Double Standards

"Your relative," Nick repeated with freezing sarcasm. "Your relative is trying to blackmail you."

"Yes!" Lauren feverishly tried to explain. "Philip thought you were paying someone to spy on him, so he sent me here to find out who, and—"

"Whitworth is the only one paying a spy," Nick jeered scathingly. "And the only spy is you!" He released her and tried to push her away, but Lauren clung to him.

"Please listen to me," she begged wildly. "Don't do this to us!"

Nick jerked her arms loose, and she crumpled to the floor, her shoulders racked with deep choking sobs. "I love you so much," she wept hysterically. "Why won't you listen to me? Why? I'm begging you to just listen to me."

"Get up!" he snapped. "And button your blouse." He had already started toward the door. Her chest heaving with convulsive, silent sobs, Lauren straightened her clothing, braced a hand on the coffee table and slowly pushed herself to her feet.

Nick wrenched the door open and the security guards stepped forward. "Get her out of here," he ordered icily.

Lauren stared in paralyzed terror at the men coming purposefully toward her. They were taking her to jail. Her gaze flew to Nick, silently imploring him for the last time to listen, to believe, to stop this.

With his hands in his pockets, he returned her gaze without flinching, his chiseled features a mask of stone, his eyes like chips of gray ice. Only the muscle jerking in his tightly clenched jaw betrayed the fact that he was feeling any emotion at all.

The three armed guards surrounded her, and one of them took her by the elbow. Lauren yanked free, her blue eyes deep pools of pain. "Don't touch me." Without looking back, she walked with them out of his office and across the silent, deserted reception area.

When the door closed behind her, Nick went over to the sofa. Sitting down with his forearms resting on his knees, he stared at the enlarged black-and-white photo of Lauren handing Whitworth the stolen copies of the bids.

She was very photogenic, he thought with a stab of bittersweet pain. The day had been windy, and she had not bothered with a coat. The photograph had captured her delicate features in profile with the wind whipping her hair into glorious abandon.

It was a picture of Lauren betraying him.

A muscle moved convulsively in Nick's throat as he swallowed over the constriction there. The photograph should have been taken in color, he decided. Mere black and white couldn't capture her glowing skin, the gold highlights in her beautiful hair or the sparkle of her vivid turquoise eyes. He covered his face with his hands.

The silent guards escorted Lauren across the marble lobby, which was crowded with late-departing employees. In the press of so many people, Lauren was spared the humiliation of curious onlookers. Everyone else was rushing home, absorbed with individual thoughts. Not that she particularly cared who witnessed her shame; at the moment, she cared about nothing.

It was dark outside and raining, but Lauren hardly felt the icy sting of the rain pelting against her thin silk blouse. She looked disinterestedly for the police car that she expected to see waiting at the curb, but there was none. The guard on her left and the one behind her stepped back. The guard on her right also turned to leave, then he hesitated and said with curt compassion, "Do you have a coat, miss?"

Lauren looked at him with pain-dazed eyes. "Yes," she said inanely. She did have a coat; it was with her purse in Jim's office.

The guard glanced uncertainly at the curb, as if he expected someone to pull over and offer her a ride. "I'll get it for you," he said, and walked back into the building with his companions.

Lauren stood on the sidewalk, rain glazing her hair and pelting her face like a million icy hypodermic needles. Apparently she wasn't going to be taken to jail, after all. She didn't know where to go, or how to get there without money or keys. In a kind of trance she turned and started to walk down Jefferson Avenue, just as a familiar figure strode swiftly out of the building toward her. For a moment hope flared and burned painfully bright. "Jim!" she called when he and Ericka were about to pass without seeing her.

Jim turned sharply, and Lauren's stomach clenched at the bitter, accusing fury in the single scathing glance he passed over her. "I have nothing to say to you," he snapped.

All hope died inside of Lauren and with its death came a blessed numbness. She turned on her heel, shoved her frozen hands into the pockets of her tweed skirt and started walking down the street. Six steps later, Jim's hand grasped her arm, turning her around. "Here," he said, his expression just as hostile as before. "Take my coat."

Lauren carefully pulled her arm from his grasp. "Don't touch me," she said calmly. "I don't ever want to be touched."

Alarm flickered in his gaze before he extinguished it. "Take my coat," he repeated tersely, already starting to remove it. "You'll freeze to death."

