The Boss′s Baby Surprise
The Boss's Baby Surprise
Lilian Darcy
She’d dreamed about Nick and a baby.…
The baby had looked as good in his arms as a designer gown on a supermodel. They’d accessorized each other. Cute big dark head of hair, cute little dark head of hair. Broad shoulders, tiny fingers. Red tie, blue sleepsuit. The man and the infant had belonged together like apple pie and ice cream, like tulips and springtime, like baseball and hot dogs.
Cecelia’s multimillionaire boss had held the little boy in a way that had made both man and baby look oddly vulnerable, so that both of them had tugged at her heart in a way she didn’t want at all.
And she certainly never thought of her boss in a personal context like this. It was a point of professional pride to her that in seven years as an executive assistant for a total of six increasingly successful men in three different jobs, she’d never even come close to falling for her employer.
And I’m not falling for him now.
Dear Reader,
If you can’t beat the summer heat then join it! Come warm your heart with the latest from Silhouette Romance.
In Her Second-Chance Man (SR #1726) Cara Colter enchants us again with the tale of a former ugly duckling who gets a second chance with the man of her dreams—if only she can convince him to soften his hardened heart. Don’t miss this delightful story of love and miracles!
Meet Cinderella’s Sweet-Talking Marine (SR #1727) in the newest book in Cathie Linz’s MEN OF HONOR miniseries. This sexy soldier promised to take care of his friend’s sister, and he plans to do just that, even if it means marrying the single mom. A hero’s devotion to his country—and his woman—has never been sweeter!
Talk about a fantasy come to life! Rescued by the handsomest Native American rancher this heroine has ever seen definitely makes up for taking a wrong turn somewhere in Montana. Find out if her love will be enough to turn this bachelor into a husband in Callie’s Cowboy (SR #1728) by Madeline Baker.
Lilian Darcy brings us the latest SOULMATES title with The Boss’s Baby Surprise (SR #1729). Dreams of her handsome boss are not that strange for this dedicated executive assistant. But seeing the confirmed bachelor with a baby? She doesn’t believe it…until her dreams begin to come true!
We hope you enjoy the tender stories in this month’s lineup!
Mavis C. Allen
Associate Senior Editor
The Boss’s Baby Surprise
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Books by Lilian Darcy
Silhouette Romance
The Baby Bond #1390
Her Sister’s Child #1449
Raising Baby Jane #1478
* (#litres_trial_promo)Cinderella After Midnight #1542
* (#litres_trial_promo)Saving Cinderella #1555
* (#litres_trial_promo)Finding Her Prince #1567
Pregnant and Protected #1603
For the Taking #1620
The Boss’s Baby Surprise #1729
Silhouette Special Edition
Balancing Act #1552
LILIAN DARCY
has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.
June 10, 1904
Dearest Mama,
This will be my last letter to you before your muchanticipated visit. I must confess I am counting the days, as I am getting so heavy and already feeling the heat. I am sitting in my favorite room as I write this, and I cannot wait for you to see it–well, the whole house, too. Frederick has worked so hard to make it perfect.
I spend so many happy hours here in my sewing parlor, looking onto the street. I have just finished making dear Cousin Lucy’s wedding gown, a summer hat for me and Jemima’s christening robe, as well as all sorts of pretty things for the baby, of course. I sit here in the afternoons and listen for my dearest Frederick to come home, and my thoughts fly all over the place. Mama, I never imagined I could be so content!
Sometimes I think that even a hundred years from now, my spirit will live on in this room, sending out hope and happiness and perhaps just a little mischief.
Your loving daughter,
Charlotte
Contents
Chapter One (#u0fd9fb2b-edbe-5f24-a2c0-b5cea008068d)
Chapter Two (#u187b8254-9712-5ff0-af4f-208c1d88772e)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
One of the best things about flying business class, if you were an organized, efficient executive assistant like Cecilia Rankin, was that it was located right up at the front of the plane. There were no long, narrow aisles to negotiate, and no obstacle course of fellow travelers to apologize to as you eased your way past.
Stepping aboard the New York to Columbus flight in Nick Delaney’s wake, Celie’s fingers already itched to open her laptop, and she wasn’t surprised when her boss himself picked up a conversation they’d abandoned midsentence a few minutes earlier, cut off by the boarding announcement.
“In fact, don’t even get out the Fadden McElroy file,” he said, stopping beside his seat.
“No, they didn’t seem to have a grasp of the Delaney’s ethos, I felt,” Celie answered. The Delaney’s chain of steak houses had recently fired its advertising agency, and this two-day trip to New York had been part of the process of selecting a new one. Celie had found it fascinating, though tiring.
“Exactly,” Nick said, in answer to her comment. “The other agency presentations I want to review inflight, but I’ll make that call to the Chicago office, first.”
“They’ll want cell phones switched off soon,” she reminded him.
“It’s a quick call.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, flipped it open and keyed in the number. His strong body almost managed to fill the wide business-class aisle. Celie and Nick had been nearly the last passengers to board, and the flight attendants were beginning to make their final checks. Nick looked down at his seat as he spoke into the phone. There was a blue pillow on the seat, and he picked it up with a preoccupied expression, then stood back for Celie to pass.
As she took her seat, she debated removing the pillow from his grasp, but he had it tucked into the crook of his arm like a baby, and he was listening intently to the voice at the other end of the phone right now. She didn’t want to distract him, even though she was sure he didn’t really want the pillow.
It reminded her of something, suddenly, and she blinked. A baby. Nick and a baby. Nick and a baby that he didn’t really want.
She’d dreamed this. Something very akin to this. The night before they’d left Columbus for New York, two days ago.
Celie lived in a cozy apartment in a big old house in the Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood of Victorian Village. It was a place that she sometimes felt might be too cozy, and too dangerously romantic, for an efficient, organized person such as herself, and she’d certainly never before had the vivid dreams she’d been having since she moved into it two months ago.
And this week, she’d dreamed about Nick and a baby. She could remember it in detail, now.
The baby had looked as good in his arms as a designer gown on a supermodel. They’d accessorized each other, so to speak. Cute big dark head of hair, cute little dark head of hair. Broad shoulders, tiny fingers. Red tie, blue sleepsuit. White shirt that was coming untucked, and a blue flannel blanket, also untucked. The man and the infant belonged together like apple pie and ice cream, like tulips and springtime, like baseball and hotdogs.
Celie’s multimillionaire boss had held the little boy in a way that had made both man and baby look oddly vulnerable, so that both of them had tugged at her heart in a way she didn’t want at all, and wasn’t used to. He’d seemed different in the dream, not like the Nick Delaney she knew so well from the hours she spent in the same office with him. That Nick was confident, driven and impressive in every way.
In contrast, the dream Nick had had a softness to his eyes that had looked partly like fatigue and partly like tenderness, and both qualities had called forth an almost painful hunger inside the Celie-in-the-dream to go up to him, real close, lean into his tall, well-muscled body, lift her fingers to his face and—
Celie frowned and sat up straighter.
She didn’t like having such vivid dreams, nor did she like remembering them in such detail. She was practical, responsible, efficient and in control. She wasn’t a visionary. And she certainly never thought of her boss in a personal context like this. It was a point of professional pride to her that in seven years as an executive assistant for a total of six increasingly successful men in three different jobs, she’d never even come close to falling for her employer.
And I’m not falling for him now.
This employer, in particular, she sensed, would be a dangerous man to care for. He organized his emotions the same way he organized his life—in separate compartments, with strict labels. Celie valued this quality in a boss, but she didn’t think she’d want it in a lover.
Still on the phone, Nick paced back and forth, the way Celie’s sister’s husband, Alex, sometimes paced back and forth when he was trying to soothe their crying baby girl. Little Lizzie had recently celebrated her three-month birthday with a weeklong visit from Kentucky to Columbus with her parents, and her aunt Celie adored her.
“Maybe I got Alex and Nick mixed up in the dream,” Celie muttered to herself, as she opened her laptop.
“You okay?” he said, with his hand over the phone.
“I’m fine.”
Nick saw that she had her laptop out. “Bring up the spreadsheets from Hampton Finn Lloyd, would you?”
He continued to pace. This was his caged-lion look, and he did it a lot, although today his movements were confined to a smaller area than usual. To and fro he went, like a big cat, with every muscle coiled, as if he had too much energy at his disposal to expend on a mere telephone call.
He would have to sit down, soon. The flight attendants had begun to close the aircraft doors. Celie managed to take the blue pillow from him, at last, in a deft maneuver that didn’t disrupt his train of thought, the way her sister would take Lizzie from Alex, sometimes.
Nick didn’t have any babies in his life that Celie knew of. Not one of his own, and no nieces and nephews, either. His only brother, Sam, although married, was childless. And if Nick was dating anyone, Celie didn’t know. He wasn’t the kind of boss who asked his assistant to buy gifts—or kiss-offs—for his girlfriends.
If she’d had to guess, Celie would have said he was uninvolved, right now.
Which means he’s available, said a sneaky little voice inside her head.
She frowned at the voice, and mentally argued it down. For the second time in as many minutes.
Sure, she liked Nick. Respected him. Was aware of the powerful impression he made on almost everyone he met, with his clear gaze, his strong handshake, his quick mind. She even felt a little possessive toward him at times, running so many important aspects of his life the way she did.
Professionally, they accessorized each other, so to speak. Like baseball and hotdogs. Like tulips and springtime.
But all of this was a long way from feeling, like Celie-in-the-dream, as if she wanted to reach up and—
“Okay, now, these figures here,” Nick said.
“Cost breakdowns on their proposed print ad campaign,” Celie answered at once, happy to snap off that other, much more disturbing train of thought and focus on work.
The airplane engines began to speed up, ready to taxi away from the gate. The flight attendants launched into their safety announcement. Nick and Celie were forced to pause briefly during takeoff, when laptop and briefcase had to be stowed beneath their seats, but apart from that, Nick was as tireless as ever.
Only toward the end of the flight did he announce, “Okay, we’ll leave it there. I’m going to call Sam.”
“Do you want me to—?”
He shook his head, pulled out the phone again, and hit the speed dial. His eyes looked clouded, which they hadn’t a few minutes ago, and his mouth looked a little tight. Celie had become adept at picking up Nick’s emotional signals over the past eight months.
He was worried about his younger brother, the way Celie herself often worried about her mom.
He probably didn’t realize he let it show, but Celie could tell, and she wasn’t surprised. Sam was only eleven months younger than Nick, and she knew they’d always been close—close enough to make a spectacular success of working together for the past ten years. Sam’s marriage had been in trouble, in recent months, and her boss didn’t want his brother to get hurt.
“Where are you?” Nick asked him at once. “Home? Anything to report?” He listened for a minute, then told Sam, “No, just checking in. You on your own? Eating out?” He listened again, then added a little too casually, “Maybe I’ll drop by.”
In contrast to the casual manner, his eyes looked serious, focused and very blue. Actually, they were almost the same shade of blue as the airline pillow and the baby blanket in Celie’s dream, she realized. The fact unsettled her again. Was that why she’d suddenly remembered the dream? Baby blankets, baby-blue eyes, his daddy’s blue—
No. Surely not.
I’m just tired.
The flight landed on time, their bags were waiting for them on the carousel, and Nick’s personal driver Leo whisked them away from the airport in Nick’s personal limo within minutes. Since her apartment was almost on the route to his home in Upper Arlington, Nick dropped her there as usual.
“You look wiped,” he told her. He wasn’t being unkind, she understood, he was just making a statement of fact. His gaze flicked over her, taking in the creases in her knee-length charcoal-gray skirt, and around her eyes and mouth.
Her nerve endings heated under his regard in an unexpected way, and she nodded, feeling awkward. “Yes, I am,” she answered. “It’s good to be home.”
“Take the morning off, okay? Come in at around two. If you need longer, just call and let me know.”
“I’ll be fine. Two o’clock.”
“You sure?”
“We have the regional figures to go through,” she reminded him. “And meetings to prepare for.”
“We do. Okay, then. Two o’clock it is. Have a good night.”
Leo had already opened the trunk to collect her bags and carry them to the door for her. Nick watched as Celie followed the older man to the side door that led up to her apartment. She had a straight back, a tidy walk, a taste for very efficient and very tailored professional clothing, and glossy dark hair that would have bounced in time to her footsteps if it hadn’t been so neatly twisted and clipped high on her head.
Something moved in the corner of his vision. A curtain in one of the Victorian mansion’s six apartments, maybe, wafting in the night breeze. Nick’s muscles tingled with a sudden urge to chase after Celie and snap the clip off her hair so that its clean, silky bounce would become fact instead of imagination.
He resisted the urge, disturbed by how unexpected and how strong it was. He could almost feel her hair in his fingers. He kept watching as she reached her door, just ahead of Leo. Typically, she had her key already in her hand.
