Nick pulled a small velvet box from his pocket and slapped it onto the kitchen table. "I owed you a pair of earrings," he said, already striding out of the kitchen.
Lauren
heard the front door slam behind him, and with trembling fingers she picked up the little box and opened it. She expected to find her mother's small golden hoops, but instead there was a pair of glowing pearls in a setting so fragile that the pearls appeared to be two large, luminous raindrops suspended in thin air. Lauren snapped the box shut. Which of his girlfriends had lost those in his bed, she wondered in angry loathing. Or were they her "present" from Italy?
She marched upstairs to get her purse and a warmer sweater to cover her shoulders. She would go shopping for Jim's birthday gift exactly as she'd planned, and she would put the last hour out of her thoughts—permanently. Nick Sinclair was not going to haunt her anymore. She would erase him from her mind. She jerked open her bottom drawer and stood looking down at the beautiful silver gray sweater she'd knitted for that… that bastard!
Lauren removed it from the drawer. Jim was almost exactly Nick's size, and he would probably like it very much. She would give it to him, she decided, ignoring the sharp stab of anguish that shot through her.
15
« ^ »
Lauren walked into the office the next morning wearing a chic burgundy suede suit and a determinedly bright smile. Jim took one look at her and grinned. "Lauren, you're gorgeous—but aren't you supposed to be upstairs?"
"Not anymore," she replied, handing him his mail. She had assumed that because their "game" was over, Nick would no longer want her upstairs in the mornings.
She was wrong. Five minutes later, as they were discussing a report Lauren was working on, the phone on Jim's desk rang. "It's Nick," he said, passing the receiver to her.
Nick's voice was like a whip crack. "Get up here! I said I wanted you here all day and I meant it. Now move!"
He hung up on her, and Lauren looked at the receiver as if it had just bitten her. She hadn't expected Nick to sound like that. She'd never heard anybody sound like that. "I—I think I'd better go upstairs," she said, hastily standing up.
Jim's face was a study in incredulity. "I wonder what the hell has gotten under his skin?"
"I think I have." She saw the thoughtful smile that slowly spread across Jim's attractive face, but she had no time to ponder it.
Only a few minutes later Lauren tapped on Nick's door and, with an outward calm she didn't feel, walked into his office. She waited a full two minutes for him to acknowledge her, but after having practically shouted at her to get up there, he continued writing, ignoring her presence. With an irritated shrug she finally went over to his desk and held the little velvet jeweler's box toward him.
"These are not my mother's earrings, and I don't want them," she told his granite profile. "My mother's earrings were ordinary gold hoops, not pearls. They weren't worth a fraction of what these are; their only value was sentimental. But to me they're priceless. They mean something to me, and I want them back. Are you capable of understanding that?"
"Perfectly capable," he replied icily, without looking up. He reached out and buzzed for Mary to come in. "However, yours are lost. Since I couldn't get them back for you, I gave you something that had sentimental value to me. Those earrings belonged to my grandmother."
Lauren's stomach knotted sickly, and the resentment left her voice as she said quietly, "I still can't accept them."
"Then leave them there." He nodded curtly toward the corner of his desk.
Lauren put the box down and went back to her temporary office. Mary followed her a minute later, closed the door to Nick's office behind her and came over to Lauren's desk. Smiling kindly, she relayed the instructions Nick had obviously just given. "Sometime during the next few days he's expecting a call from Signor Rossi. He wants you to be available to act as translator whenever the man decides to call. In the meantime, I would be very grateful for your help with some of my work. If you still have time to spare, you could bring some of Jim's work up here to do."
During the next three days, Lauren saw sides of Nick that she had only imagined existed. Gone was the teasing man who had held and kissed and pursued her so relentlessly. In his place was a powerful, dynamic businessman who treated her with a brisk, aloof formality that thoroughly intimidated her. When he wasn't on the phone or in meetings, he was dictating or working at his desk. He arrived before she did in the morning and was still there when she left at night. Acting as his auxiliary secretary, she grew petrified of displeasing him in any way. She had the feeling he was merely waiting for her to make a mistake so that he would have a legitimate reason to fire her.
On Wednesday, Lauren made the mistake she'd been dreading: she left an entire paragraph out of a detailed contract Nick had dictated to her. The moment his summons snapped over the intercom she knew her time had come, and she walked into his office with limbs shaking and hands perspiring. But instead of flaying her alive, which she could see was what he wanted to do, he pointed out the error and shoved the contracts toward her. "Do it again," he snapped, "and this time get it right."
