Prince Charming's Child. Jennifer Greene
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twenty-eight, a brown-eyed brunette with a centerfold figure and the nature of an incurable flirt. She was openly affectionate with all the guys. Discussing the antics of her exuberant love life was a ritual over morning coffee. The boys inhaled every wild detail. Nicole had never tried to rein her in. Wilma managed the office and bookkeeping side of things and kept the whole place pumping.
And that left Mitch...the only staff member who Nicole couldn’t see from the doorway, but she could hear him yell something to Rate with that distinctly whiskey baritone. Mitch was thirty-two, her own age. The guys called him “Stretch” because he was a lanky six feet three inches, with hair the color of sun-bleached sand and eyes bluer than sky. Sexy enough, if a woman’s taste ran to overtall bean-poles—which Nicole’s never personally had.
Mitch was the newest team member, she’d only hired him six months ago. Originally Janice had been the group’s architect, and she’d done so well that her leaving for a job in New York had left a precarious hole. Nicole expected the employee search to be worrisome, and instead had a plum drop in her lap. Mitch’s background surpassed even what Janice had offered them.
Ironically, he’d rubbed Nicole personally wrong from the beginning, and she admitted it. Heck, so did he—they even joked about it together sometimes. The dam man had a gift for getting along with everyone. He was in his element with the men’s men contractor types, yet he never lost patience with the creative design types on the team. From the start, he’d leaped into touchy situations that had everyone else running for cover. The whole team loved him. Objectively, so did she—there was simply no explaining why they scraped against each other’s nerves. Nicole had quit fretting the why of it. She just gave Mitch an extra wide berth and let him do his job. Everyone was critical in a small business this size, but Mitch was damn near irreplaceable.
Even if he weren’t irreplaceable—even if there wasn’t that strange prickly edginess between them—there was another reason why Nicole would never touch a hair on his head. More than once, he’d mentioned a woman friend. A solid woman friend. Nicole had forgotten her name—Susan, maybe? Regardless, he was already involved. Nicole couldn’t imagine any circumstance in the universe where she’d poach on another woman’s territory—which meant there was zero possibility of her sleeping with Mitch.
Abruptly she pressed a protective hand on her abdomen. Her stomach was increasingly queasy, her heart starting to gallop with anxiety. She simply had to try and calm down. It’s not like all this thinking was getting her anywhere.
Every mental road led her to the same place. The only men in her life were the guys in the office. There was no occasion anything could have happened except the night of that Christmas party. But party or no party, champagne or no champagne, she simply would never have let anything happen with any of her guys. It went against her whole moral and character grain. And a woman didn’t forget making love with a man, for heaven’s sake. And surely the man would have said something if anything like that had occurred. And she’d wakened the morning after the party in her own bed, alone.
Nicole kept trying to add two and two, but the sum just refused to be four.
She couldn’t be pregnant.
Yet she was.
“Nicole? You have a free minute?”
Mitch Landers had been waiting all afternoon for a chance to catch the boss in and alone. The envelope in his hand contained a letter of resignation. He had no illusions this was going to be an easy conversation, but he’d postponed it for days. He needed a moment when the rest of the team were solidly occupied and the phone wasn’t ringing and there was a chance of him catching some uninterrupted time with her. A quarter to five seemed his best shot. And Mitch had quit kidding himself that this didn’t have to be done.
That was the plan. But she was standing at the window when he knocked, and the instant she heard his voice, she promptly spun around. And he saw her face. “Sure, come on in. What’s the problem? The Llewellyn account?”
“No, nothing like that. I just need to talk to you about something, but...look, are you feeling okay?”
She produced an instant smile, but it was as fake as a politican’s promises. “To tell you the truth, I’ve had better afternoons, but I’m fine, really, just a little distracted. Sit down, tell me what the problem is.”
One look at her face, and Mitch knew his plan was going to hell in a handbasket. But he sat in one of her prissy blue office chairs and stretched out his long, lanky legs. Everything about her office always made him feel like an ox in a boudoir. Restlessly he batted the envelope on his knee, then just as restlessly pocketed it out of sight.
He couldn’t tell whether his boss was sick, scared or somebody just killed her dog. But something was wrong. And for Nicole Stewart to look fragile as a cotton puff was so out of character that something had to be “bad” wrong.
It only took a second to catalog her features head to toe—but at least this once, he had a judiciously altruistic motive. His pulse could rev from zero to sixty with a single glance at her, and had from the day they met. On the surface, nothing looked particularly different. Her silky cream blouse and mannish green suit were pretty typical office attire. Not much figure. On a scale of one to ten, the legs got a ten-plus, but the rest of the package maxed out at three. No boobs. No hips. She was built long on angles and short on curves...but the way she moved those angles had inspired his hormones to great feats of imagination from the beginning—and would now, if the look on her face wasn’t worrying him.
Her face had always been the killer. It started with a frame of vibrant auburn hair, chopped off at chin length with spiky bangs. He’d never seen it longer. About every four weeks, she zealously hit a stylist to ruthlessly tame the mop into a nice, sedate, businesswoman’s haircut. Waste of money, Mitch thought personally. Maybe you could beat the wicked out of a sinner, but nobody was gonna tame that thick, curly hair. It bounced around an oval face with all kinds of interesting lines. Sharp little nose. Chin with character. A slash of delicate cheekbones. A too-wide mouth that showed off gorgeous white teeth when she laughed, and could prim up into a straight line when she was serious—which was way too much of the time, as far as Mitch was concerned. But either way, the shape of those soft lips was always going to make a man wonder how she kissed.
Normally when he looked at her face, the way she moved, he saw sass. Spirit. Don’t-mess-with-me-buster character. Maybe she was a five-foot-five-inch welterweight, but he’d bet on her over a bruiser in a dark alley any day. She was a dirty infighter, something he’d always admired in a woman. Her loyalty to the staff was legend. She always stepped in front of staff if there was an aggravating client or a touchy problem, always taking the heat, charging in whenever she smelled trouble. Sometimes too much so. When Nik was on a full-speed charge, she had a tough time backing down. She’d probably take on Goliath—and God knew, lose—but Mitch didn’t doubt Goliath would suffer mightily first. Not from a punch. The blue silk walls in her office were a measure of her pure-female methods. She fought strictly girl fashion, almost never swore, rarely raised her voice—but if a guy crossed her, she went straight for the balls.
As far as Mitch had ever seen, she feared nothing. Which had always concerned and fascinated him both—he didn’t know her background, because she didn’t talk. Not to staff. Not about personal things. But she had to learn to fight that way somewhere. She had guts, will, strength.
But dammit, not today. She was shook up about something. The only real splash of color in that face were her eyes. They were blue-gray, almond shape, too big for that small face. Normal women tattletaled every emotion they were feeling in their eyes. Not her. Her expression just went flat when she was blocking something, and she was good at blocking any damn thing she wanted to. That those eyes revealed panic and vulnerability at the moment made Mitch inclined to call 911 and not waste time hearing the explanation.
“You said you wanted to talk about something,” she prompted him again.
“Yeah, but it’ll wait. Look, you’re real pale. You sure you’re okay? Did something happen this afternoon?”
“Yes.