And Babies Make Four
Автор
Marie Ferrarella
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Chapter One
That Monday morning Jason Mallory had a great many things on his mind as he hurried into the spacious suite that comprised the securities investment offices of Mallory and Dixon. From the ridiculous—as in where he’d stashed his dry cleaning ticket for a jacket he needed—to the sublime, which meant going over the net-quarterly returns of a very successful firm season.
Being instantly and unceremoniously catapulted into the past, however, was not one of them.
But, scheduled or not, that was exactly where he found himself. In the past. More than eleven years in the past to be exact, at a time when he had been the loner in a local high school where everyone else seemed to know one another.
At that time, all he’d had were his thoughts, his books and an overwhelming ambition to become someone. A powerful “someone.” Someone a person like Mindy Conway would notice. She’d been, as much as anything, the reason why he’d been so driven, so compelled to scale those corporate mountains, so dedicated to accumulating not only money but respect for who and what he was.
She had been his catalyst, his focus. His impossible dream, even after she’d left town. Because loners like him didn’t stand a chance with popular girls like Mindy Conway.
So, after high school, after she’d gone away to Northwestern, he’d stayed in New York and attended first NYU, then Columbia University. And diligently worked toward his goal even though he would never see Mindy again.
After a while, of course, there had been Debra. Debra, with her extensive family connections that she’d tried to dangle before him like some kind of enticement. Debra with her sexy smile and her own agenda. Why she’d chosen to single him out as the man she wanted to be with was still a mystery to him. A flattering mystery.
At least, it was flattering at first.
But that all changed once vows had been exchanged and for the first time in his life, he’d surrendered himself completely to a woman, breaking down his own walls of reserve to be the man he thought she wanted him to be. He’d thought wrong. And just as suddenly as she’d burst onto his horizon, she’d withdrawn from it. From him. Physically, emotionally. He had no clue as to why. Another mystery, one he chose not to explore. The pain there was still too great. And very possibly always would be, he judged.
But now, for some strange, whimsical reason known only to the gods who helmed the universe strictly for their own amusement, the girl from his long-lost past was here. In his office.
Sitting at a desk.
Mindy.
Bigger than life and twice as beautiful as he remembered.
But Mindy wasn’t a girl anymore, she was a woman. A gorgeous woman with longish, straight black hair and the most beautiful sky-blue eyes he’d ever seen.
And he wasn’t that quiet, introverted loner no one noticed. He was Jason Mallory, whose business acumen people listened to with rapt attention because in this strange, topsy-turvy world of upending finances, he somehow, through instinct and a great deal of careful observation and painstaking, ongoing evaluation, knew how to negotiate through the often turbulent and troubled waters of the stock market.
Right now he would rather have been traveling down the Colorado white rapids in a canoe made out of paper cups than standing here, staring at a woman who could have so easily had his heart—if she had only known that he was alive.
For a frozen second in time, Jason’s mouth felt too dry to form any words.
A single word kept echoing within Mindy Richards’s brain over and over again, each time increasing in volume. Omigod, omigod, OMIGOD!
She was surprised that she’d somehow managed to keep it tucked in the confines of her head and not let it burst out of her all-but-numbed lips.
It was a complete set. Her numbed lips went with her numbed everything else. Because that’s how she felt. Completely numbed. She’d become that way the second she raised her eyes to see who walked in through the door of the office that she had only moments ago walked into herself.
Everything inside of her froze for exactly half a beat, then went into a frenzied dance, the kind that would make a musician’s fingers fall off if he tried to emulate it.
Forget about what her heart was doing.
Jason? Jason Mallory?
It just hadn’t occurred to her that the Mallory attached to the logo on the door belonged to Jason, to the hunk she’d spent all four of her high school years daydreaming about. How many hours had she wasted wishing, praying, that he would part the sea of people in the high school hallway and just walk up to her? She couldn’t begin to remember.