Of course she did. He would have been surprised if she hadn’t, and Celie Rankin almost never surprised him. This was one of the things he liked about her.
She wouldn’t let Leo bring her bags up the stairs, and disappeared inside within seconds. Leo headed back to the car, while Nick kept watching the big old house. A series of lights came on, showing Celie’s progress up the stairs. Finally, the big, round turret room at the front of the second floor lit up. He saw a faint shadow through the drapes as she moved across the room.
Celie was a great executive assistant. Nick had kept her up until well after midnight in his hotel suite last night, working on her laptop, and he suspected her mind had been buzzing too fast afterward to wind down and permit her some good rest. No wonder she seemed tired, and a little offline.
He never had that problem. He’d learned very early in his life the trick of switching off and disappearing deep into the haven of sleep. As a young child, sleep was the only place in his life where he’d felt safe. Now his facility for deep, unbroken sleep allowed him to function at a higher level than many people during his waking hours, and he rarely remembered his dreams.
“Okay, Leo,” he told his driver, dismissing Cecilia Rankin from his mind. He picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call for some takeout and bring it over to Sam’s, since he hasn’t eaten yet. Can we swing by the Green Dragon, next?”
“I’m glad you’re back,” Celie’s creaky-floored old apartment seemed to say to her.
The chandelier in the middle of the turret room’s ceiling sparkled, and when she opened a window, a cool evening breeze wafted in. The antique clock on the side table by the door clacked like a percussionist playing out a rhythm. Eight o’clock, it read. Time to eat, her stomach said.
No problem, there. As efficient at home as she was at work, she kept the refrigerator in her little kitchen well-stocked with quick-to-prepare meals. Toss some frozen cheese ravioli into a pot of boiling water, heat a creamy pasta sauce in the microwave, tear up a few lettuce leaves, and she could eat in ten minutes.
Celie caught sight of her cherry-red robe hanging on a hook in the bathroom, and into her mind jumped the idea of taking a quick shower while the ravioli cooked, then eating in the robe and her matching slippers.
As a child, she’d been allowed to do that, when she was tired. Her mother would bundle her up on the couch with a crocheted blanket over her knees and a little tray table, spread with a linen place mat. She would eat a big bowl of homemade soup and fresh hot biscuits, and she’d feel so deliciously cosseted and safe.
She hadn’t done anything like that for years. Since her dad’s death, when Celie was seventeen, she had had to be the adult, the responsible one, the one who did the cosseting. It had seemed to frighten her mom if the daughter she depended upon displayed any sign of softness or vulnerability.
“You’re exhausted. Baby yourself a little tonight, Celie,” the robe on its hook seemed to say, but she ignored it and stayed in her clothes, afraid that if she gave in to the impulse she might fall asleep on the couch with the ravioli still boiling on the stove and not wake up until the kitchen caught fire.
She ate her meal, prepared for bed and fell asleep before ten.
The sound of a baby crying came to her ears after several hours of good rest. It seemed so close that it startled her awake. Or—But, no, was she awake? She found herself at the window, although she didn’t quite remember how she’d gotten there. Had she walked? Or floated? Someone whispered a sound. Soothing the baby? Or calling her name?
The cries still came. In this room? They sounded close enough, but no. She looked around. There was no baby here. Outside, then? Downstairs?
The sound seemed distinct and real—as real as sounds and senses could feel in a dream, heightened more than they were in daily life.
Celie pushed the curtain aside and looked out. She’d kept the window open, as the April night was mild. The street looked quiet. She couldn’t see anyone. Maybe the crying came from the apartment below. It sounded a little fainter to her ears, now. The couple downstairs didn’t have a baby of their own, but they could have visitors staying with them.
She stepped back, and was about to let the curtain fall back into place when something on the windowsill gleamed in the moonlight and caught her attention. She picked it up. It was a hat pin, old-fashioned, with a long shaft of dull, dark gray metal and a big glass pearl at one end.
And that means I’m definitely dreaming, she realized, as part of the dream. Because I’ve never seen this before.
The glass pearl was pretty, and she imagined a dark-haired young woman with a wide, mobile mouth and friendly eyes, standing in front of a mirror and reaching her hands up behind her head as she used the hat pin to fasten a broad-brimmed creation of straw and chiffon into place on her thick pile of hair.
“This is a very nice dream,” she told the woman. “If only that little baby would stop crying.”
“Nick will go to him and soothe him back to sleep,” the woman said. Her smile at once began to calm Celie’s concern.
And a few seconds later, the baby stopped crying, so the woman pinning her hat must have been right. Nick had picked him up. Of course he had! Celie could see him with that little dark head settled on his broad shoulder and brushing against his clean-shaven cheek. His shirttail had escaped from his waistband again, but he was too absorbed in the baby to notice. Everything was fine.
Celie tucked herself back into bed with a smile on her face.
In the morning, however, the hat pin still lay there on her windowsill, and that was distinctly strange.
Dressed in her blue-striped flannel pajamas and only just out of bed, she picked it up and twirled its metal stem in her fingers as if the glass pearl was a little flower. So pretty, the way it caught the morning light. It made her think of Victorian lace, hand-stitched fabrics, elaborate hats and porcelain figurines. Despite its spiky point, it felt feminine.
When she thought about it, there was a perfectly rational explanation for its presence on her windowsill, too.
No, okay, not perfectly rational.
She wished she could find a better one.
But it was plausible, if you were prepared to stretch. The attic apartment directly above this one was in the process of renovation. The construction team had really torn into the place, pulling up floorboards and ripping ancient plaster off the walls. The hat pin must have gotten lost a hundred years ago, fallen through a crack in the floorboards and—
Well, here it was on the windowsill, so something like that had obviously happened, even if Celie couldn’t quite picture the physics of it, right now.
And the baby—Nick’s baby, protected in his strong arms—had been purely a dream.
For some reason, Celie didn’t want to risk losing the wandering hat pin again, so she put it in the little zippered compartment on the side of her purse. After her usual light breakfast, she went to the mall.
“Sorry I’m late,” Celie said breathlessly, as she entered Nick’s office.
He looked at his watch.
She was right.
She was late.
By a whole two minutes.
And she looked a little different. Fresh, energetic, happy and well-rested, for a start, although he felt there was more to it than that. Her hair looked extra silky, and the clips had to be new. He didn’t think she usually wore clips decorated with little flowers. They went some way toward undercutting the severe styling of her skirt, he thought, as did the pastel top she wore.
She definitely looked different.
This fact niggled at him a little, although he didn’t have time to work out why. They had a lot to get through this afternoon. He allocated only a few seconds to the topic, and told her sincerely, “You look very nice.”
She nodded, and said, “Thanks,” and he knew she wouldn’t expect him to pursue the question any further than that.
“Let’s get right to those regional figures,” he told her.
With various interruptions, the regional figures took most of the afternoon, and didn’t leave Celie much time to contemplate her slightly disturbing morning at the mall. In the few moments she did have in which to think about it, she felt churned up inside. On the one hand, fluttery in the stomach, like a child going to a birthday party, but on the other, ill at ease.
At the mall, she’d kept thinking about her dream last night and about the hat pin. She’d even gotten it out of her purse a couple of times, to prove to herself that it was real…although she might have felt more reassured if it hadn’t been. She’d been twirling it in her hand when the hairstylist had asked her, “Just a trim?”
And she’d felt the strongest temptation to answer, “No, I’d like to try something completely new.”
She’d resisted it in the end. There was a good reason she always kept her hair up and out of the way. With the hairstylist waiting, and the hat pin still twirling in her fingers, Celie had needed several seconds to remember what the reason was—that it wasn’t very efficient to have hair in her face when she was focused on work—but it did come to her in the end, and she opted for the usual trim.
She and Nick got through the regional figures by the anticipated time, and her boss was happy. When Celie got home that night and opened the closet to hang up two of the new, more softly styled tops she’d bought this morning to pair with her skirts—she’d worn the third top to work—the closet seemed to approve.
Several hours later, the bed wasn’t so friendly. Tonight’s dreams clattered into her mind with more violence, and the images were harder to put together. A figure lay on the floor of the kitchen. Her kitchen? The room looked familiar, and so did the figure itself, but then her dream lurched off into a different direction, she heard the sound of tearing fabric, and lost the image of the figure in the kitchen before she could decide exactly who it was, and what was going on.
The baby started crying, and she sat up in bed, alert at once, but the woman by the mirror told her again, “It’s all right. Nick will go to him. Nick will care for him.”
“I hope so,” Celie answered. “But what about the woman on the floor?”
“Call her in the morning.”
“Okay. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Of course.” The suggestion made so much sense that it soothed her back into sleep…or out of her dream…and it didn’t occur to her that she didn’t know who she was supposed to call.
In the morning, she woke late. Hurrying to prepare for work, she knew her sleep had been cut through by another dream, but didn’t have time to try and bring it back to mind.
That happened later.
Sam’s personal assistant, Kyla, told her, as they sat waiting for a meeting, “I love your hair like that. Any reason?”
“Oh, I just didn’t get a chance to put it up this morning, that’s all.” She’d tried a couple of times, but for some reason her fingers wouldn’t go through the familiar maneuver, and the fold of hair kept slipping sideways. In the end, she’d let it drop around her shoulders, still sheened and slippery from yesterday’s salon conditioning treatment.
“You should wear it that way more often,” Kyla said.
White-blond Kyla wore lots of jewelry, and lots of black. She was a single mother with a five-year-old daughter, Nettie, and although she came across as a ditz sometimes, she got things done. Sam depended on her more than Kyla herself ever let the man guess.
“I would, only it’s not very practical,” Celie answered.
She had that churned up, self-conscious sensation again. Somehow, she didn’t feel quite safe. She suddenly remembered last night’s dreams, and the reassuring advice of the woman who stood by the mirror.
“I’m supposed to call someone,” she said aloud. “Check on someone.”
She stood up in a panic, and it came to her in a rush. That figure, lying on a kitchen floor, wearing a nightdress and with one leg stuck out strangely…
Mom.
Eleven years ago, Celie’s older sister, Veronica, had already been away at college when their father died, and her mom hadn’t coped with Veronica’s absence or with widowhood and grief too well. Celie herself had gone to college at Ohio State, so that she could remain at home. She’d moved into an apartment of her own several years ago, but still she never wanted to let her mother down. She spent a lot of time at Mom’s, helping her out, and this morning’s call to her seemed urgent, now.
A cluster of senior Delaney’s executives and regional managers entered the room at this moment, carrying briefcases and sheafs of papers. Nick and Sam wouldn’t be far behind.
“If they’re ready to start, Kyla,” she gabbled. “Tell them…uh…that I won’t be long. Or—could you take notes for my Mr. D, if he needs it?”
“Sure. What’s up? You look—”
“Nothing. I’m sure everything’s fine.”
Celie hurried to her private office, adjacent to Nick’s, and keyed in her mother’s phone number, but her mom didn’t pick up, and neither did the machine.
Celie’s mother had had a bone-density scan a few months ago, and the result had come back low. She took risks, too—vague, thoughtless ones that she didn’t even realize were risks until Celie pointed it out. She went down the basement stairs of her little house without turning on the light. She put a step stool on the grass in the yard to reach up and prune a branch.
Celie had the phone number of her mom’s neighbor Mrs. Pascoe in her address book, and she’d called a couple of times in the past to ask Mrs. Pascoe to check next door.
“Sure I’ll go across, honey,” Mrs. Pascoe told her today. “Just don’t you worry, okay?”
But when Mrs. Pascoe called Celie back a few minutes later, her voice sounded very different.
“Thank heaven you called me when you did, Cecilia!”
Her mother had fallen from her step stool two hours ago while trying to change a lightbulb in the kitchen. She’d broken her leg, and she hadn’t been able to get to the phone.
“I’ve already called 911,” Mrs. Pascoe told her. “The ambulance is on its way.”
Celie hung on the line, shaky and hardly able to breathe, and it seemed like an hour before the other woman came back to the phone again to report, “She’s going to be okay, although the paramedics say it looks like a bad break. They’ve just left, and they’re taking her to Riverside. You can probably hear the sirens in the background. She’s in shock, after lying on that cold floor for so long.”
Mrs. Pascoe hung up, but Celie’s fingers were curled tightly around the phone and she couldn’t seem to let it go. Nick appeared in the doorway while the receiver still hung in her hand.
“Kyla said—” Nick stopped, midsentence. “Heck, what’s wrong, Celie? You’ve gone white.”
“My mother’s broken her leg. She had to lie in pain on the kitchen floor for two hours, with no help on its way. I dreamed about it. Which is just so weird.”
“You dreamed your mother broke her leg?”
“Yes. I saw a figure lying on a floor, only I didn’t know who it was. Someone in the dream told me, ‘Call her in the morning.’ I remembered the dream just now, so I did call her, and when I did…” She took a shuddery breath. “Thank heaven I called!”
