Booties And The Beast

He saw right through it. “This man you’re so mad at, is he Joel’s father?”

This, at least, she could answer truthfully. “Yes, he is.”

She felt his gaze settle on the third finger of her left hand. “You’re not married to him?”

Cursing herself for not thinking to wear a ring as camouflage, she snapped, “I should hope not.”

Her vehemence intrigued him, she saw. “You have a child by him but you don’t want him in your life. Interesting.”

She tried to tell herself it was the writer in him, finding story possibilities in everything, but she didn’t like the way his interest threatened to undermine her anger. “I don’t want to talk about me,” she said shortly. She was alarmed at the way the conversation kept coming back to her, when the whole point was to learn as much as she could about him so she could share it with Joel when he was old enough to ask about his father.

Her body had its own ideas, she found to her dismay. Sam sat so close that her senses were assailed by the woody fragrance of his aftershave lotion, coupled with the indefinable man-scent of Sam himself. The combination was relaxed and outdoorsy, not sophisticated like Richard, she thought, unwillingly comparing Richard with the man beside her. Sam’s aura was so overpoweringly alluring it was in danger of throwing her completely off balance. Richard had never affected her so strongly.

She wasn’t planning on dating Sam, she reminded herself hastily. After Richard, she enjoyed being accountable to no one but herself and Joel. So it hardly mattered whether Sam was the indoor or outdoor type, or given to group orgies behind his impressive wrought-iron gates.

Now where had that thought come from? What was it about him that made her thoughts turn in directions they had no business going? She and Richard had only split up a few weeks ago, so it wasn’t as if she were starved for a man’s attention.

The image of Sam’s savagely rumpled bed returned to her mind. She kept a rein on her runaway thoughts by reminding herself that he had slept with her half sister, made her pregnant then denied that the baby could possibly be his.

Sobering as the reminder was, still she had trouble keeping her mind focused. Was this what he had done to Ellen?

It wasn’t hard to see how it could happen, Haley thought. She pulled herself together with an effort. Sam might well be the kind of man who attracted women as effortlessly as a magnet attracted iron filings, but Haley had no intention of falling prey to his allure.

There was probably a good reason for his divorce, she told herself. Being the kind person she was, Ellen had accepted his explanation that he and his wife were simply incompatible, but Haley would have wanted to dig deeper. Was he a workaholic or a womanizer? Insanely jealous? That the fault could have been on his ex-wife’s side, she didn’t want to think. It brought her dangerously close to feeling compassion for him, and look where that had gotten Ellen!

For Joel’s sake Haley knew she had to keep a clear head and the best way to do that was to remind herself that he was The Beast and he wasn’t about to turn into a handsome prince any time soon. Had it been possible, he would surely have done so when Ellen had told him about the baby. Instead, he had rejected both her and their child. Haley made herself remember that part.

“I’d say your child is highly relevant to our discussion, if you’re to be my house sitter while I’m on tour,” he said, breaking into her thoughts.

“You misunderstand,” she said primly. “I’m only interviewing you about your requirements, not taking the job myself.”

“Why not? You’re not Miranda’s regular assistant. What happened to the pretty redhead with the infectious laugh? Donna—isn’t that her name?”

Telling herself she didn’t care that he obviously found Miranda’s assistant attractive, Haley nevertheless found great satisfaction in saying, “I’m only filling in while Donna’s on her honeymoon. She eloped with a client.”

She had surprised him, she saw, when his dark eyebrows arched upward. Serve him right if he had fancied Donna and she had run off with someone else. It was time he got a taste of his own medicine. At the same time, something uncomfortably like jealousy gripped her. What would it be like to be the object of his passion?

“Is she coming back?” he asked.

Didn’t the man ever give up? “She’ll be back in a few days with her new husband.” She gave the relationship extra emphasis to make sure he got the point.

“What will happen to you when she does?”

Had she misread his concern? For a moment she’d thought he was sufficiently interested in Donna not to care whether or not she was married, as long as she was coming back. Now it sounded as if he was anxious about Haley herself. She didn’t want his concern and she certainly didn’t need it, she told herself, but found it more pleasant than she wanted to. “She’ll return to her job and I’ll go back to my own work.”

“And that is?”

She didn’t want to talk about herself but he gave her little option. “I’m a systems planning consultant for small companies who don’t have full-time support staff. I organize their offices and their computer systems for maximum efficiency. Now can we—”

“Give me a minute to think.” He massaged his chin, looking thoughtful. From the aura of aftershave around him, he had evidently shaved this morning but his hair was so black that a hint of shadow already darkened his jaw, giving him a slightly piratical air. “Organizational skills and Miranda’s recommendation. You could be just the person I need. Last month my personal assistant left for Zimbabwe. I’ve been on a deadline so I haven’t had chance to replace him yet.”

It explained the chaos in the office, she thought. “Miranda understood you needed a house sitter.”

