Pregnant and Protected Read online

  She broke off, blinked back hot tears and was furious at her own betrayal. Doubly so because beneath her anger, all her senses had suddenly flooded with memories of the way his body had felt against hers. His heat, his weight, his taste, the pressure of his mouth on hers.

  “—just clinging to that memory—” she kept going with difficulty “—because it was about the cleanest, neatest, simplest, most reassuring thing that’s happened to me this year. That you cared about how I’d feel later on. That you told me not to marry Ben as if you cared. That you respected my privacy after the things I’d said. But all you were doing was protecting your own butt, wasn’t it? Trying to hide from that guilt you talked about. Or was it the security consultancy? You didn’t want to lose the work. Oh! This stinks!”

  “Yeah, it does,” he said at last in a low voice.

  Lauren had pulled a tissue from her purse and was crushing it against her eyes. Daniel had a sinking sense, deep in his gut, that not making contact with her during the past six months had suddenly become one of the worst mistakes of his life. It hadn’t felt that way before. It had felt necessary. The only thing he could have done. For his own sake and hers. Face-to-face with her, he understood that he’d been wrong.

  “It does stink.” He went on. “I knew we would be meeting up again, Lauren, but I didn’t want it to be like this. Believe me, I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what that night meant to you. It’s nothing to do with my work. I was just trying to give you some—”

  He stopped, watched her shake her head, wheel around and stride back toward the revolving door. Beneath an open black leather coat, the beautifully cut gray wool maternity dress hugged her figure with a delicious emphasis that he tried to ignore. From behind, you wouldn’t have known she was pregnant at all, and the security guards in their back office had been absolutely right about her legs.

  “—space,” he finished on a down beat, although he knew she wouldn’t hear. He also knew that she was crying.

  Well, good. Fine. She was right about most of it, wasn’t she? Emotionally, he had been protecting his butt, and hiding from his guilt. Let her think that, let her deny him any other more honorable motivation, and let the buffer of her anger guard them from each other.

  Guard? Why that?

  He knew the answer. Because, to his deep dismay, the chemical heat they’d generated in each other that night hadn’t gone away. Maybe it was the sensory deprivation of their entombment which engraved that kiss more strongly on his memory, or maybe it was the, yes, admit it, voyeuristic connotation of glimpsing her occasional image on those monitors, but Lauren Van Shuyler had slammed every one of his senses with hunger and desire the moment she’d touched his arm just now.

  Ah, heck, it had nothing to do with the damn monitors! It was the six-hour press of her body against his, the six-hour jasmine-and-orange blossom scent of her, the sweet six-hour sound of her voice and its vibration against his rib cage, all of it still so vivid in his memory.

  He didn’t want that sort of chemistry. He’d been so wrong in his understanding of the woman he’d married. It would be a long time before he’d be ready to trust his own perceptions in that area again. On the other hand, when he stopped to think about it, he didn’t want this anger and distance, either. Couldn’t two intelligent adults manage to do better than this?

  “Lauren!” he yelled after her.

  She hadn’t heard, or she wasn’t listening.

  The revolving door sighed to a stop behind her and she was lost to his sight in the darkness. All he could see was the reflection of his own big body moving awkwardly in the flawless mirror of the tinted glass. Let her go? No. If for no other reason, they had to meet formally next week, beneath the concerned regard of Lauren’s own father.

  They had to be civil to each other, and they had to find a way to tolerate each other’s company while he fulfilled his brief regarding her safety. He couldn’t let her go tonight in a state of such anger and emotion.

  He pushed his shoulder to the huge door and sprinted after her. She’d almost reached the well-lit entrance to the parking garage, and her heels were echoing like gunshots on the paved plaza.

  “Lauren!”

  She didn’t stop, but her pregnancy was slowing her down. Her pretty Italian shoes weren’t designed for speed and his shoes were. He caught up to her just inside the entrance as her hand stretched out to the elevator button.

  “Hey!” he said, and reached for her.

