Candy Halliday – Lady And The Scamp: Lady And The Scamp / The Doctor Dilemma (страница 9)

Cassie sputtered in her champagne and jerked her head around in time to see that the woman’s rude comment had brought Nick to a mid-stride stop. Turning slowly back to face them again, he wore the same cocky grin she remembered from the morning she first found Nick swimming naked in his pool. She shivered.

“Oh, by the way, counselor,” Nick called across a room that was now so quiet Cassie could hear her own breathing. “You never did telephone me with the results of that pregnancy test.”

“Dear Heavenly Father…” Evelyn Van Arbor wailed, and dropped the champagne glass she was holding in her wrinkled, diamond-laden hand.

Cassie instantly sprang forward and grabbed Nick by the arm before he could slither off into the sea of people, who were all now staring in their direction. Pulling him toward the exit door, she managed to push Nick outside onto the large veranda that ran along the back side of the inn. But by the time she hurried out the door behind him, Cassie could already hear the excited whispers skipping across the crowd.

“Yeah, I like this much better,” Nick announced when Cassie stomped up beside him. “Excellent choice, counselor. And it’s such a beautiful night, too. Much too pleasant to waste inside with all those stuffy friends of yours.”

“How dare you say something like that in front of that old gossip.” Cassie fumed.

“What? Did I say something wrong?”

“You know perfectly well you said something wrong,” Cassie snapped. “And by the time Evelyn Van Arbor spices up the story, it’ll be all over Asheville tomorrow that I’m pregnant with your illegitimate child.”

“But that’s how I prefer my women, remember? Barefoot and pregnant.”

“You’re impossible,” Cassie said, resisting the urge to reach out and strangle him. “How did you get invited to this benefit in the first place? You know these people despise you.”

Nick winked, unruffled by her comment. “You’d be surprised what the right amount of money can buy in this world, Miss Collins.”

Cassie sent him a murderous glare. “I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Hardin, but all the money in the world can never buy you class.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Nick assured her. “Take that rich old bat you’re so worried about now. If she had one ounce of class, she wouldn’t dream of repeating any gossip about you.”

The truth in Nick’s statement kept Cassie silent for a moment. Knitting her perfectly arched eyebrows together in a deep frown, she leaned back against the old stone wall that surrounded the veranda, wondering how long it would take her mother to hear through the grapevine that Nick Hardin had sired her first grandchild.

Cassie feared that, with that kind of news, Lenora Collins really would have the coronary she’d been threatening all these years.

“You know what you need?” Nick asked, studying Cassie’s grave expression.

“A submachine gun might come in handy at the moment,” Cassie shot back, but her caustic wit didn’t discourage Nick from lending his advice.

“You need to lighten up a little, counselor. Don’t take life so seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive, anyway.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “Spoken like the true scholar you aren’t,” she chided.

“I might not be a scholar,” Nick agreed, taking several steps closer than Cassie felt was necessary. “But I’m smart enough to know that old biddy will believe you over a…what did she call me?”

“I believe it was ‘derelict,”’ Cassie provided gladly.

Nick grinned. “Yes, I’m sure she’ll believe you over a derelict like me the minute you go back inside and tell her I was only talking about your prissy dog.”

Cassie didn’t bother to tell Nick she only wished it were that simple. She would rather have the entire city of Asheville think she was pregnant than have her mother find out that her precious dog with the award-winning genes had accepted a bad seed under Cassie’s supervision.

Ignoring the splendid full moon that was shining above them and the dreamy music that was now floating out to the veranda, Cassie glared at the incorrigible man who was directly blocking her path. “For your information, I’d rather face a firing squad than walk back through that room,” Cassie told him. “And since you’ve already done enough damage to my reputation for one evening, if you’ll move your obnoxious self out of my way, I plan to get out of here before you pull another stunt that makes us both the topic of conversation for the night.”

To her surprise, Nick’s ink-black eyes instantly flickered with anger. “Now, wait a minute, counselor. Don’t try to blame me for making you the topic of conversation in that room this evening. Your boyfriend, old Markie, did that all by himself when he showed up with a different lady on his arm.”

