Prince Charming's Child

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—”

“Oh God. What’d I say?”

She’d told him no deep dark secrets. Mitch only wished she had. If he understood better what made her tick, he’d feel a lot more secure knowing how to handle this whole situation now. “You never said anything you need to worry about. I’m just trying to tell you how that night played out. I’d had a fair amount of champagne. So had you. I never planned to end up in your bed, Nik—hell, I’d have brought protection if I’d ever thought there was even a remote chance of that. We just started talking. And you’d never really talked with me before, not deep-type talk, and one kind of closeness led to another. I knew we’d been drinking, but I honestly didn’t think either of us had that much. As far as I understood, we were both fully aware of making a choice.”

Edgily she picked up a flat stone, skimmed it like he had. Hers bounced six times, which she didn’t even stop to appreciate. She was already looking at him again. “Mitch, it never crossed my mind to blame you. I already figured it was my fault.”

Frustration clawed through his pulse. He’d wanted her to understand that he’d never been a predatory wolf in the story, preying on a vulnerable woman who’d maybe sipped a little too much champagne. But he’d never intended to cop out on responsibility or for her to heap guilt on her own shoulders either. “Nicole, listen to me. Get that idea out of your mind. It wasn’t about fault. It was an unforgettable night. You were...incredible. Warm, giving, uninhibited. Wild. You went straight to my head. Champagne had nothing to do with it.”

Three

Hopefully Mitch couldn’t see the flush burning her cheeks in the darkness, but for that instant, Nicole couldn’t have answered him if her life depended on it. Wild? Surely he had her confused with another woman. Warm, uninhibited, incredible? She had no idea who he was describing, but it couldn’t possibly be her.

Her arms were already wrapped around her ribs, but she tucked them even tighter. For years she’d had her life on a clear track. She only colored between the lines. She obeyed the rules. She’d even decorated her house to express exactly the kind of woman she was—fussily neat, proper, on the formal side. She wasn’t remotely related to the selfish, irresponsible teenager she’d once been. Champagne or no champagne, she just couldn’t imagine throwing all that hard-won caution to the winds and being the kind of passionate cookie Mitch was describing.

She wasn’t passionate.

She wasn’t even an emotional woman. Actually, there were moments she thought she was turning into a downright tedious prig—but that was way better than flying through life barreling into impulsive, disastrous mistakes the way she used to.

The tide whooshed in and foamed around her feet, seeping into her sneakers. The water was icy, yet she didn’t move, fiercely willing the cold to shock her mind into remembering that darn night. Only nothing came. The night was a complete blank slate—except for the parts he’d filled in.

She stole a glance at Mitch, then quickly looked away. This was horrible. Suddenly she couldn’t look at him without thinking about sex. She’d never thought of him that way, not just because he was an employee, but because he was a blond beanpole. If a guy caught her eye, he invariably had darker coloring and some meat on his bones. Mitch was about five miles tall and all of it skinny.

Only now she kept noticing that there was nothing skinny about the breadth of his shoulders. And his basket-ball-player height made her think of an athlete’s rhythm and stamina. And once she thought back, he’d just never looked at her with those sky-blue eyes in a nice, innocuous, friendly way. It was always there. That gender edginess. She just never forgot for an instant that she was female, not around Mitch, and now all those little details were adding up to drive her crazy. She’d have given gold for even fragments of memory from the night of the Christmas party, yet that corner of her mind seemed as locked as a bank vault.

“Mitch,” she blurted out, “if it all happened that way, why didn’t you ever say anything to me long before this?”

“Believe 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, that’s what I’m asking.”

She slugged her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “If I were sixteen, or ill, or I knew something was wrong with the baby...I don’t know what I’d do,” she said with careful honesty. “But my circumstances are nothing like that Maybe I wasn’t expecting the news of a pregnancy at this exact moment in time...but I always wanted children. I couldn’t be more at an ideal healthy age to have a baby. I can financially support one. And yes, I want him...or her. I just haven’t had time to do all the thinking or planning about how I’m going to cope with things yet.”

