Conflict of Interest (The McClouds of Mississippi) (26 page)

But it was his sheer arrogance that made him the most exasperating man she had ever met.

“So you’re leaving.”

He zipped his bag. “I can change a story’s ending for you, but I can’t change who I am. I couldn’t do it for my family and, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it for you, either.”

She locked her arms over her chest, one foot beginning to tap against the carpet. “Funny. I don’t remember asking you to change anything but the ending to your story. And, if you’ll remember, even that suggestion was in response to your request for my input.”

He sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to blame you for anything. I’m the one who had to find out if I could make this work. And if it makes you feel any better, you’re the only woman I’ve ever considered changing for.”

“I suppose I should be flattered.”

He searched her face with a frown. “You’re angry.”

“That’s an understatement,” she replied through clenched teeth.

“Because I’m leaving?”

“Actually, that sounds like a very good idea right now.”

Because she really needed coffee, she turned to leave the bedroom. His hand on her arm spun her around again.

“I never said I could stay,” he reminded her.

“I never asked you to stay,” she snapped back. “Now let go of my arm.”

Instead of releasing her, he held on, looking even more confused. “So you’re angry because I considered staying? Because you didn’t
want
anything permanent to develop between us?”

“How can such a brilliant writer be such a stupid man?” She tugged at her arm. “Let me go.”

“Just wait a minute, will you? I’m trying to figure out what you’re so mad about. Is it because I’m leaving or because I thought about staying?”

“It’s because you’re so arrogant that you never even discussed the possibility of staying with me! And because you’re either so selfish or so cowardly that you refuse to share any part of yourself with me—or with anyone else who cares about you, for that matter.”

Now he was the one who was angry, his emerald eyes flashing with temper. “That’s garbage.”

“You pride yourself on being such a self-contained loner, and you act like you’re doing everyone else such a favor when you let them into your life for a little while. You pretend you don’t really need anyone, rather than admitting how lucky you are to have such a nice family, who have been much too patient and indulgent with you, in my opinion.”

He had finally released her arm. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I? You claim New York is too crowded for you, when the truth is that you simply like living in Honesty. You like the people there, even though you treat them so shabbily, and you don’t want to live so far away from them or from the family you ignore so shamelessly. So you’ve been hurt a few times, well, who hasn’t? What gives you the right to treat other people this way just because you’re afraid of being hurt again?”

“I am not a coward.”

She was angry and hurt enough to be reckless. “Really? Have you read your father’s letter yet?”

His eyes narrowed to furious slits. “My father has nothing to do with this.”

“Doesn’t he? What about his second wife? Isabelle’s mother? Your girlfriend, I understand.”

“Who told you that?”

She didn’t recoil from the sharpness of his question, but it took an effort to hold her ground. “Not you, obviously. You didn’t let me into your life that much, but you thought about moving here to grace me with your company for a little while. And then you accused me of trying to change you, just like your father did. Well, I never asked you for anything, including clarifications of some of the rumors I heard while I was in your hometown, and I damn well resent being lumped with everyone in your past who let you down.”

“Let me make something clear—Kimberly was never my girlfriend. I dated her a few times, casually, before she got involved with my father’s campaign and my father. I wasn’t seeing her at the time she started dating him, hadn’t been interested in seeing her for several months, and the only reason I cared that he was sleeping with her was because his selfish behavior was so devastating for my mother and my sister. I’ve never held any of those circumstances against Isabelle, and I haven’t carried a torch for her mother. Is there any other gossip about my past you’d like to discuss?”

She wasn’t angry now. Just sad. “Don’t you see, Gideon? I didn’t want to force you to tell me those things. If you expected me to be an important part of your life, you should have wanted to share your thoughts and your feelings with me. You should have been willing to take a few emotional risks.”

“What would you have said if I had taken a risk and asked you to move back to Honesty with me?” he challenged her.