  Big mistake.

  She interpreted his urgency as aggression, and as he caught one of her hands before it touched the elevator control, she lifted the other and prepared to bring it hard against his cheek. With the security training he’d learned when he first started in this business, he was quicker. He snapped his grip around her wrist and ended up with both her hands in his, at eye level, her arms stretched to each side and her blue-eyed, red-rimmed gaze blazing into his face. He’d never seen her eyes up close before, never seen them in more than a blurred gray light. Despite the recent tears, they were beautiful, like exotic gems.

  “Let me go,” she said. Her chin was high and her jaw was square.

  “You’re wrong about my reasons!”

  “I said let me go!”

  He dropped her arms and she hugged them over the precious bulge of the baby, chafing her slim wrists as if he’d hurt them.

  “And I said you’re wrong about my reasons.” It was much softer this time. “I’m sorry, Lauren.”

  Had he hurt her? Probably. In his haste, his grip had been rough. He reached out and tried to rub her wrists as well, but she shook her head. “I’m fine.” She was still unconsciously protecting the baby, and there was something fierce and strong about her, despite the coexisting vulnerability.

  “Listen, can we talk?” he said.

  “We’re meeting on Monday afternoon, aren’t we?” She turned slightly to press the elevator button, but before her fingertip touched the panel, Daniel heard the machinery starting up, and the faint sound of the doors closing two floors above.

  “It can’t wait until then,” he answered her. “What would your father think if he sensed how hostile you are?”

  “He’d think that I don’t want you working with me. Would you have a problem with that? Because it’s a fact!”

  “I’m not turning this contract down, Lauren. If your dad hadn’t got my father to the field hospital when he did, Dad would have lost both his legs. My father never got a chance to repay that debt.”

  “You did, though,” she answered. “You repaid it to me under a pile of bricks.”

  “I didn’t do any more for you that night than you did for me. It went both ways, give and take, as needed. We took care of each other.”

  The elevator doors opened and a man in a blue jacket hurried out, glanced at Daniel briefly and loped through the exit out of sight. Neither he nor Lauren took any notice.

  “If I can do it, if I can repay it,” he went on, “by watching out for you, finding ways to protect you from this creep who’s threatening you, Lauren, I’m going to do that.”

  “I don’t need you in my life, and you don’t need me.” She had her finger on the elevator button, keeping the door open. “You’re the one who insisted on that six months ago, and if it was true then, it’s truer than ever, now. I’ve got a baby coming and I’m on my own. Ben still hasn’t indicated if he wants any involvement with his child. I’ve got lawyers already preparing to fight any claim for custody he might make. The last thing I want or need in my life is a man whom I’m supposed to get close to.”

  She stepped inside the elevator as if she thought the discussion was over, and he followed her because she was wrong. The discussion wasn’t over at all.

  “Are we talking about getting close here? I’m not looking for closeness,” he said. “This is a job. Believe me, things are pretty complex at my end, too. We’ll do what your father wants, then we’ll close the book. That’s all.”

  The elevator doors closed again, and she pr
essed the button for Level 3, where the executive parking spaces were, right beside the elevator shaft. Lachlan Security Systems would be putting extra cameras in that area next week.

  “What my father wants, Lock—only I won’t call you that, it’s Daniel from now on—is for you to shadow my routine for at least a week and probably more, find out every detail about how I spend my time, where I go, who I’m with and whether it’s safe. If you think that doesn’t involve getting close, then you have a weird definition of the word!”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I do,” he shot back at her. “Because close, to me, is what happened between us that night, and I promise you that’s not on my agenda.”

  “Dad is just going to have to find someone else.” She flung the words over her shoulder as she left the elevator, and once again Daniel followed her, not prepared to let the issue drop.

  “He wants someone he can trust,” he told her.

  “And suddenly you own the only security company in the entire Philadelphia phone book that he can trust?” She wheeled around.