“Okay.” Mitch released a pent-up sigh, as if he really hadn’t been sure how she was going to answer that question. “But you’re going to be trying to juggle a pregnancy and work. And then a new baby and work.”

“I know that—”

“And I’m in this picture, Nik. Not just because I want to be a father—and an active, involved father. But because I know your business. There’s no one else who’s in an equally good position to help you through this. I can deal with work decisions when you can’t. I can make it possible for you to juggle your personal schedule any way you need it juggled.”

She fell silent. Those things were undeniably true. She hadn’t thought about Mitch in a role as father, or his rights as a dad—or how to make any of that work. She also hadn’t meant to be so insensitive as to only be thinking of herself and the baby as only her problem.

“I’m also concerned about the side ways this could affect your work and the business. Like you said, a woman could choose to have a kid on her own today. But that’s in theory, and life’s never quite so nice as theory. There’s bound to be buzz about your getting knocked up, getting involved with a guy who wouldn’t step up. So maybe most people would be okay with it. But you’ve got some conservative clients. And you’ve worked hard to build a respectable, responsible reputation.”

“I hear you. But I’m not afraid of taking any heat—”

“Nik, I’m sure you’re not. And I never did give a damn what people thought. But I’m a saying a ring on your finger would make sure those problems never happened.”

She shoved a hand through her hair. This was exactly how Mitch was at work. When the team started arguing—and creative people were notorious for getting their egos confused with their opinions—Mitch rarely raised his voice, just quietly, firmly, kept spilling out practical, sensible angles on a problem. A woman could actually start believing that a marriage between strangers made sense—when she knew perfectly well it didn’t

“And a ring on your finger would give the baby a name. People don’t label a kid ‘bastard’ any more, thank God, but I still think a name matters. I can’t believe your parents and family wouldn’t have something to say about your having a baby out of wedlock—at least if being married were a choice.”

She swallowed. Hard. Mitch couldn’t know he was ripping the scab off some real old scars with that comment. For years now, she’d been trying to rebuild a relationship with her parents. The estrangement had been caused by her irresponsible teenage behavior entirely—and in their shoes, Nicole wouldn’t have been any quicker to forgive. But she’d hoped that time would prove to them that she’d changed, and those hurts would eventually heal if she persisted in living a decent, respectable life. To announce an unwed pregnancy could well close those doors all over again. Because it was exactly the kind of disappointment in character and morals they were surely expecting from her.

Still. Trying to correct a wrong by doing something disastrously more wrong was never a solution. “Every problem you’re pointing out is very real, but I just can’t believe you mean it. We can’t possibly get married, Landers! Come on, it’s just crazy. We don’t even know each other!”

“You’ve known me for months.”

“That’s not the same kind of knowing! For Pete’s sake, we can’t even get through a staff meeting without bickering and friction most of the time.”

“It never occurred to you that there might be an interesting reason we always caused so much friction together?”

She halted in her tracks. “What are you trying to say? That sexual chemistry caused that friction?”

“Yeah, I do. Now. Originally I just thought we had a little personality clash...but the night of the Christmas party damn well forced me to notice there was evidence in another direction entirely. I think we had liquid oxygen between us all along. We just didn’t know it until someone lit a match.”

Well, the damn man flustered her all over again. She couldn’t deny what she couldn’t remember. “Chemistry or no chemistry...you just can’t be serious, Mitch. Knights don’t charge in to rescue ladies in trouble any more. I’m not in trouble. Neither are you. Not only do neither of us have to get married, but in a thousand years I can’t imagine your wanting to get hooked up with me.”

“No?”

“No,” she sputtered. “Of course not. I mean, look at us. Your office looks like a marine bivouac, sports stuff and guy-type messes all over the place. I’m a neatnik, an order lover. You think I don’t know the whole staff thinks I’m prissy? A pain-in-the-behind stickler for the rules? You couldn’t possibly want to be married to me. We’d drive each other crazy in half a day—assuming we lasted that long.”