“Does Ayers know you’re looking into his employee?” he reiterated, his black gaze scouring David’s expression for any hint of his true intentions.
He’d find nothing.
Does Ayers know…he’d asked. Does Ayers know that David fucked his paralegal and spent the last two weeks fantasizing about her big, bountiful breasts, her tight, hot cunny, and her cries of pleasure? That he’d jerked off at least twice a day to memories of her lush body, her delicious pussy, and her welcoming slit?
“No, he does not,” he answered, placing his still full tumbler on the table beside the couch. While he usually liked his twenty-year-old Scotch, he had no thirst for it at present, and not because it wasn’t even 10AM yet. Brits drank liquor whenever the hell they wanted. He needed a clear head so he could make decisive decisions about how he should deal with the Diana Bluth issue.
She wasn’t an issue until you returned and she rejected you, right there in the street.
He continued as if his thoughts hadn’t kicked him in the balls. “I want to keep this between you and I. The last thing I need is to get Rick involved in this.”
Alexei leaned back in his seat, his fingers steepled in his lap. That was his way—he would make that face, place his hands like that, when he was slowly unwrapping the truth about something.
Hell! David didn’t need Alexei thinking there was more to it than there really was; he was curious about Diana Bluth, and he’d helped him uncover information on her.
Simple. There wasn’t more to it than that.
So why was David itching to ask Alexei her address or when she usually took a lunch break.
It was none of his business, even if he wanted Diana Bluth to be his business.
Sitting up, he leaned forward, planting his elbows on his thighs, meeting Alexei’s gaze with as much of an apathetic face as he could muster.
“I am just protecting myself,” David remarked, annoyed by the arch of Alexei’s eyebrows and the pinch of his lips. Alexei was a fucking moral compass, wrapped in an Armani suit. God damn… David didn’t need his perceptive and too curious gaze upon him just then. He needed someone who would get the job done without being so damn judgy.
Though…Alexei was right to question his motives, because he questioned them himself…in his weakest moments. He couldn’t be weak, not with his fortune, his empire, and his own self on the line.
No. Diana Bluth was working an angle, she had seen him in Ayers’s offices, and then she met him at the Incantata…she was looking to make some money, and David was the pay day.
Over his dead body.
She wouldn’t win—whatever her game.
He hadn’t lost yet a challenge yet.
“What?” Diana asked, surely having misheard the nurse on the other end of the line. She’d clearly been day drinking. “What did you say?” Diana was in the office, her door closed, her lunch only partially consumed. She’d answered the call because she was curious about the results, since she hadn’t been able to shake the icky feeling for the last ten days.
It was like food poisoning, only without the fevers, desire to die, or vomiting. She thanked God for the latter.
The nurse, Debbie, was silent for a moment, no doubt weighing whether or not she should call Diana an ambulance after her shriek of a response, but then she’d repeated the words that rocked Diana right out of this world.
“I know it’s taken a while to get the results—there was a backup at the lab. The blood tests show moderate levels of hCG, the pregnancy hormone. Congratulations, Miss Bluth. You’re pregnant.”
Diana couldn’t remember what she’d muttered after that, and she didn’t remember pushing END on her cell, but she did remember sitting at her desk, her body numb, her eyes wide open and unblinking, and her heart racing the Preakness in her chest.
Pregnant?
She wanted to ask how it was possible, but her mother had given her the birds and the bees speech when she was fourteen. She knew where babies came from but…how could that happen to her? She’d only had sex with one person, and he’d been religious about condoms—all three times.
Swallowing, she slumped down into the chair, cradling her face in his hands. Over the last three years, she’d complained about only having one window in her office, it faced the street, allowing in enough light to see by during the day, but not having a view into the corridor outside her office. Now, she was glad no one could see inside her space—the space where she was about to fall to pieces.
Pregnant. Not a virus as the doctor had said.
“How did this happen?” You fucked a virile male, and condoms aren’t 100 percent, there are stories online of women getting pregnant even while on birth control. And she’d never been on birth control, there’d been no need. She’d been a virgin, and the night she’d followed David to his room had been her first sexual encounter ever. She thought she was safe, and she assumed David thought he was safe.
But it wasn’t safe. She was pregnant. With David Brenner’s baby.
She lowered her head to her desk, the cold press of it against her forehead doing nothing to clear the fog from her brain.
She had to tell him.
“God,” she groaned, pushing the bile back, refusing to be sick anywhere near her work documents. The last thing she needed was having to explain the vomit on the Clifton depositions.
“Hey, lady, you ready for lunch?” Margie asked as she practically threw Diana’s office door open. Diana lifted her head to glare at Margie. Today, her exuberance was annoying. Catching sight of Diana’s face, she paused, her gaze taking in Diana’s trembling lip and no doubt the rim of moisture gathering just at the tips of her eyelids. She stepped into Diana’s office, turned, and then closed the door behind her. Diana heard her click the lock and then she turned back