“Celie, it’s all right. Keep remembering to breathe, okay? Are you going to faint?”
“No.” She’d never fainted in her life, and didn’t intend to start now.
“Help is with her now, right?”
“She’s in the ambulance.”
“So it’s okay. And for heaven’s sake, don’t worry about a little thing like a dream!”
“No. Of course. You’re right.”
Celie felt herself sway. She didn’t think she would have fainted, since she never had before and was so determined not to, but when Nick’s arms came around her for support, strong and warm, she clung on to her boss for dear life and whispered hoarsely, “Don’t let go.”
Chapter Two
“We should get back to work,” Nick muttered, after a couple of minutes—or maybe a couple of lifetimes.
Celie felt a little firmer in his arms, now, thank heaven, and a little firmer on her feet. He was no longer afraid she might just crumple into a heap on the floor, as he’d been a minute ago. She’d seemed completely boneless, as if she wasn’t quite real, as if a formless wraith had invaded her body. He loosened his arms cautiously, and was relieved when she didn’t crumple against him.
Still, he was reluctant to let her go.
She felt amazingly good.
Too good.
And different.
Surprising.
He didn’t want an executive assistant who surprised him, and yet every sense told him that this was good. She felt far softer than she looked in her crisp suits. Warmer, too. As warm as if he’d just climbed into bed with her on a winter morning, or as if she’d been toasting herself in front of an open fire moments earlier.
As for the way she smelled…Faintly rose-scented, like soap and shampoo lingering on clean skin and hair. There were some other scents in there, too, but he couldn’t pick them. Good scents. Spring scents. Classic. Not astringent and artificial, but soft.
His face had never lingered this close to her neck before. Who knew that his efficient, unsurprising and utterly reliable executive assistant would feel and smell so warm and soft and sweet in his arms?
Nick let her go at last, stepped back and looked at her, still standing close. She had a fuzzy look around her gray-blue eyes and a new fullness to her mouth, which changed her whole face.
He’d never considered that there might be this side to Celie. Somehow, if he ever broke his own rules and thought about her private life or the deepest emotions of her heart, he always assumed a level of…safety, or something. Secretarial efficiency, even in her heart. Neatly packaged emotions. Cautious affections. Suitable, unthreatening relationships.
After her first month in the job, he’d congratulated himself on getting such a great assistant, and he’d been determined to do everything he could to keep her. She’d probably marry eventually, he’d calculated. Some local man, with a local career. He wanted her still here at Delaney’s when she had pictures of her grandchildren on her desk, her hair still pulled back in its efficient knot, but gray.
He’d always thought her intelligent, capable and practical, but he’d never considered that she might be a deeply passionate person as well. He wondered if she knew this about herself. It seemed possible that she didn’t. So new to him, the hint of this unsuspected passion around her eyes and mouth stirred him to an extent that shocked him, and tilted his balance. He didn’t like it, and he definitely didn’t want it to upset the status quo.
She smiled at him carefully. “Getting there,” she said.
He could almost sense the way her blood beat in her veins. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, and her breathing went in and out steady and strong, as if she had to work hard to get it to happen at all.
I’m watching her body, he realized.
He was watching the way her lower lip had dropped open, and the way her breasts moved when she breathed. In eight months he’d never thought about her breasts. Her suits tended to tailor them out of visible existence, but the softer top she wore today above her straight navy skirt hugged her shape much more closely. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, even though he knew it wasn’t right.
In another second she would notice, and of course she wasn’t thinking about anything like that. She was thinking about her mother, and her disturbing, clairvoyant dream.
Nick didn’t believe in psychic dreams, himself. He’d learned early on to believe only in the things he could see and touch and feel for himself. His adoptive parents were practical, rational people who’d worked very hard to rescue him and Sam from the darkness of their early years, and he had enormous respect for their attitude.
His dad had retired a few years ago, and they wintered in Florida, now, so he saw less of them. He still felt they were close, however, and still shared many of their beliefs. Even those he didn’t share, he respected.
From the beginning, his mom and dad had encouraged their boys to respond to the tangible proof of their care—things like home-cooked meals and bedtime stories—and not to go stirring up the murky memories that lay beneath, by reading anything into the bad dreams they’d sometimes had.
No, like Mom and Dad, he definitely didn’t believe in the significance of dreams.
But he could see how upset Celie was, both by what had happened and by the fact that she thought her dream had warned her of it in advance. Of course she was upset!
“Sit,” he urged her, emotional himself, worried about her, thrown off balance. “I’m going to ask Kyla to get you some hot tea and something from the cafeteria. Then we’ll talk about how much time you’ll need. Your mother’s here in Columbus, right?”
“Yes. In Clintonville. They’re taking her to Riverside.” She didn’t sit, she just stood there, leaning her left hand heavily on her desk. Her fingers splayed out fine and neat and long.
“What would you like to eat?”
“Oh, I…I’m not really hungry.” She waved away the idea of food with a graceful right hand that looked limp with shock.
“No, you should,” he urged again. “Even just a muffin.”
“Okay, a muffin.”
“Because I’m not letting you drive like this.”
“Drive?”
“Don’t you want to try and see her before she goes into surgery?”
Her face cleared, leaving her brow wide and smooth, and bracketed softly by the hair she’d left loose this morning. “Yes, of course. Oh, could I? Can you spare me right away? Can Kyla handle the rest of the meeting? I have the files laid out on—”
“Don’t worry about it, Celie. Between us, we’ll manage. Take as much time as you need. A couple of weeks, if you have to.”
“Thank you, Mr. Delaney!” She smiled again.
Celie had a gorgeous smile. He’d noticed it very early on, when she’d just started working for him, and he remembered thinking it was such a huge professional asset it was a shame she couldn’t list it on her resume. Today, the smile was wide and soft and wobbly, far more heartfelt than he’d ever seen it look before. She couldn’t keep it in place, and it faded at once.
“Please save the Mr. Delaney stuff for executive meetings,” he said. “I’m just Nick. How many times have I told you that?”
He took her arm, led her to her ergonomic chair and pushed her gently into it, then called Kyla from the phone on Celie’s desk because he didn’t quite trust what his executive assistant would do if he left her alone, even for a moment. If she thought she had to clear her desk, leave memos, check her e-mail before she departed…It would be typical of her to think that.
“You’re still a lot shakier than you realize,” he told her.
“No, I’m not,” Celie answered. She added more firmly, in order to clear the ambiguity, “I mean, I do realize. How shaky I am. Now. Thanks. The tea will help.”
She watched Nick take the tea and a blueberry muffin from Kyla a few minutes later. “Thank you,” he said. He clicked his tongue at Sam’s assistant, curled his fingers around the disposable cup and cradled the paper muffin plate in the opposite palm.
Something had happened just now. She and Nick hadn’t kissed, hadn’t come close to that, but it was the most potent hug that Celie had ever experienced. She could still feel Nick’s body against hers, and smell his scent—clean male, mixed with professional laundry—on her skin. She could feel the throb of secret places inside her.
He’d felt so solid and strong and steady, and she’d needed that, after the shock of the prescient dream and her mother’s pain. She’d made no attempt to let him go, even when her dizzying weakness began to ebb.
And then he’d told her she was free to go to her mother right away. She’d never needed time off at short notice before, and wouldn’t necessarily have expected such care from him. She knew how driven he was. A lot of men as successful as he was would have been far more ruthless with their staff’s personal time. It turned out he didn’t have total tunnel vision, however.
She remembered how she’d let her head rest against his chest, listening to his breathing and his heart, and how she’d wrapped her arms around him as close and tight as they would reach. She’d felt the prickle of his belt buckle against her stomach, and the squashy nudge of her breasts against his ribs. While it was happening, she’d felt too shocked about her mom to react as a woman, but as she relived the moment now, in a slightly calmer state, her skin began to tingle.
“Okay. So,” Nick said. “Do you need extra cash? I’ll write you a check.”
“I don’t need it, Nick,” she answered. “I just need the time. You’re giving me that, and I’m grateful.”
“Don’t come back too soon.”
“No, I won’t. Thank you again. So much.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just take care of your mom.”
Celie didn’t see Nick for a week.
She barely saw her apartment, either, as her mom needed a lot of time, at first in the hospital and then at home. After a week, her mom still wasn’t too confident on her crutches, but by this time Celie’s sister, Veronica, had organized to come up from Kentucky, with baby Lizzie, for as long as she was needed, which meant that Celie could go home and back to work.
The apartment sent out its silent “Good to see you” message, the moment she walked through the door. The clock on the side table had stopped, the air was a little stale and surfaces needed dusting. On the windowsill, Celie found a torn shred of white broderie anglaise fabric, left there like a message on a Post-It note.
A message for her.
She had no doubt of that.
But where had it come from, who could have put it there, and what did it mean?
“Hey, what’s going on here? Why are you doing this to me? I’m not the right person for it,” she said aloud to the room, and when she turned, she almost expected to see the woman fixing her hat in front of the mirror, wearing a broderie anglaise blouse.
But no one was there.
I’m talking to my apartment, she realized. How weird is that?
At least the solution to this problem was obvious, and within her control.
Don’t do it.
Celie hadn’t had any memorable dreams while at her mom’s, but tonight they again cut through her sleep. The baby cried. Or was it a doll? She kept seeing strange figures and forms, some of them reassuringly like people, others just the suggestion of a human shape. What were they made of? Plaster? Metal? None of the images stayed long enough for her to identify them. Bright lights flashed, startling and dazzling her, and she thought there must have been an explosion.
Where was the baby in all of this? Was it in danger?
She jumped out of bed and rushed to look for it.
No, not it.
Him.
Nick’s baby was a boy. Hadn’t the woman in front of the mirror said so, last week? Celie sniffed the air, in search of the acrid, firecracker smell of explosives but, thank goodness, couldn’t detect it anywhere.
Couldn’t find the baby, either. His cries still shrilled in her ears. Why didn’t Nick go to him tonight? His inaction distressed her. The baby was his. The woman had implied it, and Celie somehow knew it herself, in any case.
The baby belonged to Nick, only tonight Nick didn’t seem to be around.
“He doesn’t know,” she told the woman frantically. “Nick doesn’t know the baby’s crying. He doesn’t know about the baby at all.”
“He will,” she answered, with the calm smile that made Celie feel as if everything was all right. “He’ll find out. You can tell him, if you want.”
“And the explosion?”
“It’s not an explosion. The baby is miles from there, anyhow, on the other side of town. No one’s in that kind of danger.”
And this meant that Celie could sleep, so she did. This was very easy, because of course she’d been asleep all along. None of this was real.
In the morning, it felt great to be back at work, and even better to be busy—back the way life used to be, in this job, very safe and structured and efficient, with no time to think of Nick Delaney as anything except Celie’s driven, demanding employer. She wore her severest navy pinstripe suit and rocketed through the tasks Nick had given her with barely a pause to sip her coffee.
He had scheduled a long day. Meetings and conference calls ran until five, ahead of tomorrow’s demonstration of proposed new menu items by the resident team of Delaney’s food scientists and chefs. Delaney’s rotated its menu seasonally, four times a year, and although Ohio was currently clothed in spring colors, the new offerings for the coming fall were already in planning.
Celie wasn’t surprised, midafternoon, when Nick announced, “I’m going to go visit a couple of the restaurants tonight, check out the atmosphere.”
Nine years ago, there had only been one Delaney’s, and Nick and Sam had been able to check out the atmosphere in that establishment for sixteen hours of every day. Now, with ninety-eight existing locations and twelve more planned to open this year, the chain was so large and so successful that they risked losing touch with the ambiance they’d worked so hard to build. It must be more than seven years, Celie guessed, since Nick had personally thrown a steak on a Delaney’s grill, or poured a Delaney’s beer.
“You want to take notes?” she asked him. “You want me to come along?”
“I’d like you to come along. I don’t know if we’ll need to take notes. I just want to get the feel. Sam’s doing the same with Kyla, over near his place, at Delaney’s Franklin Street.”
Nick didn’t mention Sam’s gorgeous red-haired wife, Marisa. He rarely did, these days, and Celie had always gotten the impression that he didn’t like her. Celie had trouble with the woman’s snobbish attitude and social climbing instincts, herself.
They left Delaney’s company headquarters at just after five, and drove to Delaney’s Mill Run in Nick’s very average-looking American car instead of the chauffeur-driven limo, with Nick himself at the wheel. Celie suspected that he kept the car especially for times like this. He hated to be recognized as co-owner of the corporation when he dropped in at one of the restaurants. Getting any kind of special treatment would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
A perky college student showed them to a booth in the bar section, and as Nick had hoped, she had no idea who he was.
Although it was only midweek, the place already had a Friday-night mood, with groups and couples laughing and talking over appetizers, cocktails and beer. The decor was fresh and clean, and diners could choose booths or tables, lounge chairs or bar stools. In towns and cities all across America, Delaney’s was the kind of place where a man could bring a woman, confident that she would like the atmosphere and he would like the beer.
