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Chapter 1
Marlowe Colton had always thought that one of the perks of being the president of Colton Oil was having her very own private, luxurious en suite bathroom installed within her rather cavernous office.
An en suite bathroom where she was currently having her very own private nervous breakdown as she stared at a small white stick that had the audacity to mock her with a glaring pink plus sign.
Her breathing grew shorter and more erratic as she continued to stare at the awful, incriminating stick. Her stomach kept tightening until it had twisted itself into a hard, painful knot.
Marlowe realized that she was sweating even as she felt a cold chill shooting down her spine and passing over every part of her body.
And the nausea was back. In spades. Any second now, she was going to throw up.
Again.
“No, you’re a Colton,” she told the unusually pale blonde looking back at her in the mirror. “You’re not going to throw up. You’re not!” she insisted.
Marlowe blinked back tears. They weren’t tears of joy, or tears of sorrow. What she felt stinging her eyes were angry tears. Angry tears that were aimed at no one but herself.
How could she have let this happen? One stupid moment of intoxicated but entirely willing weakness and longing and now here she was, in the throes of morning sickness.
It wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t.
And yet the stick in her hand told her it was all too possible.
It was a reality.
The white stick had come out of the discarded white box that was now haphazardly sitting on the edge of the sink. The pharmacist had assured her that this product was supposed to be the best, the most accurate pregnancy test on the market. She truly doubted that it had made a mistake.
Besides, if she was being completely honest with herself, the thought that she was pregnant had been in the back of her mind for the last six weeks. Ever since she had lost her head and her iron grip on her emotions by succumbing to the sexy, dark good looks and charms that she had been all but bred to hate. Because the man on the other side of that bed six weeks ago had a father who hated her father, and that feeling was very, very mutual.
What in the name of all that was good and proper had she been thinking? Marlowe silently demanded of her reflection.
That was just it—she hadn’t been thinking. For once in her career-driven life, she hadn’t been thinking at all, just feeling. Or at least telling herself that she’d been feeling. Feeling an overwhelming attraction to a man she had viewed as the enemy for as far back as she could remember.
This was what came of trying to behave civilly toward someone who she had been taught did not deserve to be treated with any sort of respect.
All of her life, Marlowe had done exactly what was expected of her—and then some. She was a Colton, and Coltons were supposed to behave a certain way. At least Payne Colton’s daughter was supposed to behave in a certain way.
She closed her eyes, fighting another strong, rising wave of stomach-lining-destroying nausea as it tried to claw its way up her throat.
If only she hadn’t gone to that stupid energy conference...
Or, at the very least, if she hadn’t spent so much time arguing with Bowie Robertson, president of Robertson Renewable Energy Company, over proposed pipelines and the environmental consequences they could have. The argument went on and on relentlessly until everyone else at the conference had withdrawn for the night. That left just the two of them to continue the argument on their own.
How heated words had somehow given way to splitting a bottle of champagne—or had that been two bottles?—she still really wasn’t clear about. But somewhere along the line, their different philosophies and the eternal ongoing rivalries that defined their lives had just somehow managed to melt away, leaving nothing to get in the way of a very real and exceedingly strong attraction that had mysteriously taken root and been growing between them for who knew how long.
Marlowe could remember only bits and pieces of their night together after that. One of those bits and pieces had included a very strong desire to be, for once in her life, swept away, for the space of at least that one isolated evening.
An evening that became free of thoughts about rivalries, corporate profits and even the ever-increasing concerns about green energy being a threat to her family’s oil company.
Just one carefree evening, that was all she had wanted, Marlowe thought.
And now this stick and its menacing, mocking pink cross were exacting a price for those frivolous few hours of passion she had spent.
A price she had never, even in her wildest dreams, been prepared to face up to and pay.
That wasn’t to say that she didn’t want children. She did, Marlowe thought. She did want children. But just not now.
And definitely not with him.
They hadn’t even spoken a single word to each other since that fateful night, as if silence was actually an acceptable way of denying that those few hours of unabashed passionate consorting—of wild, consensual lovemaking—had ever happened.
But not talking about it, not acknowledging that it took place, was not a way of wiping that night’s existence out of the annals of time. The pregnancy test clearly testified that it had happened, she thought ruefully, frowning at the offending mark on the white stick. And that, in turn, had most definitely produced a consequence. A very big consequence.
Marlowe felt her throat closing up. What the hell was she going to do now?
The question throbbed insistently over and over again in her brain. But no matter how many times she asked herself, she came up with the same answer.
She didn’t know.
She had absolutely not even a glimmer of an idea what she was going to do about this.
The only thing that she did know was that her father was going to see this pregnancy—and how it came about—as nothing short of a personal betrayal of him of the first order.
“I wasn’t thinking of you at the time, Dad,” Marlowe whispered to the man who wasn’t there in person but was somehow always around Colton Oil headquarters in spirit. Payne Colton was the reason behind everything she did.
The truth of the matter was that her father had always been a very strong presence in her life, influencing, in one way or another, her every move, practically her every thought.
But not that night.
That night the intrusive spirit of Payne Colton had been utterly absent. At least, he had been by the time she and Bowie Robertson, drunk on champagne and each other, had gone up to her suite at the Dales Inn.
The Dales Inn was the only hotel in town, and coincidentally it was also where the green energy conference was being held.
To someone viewing this from the outside, with everything that was going against them—feuding fathers, rival companies—that night she and Bowie might have come across as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Except, once the dust had settled again, they were much more like the Hatfields and the McCoys, but with the Coltons focusing on drilling oil wells and the Robertsons worrying about environmental impact.
She sighed, holding her head with one hand. There was no happy ending in sight here.
But then, she remembered, there hadn’t been one for Romeo and Juliet, either.
Her head was really beginning to hurt, Marlowe thought. And it didn’t exactly help her condition any to have both her desk phone and the cell phone she had left next to it when she’d walked into the bathroom ringing like crazy now. The phones sounded as if they were jointly heralding the end of the world and doing so just slightly out of sync.
Maybe they were, she thought darkly, still staring at the offending stick.
“Why don’t they shut up?” she cried, helplessly putting her hands over her ears.
As if that would stop the noise, Marlowe thought angrily.
She rose to her feet—her legs felt oddly shaky, she realized, holding on to the wall for a moment to get her balance—and opened the bathroom door and glared accusingly at the offending phones.
If they were both ringing like that, something had to be very, very wrong, she thought.
Something other than an offending white stick with its glaring pink cross.
Taking a deep breath, Marlowe made her way over to her wide custom-built desk. Part of her was hoping that the ringing would abruptly stop by the time she reached the phones.
No such luck.
Braced for almost anything—after all, the worst possible thing had already happened, she reasoned—Marlowe picked up her multiline desk phone. Thinking it was one of the company’s many administrative assistants on the other end, she said tersely, “Okay, this had better be good.”
