Six
In the small office Carrick had allocated to her at Murphy’s International, Sadie sat back in her chair and glared at her monitor. She had a ton of work to do, but she’d lost her ability to concentrate.
Carrick had strolled into her brain, plopped himself down and refused to leave.
Dammit.
Sadie pushed her laptop away and placed her arms on the desk, resting her chin on her fist. In a little more than a month her world had been flipped on its head, the plan of her life rewritten and reimagined.
Who knew that when she’d taken this job, a few scant weeks later she’d find herself pregnant and crazy obsessed over a man who made her blood sing?
Sadie thought back to her conversation with Hassan and, forcing herself to be as unemotional as possible, remembered his thoughtful comments on her situation. Was Carrick simply not good for Tamlyn or was he not good to her? Were Boston society’s perceptions fair?
In Carrick, she’d seen no trace of the man who’d treated Tamlyn badly, who was verbally abusive, who thought the sun dimmed when he sat down.
Carrick was tough, sure—he had to be to run a multinational, successful business like Murphy’s—and he took no prisoners, but so far, she hadn’t seen the jerky man Tamlyn had told her about. Not in the way he spoke to his staff, his brothers, his friends.
Her.
Sadie sighed. Maybe she was hoping he wasn’t the man Tamlyn and Beth said he was; maybe she wanted him to be a better version of himself with her; maybe she was seeing Carrick naively. He was the father of her unborn child, the man who took her from zero to horny in six seconds flat. It was natural for her to want to see the best in him.
And she couldn’t help remembering that she’d also only seen the best side of Dennis before the wedding. It was only when they were back in Boston, juggling the demands of two successful careers, both traveling internationally, when the ugliness started to creep in.
Like all things, it had started small...
She desperately wanted to believe that Carrick wasn’t another Dennis, that she wasn’t misjudging him. Would Carrick also eventually turn out to be a bastard? If she believed Tamlyn and Beth, then he would.
If she had to trust her intuition, she believed he wouldn’t.
But she’d trusted her intuition before and it had proved to be as faulty as a badly wired house.
Sadie rested her forehead on her bent arms, conscious of a headache building behind her eyes. She took a couple of deep breaths, felt her tension levels drop and told herself she was stressing about this for nothing. She wasn’t going to marry Carrick, nor fall in love with him.
If he showed himself to be a bastard to her child, she’d make sure her baby was protected.
She wouldn’t have these crazy thoughts running around her head if she hadn’t slept with Carrick a second time. But she had to be honest here; she had no intention of not having sex with him in the immediate future.
Oh, she knew there would come a time when she’d feel too big, too uncomfortable, to think about sex, but that was half a year away. In less than a year, her life would be coated with an extra layer of crazy and she doubted that, between the baby and her job, she’d have the time to date, or have any interest in doing so.
Carrick would move on—why did that feel like acid splashing on her soul?—and she’d be a single mom wrestling her way through motherhood.
Until then she’d take this time, this reprieve, and do everything within reason that she wouldn’t be able to do when she had the responsibility of a child.
And that included sleeping with, and not falling for, the very sexy Carrick Murphy.
“What are you frowning about?”
Sadie jerked her head up and looked toward the door. Think about the sexy devil and he arrives.
Sadie lifted a hand and sent him a quick smile. “Just general frustration.”
“Baby or art-related?”
“Both,” Sadie said as he leaned his shoulder into the door frame. His tie was pulled down from his open collar and lay flat against the white button-down shirt tucked into a pair of tailored pants.
Judging by his tired eyes and messy hair, the day had kicked his ass and she fought the urge to stand up and wrap her arms around his waist and hug him tight.
She suspected Carrick was the tree many people relied on for shelter from the sun, wind and rain, tall and broad and protective. But who protected him from the elements? Where did he lay his head?