Up in a high corner across from their booth, a big television showed news and sports, but it didn’t dominate. Nick took a seat with his back to it, and didn’t even spare it a glance. Celie knew what he must be thinking. How many people in here? What was the gender balance? The age mix? The ethnicity? How many people ate in the bar section, and how many had one drink here, first, before moving to their table in the restaurant itself?
The Delaney’s marketing division had facts like these at their fingertips, but Nick liked to sample the data in a more personal way. He and Sam both believed that this was the way to pick up on trends and apply them successfully.
“Who’s watching the TV?” he asked Celie, when her club soda and his light beer had arrived. “I don’t want to turn ’round and stare.”
“Three guys. No, four. There’s news coming on, now.”
“TV in a bar is a real guy thing, isn’t it? Figures show a significant difference in the demographics we get when the layout of the restaurant is—”
He stopped. Celie tried to smile, to encourage him to go on by showing him that she was listening, but she couldn’t. All at once, the image on the television screen had her vision and her concentration in a tight lock.
Reporters were jostling to get close to a politician so they could ask questions. Cameras flashed, lighting up the screen like explosions.
Camera flashes.
She’d seen camera flashes in her dream about Nick’s baby in Cleveland last night. She’d interpreted them wrongly until this moment, but she knew they were significant all the same.
“Cleveland,” she said aloud. The baby was in Cleveland.
She stood up automatically, as if the cameras were flashing in her own face and the reporters wanted to interview her, wanted to put her picture in the newspaper. Then she sat again, just as abruptly, as the strength drained from her legs. That message about Cleveland and Nick’s baby was suddenly so clear—far more clear than she liked. She didn’t want this to be happening to her. She wanted her life, and her subconscious, to stay just the way they were.
“Cleveland?” Nick asked. His voice came from far away, and he shot a quick look behind him, toward the television screen, following the direction of Celie’s gaze. “No, that’s Washington, D.C. Some political scandal. What’s the matter, Celie?”
“I—had a dream last night, with cameras flashing in it,” she answered, her gesture at the television as limp as a wet rag. “I didn’t realize until now that that’s what they were. I thought they were explosions. They mean something. They’re important, somehow. And the dream has something to do with Cleveland.”
Your baby is in Cleveland, Nick.
Should she tell him this?
Or would he think she was as crazy as she feared she might be?
“Well, we’re going there next week.” He frowned. “We have the art museum opening.”
“That’s right. I’d forgotten.”
As part of its corporate philanthropy, Delaney’s was sponsoring a major sculpture exhibition, which would be seen in only four U.S. cities during its world tour. Cleveland was one of them. Celie had been extensively involved in liaising with the Great Lakes Museum of Art during the planning stages of the tour, but most of the details had been finalized months ago.
With her mother’s accident, she’d forgotten the opening was so close. Nick had meetings in Cleveland that day, and she’d already booked hotel rooms for an overnight stay after the event. She’d been looking forward to the glamorous occasion, and had bought a new dress—simple, black, appropriate but glamorous all the same. Now she wondered, with a sick, sinking feeling, if she ought to be dreading the evening instead.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Nick said. “Here take a sip of your drink. No, hang on…”
He slid out from his side of the booth and came to hers. Resting his upturned hand on the table, he coaxed her head forward and down so that his palm cradled her forehead. His other hand stroked the nape of her neck for a moment, then slid lower, to rest on her back.
“Take some deep breaths,” he said. “Are you going to get sick?”
“No.”
“When you can sit up, take a drink and then tell me what’s wrong. This is the second time I’ve seen you like this in a week.”
He stroked her back. His touch was firm enough that she could feel the weight and warmth of his hand, but light enough that it caressed her skin through the thin knit fabric of her top like running water. It wove a net of sensation all around her—a net that she could have cocooned herself in for the rest of her life.
When she sat up, a little too soon, his face blurred in her vision but she could still perceive the depth of his concern, and it disturbed her.
She’d never needed him in this way before, and now, as he’d said, it had happened twice in a week. She didn’t want to need him, didn’t want to have a reason to need him. She wanted her life fully under control, and she was sure he’d feel the same. They both took pride in their professional boundaries, and in how much they could handle on their own.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right,” he drawled. “Sure you’re fine.” He brushed her hair behind her ear, touched her shoulder lightly, frowned at her. He narrowed his eyes, and his lips parted. Celie stared down, and heard the hiss of his breath, very close. “Are you still worried about your mother, Celie? Did you come back to work too soon? You look like you’re falling apart.”
“I keep having dreams with messages in them,” she told him, pressing her hands together in her lap. “Last week, I dreamed about my mom breaking her leg. I have cameras flashing in my face as if they’re telling me something. I hear your—I hear a baby crying, and the crying is a message.”
“I’m not sure that I believe in dreams like that,” Nick answered slowly. “In fact, I know I don’t.”
“I never used to, either.” She looked up at him again and tried to smile. “Until I started having them. I don’t want to believe in them. But how can I help it, when they come true? If you could talk me out of believing them, Nick, trust me, I’d be grateful.”
She reached to pick up her glass, and gulped a mouthful of her drink. The dry fizz stung in her mouth. A loud burst of laughter came from a nearby booth, and a party of new arrivals trooped past to the group of low chairs in the far corner. Delaney’s was filling up, and getting noisier.
“Let’s get out of here,” Nick said. “I want to put a good meal into you, and I want to talk about this. But not here, where I’m thinking about Delaney’s and trends and the next advertising campaign. Let’s go somewhere quiet, where nothing else is going to impinge.”
Celie didn’t argue.
Nick flung some cash on the table and they left immediately. Celie paid no attention to where they were going until he parked in front of one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants. Salt was the kind of place where most people needed a reservation, even on a weeknight. Nick Delaney didn’t, because unlike the college-student waitress at his own restaurant, the deferential maitre d’ at this establishment knew at once exactly who he was.
“Better?” Nick said, as soon as they were seated.
Only a few tables were filled as yet, and the clientele was well-dressed and very well-behaved. So were the staff. The waiters skimmed back and forth on silent feet, and even the sounds that came occasionally from the kitchen were muted against a background of soft, smoky music.
With effort, Celie created a smile. “Are you saying you don’t like your own restaurants?”
“I love our restaurants. Tonight, this place seemed like a better idea. Somewhere more discreet, where we can relax. With staff who’ll protect our privacy. I want to hear about the dreams, Celie.”
She told him about the image of her mother lying on the kitchen floor, and the image of cameras flashing, somehow telling her Cleveland. She didn’t tell him what she knew about the crying baby yet, but she did tell him about the hat pin, the woman in front of the mirror and the scrap of torn broderie anglaise.
Since she still had the hat pin in her purse, she took it out and showed it to him.
“You’re right. It has to be the renovations upstairs,” Nick said. He ran a fingertip along the gray metal toward the point, and for half a second Celie could almost feel the touch of his finger on her own skin.
His confident tone reassured her, but she pushed at the issue, all the same. “Renovations give people dreams that come true?”
“Renovations could give someone a hat pin on their windowsill.” He looked up. “Isn’t that what you thought, yourself?”
“I’m not so sure, anymore.”
“And, yes, renovations are stressful and unsettling. People dream more when they’re unsettled. The dreams themselves can be explained.”
“Then do it, Nick, please. I want explanations for this.”
“You were already concerned about your mother, right?”
“She’s elderly. Her bones aren’t strong, and she takes risks without thinking about them. I’ve been responsible for her since my father died, eleven years ago, and she’s never regained the ground she lost when she lost him. Part of her just…left…and I’ve had to pick up the slack.”
“You don’t talk much about all that.”
“There’s no need. It’s under control and it’s not your concern. I love Mom, and I’m happy to help her. But, yes, I do worry.”
“So there you go. Both your conscious and your subconscious mind feared an accident, and it happened.”
“And the flashing cameras? What do they mean? Why are they saying Cleveland to me?”
“The exhibition opening next Tuesday night is a big deal. You know that. The press will be there. No surprise if we get cameras flashing in our faces. Subconsciously, you must be a little nervous about it.”
Celie pretended that he’d convinced her. She wanted him to have convinced her, but he hadn’t. Not really. The dreams remained too vivid in her mind for that. They threatened her own sense of who she was.
As she’d just told Nick she’d run her mother’s life, and her own, from the age of seventeen. She didn’t have a mystic, intuitive streak. She had responsibilities. She couldn’t afford to have dreams that competed with reality in her mind.
Their waiter brought menus and they both ordered. Celie chose a fennel bisque soup and grilled chicken, while Nick decided on shrimp and beef. “Would you like some wine?” he asked.
“Just a glass.”
Even one glass turned out to be a mistake. It loosened her tongue just that little bit more, and as they ate she found herself telling him, “There’s another dream I’ve been having, too, Nick, repeated night after night. It makes even less sense than the others.”
“More predictions? Do I want to hear this? I’m trying to help you get your feet back on the ground, Celie.”
“Are you?”
“For the best of reasons. You’re getting too stressed over this. It’s eating at you more than it should. Look at the way you’re frowning at me.”
“You’re right. I am.” She squeezed out a smile and touched her forehead with her fingers, trying to smooth the frown away. “I—I don’t know if the dream is a prediction. But it gets a little clearer, each time. Maybe you can tell me, because I do think that there’s a message in it, and the message is for you.”
She took a breath, and twirled the hat pin between her finger and thumb. Its rounded, pearly end gleamed in the leaping golden light from the candle in the center of their table. Nick’s china-blue gaze was fixed on her face, and she felt as if she was swimming in the deep pools of his eyes.
“Tell me, Celie,” he said. “Don’t hedge it, or qualify it, just tell me.”
“Okay, then, here it is. Is there any chance, Nick, that somewhere in this world—” Cleveland, let’s say “—you have a baby you don’t know about?”
“A what?” Nick almost yelled the words.
“A baby,” Celie repeated.
She leaned forward and captured Nick’s big, firm hand in hers without even realizing she’d done it. It felt warm and dry and strong—even stronger when he twisted it out of her grasp and closed his fingers over her knuckles. He squeezed them and looked down, drawing her attention to the body contact. “Pick up your spoon, Celie,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She slid her hand away at once, and continued, “It’s a little boy. I hear him crying, and I get up to go to him, and then there’s a woman who tells me it’s all right, I don’t have to, because you’ll go. And the crying stops, and I feel a sense of peace because I know you’re there, holding him, belonging with him. Only last night, you didn’t go.”
“I…didn’t…go.”
“To the baby. And I realized it was because you didn’t know that he exists. Believe me, as I’ve said, I’m not happy about these dreams, and I know this one sounds—”
“He doesn’t exist, Celie. The dream is nonsense.” He frowned. “Boy or girl, I’ve never fathered a child.”
“But I’m wondering if that’s true,” she persisted, still caught in the strong, sticky web of the dreams, forgetting her allotted place in Nick Delaney’s life, overlooking her own doubts. “You know, sometimes a woman gets pregnant and she has reasons for not wanting to tell the father. It happens. I don’t want to trespass into your personal life, but if you think back, look through your diary, isn’t there someone who could have gotten careless with—?”
“No.” The flat of his hand came down hard on the table. “I’m telling you, it’s not possible, Celie, and you need to believe me on this. I really hope you’re not suggesting that I give you a list of the women I’ve slept with.”
“No, of course not.”
“And that I should call them up and ask?”
He looked angry now.
Of course he did! This whole conversation was an affront to his privacy, to the boundaries they both believed in and to their whole working relationship. Celie should have seen it, but even if she had, would the dreams have prompted too strongly for her to resist? She needed to understand what was going on.
Her fingers slipped, and the hat pin pricked the ball of her thumb, as if to taunt her, “Gee, didn’t you handle this well?”
She dropped the hat pin on the table, beside the remains of her meal. She had no appetite left for it, now. The restaurant had filled, and the few couples who’d been here when she and Nick first arrived had reached coffee and dessert. If Nick didn’t want to listen to this, then it was time to go.
“Just how long do you think such a list would be, if you don’t mind my asking?” Nick said, his voice deceptively quiet and controlled, this time. His blue eyes sparked.
“I’m sorry,” she answered quickly. “I thought I should tell you about what the dream seemed to be saying. That’s all. Since it was so vivid. And so real. Of course I’m not suggesting you keep a—a list.”
“But you’re suggesting there’d be some names on it if I did? That there’s a woman out there from my past—and this is an infant we’re talking about, so you think it’s my recent past—who’s been pregnant with my child over this past year and I haven’t known? That I could have been that careless, that casual, and not even thought to follow up on it?”
She gaped at him, her cheeks on fire. “I’m sorry,” she said again. It sounded terrible when he said it like that. What was happening to her? How could a few dreams have taken such a strong hold on her imagination?