All she remembered was that he hadn’t made that short trip. And she hadn’t had the nerve to approach him. Except on the very last day of high school, when, clutching her senior yearbook to her young chest, she’d walked up to Jason and asked him to sign it for her. The words had tasted like cotton in her mouth, but she’d gotten them out somehow. And belatedly remembered to smile.
Have A Nice Life—Jason. That was all he’d written. It was enough. She’d slept with the open page beside her on her pillow for weeks.
Right now, remembering how she’d felt approaching him that one time infused a ray of heat through her that melted away the iciness of her fingertips. She had to remember to make herself breathe.
Eventually, after she’d gone to Northwestern in pursuit of a degree in journalism, Jason had become that unattainable star for her, like some celebrity you fall in love with on the screen. With effort, she’d filed him away in her mind. To take out and sneak a peek at every so often when her spirits were low and she needed to think, “What if—?”
But that was before Brad had entered her life. “What if—” became a thing of the past. Until just recently. She had no idea why, but as she’d spent her first night in her new, minuscule apartment, she’d found herself thinking what if Jason had taken that single opportunity to talk to her? What if they’d gone out, become romantically involved and gotten married? What if they’d begun their married life in an apartment just like this little bit of plaster, floorboard and paint?
God, but life was funny. She’d never dreamed that she’d run into him again. Yet, here he was, looking twice as gorgeous as he ever had.
Jason thought he was hallucinating. Maybe the pressure he’d been putting on himself had finally gotten to him. Like a man not entirely sure of what his eyes were seeing, he said her name. Part of him expected her to either vanish or transform into someone else, into the real woman sitting there.
“Mindy?”
She couldn’t think, couldn’t even answer in the affirmative. All she could do was say his name. And hope that she didn’t sound like some addle-brained idiot. “Jason?”
Somehow he found enough moisture in his mouth to ask, “What are you doing here?”
Even as Jason asked the question, he upbraided himself. Damn it, he sounded just as tongue-tied as he was certain he would have if he’d ever tried to talk to her in high school. What the hell was wrong with him? He gave seminars for high-ranking financiers from all over the country without so much as a second’s hesitation. Met with important CEOs of major companies on a regular basis. Even if this was Mindy, there was no reason to feel as if the very foundation of his life had suddenly transformed into delicately arranged playing cards.
He followed up his own question with the only thing he could think of. “Are you here for some financial advice?”
But if that were the case, what was she doing, sitting at the desk normally occupied by the battalion of temporary administrative assistants his partner, Nathalie Dixon, kept insisting on hiring?
Her eyes never left his face. My God but he’d gotten even sexier looking than I remembered. Stop it, you can’t think like that anymore.
“No,” Mindy heard herself saying, “I work here.”
Jason frowned. He’d only been away on business for four days. “Since when?”
“Since now.” That sounded almost confrontational, she thought as a sudden zip of panic came out of nowhere. “Um—” she looked at her wristwatch, wanting to be more accurate “—since ten minutes ago.”
His dark-brown eyes narrowed beneath what Mindy had always considered to be perfectly shaped eyebrows. She couldn’t help wondering if her heightened hormonal state was responsible for her very physical, very intense reaction to Jason.
“I don’t understand.” When he’d left Wednesday evening, the young, rather vapid temp who’d been sitting at this desk was gathering her things together to leave. Permanently. He’d just assumed that Nathalie would find someone else from that bottomless well of temps. How did Mindy Conway even remotely qualify?
Mindy knew she had to get control of the butterflies that were dive bombing around her as-yet visually undetectable twins or she was going to make an absolute fool of herself and throw up right in front of Jason. Trying to pull herself above this newest unforeseen wrinkle in her life, Mindy pressed a hand to her stomach, hoped he wouldn’t notice this very maternal gesture and tried to sound as professional as possible under the circumstances. “Ms. Dixon hired me.”
“Oh, she did, did she?” Jason raised his voice as he called out his partner’s name, “Nathalie.”
