The Executive's Valentine Seduction / Valente Must Marry: The Executive's Valentine Seduction

With a distracted wave, she indicated a leather portfolio on the coffee table. “The conference information is in that folder. I’ll see you later.”

She certainly would. Rory hadn’t spent all those years in the Army without learning to develop contingency plans for just about every situation. He’d put a good deal of time and thought into Operation Caroline Walters.

As the door closed behind her, he tried to reconcile the woman she’d become with the seventeen-year-old she’d been. It took some doing. His memory of that summer was a little hazy around the edges.

With good reason. He’d left home at sixteen after a final, explosive brawl with his drunk of a father. For more than a year he’d drifted across the country on the beat-up Ducati 600 he’d put together from spare parts, picking up odd jobs as he went. Best he could recall, he’d worked for less than a month in the garage owned by Buck Walters. Millburn, Kansas, was too flat, too dusty and way too boring for his taste.

The same couldn’t be said about Walters’s niece. Rory vaguely remembered a shy smile, an embarrassed blush whenever he caught her eye and very shapely legs showing beneath her shorts.

The legs had interested him a whole lot more than her smiles or blushes. He’d been such a horny bastard at that age. Most of the time he’d walked around with a permanent hard-on. So naturally he’d had to strip off his T-shirt whenever the shy brunette came into her uncle’s garage. Had to tease a smile out of her. Had to taunt her into a ride on the Ducati.

He’d never really expected her to swing into the saddle behind him the night before he left town. Never dreamed she’d wrap her arms around his waist and lean into his back that hot August evening. And when they’d parked beside the river, he sure as hell had never expected to get lucky.

The next morning, he remembered with a grimace of disgust, he’d left with a casual promise to call the next time he came anywhere close to Kansas. Thirteen years later, he still hadn’t been back.

But he was here. Now. With the woman whose life he’d altered so irrevocably that night.

Her stricken look when she confirmed the pregnancy made Rory want to kick himself all over again for not using a condom. Or maybe he had and the damned thing didn’t work. All he knew for sure was Buck Walters’s niece didn’t sleep around. Not back then, anyway. She’d given him ample proof of that.

He’d covered a lot of miles since that night and been with his share of women. As far as he knew, he’d never left one crying or cursing his name. The fact that he’d given Caroline plenty of reason to do both had scratched at Rory’s conscience, big-time.

He’d begun developing Operation Caroline Walters the day after he’d learned of her pregnancy. His first objective had been to scope out the target. That hadn’t taken long. A few clicks of the keyboard and some poking around in databases he had legal access to—and several he didn’t—had verified the basic facts.

His second objective was to arrange the initial contact. He’d debated whether to approach her on a personal basis or through her business. He’d opted for the business angle for two strategic reasons. One, it gave him a hold over her. She couldn’t just haul off, slug him in the jaw and stalk away. Second, this angle dovetailed nicely with his corporate plans. With so many explosive events happening all around the world, he’d been planning to pull in his key operatives for a face-to-face.

The third objective involved actually making the contact. Rory could now check that item off his plan. The meeting had gone pretty much as he’d scripted. Except…

He’d expected to experience a welter of emotions when he saw her again. Guilt, yes. Regret, certainly. Relief that he’d taken the first steps to making things right for the girl whose life he’d brought crashing down around her ears, for sure.

But he hadn’t expected this tug of interest in the woman that girl had become. He’d shocked the hell out of her; yet she hadn’t folded, hadn’t yielded an inch of ground. This Caroline Walters was tougher than the shy girl he remembered. Tougher than those misty green eyes and soft mouth would lead a man to expect.

Then, of course, there were those smooth, silky legs.

The sudden tightening in his groin had Rory shaking his head in disgust. He wasn’t a horny young stud anymore. He’d learned to control his appetites and harness his lust.

Stick to the plan, man! Keep the final objective firmly in view.

With that stern admonishment, he popped the buttons on his shirt and headed for the shower to sluice off the effects of his transatlantic flight.

Caro wanted out of the resort.

She had to escape the confines of her mini-suite. Had to hit the paved walkway circling the beach and let the stiff sea breeze blow away some of her shock and confusion.

She also needed to contact her partners. She had to advise them of this incredible development and get their take on how the heck she should proceed with Rory Burke. Deciding she could talk and walk, Caro dug her cell phone out of her purse and tucked it in her jacket pocket with her room key.

The salt breeze slapped into her the moment she exited the resort’s lower level. February wasn’t the warmest month on this stretch of Spain’s Costa Brava. That didn’t deter the determined sun worshippers who flocked from more northern climates to soak up the Mediterranean rays, however. Caro picked up snatches of German, Swedish, French and Russian as she set off along the tiled walk first laid by the Romans.

An elderly Spaniard in a sweater vest and black beret hunched on the seawall, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He stared out to sea with eyes narrowed in his weathered face and displayed no interest in the topless bather stretched out on the beach below. Her generously siliconed breasts had certainly attracted the interest of others, though. Caro had to skirt a small crowd of tourists, all male and all avidly clicking away with their cameras.

Caroline found a sheltered spot at the base of the hill leading up to the castle ruins. Perching on the seawall, she pulled out her cell phone. Luckily, both of her partners were currently in Europe so she didn’t have to juggle time zones. Devon McShay had arrived in London just this morning with Cal Logan. The CEO of Logan Aerospace now had her handling all his European connections.

Sabrina Russo was in Rome, busy setting up a satellite office and sorting through an avalanche of potential jobs steered her way by the handsome neurosurgeon she’d fallen for—literally and figuratively!—last month.

Caro speed-dialed Sabrina first and felt her heart lift at just the sound of her friend’s cheerful greeting.

“Hey, girl. Wazzup?”

“Hang on a sec. I want to get Dev on the line for a three-way.”

She hit the button for a conference call and caught Devon in a limo with Cal Logan, on their way to a meeting with British Aerospace.

“Hi, Caro.”

“Hi, Dev. Sabrina’s on the line, too.”

“Great. I need to update you both on my itinerary. But first…Did you get our new client all meeted and greeted?”

“Yes.”

Caro kept her voice even, or thought she did, but the other two women had known her too long. Both picked up on the clipped response.

“Uh-oh. Is there a problem?”

“You could say that.”

She couldn’t think of any way to break the news except to blurt it out.

“Rory Burke, Global Security’s chief exec, is the father of the baby I lost when I was in high school.”

Simultaneous exclamations burst through the phone.

“What!”

“No way!”

“Trust me, you’re not half as flabbergasted as I was. Still am, for that matter. I’m—I’m not sure how to handle this.”

“You don’t have to handle it,” Sabrina shot back. “You pack up, girlfriend. Right now. Catch the next flight home. I’ll zip over from Rome and deliver a hard, swift kick to the bastard’s balls before orchestrating the rest of his friggin’ conference.”

“That’ll bring us a lot of future business,” Caro said on a shaky laugh.

“We don’t need Burke’s business,” Devon added with equal fervor. “I’m with ’Rina. Tell the jerk to take a long walk off a short pier, and get out of there.”

Caro had to put in reluctant protest. “He’s not a total jerk. He didn’t know I was pregnant. I never told him.”

“Because you couldn’t find him!”

Their fierce, unquestioned loyalty eased some of the tightness in Caroline’s chest. Devon and Sabrina were her best friends as well as business partners. The only friends she’d ever opened up to about her past.