She stared at him for a long moment. “You never talk about your family,” she finally said.
He hated like hell to discuss his childhood, but he was determined to make her see the only right course. “I don’t have a family. My father left my mother soon after she became pregnant with me, and my mother died when I was six. I spent time in foster care and at the Granger Home for Boys. I can give you a first-hand account of what it’s like to grow up without a father and it’s not pretty. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you?”
Kate put the cat down and turned away from Michael. She’d always wondered about his family, but had never asked. Michael had seemed to be a man with no personal attachments. Now she understood why. With a sinking feeling she also understood why he would be adamantly opposed to putting his child through an illegitimate upbringing. His disclosure took the wind out of her sails. “So what kind of arrangement are you proposing?” she asked in a low voice.
She felt him step closer to her. He gave her a sheet of paper. She scanned it, but the numbers were a blur. “What is this?”
“My financial statement. I’ve had my accountant put aside—”
Kate’s stomach roiled. “Oh my God,” she said, tossing the offending paper to the floor and walking to the other side of the room.
Michael stepped in front of her, his hands on her arms, male frustration emanating from every pore. “I want you to know that I can and will take care of you and the baby. I want you to see it in black and white. I don’t want you to ever worry about it.”
In some corner of her mind, she suspected his intentions were good. She could see it was vital to him to protect her and the baby, but the timing couldn’t be worse. This was a far cry from the sweet, sentimental tale her mother had often repeated to her about her father’s proposal on bended knee in an ice-cream parlor. “So this is a business arrangement. You sign over part of your money to me and the baby, you and I get married, we live separately, and I raise our child.”
“No,” he said firmly, immediately. “You and the baby will live with me.”
“Why?” she demanded. “You don’t want me.”
His gaze traveled over her, and Kate felt a surprising flicker of the forbidden but mutual attraction she’d thought he’d killed. “I never said I didn’t want you. I may not have much of a heart, but I am a man. I wanted to take you to bed from the beginning. Every day I saw you, I thought how it would be to touch you and feel you hot and wet. But you were too valuable to me as an assistant to muddy the waters with sex.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re no longer my assistant,” he said. “You’re fair game.”
Confused, rattled and, embarrassingly, a little turned on, Kate backed away. She took a careful breath and shook her head. “This is just a little too primitive for me. Your protectiveness, the money, the—” she groped for a benign description and came up empty “—the sex.” She shook her head again. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t feel like I know you at all, yet you’re insisting we marry.”
“Do you remember what it was like between us before that night we spent together?”
She nodded, remembering that underneath the forbidden wanting, there’d always been an ease, occasional laughter, and respect. Everything had felt so dreadfully tense between them, however, ever since that night. “We laughed a lot more.”
“You were a friend.”
Kate felt the push and pull of loss and confusion. He called her friend, and she felt elated, yet she knew he wasn’t offering her a lifetime of love and devotion. She crossed her arms over her chest, then lifted a hand to rub her forehead. “I don’t—” She bit her lip. “I don’t know. I need time to think.”
“You said you cared for me as more than a boss,” he reminded her.
She felt the sting of humiliation at how she’d laid her emotions bare for him to see. “That was before you told me you didn’t believe in love.”
“So you prove my point. You can’t count on emotions. Yours have changed.”
“I think it would be more fair to say I didn’t have all the facts. I didn’t know everything about you.”
“When do you ever know everything about someone else?” he asked. “You don’t.” He took her left hand in his and rubbed her ring finger, then met her gaze. “It’s right for us to be married.” He closed his hand around hers and drew her to him. “Right in a lot of ways.”
He lowered his head and took her mouth in a gentle, but firm caress, and she felt the coil of sensual tension inside her tighten. She felt his fingers splay through her hair, tilting her head for better access. He was a heady combination of masculine control and passion, and Kate struggled with overwhelming seductive and forbidden wishes.
He slid his leg between hers and she felt the evidence of his hard arousal against her. Kate remembered how easy it had been to fall into his arms before. Was she ready for that again? The thought cut through the haze of passion, and she pulled back and ducked her head. Her lips and mind were buzzing.
