Carolyn had worked so hard to forget that life, but it just kept reappearing like some hideous mirage, promising life-giving water and delivering only dry sand.
Her stomach cramped, and she looked around in panic, knowing that she would be sick.
An empty plastic bag was thrust at her. Big, warm hands gathered her hair back from her face. Carolyn leaned over the bag, but the urge to throw up passed after a moment, and she leaned back in her chair.
“Are you okay now?” Isaac asked.
Carolyn nodded, and he took the bag from her nerveless fingers and handed her a box of tissues. She pressed a tissue to her mouth, wiping it convulsively. She wanted to cry from the humiliation of nearly losing her lunch in front of Isaac. No doubt he would tell every agent in the building and she would be teased about this horrible moment for months to come.
“Cara, your father’s gone. Sara heard him shouting and had Dash, Conn, and one of the agents escort him out. He wasn’t pleased about that and was very open about saying it.”
Meaning that her father had threatened to have their business shut down and their lives destroyed unless they gave him his way or left the state, or something to that effect. Carolyn sighed. Some things never changed.
Isaac knelt on the floor by her chair. He was a tall, lean-muscled man, and even on his knees, they were almost eye to eye. He stroked her silky hair back from her forehead.
“You should have told us.” His voice was quiet, his tone serious. It was quite a change for the comedian of the office.
Carolyn just looked at him and shook her head. No way was she telling her sob story to him. No way was she having him think of her as the poor little rich girl. She could almost hear his jokes already, with her name as the punch line.
“I mean it, Carolyn. You won’t have to see him again. If this is what it does to you, it’s not happening.” He sounded determined. “I’m not letting this happen again. If he walks in the door at DIG, we’ll kick his ass out.”
It almost sounded like Isaac was angry on her behalf. Carolyn looked into his deep brown eyes, often dancing with some kind of mischief, and saw that they were flat and serious. Deadly serious. He looked like the Ranger he had been. He looked as if he wanted to kick her father’s ass himself.
“Isaac,” she said huskily. Her voice broke and she tried again. “Isaac, I can handle it.”
Isaac abruptly switched their positions, and when the world settled back into position, she was cradled on his lap with his muscular arms wrapped around her.
“Honey,” he said almost tenderly, “I hate to tell you this, but you are not handling it. Your face is as white as death, your hands are still shaking, and you were almost sick to your stomach over his visit. I’ve known for a lot of years that you avoid your family as much as possible. Can’t fault you for that, since I avoid my family, too. I know I can seem like a clown in the office, but I never give out confidential information. If you need to talk, I know what to tell and what not to.”
Carolyn sighed again as he rubbed her back in gentle circles and waited. It was true that Isaac kept secrets well. People in the office routinely told him things that they wouldn’t tell their own mothers. Her hesitation in speaking was more her problem than it was his. Her constant unreasonable attraction to him was getting in the way of her judgment. How one average woman could be so deeply attracted to two such different men was beyond her understanding.
“My father wants me to attend the charity dinner that my mother is hosting on Friday,” she began.
Isaac nodded to show that he was listening.
“He has arranged a marriage for me with his junior vice president and wants to announce it there.” She shuddered just saying the words aloud.
Isaac tensed under her and all at once his arms were too tight around her. He pulled his phone from his belt clip and put it to his ear.
“Grange, Isaac here. Carolyn’s office. Now,” he said sharply into the device. His voice was hard, and her canary, named after her favorite opera singer, fluttered in his cage, chirping in sudden alarm.
Carolyn pushed against his rock-hard chest and he let her go and rose to pace the room. Carolyn sat in the chair he had vacated, watching him in astonishment. The easygoing jokester was gone and in his place was a soldier, a soldier with fierce eyes and a military snap to his walk. The abruptness of the change was startling. She had seen him in action as an agent, of course, but even on a case, he always had a hint of a sardonic grin. Seeing him now, looking so cold and dangerous, sent a shiver down her spine.
* * * *
“Grange, Isaac here. Carolyn’s office. Now.”
Grange heard Isaac’s words on the receiver, but more than the words, the tone communicated that the situation was dire.
Grange left his office at a dead run, and made it to Carolyn’s door at the opposite end of the hallway in seconds. He burst through the door with his hand on his gun, but his trained eye couldn’t see the emergency. Carolyn’s pet bird was agitated, flitting from one side of his large cage to the other, but no one was being held at gunpoint, and no one was bleeding. Isaac had never yet called a false alarm, however, so something was definitely wrong.
Carolyn was sitting as if stunned, her wide eyes following Isaac, and Isaac was pacing the floor, his back ramrod straight and his eyes hard.
“What?” he asked Isaac, still looking for the threat.
Isaac stopped on the spot and gave his report. “Carolyn’s father has arranged her marriage to some executive boy-wonder, and the news almost made her throw up,” Isaac stated.
Carolyn moaned in embarrassment and covered her face with her hands.
“He wants to announce the engagement at some big party her mom is having on Friday,” Isaac continued, his voice heating with every word.
Grange was appalled. Arranged marriages were common in many parts of the world, but not in Texas. This stunning news was definitely an emergency.
“No,” he said flatly. This was the nightmare that he and Isaac had discussed not an hour ago—Carolyn marrying some manicured executive who wouldn’t see her for the treasure she was, Carolyn forced to keep her zest for living hidden until the flame died out altogether. Carolyn having a child with someone else.
