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“I—”
“You shouldn’t have waited, Mr. Burkett.” Her voice sounded like tearing cloth. She was either mad as hell or on the edge of hysteria. He couldn’t be sure which, but this was the most emotion he’d ever seen from her. Her cheeks were red. The calm, cool, and collected lady of the manor was about to lose it. “Why didn’t you just go?”
Quietly he said, “Your car has mine blocked in.”
In an instant, her posture went from rigid to limp. She released her breath slowly, touched her forehead with the tips of her fingers, then her flaming cheek with the backs of them, looked embarrassed. “Oh.”
“I would have moved it myself, but you had the keys.”
He gestured toward her handbag. She looked down where it hung at her side. “Right.” Then, changing back into the got-it-together businesswoman persona, she said, “I apologize for holding you up.”
“No problem.”
“You should have come and told me.”
“If it helps to keep lying down after…you know…I didn’t mind waiting awhile. The whole point of this is to get you pregnant.”
She nodded, then consulted her wristwatch. “I must go or I’m going to be late for a meeting. Will you reset the thermostat, please?”
“Sure.”
“Just pull the door closed after you. It will lock. I’ll be in touch, one way or the other.”
She couldn’t get out of there fast enough, and her haste to leave made him feel ornery. He had decided he wasn’t going to say anything. If he was smart, he wouldn’t.
But.
He said, “I wondered why you would go along with this, Mrs. Speakman.”
Already halfway through the entry, she halted, turned, looked at him. “You know why, Mr. Burkett. I want a child.”
“But this?” He tapped his fly, then motioned toward her middle. The gesture caused a frisson in her cool bearing. Some of the high color came back into her cheeks. He went to her, stopping only a few steps away. “After meeting both of you, I could almost understand your husband.”
“Your understanding isn’t important to us. Or necessary.”
“Okay. Say I wanted to understand for my own peace of mind. Your husband is eccentric, maybe even altogether crazy, but looking at this child and heir thing from his point of view, from a rich man’s point of view, I could sorta get it. Sorta.” He shook his head, frowning with perplexity. “But you, I just couldn’t figure.”
“So don’t bother trying.”
He took another step closer, crowding her, making her uncomfortable, wanting to because in the bedroom she had made him feel like a vandal ravaging the village virgin. “Why, I asked myself, would you agree to making a baby this way?” His eyes held hers. He lowered his voice. “And now I know.”
Coldly, she said, “Now?”
“Now that I know why your husband is in that wheelchair.”
I can do this, Laura asserted to herself as she entered the conference room. Everyone else had assembled. She moved to the head of the table. “Sorry I’m late.”
“We promise not to tell Foster,” one of the department heads quipped.
“Thank you. We all know that punctuality is a religion to him.”
“Long lunch?” someone teased.
Her hand faltered just a bit as she reached for the water carafe. “No, just an errand that took longer than I anticipated.”
The errand hadn’t taken that long. Her recovery from it had. She wondered how women who had extramarital affairs in the middle of the day completed their afternoons with any level of composure. She’d been certain that when she returned to her office, her assistant, Kay, would look at her with accusation and say, “You’ve just had sex.”
But apparently there were no visible signs of how she’d spent her lunch hour. Kay had treated her as she always did, efficiently reminding her of the meeting as she handed her a stack of phone messages in the order of their priority.
