lump dissolved. He found his voice. “Hey, you don’t need to be thinking about John that way. In fact, forget John. Nicole—”
“Well, I could forget John, but that leaves Rafe. Only Mitch, he’s made such a point of never talking about his personal life. You know how Wilma flirts. He never bites. He’s just violent on not combining business with his private life, so if something happened with him, it’s really the worse kind of harassment. He could have been put in a position where he didn’t feel he could say no because of his job. But he is an attractive man. It’s not like I can’t imagine any circumstance where—”
“Forget Rafe. Forget imagining him that way, too. Nicole—”
“There’s no point in my considering Wilma, because she couldn’t have gotten me pregnant,” she said with another dry attempt at humor. “I have to know who it is. And it’s so frustrating that I can’t remember. Somehow I have to make this right for the man involved, but I don’t even know how to start. I’m just so ashamed and disgusted with myself that I could have put someone in this position. I care about all of you. This is just so wrong. Wrong of me—”
“Nicole,” Mitch said for the third time—this time loud enough to wake the dead, which was what it seemed to take to catch her attention.
“What?”
“You can quit thinking about the other guys in that context. It wasn’t any of them. It was me. I’m the father of your baby.”
Two
“Oh, no! You couldn’t be the father, Mitch! You just couldn’t be!”
Mitch didn’t wince, but he wanted to. Although Nik might not appreciate it, his mind was racing from shock, no different than hers. Obviously he was aware they’d taken a risk the night they made love, but there’d been no tip that night had repercussions until this instant. That she seemed stunned at his admitting paternity was bad enough, but she also threw herself in her office chair as if she lacked the strength to face such appalling news.
At thirty-two, naturally Mitch had taken a few slices in his masculine ego—but nothing that knifed his male esteem quite so fast or lethally.
Way, way back—in the era before Nicole had upended his entire life—he vaguely remembered a pleasant historical time when women actually liked him. One even told him he was a creatively inspired lover. Several had chased him downright ruthlessly. Amazing as it seemed now, he’d never had a complaint about his prowess or talent between the sheets. Until Nik, no woman had ever felt obligated to completely block all memory of sleeping with him. And until now, he’d never taken up with a woman who looked aghast at the idea of him in her bed.
Any second now, Mitch figured the letter of resignation burning a hole in his pocket would strike his sense of irony. Quitting was obviously out of the question now. A baby in the picture changed everything.
Only it was hard to imagine how an impossible situation could possibly have become even more disastrous. Mitch had learned the hard, bloody way that he had a problem with tenacity. Sensible people turned off when they saw a dead-end road sign. Not him. If there was something he wanted or valued, he stubbornly persisted in charging forward long past the hopeless point. He hated giving up on anything. But this afternoon, he thought he’d finally gotten smarter and was doing the rational, practical thing by resigning. Getting out of her life. Removing himself from the hopeless temptation of Nicole altogether.
Only this afternoon wasn’t going precisely like he planned. Under any other circumstances, that would have been great news. He never wanted to get out of her life. He never wanted to quit a job he loved. Hell, as soon as he recovered from the life-threatening shock that he’d fathered a child, he was likely gonna spin high on the baby news, too. Unfortunately, one teensy small detail hadn’t changed from the original core problem.
Nicole still couldn’t see him for dust.
And she was still facing him with that aghast expression.
“Mitch...it just couldn’t have been you. The two of us just couldn’t have slept together. I mean, for one thing, I know there’s already a woman in your life, a Suzanne or Susan or something—”
Bewilderment furrowed his brow. For a moment he was completely confounded how Suz could have possibly entered this conversation—but that didn’t stop him from immediately correcting her misconception. “Whoa—there’s no one in my life. Nor would anything have happened between us if someone else had been in the wings. If I’m involved, I believe in doing the loyal-as-a-hound routine. No exceptions. I can’t imagine how you even heard Suz’s name?”
“From Wilma. I’m positive she said—”
Aw, hell. Finally it clicked how she’d made the association. “Yeah, well...before I moved and took the job here, there was a Suz. And when I was first hired on, Wilma came on pretty strong. I didn’t know then that flirting was a life-style with her. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and didn’t want to start a new job with an awkward situation, so I made some comment about there being a Suz in my life. Good grief, I never even thought about it again. It was just a chance comment at the time. It never occurred to me that she’d spread the word or that anyone else had made anything of it.”
That didn’t stop her from sputtering. “But Mitch, it still couldn’t have been you.”
A billion women on the planet, and he had to fall for the one who used his masculine ego for machete practice? “Trust me. It was.”
“But I always thought you didn’t even like me—”
“Um, Nik, that’s not remotely true.”
Instead of that comment reassuring her, it seemed to cause more mental wheels to spin in her mind. She seemed to sink even deeper in that office chair. A flush of guilt splashed her cheeks with color. “Oh, God. Look, I have to face this, so I just you want you to be honest with me. What did I do? Throw myself at you at that party? Put you in a position where you couldn’t say no because I was the boss?”
“Nicole, that’s not at all how it happened.”
“Then how did it happen? And why didn’t you ever say anything to me long before this?”
Mitch rubbed an exasperated hand at the back of his neck. For almost three months, he’d have given gold for those questions to come up. He’d had to battle every grain in his character to shut up, when his nature was to charge into a problem and confront it head-on. It was only for her sake—ever—that he’d been silent.
Now, though, blurting out the plain truth wasn’t that simple. He was painfully conscious that how he handled the situation could either open doors—for her, for him, for the two of them—or permanently close them. Somehow, he had to buy himself some thinking time.
Slowly he stood up. “I’m not ducking those questions, Nik—I want to answer them. But it’s after hours. You look beat. And I don’t think the office is the best place to discuss this. I’m guessing you’d like to go home, put your feet up, get a chance to catch your breath. How about if I pick up some Chinese—or whatever you feel like for dinner—and we meet up at your place?”
“I don’t know...” She started shaking her head.
“I understand—you just had all this sprung on you. And I don’t want you to feel put on the spot. About anything. But before you start making plans about the baby, I think you need to know what happened that night. I’m part of this, too...and it doesn’t matter to me whether we talk at my place or yours, but I assume you’d be more comfortable on your turf.”
She agreed—not, Mitch suspected, because she willingly wanted more time with him, but because she really, really wanted to know what happened that night. After that, they both went in motion. She locked the office; he called ahead to order dinner, and they separated in the parking lot. A half hour later, he’d picked up the Chinese takeout and was swinging his red Miata into her drive.
Juggling