One Wild Night. Heidi Rice
since he had the gall to look surprised to see her.
She couldn’t form words. Every phrase she’d practiced on the drive was trapped behind the anger choking her.
While the blond-haired assistant sputtered behind her, a matronly woman rose from the chair in front of Chris’s desk. As she turned, Ally saw both concern and, oddly, affection in her eyes.
“You must be Ally. You’re even lovelier in person.” The woman’s kind smile and gentle pat to Ally’s arm as she passed seemed surreal. “Let’s go, Grace.”
The older woman ushered the younger one out and closed the door behind her, leaving Ally alone with Chris, who looked remarkably calm and unperturbed for someone who’d just served enough legal papers on her to put that lawyer’s child through college with the expense.
“Would you like to sit?” Chris came around from behind his desk and gestured toward the chair the woman had just vacated.
Had she crossed into the freaking Twilight Zone? “I don’t know if I should. You’d probably use my decision to sit against me later.”
She couldn’t tell if the slight inclination of Chris’s head was meant to be mocking or conciliatory as he perched on the edge of the desk. The jerk.
“I expected I’d hear from you today. I kind of assumed you’d call, though.”
Molly had suggested the same thing, claiming distance would make it easier to deal with Chris and his outrageous demands. She’d been too mad to listen. “You questioned my competency, my fitness to be a parent. You’re demanding my medical records and serving me with an order to keep me from traveling outside Georgia or South Carolina, and you wonder why I came to confront you in person? Maybe we should be questioning your mental stability.”
“Actually, my attorney did all of that. I just told him I wanted my child and that you were unwilling to come to an agreement.”
How dare he try to blame her for this? “So you decided to serve all this—” she tossed the envelope onto the desk “—on me? It won’t work. I’m not going to let you take custody of this baby. I’ll fight you.”
“But you won’t win.”
A red haze clouded her vision, and she curled her hands into fists, her nails digging into her palms. “This is the twenty-first century. I have rights, and no judge in the universe would rule in your favor. I’m not incompetent.” She lifted her chin in defiance. That much she was sure of. She was the poster child of competency.
“Maybe not, but it’ll still cost you buckets of money to prove it.”
All the air left her lungs at his matter-of-fact pronouncement, but Chris just shrugged. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but it doesn’t really matter if I can do half of what’s in that envelope. My lawyers will serve you with motion after motion, and you’ll be forced to respond to each one.”
The possibility of a long, legal battle sobered her. It wouldn’t matter if she was in the right; the repercussions would be horrific—not only on her, but on her family, on Molly, on the baby. Especially on the baby.
“Zillion-dollar endorsement deals will buy a lot of legal expertise, Ally.”
Dear God, he was right. She didn’t have the money to fight. She’d be bankrupt just responding to a fraction of the motions in that envelope. And if she couldn’t fight him, would he win simply by default? Her stomach dropped. She’d made a horrific mistake in angering him, and she’d walked straight into this mess with her pride and anger. But what could she do now?
Chris seemed to realize when that last thought crystallized for her. He indicated for her to sit again, and took the other chair. “Maybe now you’ll be more open to negotiation.”
Negotiation? Just the two of them? She looked carefully for the trap, but Chris’s face was the picture of friendliness and conciliation. Oh, she’d love to kill him. “You mean to tell me…You did this to…This was all just scare tactics?” Hesitant relief now mingled with her earlier anger, and the emotional toll left her drained as her head spun. As much as she’d like to turn on her heel and march out of there, she needed to sit.
“No, not just scare tactics. If we can’t come to a workable solution, I will do whatever it takes. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”
She tried to sort her scrambled thoughts, but those blue eyes locked on hers didn’t help the process. She’d spent the past three days trying to figure out what to do, and she wasn’t any closer to a solution than she was when Chris had stormed off her front porch. Trying to balance what was right for the baby with what would be good for them both in the long run…Chris’s arrival had thrown all of her carefully made plans into the wind.
Then those papers had arrived and she hadn’t been able to think at all. Chris’s sudden willingness to be reasonable just brought back all of her earlier problems—this time coupled with the suspicion she wasn’t going to like these negotiations.
Anger had kept her not-just-in-the-morning sickness at bay so far today, but as it ebbed, nausea swept back in. She fumbled in her purse for the bag of saltine crackers stashed there. She nibbled slowly on one, grateful for the stalling tactic, as Chris frowned. Then he left, returning a minute later with a paper cup.
“Ginger ale. It should help.”
She nodded her thanks and sipped carefully. A few deep breaths later, her stomach settled some and the queasiness waned.
“I’m guessing discussing this over lunch is out of the question?”
Looking up, she saw a hint of laughter in those blue eyes, and the corner of his mouth twitched. He found her nausea amusing, did he? Next time, she’d just let fly on his shoes. See how funny he thought that was. “I’ll stick with the crackers.”
Of course, sitting in Chris’s office with those horrible papers still on his desk waiting for him to tell her what he wanted from her wasn’t helping her stomach much, either. Chris certainly had the upper hand in this “negotiation,” and she knew it. You have no one to blame but yourself, her conscience nagged. You fired the opening shot. She needed to forget about her stomach and focus on keeping Chris reasonable—
“How’s your brother?”
The change in topic jarred her, and she looked at him blankly.
“Your brother got hurt. That’s why you left Tortola so suddenly, right?”
How’d he know that? “He’s fine now. He flipped a dirt bike in a race and it landed on him. He was banged up a bit, but Mom just did her usual freak-out and I had to come sort everything…” Don’t give him more ammunition to use against you later. Her batty family was a liability now. Great. She tried to shrug off the statement. “You know how moms are.”
Chris didn’t answer. Instead, he leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs at the ankles, looking far more relaxed than was at all fair, considering the emotional mess she was at the moment. “And you’re in business with your best friend. That’s interesting. You’re a bookkeeper, correct?”
These questions she could answer properly. Nothing about AMI could possibly be used against her later. “Bookkeeping and general accounting, payroll, taxes—we do it all. My degrees are in accounting and finance, and Molly is also a CPA.” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice. “We’ve been in business for six years now and we operate totally in the black. Our clientele continues to grow, and we’ve won several small business awards…” At Chris’s amused smile, she stopped. “What’s so funny?”
“This isn’t an interview. You don’t need to read me your résumé.”
Confusion reigned. “Then why did you ask?”
Chris sighed. “I’m trying to get to know you a bit better. We’re about to have a baby together, and we hardly