Though her heart clenched, she lifted her chin defiantly, knowing he still didn’t fully comprehend what she had said. “You’ll never know, will you? You were too stubborn to ask.”

He hesitated long enough to make her wonder if he was going to ask now, but then he turned and picked up his bag. “I’ll get a cab to the airport,” he said. “I’m sorry everything turned out this way. I hope it won’t interfere with our working relationship.”

She might have laughed at that, if she could have found even a trace of bitter humor inside her. “I don’t see why it should. I’ll take a lesson from you and lock my personal feelings inside where no one else can see them or examine them too closely. It seems to work so well for you.”

“Adrienne—”

“I’ll have my assistant give you a call next week about those contracts you need to sign. We’ll express them to you so we can get the next project underway without much delay. Your publisher will be in contact with you about the details of the promotional events you’ve agreed to. If there’s anything else I can do for you, feel free to send me an e-mail or give Jacqueline a call.”

He didn’t seem to know how to respond to her brusquely professional tone. On one hand, it must have been a relief to him that they were no longer treading on dangerous emotional ground, but the way he was looking at her told her that he hated leaving this way.

Maybe it was best that it had happened like this. Clean and final. She wouldn’t be left wondering when he might show up on her doorstep again, waiting for calls that might never come, hoping for something that would never happen. They should never have confused their business relationship with a physical element, and she should never have let her heart get involved when she’d known all along that he kept his own locked tightly away.

“I’ll call you,” he said finally.

She did laugh then, a sound that was painful even to her. “I wonder how many women you’ve said that to as you walked away. And I wonder how many of them were foolish enough to believe it.”

Muttering something she couldn’t hear—and didn’t try to—he turned and left the room, his shoulders stiff, his bag gripped in a white-knuckled fist.

She had no doubt that he was hurting a bit. After all, he’d cared enough to think about moving here, she reminded herself as she sank numbly to the edge of her still-tumbled bed. But he would get over it. He had so much more practice than she did at creating a safe new world for himself.

Adrienne wasn’t in a good mood on Monday morning. She snapped at her father, was impatient with her assistant, snarled at an editor. When she realized what she was doing, she made herself take a deep breath and force a smile onto her face. It wasn’t fair of her to take out her pain and anger on other people, she reminded herself.

That was the sort of thing Gideon McCloud would do.

And so she looked around with forced patience when a sound from her office doorway distracted her from a difficult letter she was trying to write. “What can I do for you, Ja—”

She fell silent when she saw the man standing in her doorway.

“Don’t blame your assistant for not announcing me,” Gideon said, closing the door behind him. “I sort of barged past her.”

She wanted to rise, but she wasn’t sure her legs would support her. “I thought you’d gone back to Mississippi.”

“No.” He set his bag on the floor at his feet. “I spent the night in a hotel. I decided during the night that there’s something I need to do before I leave.”

She cleared her throat. “What?”

“Ask you to go with me.”

It was a good thing she was sitting down, she decided. She would surely have fallen if she hadn’t been. “You—”

He took a step toward the desk, his expression grimly determined. “You’re right, you know. I was afraid to ask—still am, I guess. It’s going to hurt like hell if you say no. Not to mention being a rather humiliating experience. It’s the sort of risk I’ve been careful to avoid my entire adult life.”

“Then why—”

“Because you’ve changed me,” he answered before she could even complete the question. “You didn’t ask me to change, but I changed, anyway. I know now that my house is never going to feel like a home again without you in it. And I know that if you can’t see yourself living there with me, then I’ll have to figure out a way to live here with you, if you’ll have me.”

She finally found the strength to rise, but she didn’t move toward him. “You just suddenly decided all of this?”

“I can understand why you’d be skeptical, considering the things I said to you yesterday,” he acknowledged. “But it isn’t as impulsive as it seems. I was already thinking along these lines when I came to New York. And then yesterday, well, I guess I panicked. I didn’t want to admit that I was the coward you accused me of being, so I sort of blamed everything on you.”