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Lilian Darcy
She’d dreamed about Nick and a baby.…
The baby had looked as good in his arms as a designer gown on a supermodel. They’d accessorized each other. Cute big dark head of hair, cute little dark head of hair. Broad shoulders, tiny fingers. Red tie, blue sleepsuit. The man and the infant had belonged together like apple pie and ice cream, like tulips and springtime, like baseball and hot dogs.
Cecelia’s multimillionaire boss had held the little boy in a way that had made both man and baby look oddly vulnerable, so that both of them had tugged at her heart in a way she didn’t want at all.
And she certainly never thought of her boss in a personal context like this. It was a point of professional pride to her that in seven years as an executive assistant for a total of six increasingly successful men in three different jobs, she’d never even come close to falling for her employer.
And I’m not falling for him now.
Dear Reader,
If you can’t beat the summer heat then join it! Come warm your heart with the latest from Silhouette Romance.
In Her Second-Chance Man (SR #1726) Cara Colter enchants us again with the tale of a former ugly duckling who gets a second chance with the man of her dreams—if only she can convince him to soften his hardened heart. Don’t miss this delightful story of love and miracles!
Meet Cinderella’s Sweet-Talking Marine (SR #1727) in the newest book in Cathie Linz’s MEN OF HONOR miniseries. This sexy soldier promised to take care of his friend’s sister, and he plans to do just that, even if it means marrying the single mom. A hero’s devotion to his country—and his woman—has never been sweeter!
Talk about a fantasy come to life! Rescued by the handsomest Native American rancher this heroine has ever seen definitely makes up for taking a wrong turn somewhere in Montana. Find out if her love will be enough to turn this bachelor into a husband in Callie’s Cowboy (SR #1728) by Madeline Baker.
Lilian Darcy brings us the latest SOULMATES title with The Boss’s Baby Surprise (SR #1729). Dreams of her handsome boss are not that strange for this dedicated executive assistant. But seeing the confirmed bachelor with a baby? She doesn’t believe it…until her dreams begin to come true!
We hope you enjoy the tender stories in this month’s lineup!
Mavis C. Allen
Associate Senior Editor
The Boss’s Baby Surprise
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Books by Lilian Darcy
Silhouette Romance
The Baby Bond #1390
Her Sister’s Child #1449
Raising Baby Jane #1478
* (#litres_trial_promo)Cinderella After Midnight #1542
* (#litres_trial_promo)Saving Cinderella #1555
* (#litres_trial_promo)Finding Her Prince #1567
Pregnant and Protected #1603
For the Taking #1620
The Boss’s Baby Surprise #1729
Silhouette Special Edition
Balancing Act #1552
LILIAN DARCY
has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.
June 10, 1904
Dearest Mama,
This will be my last letter to you before your muchanticipated visit. I must confess I am counting the days, as I am getting so heavy and already feeling the heat. I am sitting in my favorite room as I write this, and I cannot wait for you to see it–well, the whole house, too. Frederick has worked so hard to make it perfect.
I spend so many happy hours here in my sewing parlor, looking onto the street. I have just finished making dear Cousin Lucy’s wedding gown, a summer hat for me and Jemima’s christening robe, as well as all sorts of pretty things for the baby, of course. I sit here in the afternoons and listen for my dearest Frederick to come home, and my thoughts fly all over the place. Mama, I never imagined I could be so content!
Sometimes I think that even a hundred years from now, my spirit will live on in this room, sending out hope and happiness and perhaps just a little mischief.
Your loving daughter,
Charlotte
Contents
Chapter One (#u0fd9fb2b-edbe-5f24-a2c0-b5cea008068d)
Chapter Two (#u187b8254-9712-5ff0-af4f-208c1d88772e)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
One of the best things about flying business class, if you were an organized, efficient executive assistant like Cecilia Rankin, was that it was located right up at the front of the plane. There were no long, narrow aisles to negotiate, and no obstacle course of fellow travelers to apologize to as you eased your way past.
Stepping aboard the New York to Columbus flight in Nick Delaney’s wake, Celie’s fingers already itched to open her laptop, and she wasn’t surprised when her boss himself picked up a conversation they’d abandoned midsentence a few minutes earlier, cut off by the boarding announcement.
“In fact, don’t even get out the Fadden McElroy file,” he said, stopping beside his seat.
“No, they didn’t seem to have a grasp of the Delaney’s ethos, I felt,” Celie answered. The Delaney’s chain of steak houses had recently fired its advertising agency, and this two-day trip to New York had been part of the process of selecting a new one. Celie had found it fascinating, though tiring.
“Exactly,” Nick said, in answer to her comment. “The other agency presentations I want to review inflight, but I’ll make that call to the Chicago office, first.”
“They’ll want cell phones switched off soon,” she reminded him.
“It’s a quick call.”
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, flipped it open and keyed in the number. His strong body almost managed to fill the wide business-class aisle. Celie and Nick had been nearly the last passengers to board, and the flight attendants were beginning to make their final checks. Nick looked down at his seat as he spoke into the phone. There was a blue pillow on the seat, and he picked it up with a preoccupied expression, then stood back for Celie to pass.
As she took her seat, she debated removing the pillow from his grasp, but he had it tucked into the crook of his arm like a baby, and he was listening intently to the voice at the other end of the phone right now. She didn’t want to distract him, even though she was sure he didn’t really want the pillow.
It reminded her of something, suddenly, and she blinked. A baby. Nick and a baby. Nick and a baby that he didn’t really want.
She’d dreamed this. Something very akin to this. The night before they’d left Columbus for New York, two days ago.
Celie lived in a cozy apartment in a big old house in the Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood of Victorian Village. It was a place that she sometimes felt might be too cozy, and too dangerously romantic, for an efficient, organized person such as herself, and she’d certainly never before had the vivid dreams she’d been having since she moved into it two months ago.
And this week, she’d dreamed about Nick and a baby. She could remember it in detail, now.
The baby had looked as good in his arms as a designer gown on a supermodel. They’d accessorized each other, so to speak. Cute big dark head of hair, cute little dark head of hair. Broad shoulders, tiny fingers. Red tie, blue sleepsuit. White shirt that was coming untucked, and a blue flannel blanket, also untucked. The man and the infant belonged together like apple pie and ice cream, like tulips and springtime, like baseball and hotdogs.
Celie’s multimillionaire boss had held the little boy in a way that had made both man and baby look oddly vulnerable, so that both of them had tugged at her heart in a way she didn’t want at all, and wasn’t used to. He’d seemed different in the dream, not like the Nick Delaney she knew so well from the hours she spent in the same office with him. That Nick was confident, driven and impressive in every way.
In contrast, the dream Nick had had a softness to his eyes that had looked partly like fatigue and partly like tenderness, and both qualities had called forth an almost painful hunger inside the Celie-in-the-dream to go up to him, real close, lean into his tall, well-muscled body, lift her fingers to his face and—
Celie frowned and sat up straighter.
She didn’t like having such vivid dreams, nor did she like remembering them in such detail. She was practical, responsible, efficient and in control. She wasn’t a visionary. And she certainly never thought of her boss in a personal context like this. It was a point of professional pride to her that in seven years as an executive assistant for a total of six increasingly successful men in three different jobs, she’d never even come close to falling for her employer.
And I’m not falling for him now.
This employer, in particular, she sensed, would be a dangerous man to care for. He organized his emotions the same way he organized his life—in separate compartments, with strict labels. Celie valued this quality in a boss, but she didn’t think she’d want it in a lover.
Still on the phone, Nick paced back and forth, the way Celie’s sister’s husband, Alex, sometimes paced back and forth when he was trying to soothe their crying baby girl. Little Lizzie had recently celebrated her three-month birthday with a weeklong visit from Kentucky to Columbus with her parents, and her aunt Celie adored her.
“Maybe I got Alex and Nick mixed up in the dream,” Celie muttered to herself, as she opened her laptop.
“You okay?” he said, with his hand over the phone.
“I’m fine.”
Nick saw that she had her laptop out. “Bring up the spreadsheets from Hampton Finn Lloyd, would you?”
He continued to pace. This was his caged-lion look, and he did it a lot, although today his movements were confined to a smaller area than usual. To and fro he went, like a big cat, with every muscle coiled, as if he had too much energy at his disposal to expend on a mere telephone call.
He would have to sit down, soon. The flight attendants had begun to close the aircraft doors. Celie managed to take the blue pillow from him, at last, in a deft maneuver that didn’t disrupt his train of thought, the way her sister would take Lizzie from Alex, sometimes.
Nick didn’t have any babies in his life that Celie knew of. Not one of his own, and no nieces and nephews, either. His only brother, Sam, although married, was childless. And if Nick was dating anyone, Celie didn’t know. He wasn’t the kind of boss who asked his assistant to buy gifts—or kiss-offs—for his girlfriends.
If she’d had to guess, Celie would have said he was uninvolved, right now.
Which means he’s available, said a sneaky little voice inside her head.
She frowned at the voice, and mentally argued it down. For the second time in as many minutes.
Sure, she liked Nick. Respected him. Was aware of the powerful impression he made on almost everyone he met, with his clear gaze, his strong handshake, his quick mind. She even felt a little possessive toward him at times, running so many important aspects of his life the way she did.
Professionally, they accessorized each other, so to speak. Like baseball and hotdogs. Like tulips and springtime.
But all of this was a long way from feeling, like Celie-in-the-dream, as if she wanted to reach up and—
“Okay, now, these figures here,” Nick said.
“Cost breakdowns on their proposed print ad campaign,” Celie answered at once, happy to snap off that other, much more disturbing train of thought and focus on work.
The airplane engines began to speed up, ready to taxi away from the gate. The flight attendants launched into their safety announcement. Nick and Celie were forced to pause briefly during takeoff, when laptop and briefcase had to be stowed beneath their seats, but apart from that, Nick was as tireless as ever.
Only toward the end of the flight did he announce, “Okay, we’ll leave it there. I’m going to call Sam.”
“Do you want me to—?”
He shook his head, pulled out the phone again, and hit the speed dial. His eyes looked clouded, which they hadn’t a few minutes ago, and his mouth looked a little tight. Celie had become adept at picking up Nick’s emotional signals over the past eight months.
He was worried about his younger brother, the way Celie herself often worried about her mom.
He probably didn’t realize he let it show, but Celie could tell, and she wasn’t surprised. Sam was only eleven months younger than Nick, and she knew they’d always been close—close enough to make a spectacular success of working together for the past ten years. Sam’s marriage had been in trouble, in recent months, and her boss didn’t want his brother to get hurt.
“Where are you?” Nick asked him at once. “Home? Anything to report?” He listened for a minute, then told Sam, “No, just checking in. You on your own? Eating out?” He listened again, then added a little too casually, “Maybe I’ll drop by.”
In contrast to the casual manner, his eyes looked serious, focused and very blue. Actually, they were almost the same shade of blue as the airline pillow and the baby blanket in Celie’s dream, she realized. The fact unsettled her again. Was that why she’d suddenly remembered the dream? Baby blankets, baby-blue eyes, his daddy’s blue—
No. Surely not.
I’m just tired.
The flight landed on time, their bags were waiting for them on the carousel, and Nick’s personal driver Leo whisked them away from the airport in Nick’s personal limo within minutes. Since her apartment was almost on the route to his home in Upper Arlington, Nick dropped her there as usual.
“You look wiped,” he told her. He wasn’t being unkind, she understood, he was just making a statement of fact. His gaze flicked over her, taking in the creases in her knee-length charcoal-gray skirt, and around her eyes and mouth.
Her nerve endings heated under his regard in an unexpected way, and she nodded, feeling awkward. “Yes, I am,” she answered. “It’s good to be home.”
“Take the morning off, okay? Come in at around two. If you need longer, just call and let me know.”
“I’ll be fine. Two o’clock.”
“You sure?”
“We have the regional figures to go through,” she reminded him. “And meetings to prepare for.”
“We do. Okay, then. Two o’clock it is. Have a good night.”
Leo had already opened the trunk to collect her bags and carry them to the door for her. Nick watched as Celie followed the older man to the side door that led up to her apartment. She had a straight back, a tidy walk, a taste for very efficient and very tailored professional clothing, and glossy dark hair that would have bounced in time to her footsteps if it hadn’t been so neatly twisted and clipped high on her head.
Something moved in the corner of his vision. A curtain in one of the Victorian mansion’s six apartments, maybe, wafting in the night breeze. Nick’s muscles tingled with a sudden urge to chase after Celie and snap the clip off her hair so that its clean, silky bounce would become fact instead of imagination.
He resisted the urge, disturbed by how unexpected and how strong it was. He could almost feel her hair in his fingers. He kept watching as she reached her door, just ahead of Leo. Typically, she had her key already in her hand.
Of course she did. He would have been surprised if she hadn’t, and Celie Rankin almost never surprised him. This was one of the things he liked about her.
