Double Standards

Nick nodded curtly. He voted carefully on the next three issues, but as the morning drifted into afternoon, and afternoon darkened into early evening, it became more and more impossible to think of anything but Lauren. Snow fell outside the windows of the Chicago skyscraper as the meeting continued, and Tony's outraged voice played through his mind… "You threw her out with no coat, no money, no nothing, and does she call Whitworth? No! She walks eight blocks in the cold and rain, to collapse in my arms."

Eight blocks! Why hadn't the guards let her stop to get her coat? He remembered the thin blouse she'd been wearing, because he had unbuttoned it himself with every intention of exposing and degrading her, exactly as he had. He remembered the sheer perfection of her creamy breasts; the incredible silkiness of her skin; the exquisite taste of her lips; the way she had kissed him and held him to her…

"Nick," the chairman said sharply, "I assume you are in favor of this proposal?"

Nick dragged his gaze from the windows. He had no idea what proposal was being discussed. "I'd like to hear more about it before I decide," he prevaricated.

Seven surprised faces turned toward him. "It's your proposal, Nick," the chairman scowled. "You wrote it."

"Then naturally I'm in favor of it," he informed them coolly.

The committee dined as a group in one of Chicago's most elegant restaurants. The moment their meal was over, Nick abruptly excused himself to return to his hotel. Snow fell in thick flakes, dusting his tan cashmere overcoat and clinging to his bare head as he strolled down Chicago's Michigan Avenue, glancing disinterestedly into exclusive shops whose brightly lit windows were decorated for Christmas.

He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, mentally cursing Jim for calling him this morning about Lauren, and cursing Lauren for walking into his life. Why hadn't she called Whitworth to come and get her when the guards forcibly removed her from the Global building? Why in God's name had she walked eight blocks in freezing weather to go to Tony?

After he had hurt and degraded her, why had she wept at his feet like a heartbroken angel? Nick paused to take a cigarette out of his pack and put it in his mouth. Bending his head, he cupped his hands over the flame and lit it. Lauren's voice drifted through his mind, choked with racking sobs. "I love you so much," she had wept. "Please listen to me… Please don't do this to us…"

Fury and pain blazed through him. He could not take Lauren back, he reminded himself forcefully. He would never take her back.

He was willing to believe that Whitworth had blackmailed her into giving him the bids. He was even willing to believe that Lauren hadn't told Whitworth about the Rossi project. After all, if she had, Whitworth's men wouldn't have been swarming all over the village asking questions about Nick's activities—they'd have been asking about Rossi. Apparently they didn't even know the chemist's name. Even if they found out, it wouldn't matter. The lab tests had proved Rossi's formula to be only a fraction as effective as he'd claimed it was, besides being a skin and eye irritant.

Nick stopped at the light on the corner, where a man in a bright red Santa Claus costume was standing beside a black iron pot and ringing a bell. Christmas had never been particularly pleasant to Nick. It was a holiday that invariably called to mind the visit he had paid to his mother as a boy; in fact, he never thought of her except at Christmas time.

Cars glided past him, their tires crunching in the fresh snow. This Christmas could have been different; it could have been a beginning. He would have taken Lauren to Switzerland. No—he would have spent it at home with her. He would have built a roaring fire in the fireplace, and they could have started their own traditions. He would have made love to her in front of the fire, with the lights from the Christmas tree glowing on her satin skin…

Nick angrily jerked his mind away from those thoughts and stalked across the street, ignoring the horns that blared their protest and the headlights flying toward him. There would be no Christmases with Lauren. He wanted her badly enough to forgive her for almost anything, but he could not, would not, forgive or forget the fact that she had betrayed him to his mother and stepfather. Perhaps in time he could have forgiven her for conspiring against him, but not with the Whitworths. Never with them.

Nick inserted his key into the double doors of his penthouse suite. "Where the hell have you been?" Jim Williams demanded from the Queen Anne sofa where he was lounging with his feet propped on an antique coffee table. "I've come to talk about the bids Lauren gave Whitworth."

