Double Standards (16 page)

During the next half hour, as they circulated among the guests, Lauren became increasingly convinced that she was right about Jim and Ericka, and that her boss was trying to make both Nick and Ericka jealous. Whenever Ericka glanced in their direction, Jim would smile at Lauren or tease her about something. Lauren cooperated by trying to look as if she was having a positively wonderful time—but she did so for his sake, not for hers. In her shattered heart she knew that Nick didn't care what she did or with whom she did it.

She was sipping her second drink when Jim suddenly slipped his arm around her. She was so surprised that she overlooked the warning squeeze of his hand at her waist. "The group standing over there," he said with a deliberate smile, "is the board of directors—all wealthy, industrialists in their own right. The man on the left is Ericka's father, Horace Moran. Horace's family," he explained, "has been in oil for generations."

"How dreadfully uncomfortable for them," Lauren joked, comically batting her eyelashes to make him laugh.

Jim shot her a warning look,
then
he continued, "The man beside him is Crawford Jones. Crawford's family, and his wife's family, as well, are in bonds."

"I wonder why someone doesn't cut them
loose?
" Lauren teased.

"Because," said an achingly familiar, laughing voice right behind her, "Crawford and his wife are both ugly, and no one wants them running around loose, frightening little children."

Lauren's whole body snapped into rigidity at the sound of Nick's deep baritone,
then
she forced herself to turn. One look at the amusement in his gray eyes as he waited for her reaction made her pride come to her aid. Although she was crumbling into a thousand pieces inside, she managed to smile as she put her hand into his. "Hello, Nick."

His fingers closed around hers. "Hello, Lauren," he said, grinning.

She carefully pulled back her hand,
then
turned a bright, expectant smile on Ericka, whom Jim promptly introduced to her.

"I've been admiring your dress all evening, Lauren," Ericka said. "It's stunning."

"T
hank
you." Without looking at Nick, Lauren added, "I noticed your dress the moment we walked in." Then she turned to Jim. "Oh, there's Mr. Simon. He's been trying to talk to you all evening, Jim." With the last remaining ounce of her vanishing poise, Lauren raised her blue eyes to Nick's inscrutable features and said politely, "Will you excuse us, please?"

Shortly afterward Jim became absorbed in a conversation with a vice-president, so Lauren made an effort to be charming and witty and to manage on her own. She was soon surrounded by a flatteringly large cluster of interested, admiring males, and for the rest of the evening she scrupulously avoided looking in Nick's direction. Twice she accidentally turned and encountered his piercing stare, and both times she casually looked right past him, as if she was searching for someone else. But after three hours, the tension of being in the same room with him had become unbearable.

She needed some solitude, a few minutes' respite from the constant pull of his presence. She looked for Jim and saw him standing near the bar, talking to a group of men. Lauren waited until she caught his attention, then she tipped her head slightly toward the sliding glass doors that opened onto the outdoor patio portion of the restaurant. He nodded, his expression telling her that he would join her there.

Turning, she slipped out doors into the welcome quiet of the cool evening. Wrapped in the velvet blackness of the night, she walked over to the chest-high wall that surrounded the patio restaurant and gazed at the glittering panorama of lights fanning out for miles, eighty-one stories below. She had succeeded—she had managed to treat Nick with a perfect combination of impersonal friendliness and smiling disregard. No recriminations, no justifiable indignation because he hadn't called her. He must have been amazed by her attitude, Lauren thought with tired satisfaction, as she lifted her glass and sipped her drink.

Behind her, she heard the whisper of the sliding glass door opening and closing, and she resigned herself to the loss of her badly needed solitude. Jim had come out to join her. "How am I doing so far?" she asked, forcing a cheerful lightness into her voice.

"You're doing very well," Nick's lazy voice mocked. "I'm half convinced that I'm invisible."

Lauren's hand shook so violently that the ice cubes in her glass clinked together. She turned slowly, trying to gather her scattered wits. She should be unconcerned and urbane, she reminded herself, as if what had happened between them had meant no more to her than it had to him. She forced her gaze upward past his white shirt and striped tie, to his humor-filled eyes. "It's a lovely party," she commented.

"Have you missed me?"

Lauren's own eyes widened with pretended innocence. "I've been very busy."

Nick walked over to the wall, leaned his elbow on it and studied her in silence. He watched the breeze blowing her shimmering hair across her bare shoulder before he shifted his gaze back to her face. "So," he said with a smile, "you haven't missed me at all?"

"I've been busy," Lauren repeated, but her composure slipped a notch and she added, "And why should I miss you? You aren't the only willing and available man in
Michigan
."

His dark brow flicked upward in amused speculation. "Is that your way of telling me that after you tried sex with me, you decided you liked it and you've been… ah… adding to your experience?"

Dear God! He didn't even
care
if she'd gone to bed with other men.

"Now that you've had other men to use as a basis for comparison, how do I rate?" he teased.

"That's an adolescent question," Lauren retorted scornfully.

"You're right. Let's go." Tossing down the remainder of his drink in one swallow, he put his glass on one of the tables, took hers and put it beside his, then caught her hand. He twisted his wrist and laced his strong fingers through hers, and Lauren was so giddily aware of his warm fingers firmly clasping hers that she didn't stop to think until he had started to lead her toward an unidentified door around the corner of the building.

When he reached out to open the door, sanity returned, and she drew back. "Nick, I would like to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer." He nodded and she said, "When I left you in Harbor Springs, did you ever intend to see me again—I mean
,
to take me out?"

Nick looked at her levelly. "No."

She was still reeling from the blow of that one word when he reached out again to open the door. "Where are we going?"

"To my place, or yours, it doesn't matter."

"Why?" she asked obstinately.