She wouldn’t let Leo bring her bags up the stairs, and disappeared inside within seconds. Leo headed back to the car, while Nick kept watching the big old house. A series of lights came on, showing Celie’s progress up the stairs. Finally, the big, round turret room at the front of the second floor lit up. He saw a faint shadow through the drapes as she moved across the room.
Celie was a great executive assistant. Nick had kept her up until well after midnight in his hotel suite last night, working on her laptop, and he suspected her mind had been buzzing too fast afterward to wind down and permit her some good rest. No wonder she seemed tired, and a little offline.
He never had that problem. He’d learned very early in his life the trick of switching off and disappearing deep into the haven of sleep. As a young child, sleep was the only place in his life where he’d felt safe. Now his facility for deep, unbroken sleep allowed him to function at a higher level than many people during his waking hours, and he rarely remembered his dreams.
“Okay, Leo,” he told his driver, dismissing Cecilia Rankin from his mind. He picked up his cell phone. “I’m going to call for some takeout and bring it over to Sam’s, since he hasn’t eaten yet. Can we swing by the Green Dragon, next?”
“I’m glad you’re back,” Celie’s creaky-floored old apartment seemed to say to her.
The chandelier in the middle of the turret room’s ceiling sparkled, and when she opened a window, a cool evening breeze wafted in. The antique clock on the side table by the door clacked like a percussionist playing out a rhythm. Eight o’clock, it read. Time to eat, her stomach said.
No problem, there. As efficient at home as she was at work, she kept the refrigerator in her little kitchen well-stocked with quick-to-prepare meals. Toss some frozen cheese ravioli into a pot of boiling water, heat a creamy pasta sauce in the microwave, tear up a few lettuce leaves, and she could eat in ten minutes.
Celie caught sight of her cherry-red robe hanging on a hook in the bathroom, and into her mind jumped the idea of taking a quick shower while the ravioli cooked, then eating in the robe and her matching slippers.
As a child, she’d been allowed to do that, when she was tired. Her mother would bundle her up on the couch with a crocheted blanket over her knees and a little tray table, spread with a linen place mat. She would eat a big bowl of homemade soup and fresh hot biscuits, and she’d feel so deliciously cosseted and safe.
She hadn’t done anything like that for years. Since her dad’s death, when Celie was seventeen, she had had to be the adult, the responsible one, the one who did the cosseting. It had seemed to frighten her mom if the daughter she depended upon displayed any sign of softness or vulnerability.
“You’re exhausted. Baby yourself a little tonight, Celie,” the robe on its hook seemed to say, but she ignored it and stayed in her clothes, afraid that if she gave in to the impulse she might fall asleep on the couch with the ravioli still boiling on the stove and not wake up until the kitchen caught fire.
She ate her meal, prepared for bed and fell asleep before ten.
The sound of a baby crying came to her ears after several hours of good rest. It seemed so close that it startled her awake. Or—But, no, was she awake? She found herself at the window, although she didn’t quite remember how she’d gotten there. Had she walked? Or floated? Someone whispered a sound. Soothing the baby? Or calling her name?
The cries still came. In this room? They sounded close enough, but no. She looked around. There was no baby here. Outside, then? Downstairs?
The sound seemed distinct and real—as real as sounds and senses could feel in a dream, heightened more than they were in daily life.
Celie pushed the curtain aside and looked out. She’d kept the window open, as the April night was mild. The street looked quiet. She couldn’t see anyone. Maybe the crying came from the apartment below. It sounded a little fainter to her ears, now. The couple downstairs didn’t have a baby of their own, but they could have visitors staying with them.
She stepped back, and was about to let the curtain fall back into place when something on the windowsill gleamed in the moonlight and caught her attention. She picked it up. It was a hat pin, old-fashioned, with a long shaft of dull, dark gray metal and a big glass pearl at one end.
And that means I’m definitely dreaming, she realized, as part of the dream. Because I’ve never seen this before.
The glass pearl was pretty, and she imagined a dark-haired young woman with a wide, mobile mouth and friendly eyes, standing in front of a mirror and reaching her hands up behind her head as she used the hat pin to fasten a broad-brimmed creation of straw and chiffon into place on her thick pile of hair.
“This is a very nice dream,” she told the woman. “If only that little baby would stop crying.”
“Nick will go to him and soothe him back to sleep,” the woman said. Her smile at once began to calm Celie’s concern.
And a few seconds later, the baby stopped crying, so the woman pinning her hat must have been right. Nick had picked him up. Of course he had! Celie could see him with that little dark head settled on his broad shoulder and brushing against his clean-shaven cheek. His shirttail had escaped from his waistband again, but he was too absorbed in the baby to notice. Everything was fine.
Celie tucked herself back into bed with a smile on her face.
In the morning, however, the hat pin still lay there on her windowsill, and that was distinctly strange.
Dressed in her blue-striped flannel pajamas and only just out of bed, she picked it up and twirled its metal stem in her fingers as if the glass pearl was a little flower. So pretty, the way it caught the morning light. It made her think of Victorian lace, hand-stitched fabrics, elaborate hats and porcelain figurines. Despite its spiky point, it felt feminine.
When she thought about it, there was a perfectly rational explanation for its presence on her windowsill, too.
No, okay, not perfectly rational.
She wished she could find a better one.
But it was plausible, if you were prepared to stretch. The attic apartment directly above this one was in the process of renovation. The construction team had really torn into the place, pulling up floorboards and ripping ancient plaster off the walls. The hat pin must have gotten lost a hundred years ago, fallen through a crack in the floorboards and—
Well, here it was on the windowsill, so something like that had obviously happened, even if Celie couldn’t quite picture the physics of it, right now.
And the baby—Nick’s baby, protected in his strong arms—had been purely a dream.
For some reason, Celie didn’t want to risk losing the wandering hat pin again, so she put it in the little zippered compartment on the side of her purse. After her usual light breakfast, she went to the mall.
“Sorry I’m late,” Celie said breathlessly, as she entered Nick’s office.
He looked at his watch.
She was right.
She was late.
By a whole two minutes.
And she looked a little different. Fresh, energetic, happy and well-rested, for a start, although he felt there was more to it than that. Her hair looked extra silky, and the clips had to be new. He didn’t think she usually wore clips decorated with little flowers. They went some way toward undercutting the severe styling of her skirt, he thought, as did the pastel top she wore.
She definitely looked different.
This fact niggled at him a little, although he didn’t have time to work out why. They had a lot to get through this afternoon. He allocated only a few seconds to the topic, and told her sincerely, “You look very nice.”
She nodded, and said, “Thanks,” and he knew she wouldn’t expect him to pursue the question any further than that.
“Let’s get right to those regional figures,” he told her.
With various interruptions, the regional figures took most of the afternoon, and didn’t leave Celie much time to contemplate her slightly disturbing morning at the mall. In the few moments she did have in which to think about it, she felt churned up inside. On the one hand, fluttery in the stomach, like a child going to a birthday party, but on the other, ill at ease.
At the mall, she’d kept thinking about her dream last night and about the hat pin. She’d even gotten it out of her purse a couple of times, to prove to herself that it was real…although she might have felt more reassured if it hadn’t been. She’d been twirling it in her hand when the hairstylist had asked her, “Just a trim?”
And she’d felt the strongest temptation to answer, “No, I’d like to try something completely new.”
She’d resisted it in the end. There was a good reason she always kept her hair up and out of the way. With the hairstylist waiting, and the hat pin still twirling in her fingers, Celie had needed several seconds to remember what the reason was—that it wasn’t very efficient to have hair in her face when she was focused on work—but it did come to her in the end, and she opted for the usual trim.
She and Nick got through the regional figures by the anticipated time, and her boss was happy. When Celie got home that night and opened the closet to hang up two of the new, more softly styled tops she’d bought this morning to pair with her skirts—she’d worn the third top to work—the closet seemed to approve.
Several hours later, the bed wasn’t so friendly. Tonight’s dreams clattered into her mind with more violence, and the images were harder to put together. A figure lay on the floor of the kitchen. Her kitchen? The room looked familiar, and so did the figure itself, but then her dream lurched off into a different direction, she heard the sound of tearing fabric, and lost the image of the figure in the kitchen before she could decide exactly who it was, and what was going on.
The baby started crying, and she sat up in bed, alert at once, but the woman by the mirror told her again, “It’s all right. Nick will go to him. Nick will care for him.”
“I hope so,” Celie answered. “But what about the woman on the floor?”
“Call her in the morning.”
“Okay. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Of course.” The suggestion made so much sense that it soothed her back into sleep…or out of her dream…and it didn’t occur to her that she didn’t know who she was supposed to call.
In the morning, she woke late. Hurrying to prepare for work, she knew her sleep had been cut through by another dream, but didn’t have time to try and bring it back to mind.
That happened later.
Sam’s personal assistant, Kyla, told her, as they sat waiting for a meeting, “I love your hair like that. Any reason?”
“Oh, I just didn’t get a chance to put it up this morning, that’s all.” She’d tried a couple of times, but for some reason her fingers wouldn’t go through the familiar maneuver, and the fold of hair kept slipping sideways. In the end, she’d let it drop around her shoulders, still sheened and slippery from yesterday’s salon conditioning treatment.
“You should wear it that way more often,” Kyla said.
White-blond Kyla wore lots of jewelry, and lots of black. She was a single mother with a five-year-old daughter, Nettie, and although she came across as a ditz sometimes, she got things done. Sam depended on her more than Kyla herself ever let the man guess.
“I would, only it’s not very practical,” Celie answered.
She had that churned up, self-conscious sensation again. Somehow, she didn’t feel quite safe. She suddenly remembered last night’s dreams, and the reassuring advice of the woman who stood by the mirror.
“I’m supposed to call someone,” she said aloud. “Check on someone.”
She stood up in a panic, and it came to her in a rush. That figure, lying on a kitchen floor, wearing a nightdress and with one leg stuck out strangely…
Mom.
Eleven years ago, Celie’s older sister, Veronica, had already been away at college when their father died, and her mom hadn’t coped with Veronica’s absence or with widowhood and grief too well. Celie herself had gone to college at Ohio State, so that she could remain at home. She’d moved into an apartment of her own several years ago, but still she never wanted to let her mother down. She spent a lot of time at Mom’s, helping her out, and this morning’s call to her seemed urgent, now.
A cluster of senior Delaney’s executives and regional managers entered the room at this moment, carrying briefcases and sheafs of papers. Nick and Sam wouldn’t be far behind.
“If they’re ready to start, Kyla,” she gabbled. “Tell them…uh…that I won’t be long. Or—could you take notes for my Mr. D, if he needs it?”
“Sure. What’s up? You look—”
“Nothing. I’m sure everything’s fine.”
Celie hurried to her private office, adjacent to Nick’s, and keyed in her mother’s phone number, but her mom didn’t pick up, and neither did the machine.
Celie’s mother had had a bone-density scan a few months ago, and the result had come back low. She took risks, too—vague, thoughtless ones that she didn’t even realize were risks until Celie pointed it out. She went down the basement stairs of her little house without turning on the light. She put a step stool on the grass in the yard to reach up and prune a branch.
Celie had the phone number of her mom’s neighbor Mrs. Pascoe in her address book, and she’d called a couple of times in the past to ask Mrs. Pascoe to check next door.
“Sure I’ll go across, honey,” Mrs. Pascoe told her today. “Just don’t you worry, okay?”
But when Mrs. Pascoe called Celie back a few minutes later, her voice sounded very different.
“Thank heaven you called me when you did, Cecilia!”
Her mother had fallen from her step stool two hours ago while trying to change a lightbulb in the kitchen. She’d broken her leg, and she hadn’t been able to get to the phone.
“I’ve already called 911,” Mrs. Pascoe told her. “The ambulance is on its way.”
Celie hung on the line, shaky and hardly able to breathe, and it seemed like an hour before the other woman came back to the phone again to report, “She’s going to be okay, although the paramedics say it looks like a bad break. They’ve just left, and they’re taking her to Riverside. You can probably hear the sirens in the background. She’s in shock, after lying on that cold floor for so long.”
Mrs. Pascoe hung up, but Celie’s fingers were curled tightly around the phone and she couldn’t seem to let it go. Nick appeared in the doorway while the receiver still hung in her hand.
“Kyla said—” Nick stopped, midsentence. “Heck, what’s wrong, Celie? You’ve gone white.”
“My mother’s broken her leg. She had to lie in pain on the kitchen floor for two hours, with no help on its way. I dreamed about it. Which is just so weird.”
“You dreamed your mother broke her leg?”
“Yes. I saw a figure lying on a floor, only I didn’t know who it was. Someone in the dream told me, ‘Call her in the morning.’ I remembered the dream just now, so I did call her, and when I did…” She took a shuddery breath. “Thank heaven I called!”
“Celie, it’s all right. Keep remembering to breathe, okay? Are you going to faint?”