Nick jerked off his coat, furious at having his suite invaded, his privacy infringed upon and particularly at being forced—even for the moment it was going to take to get Jim out of here—to talk about Lauren again. "I told you," he said in a low, deadly voice, "that I wanted Whitworth out of business and I told you how I wanted it done. When you explained your part in Lauren's complicity, I excused it, but I will not—"

"You don't have to put Whitworth out of business," Jim interrupted quietly as Nick stalked toward him. "Lauren is doing it for you." From the sofa beside him, Jim picked up copies of the original bids and the altered copies that Lauren had made to give Whitworth. "She changed the figures, Nick," he said somberly.

The meeting of the committee on international trade reconvened at precisely nine o'clock the following morning. The chairman of the committee looked at the six men seated around the conference table. "Nick Sinclair will not be present today," he informed the thunderous-looking group. "He asked me to express his regrets and to explain that he was called away on an urgent matter."

In unison, six outraged faces turned to glare with impotent hostility at the vacant chair of their missing member. "Last time it was a labor relations problem. What the hell is Sinclair's problem this time?" a jowly man demanded unsympathetically.

"A merger," the chairman answered. "He said he is going to try to negotiate the most important merger of his life."

22

« ^

Fenster, Missouri, was blanketed with a fresh carpet of snow. With Christmas decorations hanging at all the town's intersections, Fenster had a Norman Rockwell quaintness about it that reminded Nick rather poignantly of Lauren's initial primness about sex.

Aided by the directions a taciturn old man had given him a few minutes before, Nick had no trouble finding the quiet little street where Lauren had grown up. He pulled to a stop in front of a modest white frame house with a swing on the porch and an enormous oak tree in the front yard, and turned off the ignition of the car he'd rented at the airport five long hours ago.

The slow, treacherous drive across snow-covered roads had been the easy part; facing Lauren was going to be the difficult part.

His knock was answered immediately by a wiry young man in his mid-twenties. Nick's heart sank. Never in his worst imaginings during the drive down here had he considered the possibility that Lauren might have another man with her. "My name is Nick Sinclair," he said, and watched the young man's curious smile change to open animosity. "I would like to see Lauren."

"I'm Lauren's brother," the young man retorted, "and she doesn't want to see you."

Her brother! Nick's momentary relief was followed by an absurd impulse to

smash the younger man's face for stealing Lauren's allowances when she was a little girl. "I've come to see her," Nick stated implacably, "and if I have to walk over you to get to her, I will."

"I believe he means it, Leonard," Lauren's father said, stepping into the hallway, his finger in a closed book he had been reading.

For a long moment, Robert Danner studied the tall, indomitable man in the doorway, his penetrating blue eyes observing the lines of strain and tension etched deeply into his visitor's features. A faint, unwilling smile softened the stern line of Mr. Danner's mouth. "Leonard," he said quietly, "why don't we give Mr. Sinclair five minutes with Lauren to see if he can change her mind. She's in the living room," he added, inclining his head over his shoulder in the direction of the Christmas carols playing on the stereo.

"Five minutes, and that's all," Leonard grumbled, following right on Nick's heels.

Nick turned to him. "Alone," he said determinedly.

Leonard opened his mouth to argue, but his father intervened. "Alone, Leonard."

Nick silently closed the door to the cheerful little living room, took two steps forward and stopped, his heart hammering uncontrollably in his chest.

Lauren was standing on a stepladder, hanging tinsel on the upper branches of a Christmas tree. She looked heartbreakingly young in her trim jeans and bright green sweater and poignantly, vulnerably beautiful with her hair tumbling in burnished honey waves over her shoulders and back.

He ached to pull her off the ladder and into his arms, to carry her over to the sofa and lose himself in her, to kiss and hold and caress her, to heal her pain with his body and hands and mouth.