Cassie reached out to slap him, but her heel caught in a crack in the flagstone porch and landed her face-first against Nick’s massive, rock-hard chest. Angry looks flashed between them as he gripped her bare shoulders with his powerful hands to steady her fall. Entwined in an awkward embrace, neither of them expected the wave of passion that erupted between them.

But it did.

And it carried both of them along like a fast-moving train.

Before Cassie knew what was happening, Nick crushed her even closer to him and sent a tingling explosion rippling through her body. When he brushed his lips against the sensitive hollows of her throat, he left her defenseless, lost in a magical place that Cassie never knew existed. Helpless, she surrendered, but only momentarily. When his hungry mouth inched closer, threatening to claim her own, she finally came to her senses.

“I can’t do this,” Cassie gasped, forcing herself to push him away.

Their eyes locked briefly before Nick released her, allowing her time to see desire fade and a look of mischief take its place. “But we both enjoyed it, didn’t we, counselor?”

The weak “hah!” Cassie mustered was almost as shaky as the two legs that were trying to keep her standing. “The only thing I’m going to enjoy, is taking a huge chunk of your bank account if Duchess ends up pregnant,” Cassie lied, tossing Nick a smirk of her own. “I’ll know the test results tomorrow,” she added, “and if Duchess is pregnant, then we’ll see if you don’t start taking life a little more seriously.”

Before Nick could answer, she pushed past him and marched toward the outside stairway at the opposite end of the veranda.

Within seconds, she disappeared into the darkness without looking back.

CASSIE’S HANDS WERE still shaking when she accepted her keys from the uniformed parking attendant. She quickly handed the man a crumpled bill, then slid behind the wheel of her Lexus, trying to slow her thumping heart and regain her lost composure. Afraid her current rattled state of mind might result in destroying half of the luxury automobiles that lined both sides of the lot, she eased cautiously out of the parking lot, cursing the day she’d been stupid enough to stomp up Nick Hardin’s front steps.

How the man had the ability to arouse her one second and make her capable of murder the next was totally beyond her comprehension. He was the most arrogant, the most insufferable, the most exasperating man she’d ever met in her entire life, yet he had the power to reduce her to a sniveling schoolgirl with one glance from those wicked eyes of his.

Oh, he excited her, all right. He excited her more than she ever thought possible. But the type of raw desire he aroused inside her was pushing her into uncharted waters. Waters she knew could be extremely dangerous. To say her experience with the opposite sex had been limited was putting it mildly. Oh, she’d had her share of pimple-faced boyfriends in high school. She’d dated occasionally in college, and she’d even spent the past few months fighting off the unwanted attentions of a would-be senator. But the male persuasion had never been powerful enough to steer Cassie away from the personal goal she had set for herself the summer she turned sixteen.

It had all started with a conversation she overheard between her father and her famous senator grandfather. The realization that the distinguished Senator Edward Collins resented her for not being a grandson had hurt Cassie deeply. Referring to her as “a silly female who would care more about her coming-out party than she would about the family law firm” had devastated her to the point that her mission in life had become her determination to prove the old man wrong.

She had graduated at the top of her class both in college and in law school, and had surpassed any of the academic records either her father or her grandfather held. When Cassie proudly joined the family law firm, she had also brought with her enough expertise in contract and corporate law to add an impressive number of new clients to the firm roster. Until now, she had always believed that her professional accomplishments would be sufficient to sustain her throughout her safe, predictable life.

But that had been before Nick Hardin had arrived on the scene and punched a gigantic hole in her silly facade.

Leaving the Grove Park Inn far behind her, Cassie headed for the south end of town, preoccupied with the way Nick had made her dizzy the minute he took her in his arms. She let her fingers find the warm flesh of her throat and marveled that her skin still tingled from the ravishing kisses he’d placed along her neck. Just thinking of him now, in fact, made her pulse lurch again and sent even a warmer glow straight to the center of her stomach.