“No.” She’d never fainted in her life, and didn’t intend to start now.
“Help is with her now, right?”
“She’s in the ambulance.”
“So it’s okay. And for heaven’s sake, don’t worry about a little thing like a dream!”
“No. Of course. You’re right.”
Celie felt herself sway. She didn’t think she would have fainted, since she never had before and was so determined not to, but when Nick’s arms came around her for support, strong and warm, she clung on to her boss for dear life and whispered hoarsely, “Don’t let go.”
Chapter Two
“We should get back to work,” Nick muttered, after a couple of minutes—or maybe a couple of lifetimes.
Celie felt a little firmer in his arms, now, thank heaven, and a little firmer on her feet. He was no longer afraid she might just crumple into a heap on the floor, as he’d been a minute ago. She’d seemed completely boneless, as if she wasn’t quite real, as if a formless wraith had invaded her body. He loosened his arms cautiously, and was relieved when she didn’t crumple against him.
Still, he was reluctant to let her go.
She felt amazingly good.
Too good.
And different.
Surprising.
He didn’t want an executive assistant who surprised him, and yet every sense told him that this was good. She felt far softer than she looked in her crisp suits. Warmer, too. As warm as if he’d just climbed into bed with her on a winter morning, or as if she’d been toasting herself in front of an open fire moments earlier.
As for the way she smelled…Faintly rose-scented, like soap and shampoo lingering on clean skin and hair. There were some other scents in there, too, but he couldn’t pick them. Good scents. Spring scents. Classic. Not astringent and artificial, but soft.
His face had never lingered this close to her neck before. Who knew that his efficient, unsurprising and utterly reliable executive assistant would feel and smell so warm and soft and sweet in his arms?
Nick let her go at last, stepped back and looked at her, still standing close. She had a fuzzy look around her gray-blue eyes and a new fullness to her mouth, which changed her whole face.
He’d never considered that there might be this side to Celie. Somehow, if he ever broke his own rules and thought about her private life or the deepest emotions of her heart, he always assumed a level of…safety, or something. Secretarial efficiency, even in her heart. Neatly packaged emotions. Cautious affections. Suitable, unthreatening relationships.
After her first month in the job, he’d congratulated himself on getting such a great assistant, and he’d been determined to do everything he could to keep her. She’d probably marry eventually, he’d calculated. Some local man, with a local career. He wanted her still here at Delaney’s when she had pictures of her grandchildren on her desk, her hair still pulled back in its efficient knot, but gray.
He’d always thought her intelligent, capable and practical, but he’d never considered that she might be a deeply passionate person as well. He wondered if she knew this about herself. It seemed possible that she didn’t. So new to him, the hint of this unsuspected passion around her eyes and mouth stirred him to an extent that shocked him, and tilted his balance. He didn’t like it, and he definitely didn’t want it to upset the status quo.
She smiled at him carefully. “Getting there,” she said.
He could almost sense the way her blood beat in her veins. Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, and her breathing went in and out steady and strong, as if she had to work hard to get it to happen at all.
I’m watching her body, he realized.
He was watching the way her lower lip had dropped open, and the way her breasts moved when she breathed. In eight months he’d never thought about her breasts. Her suits tended to tailor them out of visible existence, but the softer top she wore today above her straight navy skirt hugged her shape much more closely. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, even though he knew it wasn’t right.
In another second she would notice, and of course she wasn’t thinking about anything like that. She was thinking about her mother, and her disturbing, clairvoyant dream.
Nick didn’t believe in psychic dreams, himself. He’d learned early on to believe only in the things he could see and touch and feel for himself. His adoptive parents were practical, rational people who’d worked very hard to rescue him and Sam from the darkness of their early years, and he had enormous respect for their attitude.
His dad had retired a few years ago, and they wintered in Florida, now, so he saw less of them. He still felt they were close, however, and still shared many of their beliefs. Even those he didn’t share, he respected.
From the beginning, his mom and dad had encouraged their boys to respond to the tangible proof of their care—things like home-cooked meals and bedtime stories—and not to go stirring up the murky memories that lay beneath, by reading anything into the bad dreams they’d sometimes had.
No, like Mom and Dad, he definitely didn’t believe in the significance of dreams.
But he could see how upset Celie was, both by what had happened and by the fact that she thought her dream had warned her of it in advance. Of course she was upset!
“Sit,” he urged her, emotional himself, worried about her, thrown off balance. “I’m going to ask Kyla to get you some hot tea and something from the cafeteria. Then we’ll talk about how much time you’ll need. Your mother’s here in Columbus, right?”
“Yes. In Clintonville. They’re taking her to Riverside.” She didn’t sit, she just stood there, leaning her left hand heavily on her desk. Her fingers splayed out fine and neat and long.
“What would you like to eat?”
“Oh, I…I’m not really hungry.” She waved away the idea of food with a graceful right hand that looked limp with shock.
“No, you should,” he urged again. “Even just a muffin.”
“Okay, a muffin.”
“Because I’m not letting you drive like this.”
“Drive?”
“Don’t you want to try and see her before she goes into surgery?”
Her face cleared, leaving her brow wide and smooth, and bracketed softly by the hair she’d left loose this morning. “Yes, of course. Oh, could I? Can you spare me right away? Can Kyla handle the rest of the meeting? I have the files laid out on—”
“Don’t worry about it, Celie. Between us, we’ll manage. Take as much time as you need. A couple of weeks, if you have to.”
“Thank you, Mr. Delaney!” She smiled again.
Celie had a gorgeous smile. He’d noticed it very early on, when she’d just started working for him, and he remembered thinking it was such a huge professional asset it was a shame she couldn’t list it on her resume. Today, the smile was wide and soft and wobbly, far more heartfelt than he’d ever seen it look before. She couldn’t keep it in place, and it faded at once.
“Please save the Mr. Delaney stuff for executive meetings,” he said. “I’m just Nick. How many times have I told you that?”
He took her arm, led her to her ergonomic chair and pushed her gently into it, then called Kyla from the phone on Celie’s desk because he didn’t quite trust what his executive assistant would do if he left her alone, even for a moment. If she thought she had to clear her desk, leave memos, check her e-mail before she departed…It would be typical of her to think that.
“You’re still a lot shakier than you realize,” he told her.
“No, I’m not,” Celie answered. She added more firmly, in order to clear the ambiguity, “I mean, I do realize. How shaky I am. Now. Thanks. The tea will help.”
She watched Nick take the tea and a blueberry muffin from Kyla a few minutes later. “Thank you,” he said. He clicked his tongue at Sam’s assistant, curled his fingers around the disposable cup and cradled the paper muffin plate in the opposite palm.
Something had happened just now. She and Nick hadn’t kissed, hadn’t come close to that, but it was the most potent hug that Celie had ever experienced. She could still feel Nick’s body against hers, and smell his scent—clean male, mixed with professional laundry—on her skin. She could feel the throb of secret places inside her.
He’d felt so solid and strong and steady, and she’d needed that, after the shock of the prescient dream and her mother’s pain. She’d made no attempt to let him go, even when her dizzying weakness began to ebb.
And then he’d told her she was free to go to her mother right away. She’d never needed time off at short notice before, and wouldn’t necessarily have expected such care from him. She knew how driven he was. A lot of men as successful as he was would have been far more ruthless with their staff’s personal time. It turned out he didn’t have total tunnel vision, however.
She remembered how she’d let her head rest against his chest, listening to his breathing and his heart, and how she’d wrapped her arms around him as close and tight as they would reach. She’d felt the prickle of his belt buckle against her stomach, and the squashy nudge of her breasts against his ribs. While it was happening, she’d felt too shocked about her mom to react as a woman, but as she relived the moment now, in a slightly calmer state, her skin began to tingle.
“Okay. So,” Nick said. “Do you need extra cash? I’ll write you a check.”
“I don’t need it, Nick,” she answered. “I just need the time. You’re giving me that, and I’m grateful.”
“Don’t come back too soon.”
“No, I won’t. Thank you again. So much.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just take care of your mom.”
Celie didn’t see Nick for a week.
She barely saw her apartment, either, as her mom needed a lot of time, at first in the hospital and then at home. After a week, her mom still wasn’t too confident on her crutches, but by this time Celie’s sister, Veronica, had organized to come up from Kentucky, with baby Lizzie, for as long as she was needed, which meant that Celie could go home and back to work.
The apartment sent out its silent “Good to see you” message, the moment she walked through the door. The clock on the side table had stopped, the air was a little stale and surfaces needed dusting. On the windowsill, Celie found a torn shred of white broderie anglaise fabric, left there like a message on a Post-It note.
A message for her.
She had no doubt of that.
But where had it come from, who could have put it there, and what did it mean?
“Hey, what’s going on here? Why are you doing this to me? I’m not the right person for it,” she said aloud to the room, and when she turned, she almost expected to see the woman fixing her hat in front of the mirror, wearing a broderie anglaise blouse.
But no one was there.
I’m talking to my apartment, she realized. How weird is that?
At least the solution to this problem was obvious, and within her control.
Don’t do it.
Celie hadn’t had any memorable dreams while at her mom’s, but tonight they again cut through her sleep. The baby cried. Or was it a doll? She kept seeing strange figures and forms, some of them reassuringly like people, others just the suggestion of a human shape. What were they made of? Plaster? Metal? None of the images stayed long enough for her to identify them. Bright lights flashed, startling and dazzling her, and she thought there must have been an explosion.
Where was the baby in all of this? Was it in danger?
She jumped out of bed and rushed to look for it.
No, not it.
Him.
Nick’s baby was a boy. Hadn’t the woman in front of the mirror said so, last week? Celie sniffed the air, in search of the acrid, firecracker smell of explosives but, thank goodness, couldn’t detect it anywhere.
Couldn’t find the baby, either. His cries still shrilled in her ears. Why didn’t Nick go to him tonight? His inaction distressed her. The baby was his. The woman had implied it, and Celie somehow knew it herself, in any case.
The baby belonged to Nick, only tonight Nick didn’t seem to be around.
“He doesn’t know,” she told the woman frantically. “Nick doesn’t know the baby’s crying. He doesn’t know about the baby at all.”
“He will,” she answered, with the calm smile that made Celie feel as if everything was all right. “He’ll find out. You can tell him, if you want.”
“And the explosion?”
“It’s not an explosion. The baby is miles from there, anyhow, on the other side of town. No one’s in that kind of danger.”
And this meant that Celie could sleep, so she did. This was very easy, because of course she’d been asleep all along. None of this was real.
In the morning, it felt great to be back at work, and even better to be busy—back the way life used to be, in this job, very safe and structured and efficient, with no time to think of Nick Delaney as anything except Celie’s driven, demanding employer. She wore her severest navy pinstripe suit and rocketed through the tasks Nick had given her with barely a pause to sip her coffee.
He had scheduled a long day. Meetings and conference calls ran until five, ahead of tomorrow’s demonstration of proposed new menu items by the resident team of Delaney’s food scientists and chefs. Delaney’s rotated its menu seasonally, four times a year, and although Ohio was currently clothed in spring colors, the new offerings for the coming fall were already in planning.
Celie wasn’t surprised, midafternoon, when Nick announced, “I’m going to go visit a couple of the restaurants tonight, check out the atmosphere.”
Nine years ago, there had only been one Delaney’s, and Nick and Sam had been able to check out the atmosphere in that establishment for sixteen hours of every day. Now, with ninety-eight existing locations and twelve more planned to open this year, the chain was so large and so successful that they risked losing touch with the ambiance they’d worked so hard to build. It must be more than seven years, Celie guessed, since Nick had personally thrown a steak on a Delaney’s grill, or poured a Delaney’s beer.
“You want to take notes?” she asked him. “You want me to come along?”
“I’d like you to come along. I don’t know if we’ll need to take notes. I just want to get the feel. Sam’s doing the same with Kyla, over near his place, at Delaney’s Franklin Street.”
Nick didn’t mention Sam’s gorgeous red-haired wife, Marisa. He rarely did, these days, and Celie had always gotten the impression that he didn’t like her. Celie had trouble with the woman’s snobbish attitude and social climbing instincts, herself.
They left Delaney’s company headquarters at just after five, and drove to Delaney’s Mill Run in Nick’s very average-looking American car instead of the chauffeur-driven limo, with Nick himself at the wheel. Celie suspected that he kept the car especially for times like this. He hated to be recognized as co-owner of the corporation when he dropped in at one of the restaurants. Getting any kind of special treatment would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
A perky college student showed them to a booth in the bar section, and as Nick had hoped, she had no idea who he was.
Although it was only midweek, the place already had a Friday-night mood, with groups and couples laughing and talking over appetizers, cocktails and beer. The decor was fresh and clean, and diners could choose booths or tables, lounge chairs or bar stools. In towns and cities all across America, Delaney’s was the kind of place where a man could bring a woman, confident that she would like the atmosphere and he would like the beer.