  “He trusted Ben once, remember,” Daniel told her bluntly. Was he hitting below the belt? He didn’t care. “You both did. His trust for me crosses a whole generation and right now, with the concern he has for you, that’s the only thing that counts for him. You won’t convince him to hire someone else, Lauren.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she gave a little nod. Clearly, she knew her father, and she knew that Daniel was right.

  “Then I’ll cancel the whole plan,” she said. “The police are working on it. So far, they’re not too concerned. There hasn’t been a letter for a week.”

  “Fine,” Daniel growled. “Fine. We’ll see what your dad has to say about it on Monday.”

  “Fine. We will.”

  She turned once more, took her keys from her pocket and headed toward her car. Still watching her, his scalp tight with frustration, Daniel noticed the problem with her vehicle at the exact same moment that she did. He heard her gasp of shock, felt his heart thud in his chest and his stomach drop with a sickening lurch.

  “Oh, my!” she stammered. “Oh, my Lord!”

  She stumbled, and her hand stretched to support her sapped strength against the cold white metal of the hood of her late-model BMW. It sat lower than usual. All four tires had been slashed.

  Chapter 4

  “Now I’m mad!” Lauren said. “Now I am steaming!”

  But she didn’t look or sound angry. She sounded jittery, shaky and like she was trying far too hard not to be scared.

  Levering herself up from her supporting lean on the car hood, she turned to Daniel and he saw the way her blue eyes glittered. Her lightly painted lips were shut tight. She had a gorgeous mouth, sensitive and full. He wasn’t sure how she came to be in his arms seconds later—which of them had moved faster?—but he didn’t dwell on the question, he just held her.

  She smelled the same as the last time they’d done this. Jasmine and orange blossom. Hell, how could he have missed it so much, when he’d only known it for six hours? She felt different, though. Her pregnancy nudged his stomach, as hard as a basketball. Her breasts were ripe and full, heavy and soft.

  Just how unacceptable is it to find a pregnant woman this attractive? It isn’t even your baby! Start thinking with something that resides above your waist. You need this woman in your life, you need this attraction to her, like you need a hole in the head. Don’t give in to it!

  “This is a little nastier than a few letters, isn’t it?” he said at last, lifting his jaw from its soft press against her cheek.

  “And more expensive, and more trouble to deal with. I’m mad!” she repeated, and this time she sounded it. She let go of Daniel and straightened up, scrunched her pretty hands into fists and pushed one set of knuckles against the other. “Clearly this guy—this person— doesn’t know me, or he’d realize that he can’t get to me this way.”

  “I’m calling the police.” Daniel pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

  She nodded, her jutting chin dropping with a jerk. “Thanks. If I tried to talk to them right now…” She stopped and shook her head.

  “You’d just splutter and hiss into the phone, right?”

  “Something like that!”

  He made the call. While they waited for the officers to show up, he drove his own car up to where her car was so she’d have somewhere to sit and keep warm. He knew without asking that she wouldn’t want to go near her own vehicle. In any case, there could be fingerprints that she might smudge, though he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be.

  Next he called Lauren’s father to cancel her planned dinner with him, and finally he called her regular garage and arranged to have them replace the tires and drive the car home for her once the police had finished with it.

  The police didn’t spend a lot of time at the scene, and Daniel wasn’t surprised. They did their job, but a crime like this didn’t rate against robbery, drugs and violence. The two uniformed officers weren’t too impressed with his powers of recall, and he was disgusted with himself as well.

  A blue jacket? A blue jacket was it?

  They couldn’t know for certain that the man who’d come out of the elevator while he and Lauren were involved in their…uh…discussion was the man who’d slashed her tires, but at least if Daniel had retained more facts, more details, the police would have had a chance of checking it out.

  Just a blue jacket? No memory as to height or hair color? Age or build? Accessories, mannerisms or footwear? And Daniel was, excuse me, CEO of his own security consultancy?

  The police officer who took their statements didn’t voice his doubts aloud, but he didn’t need to. It was all there in the way he looked at Daniel sideways from under his brows, and the way he laboriously noted his feeble description.

