that’s like—trying to meet family expectations that don’t fit you any better than a round peg in a square hole. But anyway, you said you sold the business...”

“Yeah. And for a while I didn’t work. I bought a house here, got a boat, did some fishing and hiking and mountain climbing. I can’t say I needed the break so much. But I needed time to be more sure of myself, sure I wouldn’t get sucked into the family expectation thing again, sure about what I really wanted to do. And when I felt I had my ducks in a row, I sent out résumés—and took the job with you.”

She hesitated. “I can’t believe I didn’t guess your background long before this. You and I always bucked heads at work. Now, that makes more sense. You’re used to taking charge. You jump in to fix things. And when you do it better than me, it gets my dander up every time.”

“If you think that our bucking heads was about a power struggle, I’m telling you no. I don’t want your job, Nik. Never did. Personally I think that edginess between us comes from an entirely different source.”

“What?”

He thought the chemistry between them caused enough sexual friction to spontaneously combust a forest fire or two. But just then, he didn’t think Nicole was real open to hearing that. “We can talk about that another time. The reason I brought up all this stuff about my background was to prod your memory. Because I haven’t told you one thing you didn’t already know about me.”

She stopped dead, her expression a mirror of confusion. “No, I didn’t—”

“Yeah, you did. We talked about it the night of the Christmas party.” Maybe until that moment, he’d never completely believed her about not remembering. But he could see her swallow, see the way her eyes darted nervously to his face. Nik just wouldn’t be revealing that kind of vulnerability—or fear—if she’d recalled what happened. Slowly he said, “The others left just after midnight. I would have, too, only you and I started talking. Both of us. Not just me. You told me a bunch of personal things about yourself no different than—”