The effort wasn’t necessary. His learned and usually very levelheaded business partner, not to mention close friend—at least up to this point—materialized in the doorway of her office which was next to his. There was an amused expression he didn’t appreciate creasing Nathalie’s lips.
“I see you’ve met our new administrative assistant.” Nathalie’s eyes shifted from Jason’s handsome, tanned face and almost permanent sober expression to the rather shocked look on their new employee’s face. Nathalie sighed. “Oh, God, Jason, you’re not frightening the help already, are you?” She offered Mindy a broad smile. “Because I picked this one to last.”
In response, Jason took hold of Nathalie’s arm, mumbled a barely audible “excuse us” to Mindy and shepherded his partner into her office. He managed to shut the door before demanding, “What the hell are you doing?”
Jason and she went back a ways, back to the first elementary business course at Columbia. She’d begun her education later than most and because of their age difference, treated Jason like a younger brother who needed occasional emotional support. She’d seen him through his wedding and the unsteady years that followed, and she knew him as well as, if not better than, anyone.
“Trying to run an efficient office while you make predictions from the top of Mt. Sinai, my friend, why?” She seemed to scrutinize his face, as if trying to discern what was really up. “We decided to split the tasks, remember? I was going to handle the mundane things, like getting the office to run in a timely fashion and schmooze with the clients while you were going to handle the research that has made our company a household name among the famous and rich who want desperately to remain that way.” She glanced past his shoulder toward where the outer office was. “Now, Mindy Richards seems like a very bright, capable young woman who just needs a chance to show us her stuff without being raked over the coals in the first ten seconds of your entrance.”
Richards? Was she married? It occurred to him that he hadn’t looked at her hand. He’d been too stunned to look at anything but her face.
Of course she was married. Probably in the first ten minutes after graduation. Someone like Mindy had her pick of men.
He couldn’t bank down the feeling of sadness that suddenly rose up and filled him.
Nathalie was looking at him as if he was some kind of science experiment that had gone awry. He forced his mind forward. “How could you hire her without asking me?”
“Simple. I never asked you before. And,” she reminded him diplomatically, in case he missed this salient point, “I never said very much when you sent them all fleeing into the hills. But I swear, Jason, you send this one packing and we are going to have a very, very serious talk about adjusting this attitude of yours.” Her voice softened a little. “I know where this is coming from, but it’s been over a year since—”
The look in his eyes was the darkest she’d ever seen. It cut her off midbreath.
“That has nothing to do with it.” Nathalie was closer to him than anyone else ever had been, but even she was not allowed to cross a certain line.
“It has everything to do with it. With you and the way you’ve become.”
Jason could feel himself shutting down. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t bring himself to discuss Debra’s death or the effect it had on him. Just as he couldn’t talk about how the empty sham of a marriage had unmanned him. “Drop it, Nat.”
She sighed. Stubborn though she was, even she knew when to stop hitting her head against a brick wall.
“All right—for now. And only because we both have work to do,” she added in case he thought he’d won. “But I want you to behave around that girl, hear me? She needs this job.”
Why, he wondered. Why would Mindy need a job that was so completely out of the realm of what she’d gone to school for? And if she was married, wouldn’t her husband be able to provide for her so that she could find work in her field?
It didn’t make any sense to him.
Jason looked at his partner. “Why?”
Nathalie stared at him. “Since when do you care about the personal life of anyone?”
“That’s not fair.” Damn it, she made him sound like some kind of self-absorbed despot. Feeling unaccountably restless, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his Italian custom-made slacks.
“All right, it’s not. You’ve been good to me.” Reaching up, Nathalie placed her arm around his shoulder in big-sister fashion. “But I worry about you, Jason,” she confessed. “About what all this enforced solitude is doing to you.”