“I do, while I’m on tour with the new book. But it would be a great help if the same person could sort out the office for me while I’m gone.”

This wasn’t going according to Miranda’s script at all. In desperation, Haley pulled a clipboard out of her briefcase and consulted the points listed on it. “All the same, the decision isn’t up to me.”

“But it is up to me and if I decide you’re right for this job, Miranda won’t argue. She knows I pay well.” He named a fee that Haley knew was in excess of Miranda’s usual rates. Even taking out Miranda’s commission, the amount left would solve a lot of Haley’s problems.

It wouldn’t solve the main one, that he was Joel’s father, she told herself. All the same she couldn’t help thinking that working for him would give her a heaven-sent chance to find out more about him so she could tell her child when the time came. Knowing his father and having regular contact with him would have been preferable, but that wasn’t going to happen as long as Sam denied fathering Joel.

Haley knew only too well how it felt to grow up without really knowing your father. She still couldn’t fathom how her mother, the most scatterbrained woman on earth, had managed to marry a straitlaced history professor and have his child. They had parted when Haley was six, and her mother had re-married an entomologist who was as eccentric as his wife. Currently the two of them were somewhere in the Amazon jungle collecting butterflies for his work. She had last seen Greg and her mother when they’d come back to Australia to attend their daughter’s funeral.

Afterward her mother had stayed behind to help Haley, but within a couple of weeks she had created such chaos that Haley had decided she would cope better alone. Lovingly but firmly, she’d encouraged her mother to return to Greg in the jungle. She had suspected her mother was only too happy to comply. They loved each other but they had completely different ways of managing their lives.

Haley knew she took after her real father, who was the organized one in the family. Ellen had teased Haley about being able to put her hand on whatever she needed, while Ellen had inherited Greg’s talent for creating disorder. Haley had tried to help her sister get organized, but it had never worked for long. “Let’s face it, I take after my Dad and you take after yours,” Ellen had conceded, throwing up her hands.

Haley had to agree. She’d seen little of her father while she was growing up but she had seen enough to know how finicky he was. In her teens, she had attempted to get to know him, but even she found his fussiness daunting. Arriving so much as five minutes late earned her his disapproval. She could only imagine his reaction if she had, say, spilled her food or used the wrong cutlery. She had been careful to do neither, but it hadn’t exactly made for relaxing parent-child interactions.

To be fair, her father had tried to live up to her expectations, but their meetings always felt stilted and uncomfortable. It hurt to think her father knew more about Bess Tudor than Haley Glen and that he wasn’t going to change. It seemed their orderliness was about all they had in common.

After one such outing, he had said, “I’m truly sorry I can’t give you what you want, or know what to say to you. I don’t know the first thing about being a good father. You’re better off without me.”

She had cried for two days afterward, then decided to accept the situation and get on with her life. She was proud of what she’d achieved, putting a down-payment on a her own apartment and setting herself up as her own boss. But it didn’t stop the black moments, when she wondered what it was about her that her father had found so difficult to love, from coming. She wanted better for Joel, she thought fiercely. He wasn’t going to have the same black moments in his life if she could do something about it. Even if it meant taking Sam’s assignment herself.

She had seen enough of him already to be fairly sure that his mind wasn’t easily changed once he had made it up. It sounded as if he wasn’t about to budge about having her as his house sitter. Since she couldn’t do much about it without letting Miranda down, she decided she might as well make the most of the chance to fulfill her mission. But first she needed to be sure that he wouldn’t consider any other option.

“Can we at least go through the formalities?” she asked.

He looked pleased with himself. “Go ahead, as long as the name at the foot of that impressive checklist turns out to be yours.”

She started to ask questions and tick boxes, uncomfortably aware that she was as interested in him as much for herself as for her baby.

When she closed the file, he grinned at her and she crumbled inside. It was easier to remember him as The Beast when he scowled at her. Then she didn’t have this strange sensation of being swept out of her depth by a king tide.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” he asked.

Her confusion was genuine. “About what?”

“After filling in all those little boxes, you’re still perfect for the job.”

“How can you possibly know? You know nothing about me.” And he wouldn’t, if she had anything to do with it. Her blood ran cold at the prospect of him linking her with Ellen and treating her—and her sister’s baby—as cruelly.

“I don’t need to know any more. By the time you move in, I’ll be heading off on the tour. So we’ll only be together long enough for me to brief you on what needs doing, then you’ll have the place to yourself.”

She could swear he sounded disappointed, but told herself the strain of the meeting was making her imagine things. “You don’t have a problem with a baby staying in your house.”

His expression darkened. “My sister, Jessie, has two small children so the house is equipped for a baby. And in my line of work, I’m unlikely to have a problem with children.”

Only with Joel, she thought, quelling her reaction. “I could refuse to take the assignment.”

“But you won’t.”

She met his penetrating blue gaze with an equally direct one of her own. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because you don’t want to lose Miranda one of her best clients.”

With sinking heart, Haley knew that he had won.

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