He turned and looked at her. "For a smart girl, that's a very stupid question."

Lauren's temper exploded. "You are the most arrogant, egotistical
… !"
She stopped long enough to draw a steadying breath and said tightly, "I can't handle casual, indiscriminate sex, and what's more, I don't like people who can—people like you!"

"You liked me rather well four weeks ago," he reminded her coolly.

Her color rose and her eyes blazed. "Four weeks ago I thought you were someone special!" she shot back angrily. "Four weeks ago, I didn't know you were a licentious millionaire playboy who changes beds as often as you change clothes. You're everything I despise in a man—you're unprincipled, promiscuous and morally corrupt! You're ruthless and selfish, and if I'd have known who you really were, I wouldn't have given you the time of day!"

Nick's eyes raked the tempestuous young beauty standing before him in all her scornful defiance. In a dangerously soft voice, he challenged, "But now that you do know who and what I am you don't want anything to do with me? Is that right?"

"That's right!" Lauren hissed, "And I'll—" In one swift motion he caught her shoulders, jerked her into his arms, and captured her lips in a kiss of savage, insolent sensuality. The instant he touched her, every fiber of Lauren's being quickened with longing to know again the incredible pleasure of his hard body driving deeply into hers. Her arms went around his neck, and she arched against his hardening length. Nick groaned, gentling the kiss and deepening it hungrily. "This is insane," he muttered, his mouth tormenting hers with promises of his possession. ''Anyone could walk out here and see us."

And then his mouth was gone. He let her go, and Lauren leaned weakly against the railing behind her. "Are you coming?" he asked. She shook her head. "No, I told you—"

"Spare me your lecture on my morality," he cut her off icily. "Go find some man as naive as you are, and the two of you can fumble in the dark and learn together, if that's what you want."

Like a deep, clean cut that doesn't bleed for several moments after the wound is inflicted, Lauren was blessedly numb to the pain of his words; she felt only fury. "Wait," she said, as he pulled the door open, "your mistress, or your girlfriend, or whatever Ericka is, has my mother's earrings. I left them in her bed, in her house, with her lover. She's welcome to you—I don't want you. But I do want my mother's earrings back." The pain was beginning to seep through her like a steady ache, intensifying with each moment until her voice shook with it. "I want those earrings back…"

The ceiling above Lauren's bed was a shadowy void as dismal as her heart as she went over the parting scene with Nick. He had brought Ericka to the party, but he had wanted to leave with Lauren. At least tonight he must have desired her more than he desired Ericka. Perhaps she'd been a fool not to go with him.

Furiously she rolled onto her stomach. Where was her pride and self-respect? How could she even consider having some fleeting, sordid relationship with that arrogant, unprincipled libertine? She would not think of him anymore. She would put him out of her mind. Permanently!

«
^
»

W
ith that resolution firmly implanted in her mind
, Lauren drove to work on Monday and threw herself wholeheartedly into her job.

At noontime some of the other secretaries invited her to join them for drinks after work at a local pub, and Lauren happily agreed. When she returned from lunch, the phone on her desk was ringing. Putting down her purse, she glanced over her shoulder into Jim's empty office,
then
answered it. "Miss Danner?" It was Mr. Weatherby. "Please report to me in the personnel department immediately."

"We haven't much time, so I'll be brief," Mr. Weatherby said five minutes later, when Lauren was seated in his office. "To begin with, I should explain that the information contained on every employee's application for employment is automatically fed into the Global Industries computers. Then, whenever a project requires someone with specialized skills or talents, the personnel department is notified and a computer search is made. This morning the director of Global Industries personnel received a top priority call for an experienced, skilled secretary who is fluent in Italian.
You
are the computer's selection. Actually, you're the computer's second choice. The first was a woman named Lucia Palermo, who has worked on this project before, but she is on sick leave.

"You should expect to be away from your regular position every afternoon for the next three weeks. I will notify Mr. Williams of your reassignment when he returns from lunch, and I'll arrange for another secretary to work for him in the afternoons while you're working on this project."

Lauren's objections to this arbitrary reassignment tumbled out in a flow of disjointed words. "But I'm still trying to learn my present
job,
and Jim—Mr. Williams—isn't going to be at all pleased about—"

"Mr. Williams has no choice," he interrupted coolly. "I don't know the exact nature of the project that requires your fluency in Italian, but I do know it is top priority, confidential." He stood up. "You are to report to Mr. Sinclair's office immediately."

"Whaaat?"
Lauren gasped, leaping to her feet in alarm. "Does Mr. Sinclair know I'm the one who's being assigned to him?"

Mr. Weatherby gave her a withering look. "Mr. Sinclair is in a meeting at present, and his secretary did not feel that he should be interrupted to discuss this minor substitution."

An atmosphere of suppressed excitement seemed to pervade the eightieth floor as Lauren walked across the thick, emerald green carpeting toward the circular desk in the center of Nick's private reception area. "My name is Lauren Danner," she told the receptionist, a beautiful brunette. "Mr. Sinclair requested a bilingual secretary, and I've been sent here from personnel."

The receptionist glanced over her shoulder as the doors to Nick's office opened and six men emerged. "I'll tell Mr. Sinclair that you're here," she said politely. As she reached for the telephone it began to ring, and she picked it up. With her hand over the mouthpiece, she whispered to Lauren, "Just go on in. Mr. Sinclair is expecting you."

No
, Lauren thought nervously,
he's expecting Lucia Palermo
.

The tall rosewood doors to Nick's office were slightly ajar, and he was standing behind his desk, his back to her, talking to someone on the telephone. Drawing a deep breath, Lauren walked into the immense cream-carpeted suite and silently closed the doors behind her.