Grange felt Carolyn’s eyes on him and realized that he was cursing viciously. He had a reputation for being cold and contained in a crisis, but his feelings for this woman were too hot to keep behind that wall of ice which had served him so well in the past.
“No, Carolyn,” he said again, fighting to keep his voice even.
She sat up straighter in her chair. “Well, I already told my father that I wasn’t about to attend that dinner,” she replied coolly, seeming to take exception to his command.
“Or get engaged on Friday,” Isaac insisted through his teeth.
“I refused that as well,” she said, “although why that should be any of your business—”
“It’s our business,” Grange and Isaac said at the same time. They looked at each other, and Isaac nodded.
Grange approached Carolyn and crouched before her chair. He took her cold hands in his warm ones and searched her eyes.
“Cara, everything about you is our business.” He held up a hand, forestalling her instinctive protest. “You can argue all you want later, but please do us the courtesy of hearing us out first. Please take the rest of the afternoon off, and we’ll pick you up at seven for dinner.”
Carolyn looked into his wolf-pale eyes and seemed to read the hope in them. He thought her emotions would still be seesawing after the events of the day, and almost expected a quick, negative reply, but when she opened her mouth to reply, no sound came out. He knew her well enough to wonder if the hope that he couldn’t hide from her would give them their chance. Under her tough and capable exterior, he knew she had a soft spot for both of them.
She nodded slowly, as if she wasn’t quite sure about his proposal but couldn’t come up with an immediate reason to say no.
Well, it wasn’t a resounding yes from Carolyn, but Grange would take what he could get at this point. He squeezed her hands briefly, and rose to his feet.
“Seven,” he said, and he turned and walked to the door.
“Seven,” Isaac repeated, bending to brush a kiss across her cheek and then another across her lips. Before she had a chance to even respond, he too was rising, and he strode from the office with a grin and a wink, whistling under his breath. The jaunty sound faded as he moved off down the hall.
Grange followed, feeling like he should be whistling himself.
Chapter 4
An hour later, feeling like her world had suddenly turned itself inside out, Carolyn was sitting in a tub full of bubbles in her apartment and contemplating the bizarre events of her brief day at the office. On top of all the other strange things to happen that day, when she had taken Grange’s advice and tried to leave early, she couldn’t locate her portfolio case. The case wasn’t on the little stand by her desk that she placed it on every morning. A careful habit of years broken. It seemed...wrong.
A cursory search of the office had revealed the portfolio case open and on the opposite side of the desk. Indulging her instincts, she gave the office a more thorough examination, but everything else was where it should be and nothing seemed to be missing.
She tried to remember that morning for an explanation as to why she would have left the case in such an unusual spot, but in the flurry of preparations for the arrival of their prominent guest speaker, she just couldn’t be sure.
Shaking off her suspicions, she reminded herself sternly that the files in her case were not of a confidential nature and therefore of no interest to any thief. It was probably nothing but her own absentmindedness in the face of one of their twice-yearly conference days, and her current sense of worry a result of her appalling confrontation with her father. In the face of that, the displaced case was nothing to worry about at all.
Still, her instincts were awakened, and she resolved to mention the incident when Isaac and Grange arrived for their date.
Carolyn shifted in the warm water. She couldn’t quite accept that she was preparing for a date with both of her fantasy men. She could well believe that Grange wanted her, he made no secret of that fact, but Isaac? Not Isaac. He sometimes flirted, almost as if he couldn’t help himself when the opportunity presented itself, but he didn’t really want her.
There were times recently when she felt that Isaac even resented her. He often glared at her for no reason, and sometimes even turned away when she was speaking. It made her job as business manager for the busy security company difficult, as she had once considered herself friends with all three of her bosses at DIG, and in private her heart ached for his approval.
This afternoon was perhaps the first time in weeks that Isaac had spoken to her in a gentle voice. That, in combination with Grange’s brief and ferocious lovemaking, had brought the fantasies she had fought against for so long raging back to life as nothing else could have.
Thinking of Isaac and Grange together—Grange, so tall with his massive muscular build and arctic eyes, and Isaac, leaner, more compact, but just as powerful—made her mouth water and her pussy spasm around its own emptiness.
Goaded beyond endurance, she squirmed and rubbed her thighs together under the water, but nothing could get rid of the deep, aching arousal of her body. Grange had done his job well.
In this condition, with her body already hot and wet, she would be irritable, not her usual cautious self, and easy prey for Grange’s plan.
She didn’t know exactly what his plan would be, but she knew that he always had one. He would take one look at her and immediately know the state of her body, damn him, and his presence would only make matters worse. She tried so hard to hide her reaction to him, but he always seemed to sense it somehow, watching her with his brilliant silver eyes, standing so close that she could smell his delicious masculine scent and feel the heat of his big body. Lord, this afternoon, he had singed her nervous system with his wild intensity.
Carolyn reached down between her thighs, circling her aching clit with her middle finger, rubbing and pressing softly, trying to find the motion that Grange’s body had produced. He had shot her into orbit so fast that she was still overwhelmed hours later. She couldn’t help but think of the silky feel of his fierce kiss and the way his heated breaths panted in her ear as he jammed her up against the wall. She moaned and circled faster as her other hand moved down her body and pushed two fingers sweetly inside.