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“Well, someone sure as hell faked evidence. Maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe you’re not inherently dishonest. Maybe you’re just a sloppy reporter.”
“Who do you think you are?” she demanded as she went toe-to-toe with him.
For a second—just a second—he was distracted by her flashing eyes and flushed skin. By her honeysuckle-and-vanilla scent. By her warmth. But then her words sank in and he found his temper flashing from dangerous to boiling point in the space of one breath and the next.
“Who do I think I am?” he repeated. “I don’t think anything, sweetheart. I know exactly who I am. I’m the man whose career—and hundred-year-old family business—you set out to ruin on a whim. I’m the man you have accused of the vilest crimes and human rights violations imaginable. I’m the man you slept with to get a story and then dropped the moment you realized I wouldn’t be useful to you.”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything you haven’t done. And I didn’t drop you. You dropped me.”
He stared at her, speechless. For a moment, he honestly feared his head would explode. “Is that how you do it?” he wondered aloud. “Is that how you justify the lives you ruin? You just rewrite history to fit whatever version you need it to fit? You need a big story to break your career wide open? No problem. It’s easy to manufacture evidence. You w
ant to forget that you slept with me to get a story? That’s easy. Just pretend I didn’t text you for weeks trying to get you to talk to me.” He threw his arms wide. “You’ve missed your calling, Desi. Oops, I mean D.E. You shouldn’t be a journalist. You should be a fiction writer. You’d probably top the charts with your very first book.”
She didn’t answer him for long seconds. Instead she just stared at him with her jaw locked and her eyes as cold and blue as the Pacific in the middle of a midwinter temper tantrum.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she finally said.
“You know, you’re going to call me a liar one time too many and then…”
“And then what?”
He was too stunned by her brazenness and her sheer lack of remorse to answer.
“That’s what I thought,” she sneered. “You’ve got nothing.”
Rage exploded within him, mixed with disbelief and confusion and more attraction than he wanted to admit to, and Nic finally snapped. Taking a step forward, he crowded her against her desk before closing the last inches between them. But the second his body brushed against hers, he knew he’d made a mistake. Because with that first touch, the low-grade attraction that had hummed between them from the moment he’d said her name exploded into a conflagration of fiery want and desperate need.
He wasn’t the only one affected. He could see Desi’s awareness in her flushed skin. Could hear it in her ragged breathing and feel it in the not-quite-steady hands she pressed against his chest.
“What are you doing?” she whispered as he pressed even closer.
“I don’t have a clue,” he admitted.
“Then maybe you should stop.”
“Maybe I should. But if you want me to do that, you probably shouldn’t hold me quite so tightly.” He glanced down to where she had tangled her fingers in his dress shirt.
She gasped then, started to pull back. But he didn’t let her. Instead, he held her in place with one hand on her hip and the other between her shoulder blades.
Time stopped as they stood there, bodies locked together in a too-intimate bid for dominance—of the situation and each other. He didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know what he was pushing for. All he knew was that part of him wanted to punish her for what she’d put him through but the other part of him wanted nothing more than to take her back to his house and make love to her until she screamed his name. Until she couldn’t even think of defying him again.
They might have stayed there forever in their oddly intimate standoff, except just as Nic shifted to make sure she was comfortable, he felt a small but very definite kick against his abdomen.
“What was that?” he demanded, jumping back.
“That,” she said, looking pointedly down at her gently rounded stomach, “is why I left you a voice mail.”
Eight
She couldn’t tell if Nic looked more stupefied or stupid as he gazed down at the firm curve of her stomach. “Close your mouth,” she told him after a minute, “or you’ll end up catching flies.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” She didn’t mean to be flippant, but come on. How long was he going to keep up this charade? After trying to get him on the phone three different times, she’d finally given up and broken the news to him in a voice mail. And she hadn’t been delicate about the information, either. She’d told him, straight up, that she was pregnant and that she’d very much like it if he’d call her back.
Needless to say, he hadn’t.
And now, here he was, looking completely shocked by her baby bump seconds after he’d accused her of falsifying evidence for her article. Which was total and complete bull. She’d double-, triple- and quadruple-checked everything in that article, so for him to come around here beating his chest and threatening her just because he didn’t like what she’d found out…well, that wasn’t exactly her problem, was it?