“You panicked,” she repeated.

He shrugged sheepishly. “I’ve never asked a woman to marry me before. It was a knee-jerk reaction to get cold feet at the last minute and try to run.”

“Marry.” She fell into her chair again when her knees folded. She’d known the feelings between them were strong—strong enough to draw him away from his home, strong enough to frighten him into running again—but she had never expected this. “You’re asking me to marry you?”

“I guess I am.”

“Why?”

“The usual reasons.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve been in love with you since the night you walked into my house and found Isabelle’s owl. I knew it almost immediately, but I fought it. Thought I would get over it. Now I know that I won’t.”

She locked her fingers in her lap, forcing her eyes to stay dry, her voice even. “It isn’t the most poetic proposal any woman has ever received.”

“No,” he said with a grimace. “But it’s an honest one.”

One more time she pushed herself to her feet. “I’d much rather have honesty than poetry.”

“So would I.” He moved another step toward her. “You don’t have to give me an answer now. I realize we’ve only known each other a few weeks—other than the strictly professional relationship we’ve had for the past couple of years, of course. I just thought you should know that I—”

“The answer is yes,” she said gently. “We’ll have to do some compromising about where we’ll live—maybe we can keep a home in Honesty and an apartment here for business purposes. But those details don’t matter right now as much as the fact that you love me and that you trust me enough to tell me so.”

He looked as though he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “You’re saying yes?”

She smiled mistily at his hesitation. “Yes. I love you, too, Gideon.”

Fast? Yes. But maybe she had been in love with him before she’d ever even met him. Maybe she had fallen in love with a voice on the telephone or with the man who had written the books that had spoken so deeply to her.

All she knew for certain was that she had gone to Mississippi and had found the home she hadn’t even realized she was looking for.

He swallowed hard. “So you’re saying you will marry me.”

Suddenly she couldn’t stop smiling. “Did you think I was going to say no? Are you sorry now that you asked?”

His own smile was a bit shaky. “No. Just scared to my toenails.”

That little slice of honesty affected her almost more than anything else he’d said yet. It told her exactly how hard it had been for him to reach out to her. Just how difficult it was for him to change the safe, solitary life he’d created for himself. And exactly how much he loved her, that he was willing to do so despite the fear.

She moved around the desk and put her arms around his neck. “You’d better not change your mind, Gideon McCloud, because I plan to have you sign a contract for life.”

“That contract binds both ways, you know,” he reminded her as his arms closed around her.

She lifted her mouth to his to seal the deal.

Epilogue

“Y
our father looked kind of shell-shocked during the wedding,” Gideon mused a month later as he poured champagne into two crystal flutes. “Do you think he really believed you would change your mind at the last minute?”

She laughed as she accepted one of the flutes and sank to the side of the hotel bed with it. She still wore the tailored white suit she had worn for their simple but absolutely beautiful wedding, though she’d kicked off the toe-cramping white heels. “As much as I hate to defend him, we can’t really blame him for feeling as though his head is spinning. In only four weeks I’ve announced my engagement, restructured my entire career, moved to Mississippi and gotten married. Even your family is still having a little trouble processing the changes.”

“My family is stunned but delighted,” he assured her, sitting beside her. The light from the bedside lamp glittered off the plain gold ring on his left hand.

“To family—” she said, holding up her glass with a smile “—problems and all.”

“Speaking of which—” Setting his flute on the nightstand, Gideon reached into his suit coat and removed something from the inside pocket. “I thought you’d want to know that I read this today.”

She glanced at the folded sheet of paper, then felt her eyes widen. “Is that…?”

“My father’s letter. I thought I should finally read it, so you can stop fretting about it. Today seemed like a good time, since nothing he could have said would have put me in a bad mood.”

She searched his face, finding nothing but a calm contentment there. “Was there anything important in it?”