  Even without his attitude, Daniel would have been burning, frustrated.

  I was so intent on Lauren, I didn’t even take it in, he kept thinking, when finally they could leave and he drove her home. That’s not how I was trained to be.

  She was quiet in the passenger seat beside him, drained by the whole thing, he guessed. Not mad anymore. He was the one who was mad now. At himself.

  That had to be the guy. I’m sure of it. The thoughts ran on. At six-thirty on a Friday night, people came out of that parking garage on wheels, not on foot.

  With his assistance to the police so limited, Daniel was forced to content himself with helping Lauren instead. He tried to hold her, once more, at the front door of her three-story executive town house. Her place was part of an elegant complex that strived for anonymity for its wealthy occupants, rather than ostentatious displays of luxury.

  “This has been a rough night for you, Lauren.” Damn it, even his words lacked any wisdom or power!

  “I’m fine now. Thanks.” She stiffened and he stepped back.

  Was he relieved at her rejection? Or disappointed?

  A mix, he decided, and one that was about as comfortable as five-course heartburn.

  “Have you got food in the house?” he asked her.

  “Plenty. Or I’ll call out for something. I’m fine, Daniel,” she repeated.

  “Want me to come in?”

  “No.”

  “I’m coming in anyhow, to check the place out.”

  She nodded reluctantly, her fair skin creased with fatigue and stress. It was unfair, he decided. Unfair to him, personally, as a man, that she still looked so beautiful.

  “That makes sense, I guess,” she said.

  She stepped back and he brushed past her, aware once again of her scent and her warmth and hating his body for reacting this way.

  You have no time for this. You don’t want it.

  “Do you mind if I don’t shadow you while you’re doing it?” she added.

  No. He didn’t mind.

  He didn’t make a thorough assessment—that was planned for next week—but he checked every room, checked the locks on doors and windows. His impression of the place taught h
im a lot more about Lauren in a very short time. Less than he would need to know over the next few weeks, but already enough to increase his respect and his gut-level understanding, and more than enough to make him uncomfortable. If he could, he would have run a mile!

  Her place was beautiful, every detail of comfort and decor precisely thought out and perfectly executed. Her antique-furnished bedroom was restful, her study was efficient and her living room pretty, feminine and inviting. In the granite and glass kitchen, she’d summoned energy from some hidden corner of herself and was actually cooking, making something that involved pasta, basil and fresh vegetables.

  The last room he checked was the new nursery for her coming baby, and that just about tore his heart.

  Although the baby’s birth was still nearly two months away, the room was complete and ready, from the brand-new set of pastel bed linen in the custom-made crib to the fat blue and white tube of diaper rash cream sitting on the change table against the opposite wall. There were children’s books on the bookshelf, plush toys in the crib and probably matched sets of infant T-shirts and sleepsuits in the tallboy.

  The impression it gave out was of a woman trying so painfully hard to do it right, to stay on top of her life, get ahead and keep control.

  No, he revised immediately, Lauren didn’t just want to do it right, she wanted to make it perfect.

  His mind flicked back to the stack of books he’d noticed on the nightstand beside her bed. Pregnancy books and child care manuals. Beside her TV there were pregnancy exercise videos, and in the kitchen a neat set of cookbooks featuring nutritional cuisine for young children and expectant moms.

  She’s scared. She’s so damned scared.

  This was why she seemed to be handling the threatening letters and the slashed tires with such outward strength, and almost disinterest, he realized. She was far too busy being petrified about something else.

  She lost her mother, what, fifteen years ago, didn’t she? he remembered, as he stood frozen in her perfect nursery. And her baby has the Forbes Magazine version of a deadbeat dad hiding out with his money in Switzerland. She’s got a fraction of the usual support new mothers need, and she’s running scared, so she’s decided she has to graduate summa cum laude in the motherhood course she’s set herself, before the baby is even born.