Lauren found nothing unpleasant about the prospect of freezing to death. Ignoring his outstretched coat, she lifted her gaze to his. "Do you believe what Nick believes?"

"Every single word," he averred.

With her hair plastered to her head and the rain driving into her upturned face, Lauren said with great dignity, "In that case, I don't want your coat." She started to turn, then stopped. "But you can give Nick a message for me when he finally discovers the truth." Her teeth chattered as she said, "T-tell him not to ever come near me again. T-tell him to stay away from me!"

Without thinking about where she was going, Lauren automatically walked the eight blocks to the only people who would take her in without being paid. She went to Tony's restaurant.

With frozen knuckles she rapped on the back entrance. The door opened and Tony was staring at her, his black tuxedo a discordant contrast to the noise and steam of the kitchen behind him. "Laurie?" he said. "Laurie! Dio mio! Dominic, Joe," he shouted, "come quick!"

Lauren awoke in a warm comfortable bed and opened her eyes to a charmingly quaint but unfamiliar room. Her head was pounding ferociously as she struggled to her elbows and looked around. She was in the house above the restaurant, and Joe's young wife had put her to bed after a hot bath and a warm meal. She had not died of exposure, she realized. How disappointing—how anticlimactic, she decided morbidly. Her body ached as if she'd been beaten.

She wondered when Nick would discover that she'd changed the figures on the bids. If any of the four contracts were awarded to Sinco, Nick would surely wonder how that could have happened. He would wonder why Whitworth hadn't bid less than Sinco had, and he might compare the copies of the bids Lauren had given Philip with the originals.

Then again, there was also the possibility that other companies besides Sinco and Whitworth would be awarded the contracts, in which case Nick would always believe she'd betrayed him.

Lauren threw back the heavy quilts and climbed slowly out of bed. She felt too sick to care what happened.

She felt even worse a few minutes later, when she walked into the family kitchen and heard Tony on the telephone. His sons were all seated at the table. "Mary," Tony was saying, his face furrowed into stern lines, "this is Tony. Let me talk to Nick."

Lauren's heart thumped, but it was too late to stop him because he was already launching into a nonstop monologue. "Nick, this is Tony," he said. "You better come over here. Something happened to Laurie. She came here last night almost frozen. She had no coat, no purse, no nothing. She wouldn't say what was wrong. She wouldn't let any of us touch her except for—What?" His face turned angry. "Don't you use that tone of voice with me, Nick! I—" He was perfectly still for a moment, listening to whatever Nick was saying, then he took the receiver away from his ear and looked at it as if it had just grown teeth. "Nick hung up on me," he told his sons.

His amazed gaze encountered Lauren standing uncertainly in the doorway. "Nick said you stole information from him, that you're his stepfather's mistress," he told her. "He said he never wants to hear your name, and if I try to speak to him about you again, he will have his bank foreclose on the loan they made for improvements t

o my restaurant. Nick said that to me—he talked to me like that!" he repeated disbelievingly.

Lauren started forward, her face pale with remorse. "Tony, you don't know what's happened. You don't understand."

"I understand the way he spoke to me," Tony said, his jaw clenched. Ignoring her, he turned back to the phone and dialed with furious intent. "Mary," he said into the phone, "you put Nick back on the line right now." He paused while Mary apparently asked him a question. "Yes," he replied, "you bet your life it's about Lauren. What? Yes, she's here."

Tony handed the phone to Lauren, his expression so angry and hurt that she felt ill. "Nick won't talk to me," Tony said, "but Mary wants to talk to you."

With a mixture of hope and fear, Lauren said, "Hello, Mary?"

Mary's voice was like an icicle. "Lauren, you have done enough damage to those of us here who were foolish enough to trust you. If you have any decency at all, you'll keep Tony out of this. Nick is not making idle threats—he meant what he said to Tony. Is that clear?"

Lauren swallowed the lump of desolation in her throat. "Perfectly clear."

"Good. Then I suggest you stay where you are for the next hour. Our corporate attorney will deliver your possessions, to you and explain your legal situation. We were going to notify you through Philip Whitworth, but this will be vastly preferable. Goodbye, Lauren."

Lauren sank into a chair at the table, too ashamed to look at the men who would now be watching her with the same bitter condemnation that Jim and Mary had shown her.