“I need to think,” she said, staring at the open collar of his shirt. She knew his chest was strong. She knew how his bare chest felt against her hands and cheek. Kate closed her eyes. “This isn’t helping.”
She heard him exhale deeply; his impatience shimmered between them. She knew that sound. She’d seen it and heard it a hundred times, but it had always been business-related.
“I don’t remember you being this stubborn,” he said in a wry voice.
Kate glanced up at him. “Different circumstances,” she said.
He tilted his head to one side. “How’s that?”
“You used to be my boss,” she said. “Now, you’re not.”
He nodded, taking her measure. “Works both ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I said before, now that you’re not my assistant, you’re fair game.” He lifted her hand to his mouth and brushed his lips over her fingers. “We’ll talk soon.”
Her fingers burned as she watched him walk out the door. She felt as if she’d walked into a cyclone, or perhaps one had walked into her. She rubbed her hand over her face and sagged against the wall. She hadn’t counted on Michael’s insistence. She hadn’t counted on him pursuing her with the same fervor and intensity with which she’d watched him pursue his business interests.
Her chest tightened when she remembered the you-can-fight-but-you-won’t-win look in his eyes. Her emotions were all over the place. She felt exhilarated, seduced…. She spied his financial statement on the floor and scowled in disgust. She scooped it up and crumpled it into a tight little ball.
The man was a mass of contradictions. He wanted to protect her, seduce her and marry her.
But not love her.
Kate didn’t know what to do. This was definitely not a sentimental story of a proposal on bended knee in the ice cream parlor. She tried to imagine repeating this story to her child. “Yes, a lot of men propose with words of love and devotion and diamond rings, but your Daddy brought me his financial statement instead.”
Kate groaned and tossed the paper across the room.
The next morning Kate left before Michael could call or visit. She invited her close friend, Donna, to meet her at a park in downtown St. Albans for lunch. Kate had known Donna since they’d both entered Virginia Tech’s computer science program as freshmen, and she valued the longevity and comfort of their friendship. Donna’s wide-eyed baby face belied her worldly-wise mind.
“I’m surprised you were able to get away from work,” Donna said as they shared a small table overlooking the pond. “It seems like your lunch hours are always used for special projects for the mighty Michael.”
“I’m not working for the mighty Michael anymore,” she said. “I quit.”
Donna’s brown eyes rounded. “You’re joking!”
“No. I’m pregnant,” she said, and Kate told her the whole story to the accompaniment of Donna’s repeated gasps.
“His financial statement,” Donna said and tried unsuccessfully to swallow a chuckle. “I’m curious. What did it say?”
Kate threw her a sideways glance. “I didn’t look. I already know he’s got a lot in the bank. I just don’t know how terrible it would be to marry him knowing he doesn’t even believe in love.” She tossed some breadcrumbs toward the geese that begged from the luncheon crowd.
Donna made a face and sighed. “It’s admirable that he wants to take care of you and the baby. I hate to say it, but he may be too damaged from his upbringing to really be able to love someone. This won’t be a marriage like your parents have.”
Donna was voicing all of Kate’s concerns. “I know,” she said glumly. “It’s not that he’s a bad person, but since he didn’t have an example of how to live in a family, I’m afraid he really won’t know how.”
“You can’t tell me you didn’t see this coming like a freight train,” Donna said. “You’ve worked with him for three years.”
Kate felt a rush of embarrassment at her foolishness. “That’s part of the problem. The only way I know him is through work, and even though that might have consumed a lot of hours, there are things Michael never mentioned about himself. I know it sounds silly, but I just thought I had a terrible, terrible crush. Since we spent that night together, I’ve been on an emotional seesaw.”
Donna groaned. “How hard is he pushing?”
“Very hard,” Kate said, feeling the beginning of a headache.
Donna reached over and squeezed her arm. “You could always move to France.”
Kate gave a half-hearted smile. Throughout their friendship, they’d taken turns offering the fantasy of moving to France as a way to escape the crisis du jour.