Up in a high corner across from their booth, a big television showed news and sports, but it didn’t dominate. Nick took a seat with his back to it, and didn’t even spare it a glance. Celie knew what he must be thinking. How many people in here? What was the gender balance? The age mix? The ethnicity? How many people ate in the bar section, and how many had one drink here, first, before moving to their table in the restaurant itself?
The Delaney’s marketing division had facts like these at their fingertips, but Nick liked to sample the data in a more personal way. He and Sam both believed that this was the way to pick up on trends and apply them successfully.
“Who’s watching the TV?” he asked Celie, when her club soda and his light beer had arrived. “I don’t want to turn ’round and stare.”
“Three guys. No, four. There’s news coming on, now.”
“TV in a bar is a real guy thing, isn’t it? Figures show a significant difference in the demographics we get when the layout of the restaurant is—”
He stopped. Celie tried to smile, to encourage him to go on by showing him that she was listening, but she couldn’t. All at once, the image on the television screen had her vision and her concentration in a tight lock.
Reporters were jostling to get close to a politician so they could ask questions. Cameras flashed, lighting up the screen like explosions.
Camera flashes.
She’d seen camera flashes in her dream about Nick’s baby in Cleveland last night. She’d interpreted them wrongly until this moment, but she knew they were significant all the same.
“Cleveland,” she said aloud. The baby was in Cleveland.
She stood up automatically, as if the cameras were flashing in her own face and the reporters wanted to interview her, wanted to put her picture in the newspaper. Then she sat again, just as abruptly, as the strength drained from her legs. That message about Cleveland and Nick’s baby was suddenly so clear—far more clear than she liked. She didn’t want this to be happening to her. She wanted her life, and her subconscious, to stay just the way they were.
“Cleveland?” Nick asked. His voice came from far away, and he shot a quick look behind him, toward the television screen, following the direction of Celie’s gaze. “No, that’s Washington, D.C. Some political scandal. What’s the matter, Celie?”
“I—had a dream last night, with cameras flashing in it,” she answered, her gesture at the television as limp as a wet rag. “I didn’t realize until now that that’s what they were. I thought they were explosions. They mean something. They’re important, somehow. And the dream has something to do with Cleveland.”
Your baby is in Cleveland, Nick.
Should she tell him this?
Or would he think she was as crazy as she feared she might be?
“Well, we’re going there next week.” He frowned. “We have the art museum opening.”
“That’s right. I’d forgotten.”
As part of its corporate philanthropy, Delaney’s was sponsoring a major sculpture exhibition, which would be seen in only four U.S. cities during its world tour. Cleveland was one of them. Celie had been extensively involved in liaising with the Great Lakes Museum of Art during the planning stages of the tour, but most of the details had been finalized months ago.
With her mother’s accident, she’d forgotten the opening was so close. Nick had meetings in Cleveland that day, and she’d already booked hotel rooms for an overnight stay after the event. She’d been looking forward to the glamorous occasion, and had bought a new dress—simple, black, appropriate but glamorous all the same. Now she wondered, with a sick, sinking feeling, if she ought to be dreading the evening instead.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Nick said. “Here take a sip of your drink. No, hang on…”
He slid out from his side of the booth and came to hers. Resting his upturned hand on the table, he coaxed her head forward and down so that his palm cradled her forehead. His other hand stroked the nape of her neck for a moment, then slid lower, to rest on her back.
“Take some deep breaths,” he said. “Are you going to get sick?”
“No.”
“When you can sit up, take a drink and then tell me what’s wrong. This is the second time I’ve seen you like this in a week.”
He stroked her back. His touch was firm enough that she could feel the weight and warmth of his hand, but light enough that it caressed her skin through the thin knit fabric of her top like running water. It wove a net of sensation all around her—a net that she could have cocooned herself in for the rest of her life.
When she sat up, a little too soon, his face blurred in her vision but she could still perceive the depth of his concern, and it disturbed her.
She’d never needed him in this way before, and now, as he’d said, it had happened twice in a week. She didn’t want to need him, didn’t want to have a reason to need him. She wanted her life fully under control, and she was sure he’d feel the same. They both took pride in their professional boundaries, and in how much they could handle on their own.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right,” he drawled. “Sure you’re fine.” He brushed her hair behind her ear, touched her shoulder lightly, frowned at her. He narrowed his eyes, and his lips parted. Celie stared down, and heard the hiss of his breath, very close. “Are you still worried about your mother, Celie? Did you come back to work too soon? You look like you’re falling apart.”
“I keep having dreams with messages in them,” she told him, pressing her hands together in her lap. “Last week, I dreamed about my mom breaking her leg. I have cameras flashing in my face as if they’re telling me something. I hear your—I hear a baby crying, and the crying is a message.”
“I’m not sure that I believe in dreams like that,” Nick answered slowly. “In fact, I know I don’t.”
“I never used to, either.” She looked up at him again and tried to smile. “Until I started having them. I don’t want to believe in them. But how can I help it, when they come true? If you could talk me out of believing them, Nick, trust me, I’d be grateful.”
She reached to pick up her glass, and gulped a mouthful of her drink. The dry fizz stung in her mouth. A loud burst of laughter came from a nearby booth, and a party of new arrivals trooped past to the group of low chairs in the far corner. Delaney’s was filling up, and getting noisier.
“Let’s get out of here,” Nick said. “I want to put a good meal into you, and I want to talk about this. But not here, where I’m thinking about Delaney’s and trends and the next advertising campaign. Let’s go somewhere quiet, where nothing else is going to impinge.”
Celie didn’t argue.
Nick flung some cash on the table and they left immediately. Celie paid no attention to where they were going until he parked in front of one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants. Salt was the kind of place where most people needed a reservation, even on a weeknight. Nick Delaney didn’t, because unlike the college-student waitress at his own restaurant, the deferential maitre d’ at this establishment knew at once exactly who he was.
“Better?” Nick said, as soon as they were seated.
Only a few tables were filled as yet, and the clientele was well-dressed and very well-behaved. So were the staff. The waiters skimmed back and forth on silent feet, and even the sounds that came occasionally from the kitchen were muted against a background of soft, smoky music.
With effort, Celie created a smile. “Are you saying you don’t like your own restaurants?”
“I love our restaurants. Tonight, this place seemed like a better idea. Somewhere more discreet, where we can relax. With staff who’ll protect our privacy. I want to hear about the dreams, Celie.”
She told him about the image of her mother lying on the kitchen floor, and the image of cameras flashing, somehow telling her Cleveland. She didn’t tell him what she knew about the crying baby yet, but she did tell him about the hat pin, the woman in front of the mirror and the scrap of torn broderie anglaise.
Since she still had the hat pin in her purse, she took it out and showed it to him.
“You’re right. It has to be the renovations upstairs,” Nick said. He ran a fingertip along the gray metal toward the point, and for half a second Celie could almost feel the touch of his finger on her own skin.
His confident tone reassured her, but she pushed at the issue, all the same. “Renovations give people dreams that come true?”
“Renovations could give someone a hat pin on their windowsill.” He looked up. “Isn’t that what you thought, yourself?”
“I’m not so sure, anymore.”
“And, yes, renovations are stressful and unsettling. People dream more when they’re unsettled. The dreams themselves can be explained.”
“Then do it, Nick, please. I want explanations for this.”
“You were already concerned about your mother, right?”
“She’s elderly. Her bones aren’t strong, and she takes risks without thinking about them. I’ve been responsible for her since my father died, eleven years ago, and she’s never regained the ground she lost when she lost him. Part of her just…left…and I’ve had to pick up the slack.”
“You don’t talk much about all that.”
“There’s no need. It’s under control and it’s not your concern. I love Mom, and I’m happy to help her. But, yes, I do worry.”
“So there you go. Both your conscious and your subconscious mind feared an accident, and it happened.”
“And the flashing cameras? What do they mean? Why are they saying Cleveland to me?”
“The exhibition opening next Tuesday night is a big deal. You know that. The press will be there. No surprise if we get cameras flashing in our faces. Subconsciously, you must be a little nervous about it.”
Celie pretended that he’d convinced her. She wanted him to have convinced her, but he hadn’t. Not really. The dreams remained too vivid in her mind for that. They threatened her own sense of who she was.
As she’d just told Nick she’d run her mother’s life, and her own, from the age of seventeen. She didn’t have a mystic, intuitive streak. She had responsibilities. She couldn’t afford to have dreams that competed with reality in her mind.
Their waiter brought menus and they both ordered. Celie chose a fennel bisque soup and grilled chicken, while Nick decided on shrimp and beef. “Would you like some wine?” he asked.
“Just a glass.”
Even one glass turned out to be a mistake. It loosened her tongue just that little bit more, and as they ate she found herself telling him, “There’s another dream I’ve been having, too, Nick, repeated night after night. It makes even less sense than the others.”
“More predictions? Do I want to hear this? I’m trying to help you get your feet back on the ground, Celie.”
“Are you?”
“For the best of reasons. You’re getting too stressed over this. It’s eating at you more than it should. Look at the way you’re frowning at me.”
“You’re right. I am.” She squeezed out a smile and touched her forehead with her fingers, trying to smooth the frown away. “I—I don’t know if the dream is a prediction. But it gets a little clearer, each time. Maybe you can tell me, because I do think that there’s a message in it, and the message is for you.”
She took a breath, and twirled the hat pin between her finger and thumb. Its rounded, pearly end gleamed in the leaping golden light from the candle in the center of their table. Nick’s china-blue gaze was fixed on her face, and she felt as if she was swimming in the deep pools of his eyes.
“Tell me, Celie,” he said. “Don’t hedge it, or qualify it, just tell me.”
“Okay, then, here it is. Is there any chance, Nick, that somewhere in this world—” Cleveland, let’s say “—you have a baby you don’t know about?”
“A what?” Nick almost yelled the words.
“A baby,” Celie repeated.
She leaned forward and captured Nick’s big, firm hand in hers without even realizing she’d done it. It felt warm and dry and strong—even stronger when he twisted it out of her grasp and closed his fingers over her knuckles. He squeezed them and looked down, drawing her attention to the body contact. “Pick up your spoon, Celie,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She slid her hand away at once, and continued, “It’s a little boy. I hear him crying, and I get up to go to him, and then there’s a woman who tells me it’s all right, I don’t have to, because you’ll go. And the crying stops, and I feel a sense of peace because I know you’re there, holding him, belonging with him. Only last night, you didn’t go.”
“I…didn’t…go.”
“To the baby. And I realized it was because you didn’t know that he exists. Believe me, as I’ve said, I’m not happy about these dreams, and I know this one sounds—”
“He doesn’t exist, Celie. The dream is nonsense.” He frowned. “Boy or girl, I’ve never fathered a child.”
“But I’m wondering if that’s true,” she persisted, still caught in the strong, sticky web of the dreams, forgetting her allotted place in Nick Delaney’s life, overlooking her own doubts. “You know, sometimes a woman gets pregnant and she has reasons for not wanting to tell the father. It happens. I don’t want to trespass into your personal life, but if you think back, look through your diary, isn’t there someone who could have gotten careless with—?”
“No.” The flat of his hand came down hard on the table. “I’m telling you, it’s not possible, Celie, and you need to believe me on this. I really hope you’re not suggesting that I give you a list of the women I’ve slept with.”
“No, of course not.”
“And that I should call them up and ask?”
He looked angry now.
Of course he did! This whole conversation was an affront to his privacy, to the boundaries they both believed in and to their whole working relationship. Celie should have seen it, but even if she had, would the dreams have prompted too strongly for her to resist? She needed to understand what was going on.
Her fingers slipped, and the hat pin pricked the ball of her thumb, as if to taunt her, “Gee, didn’t you handle this well?”
She dropped the hat pin on the table, beside the remains of her meal. She had no appetite left for it, now. The restaurant had filled, and the few couples who’d been here when she and Nick first arrived had reached coffee and dessert. If Nick didn’t want to listen to this, then it was time to go.
“Just how long do you think such a list would be, if you don’t mind my asking?” Nick said, his voice deceptively quiet and controlled, this time. His blue eyes sparked.
“I’m sorry,” she answered quickly. “I thought I should tell you about what the dream seemed to be saying. That’s all. Since it was so vivid. And so real. Of course I’m not suggesting you keep a—a list.”
“But you’re suggesting there’d be some names on it if I did? That there’s a woman out there from my past—and this is an infant we’re talking about, so you think it’s my recent past—who’s been pregnant with my child over this past year and I haven’t known? That I could have been that careless, that casual, and not even thought to follow up on it?”
She gaped at him, her cheeks on fire. “I’m sorry,” she said again. It sounded terrible when he said it like that. What was happening to her? How could a few dreams have taken such a strong hold on her imagination?
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Lilian Darcy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Boss′s Baby Surprise, электронная книга автора Lilian Darcy на английском языке, в жанре современная зарубежная литература