He knew she meant well, but he wasn’t in the mood for this. He shrugged off her arm. “I just got back from a convention of three thousand people—”
“It’s very easy to be alone in a crowded room. All you need is a mind that isolates you.” Tilting her head, she studied him for a moment. Then her eyes widened as a realization seemed to come with the suddenness of a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. “You know her, don’t you?” When he made no immediate denial, she advanced to the next plateau. “What is she, an old girlfriend? Someone you had a wild, secret fling with?” The grin nearly split her face. “Oh, Jason, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I don’t. I didn’t.” Damn it, where did she get off, making these wild assumptions? Well-meaning or not, sometimes Nathalie really got on his nerves. “She’s just someone I used to know.”
She cocked her head. “Know how, in the biblical sense?”
“In the elementary sense, as in high school. We went to the same school, that’s all,” he emphasized. He peeled off his jacket. It was suddenly very warm in the office. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Nat.”
“Don’t be so judgmental, Jason. Under the right set of circumstances, the gutter can be a very nice place to visit once in a while.” The wink she sent his way was a broad one. Nathalie cleared her throat. “All right, so now that we’ve established that this is a prior mysterious acquaintance—”
Damn it, why did she insist on digging this way? “Not mysterious, Nathalie, I just told you—”
She was quick to cut him off. “Oh, but it’s what you didn’t tell me that I’m more interested in, Jason. One doesn’t look like that if one runs into the kid who sat beside you in homeroom and once borrowed your pen so they could finish their English homework.” The look she gave him was a knowing one and all the more infuriating for it. Nathalie had never cared for Debra, although he’d found that out only after the fact. And she had been trying her damnedest to get him to go out again no matter how often he told her to butt out of that part of his life. “I’d wager there was more to it than that.”
“Then you’d lose, Nathalie.”
“I never lose.” Nathalie tossed her head, sending her vibrant auburn hair cascading over her shoulder. “I just suffer temporary setbacks that will eventually be overcome if I just hang in there.” It was a great motto for a firm that specialized in stock market finances. It was also the motto that Nathalie lived by.
“Excuse me, is anything wrong?”
In unison, they turned around to the source of the question. To the young woman standing now in the open doorway.
Self-conscious, Mindy dropped her hand to her side. “I knocked—twice—but I guess you didn’t hear me,” she explained.
Mindy had sat at her desk, pretending she didn’t hear the raised voices or that her future might not very well be hanging in the balance with what was being said. But it was. Since she’d arrived back in New York, she’d gone to a score of companies in response to almost any ad she found in the paper that didn’t list working out in the open fields in its job description. In desperation, she would have even gone for that, but her present stamina wouldn’t allow it. The tone of the interviews that had been conducted all wound up being the same. Hopefully positive, until her own code of honor forced her to be truthful with her perspective employer and admit that, although she didn’t look it, she was three months pregnant with twins.
And really, really needed this job, she would add silently.
Granted her parents were more than willing to take her in, but that wasn’t the way she wanted to start her new life here—indebted to her parents. It was enough that they gave her emotional support and had floated her a loan so that she could put down the first and last month’s security on her tiny apartment. The latter was the size of a moderate walk-in restaurant refrigerator, but it was hers and that meant a lot. So did earning her own way.
Up until this job, no one had room for a woman who was going to expand before their eyes in the coming months and whom they felt might or might not be back once she gave birth, despite all her assurances that she would be. But Nathalie Dixon had been sympathetic and understanding and willing to take a chance on her, which meant the world to Mindy. She’d instantly taken a liking to the other woman.
But it was obvious that she was going to have to convince the man from her past that she was up to this. Funny how things turned out.
She wondered how much Nathalie had told him. But Jason’s eyes weren’t traveling to her belly, so maybe he didn’t know.
Which was just the way she wanted it for now. One battle at a time.
“No,” Jason said curtly, sparing a look at Nathalie before he turned to face Mindy, “nothing’s wrong. Let’s see about getting you to work, Mindy.”
She smiled, relieved. Maybe this was going to be all right after all. “That sounds good to me.”
We’ll see, Jason added silently. We’ll see.
