The Pregnant Heiress

Oh, Lord. She really didn’t want to go back in there. Normally Emma made friends easily. New faces, new places—she was used to both, and good at making herself at home wherever she was. And she genuinely liked people. She considered mingling with strangers an opportunity, not a chore. Normally.

But nothing seemed to be normal anymore.

Well, she wasn’t going to hang out in the hallway all night. She took a deep breath and plunged back into the crowd.

She made it three feet before someone stopped her.

“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”

She knew that voice—deep, rumbly, as if each word rolled up from somewhere deep inside the big, broad chest of the man. She turned, her heartbeat picking up speed. “Flynn. I mean, Mr. Sinclair. I wondered if you would be here tonight. Ryan told me you’d been invited.”

He was too big. That was, once again, the first thing she noticed about the man—his size. Emma didn’t like oversize men with tough-guy faces. Not even when they had Superman hair, black and shiny as wet Magic Marker, with an unruly curl that parted company with the rest of his hair to make an adorable little squiggle on his forehead.

“Flynn works fine.” The corner of his mouth kicked up in the cocky grin she remembered. “I’ve been hoping I’d see you tonight.”

He had? “Well—that’s flattering.” An elbow jabbing her rib cage from inside made her rub her stomach soothingly, reminding her that he hadn’t meant that the way she wanted to take it. He couldn’t have, she thought wryly. Not when she was doing her seven-month impression of a blimp. “I was hoping to see you, too. I never thanked you.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly. “No thanks needed. I did what I’d been hired to do. But I’m curious. When I, ah, talked to you at the truck stop, I didn’t get the impression that gratitude was one of your reactions.”

“I was a little spooked at the time,” she admitted. No need to tell him that she’d felt uneasy from the moment he’d sat down in her station, long before he’d scared her by telling her he was a P.I. Flynn Sinclair simply did not have a reassuring face. His nose had been broken at least once; his cheeks were sunken, dark with beard shadow, and his eyes were set too deeply beneath thick black eyebrows.

But they were green, those eyes. Not hazel, not even grass-green, but the bright, hard color of an old 7-Up bottle.

And they were laughing at her right now. “I figured that out.”

“You probably wondered why.”

He shrugged those oversize shoulders. “I figured that out, too. You were running scared of someone—Steven Shaw. The man who got you pregnant.”

“I—how did you—did I mention him?”

“Yeah.” There wasn’t a trace of a smile left on his face now, and his eyes had that hard, unwavering focus that unnerved her and made something inside her tingle. “Are you glad I found you now? And dragged you kicking and screaming into your family?”

“Not kicking and screaming,” she protested. “But—yes, I’m glad.” Amusement mixed with pleasure. “I’ve got a brother now. Two of them, actually. Not to mention a half sister, two aunts by marriage, an uncle and more cousins than I’ve been able to count.”

“And a mother.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Kane says you and Miranda are having problems.”

They’d discussed her? She didn’t like that.

“Well, he’s wrong. Miranda and I get along fine. I’m afraid Kane and Gabrielle don’t entirely approve of me. I guess that’s natural—I’m living, breathing proof that their mother isn’t quite the perfect person they’d like to think. Kane, especially, is protective of her.”

“Funny. I didn’t get the impression that Kane disapproves of you. Maybe you’re having trouble warming up to him and Gabrielle because you’re jealous of their relationship with Miranda.”

“I don’t know Miranda well enough to be jealous of her. Besides, jealousy is a very destructive emotion.”

“I’d call it a very human emotion. If you don’t know Miranda well, that’s because you never had the chance, while Kane and Gabrielle had her all these years. Stands to reason that you’d be jealous of that.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you are a very annoying man?”

“Once or twice.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to see you so we could argue about family relationships, though. I’ve checked out that boyfriend of yours, and—”

“You’ve what?” Annoyance boiled over into temper.

“Checked out Steven Shaw. He’s bad news.”

“Tell me something I don’t know! What right did you have to go digging around in my personal life?”

“I’m a P.I. If I waited until people gave me permission to dig around, I wouldn’t get much work done.”

“And were you working?” she demanded. “I thought your job ended when you found me!”

“I guess it did, technically. But I got a call a few days ago from a man named Mathers. He said he’d heard I was looking for you. Pretended he had information for me, while he tried to pump me for information.”

The blood drained from her head. “Richard Mathers is Steven’s friend,” she whispered.

“That’s what I discovered when I checked him out. And that’s why I decided to find out more about your old boyfriend.”

“Former fiancé,” she corrected absently. Had Flynn’s meddling tipped Steven off?

“Whatever.” He shook his head. “I should have gone with my itch to start with. Loose ends have a way of snapping back on a man.”

“What did you tell Richard?”

“Not a damned thing. You think I’m an idiot, or just unscrupulous?”

“Are you sure? Steven used to say that people don’t realize how much they’re giving away once he gets them talking. He’s…very good at that sort of thing.”

His voice turned dry. “I’m not bad at it myself, so I recognize the tricks when someone tries to play them on me. Besides, it wasn’t your boyfriend I talked to. It was his buddy, and Mathers isn’t all that good.”

Her head was spinning with possibilities, each more frightening than the last. “Stop calling Steven my boyfriend. He never was, not really—”

“That baby didn’t get started all by itself.”

“You know, when you lift one eyebrow that way, your whole face gets sarcastic. You don’t even have to change your voice. It’s very annoying. What I meant was that I object to the word ‘boyfriend.’ It’s so silly and juvenile. Steven and I were engaged.”

“You do know how to pick ’em, don’t you?”

How could she have entertained even one fleeting fantasy about this man? “I think I’ll go talk to someone else for awhile. Someone who will make more of an effort not to insult me.”

“Ah—sorry. I didn’t mean to—hey, don’t walk off. I need to ask you a couple of questions.” He wrapped one big hand around her arm.

She jerked her arm away. “I don’t like being grabbed.”

“Okay, okay. Is Shaw likely to trash my office looking for my case file on you? How fixated is he?”