She relaxed slightly after that. If Nick hadn't fired her for that blunder, he obviously wasn't looking for an excuse to get rid of her. He must need her at hand for that call from Rossi no matter how poorly she performed.
"I'm Vicky Stewart," a breathy voice announced to Lauren at noon that same day. Lauren looked up to see an incredibly glamorous brunette standing in front of her.
"I happened to be downtown and decided to stop by and see if Nicky—Mr. Sinclair—is free for lunch," she informed Lauren. "Don't bother announcing me, I'll just go in."
A few minutes later, Vicky and Nick strolled out of his office together, heading toward the elevators. Nick's hand was resting familiarly at the small of her back, and he was grinning at whatever she was telling him.
Lauren swung back around to her typewriter. She hated Vicky Stewart's drawl; she hated the possessive way she looked at Nick; she hated the woman's breathless laugh. In fact, she loathed everything about her and she knew exactly why—Lauren was hopelessly, completely, irrevocably in love with Nick Sinclair.
She adored everything about him, from the aura of power and authority that surrounded him, to the energetic confidence in his long strides, to the way he looked when he was deep in thought. She loved the way he wore his expensive clothes, the way he absently rolled his gold pen in his hand when he was listening to someone on the telephone. He was, she decided with an aching sense of tormented hopelessness, the most forceful, compelling, dynamic man in the world. And he had never seemed further beyond her reach.
"Don't worry too much, my dear," Mary Callahan said, getting up to leave for lunch. "There have been many Vicky Stewarts in his life in the past. They don't last long."
The reassurance only made Lauren feel worse. She'd suspected that Mary not only knew everything that had happened between Nick and herself in the past, but that she also knew exactly how Lauren felt about Nick now. "I don't care what he does!" she said with angry pride.
"Is that right?" Mary retorted with a smile, and left for lunch.
Nick didn't return until afternoon, and Lauren wondered furiously whose bed they had gone to—his or Vicky's.
By the time she left the office, she was so overwrought with jealousy and so filled with self-loathing for loving such an unprincipled libertine that she had a splitting headache. At home she wandered aimlessly around the elegant living room.
Being near Nick was hurting her more every day. She had to leave Sinco—she couldn't bear to be so close to him, to love him as she did and have to watch him with other women. To have him look at her as if she was a piece of office equipment whose presence offended him but whom he was obliged out of necessity to have nearby.
Lauren had a sudden wild longing to tell both Nick Sinclair and Philip Whitworth to go to hell, to pack up and go home to her parents, her friends. But of course she couldn't do that. They needed…
Abruptly she stopped pacing, her mind seizing on a solution that should have occurred to her before. There were other large corporations in Detroit that needed good secretaries and that
paid high salaries for them. When she bought the ingredients for Jim's birthday cake that night she would also buy a newspaper. Beginning immediately she would start looking for another job.
In the meantime, she would phone Jonathan Van Slyke, whom she had studied under for the past year, and offer to let him buy her grand piano. He had wanted it the moment he'd laid eyes on it.
Despite the dull ache she felt at the prospect of selling it, Lauren felt peaceful for the first time in weeks. She would find an inexpensive little apartment and move out of this place. Until then she would do the best job she could at Sinco—and if she happened to hear one of the names Philip had given her, she would forget it just as soon as she heard it. Philip was going to have to do his own dirty work. She could not and would not betray Nick.
16
« ^ »
Lauren walked across the marble lobby the next morning, carefully balancing the box with Jim's birthday cake inside it as well as a gaily wrapped package that held the gray sweater. She felt relaxed and lighthearted, and she smiled as an elderly man wearing a brown suit stepped back in the elevator to give her more room.
The elevator stopped on the thirtieth floor, and the doors opened. Lauren noted that directly across the hall was an office door bearing a nameplate that read, Global Industries Security Division.
"Excuse me," the man in the brown suit said. "This is my floor."
Lauren shifted to one side, and he maneuvered past her. She watched him walk across the hall to the security office.
The security divisions' primary function was to protect Global Industries' manufacturing facilities, particularly those outlying facilities throughout the country where actual research was under way, or where government contracts were involved. However, here at headquarters the security division mostly processed paperwork from the field. As director in Detroit Jack Collins felt rather bored, but his failing health and advancing age had forced him to leave the field and accept this desk job.
His assistant, an over-eager, round-faced young man named Rudy, was sitting with his feet propped up on his desk when Jack walked into the office. "What's up?" the younger man asked, hastily sitting up straight.