Thank God, thought Lex, feeling the band around his heart ease very slightly.
There was a beat, and then his mind caught up with his eyes, in a double take so startled that it would have been comical if Lex had felt anything like laughing, which he didn’t.
With a what in her arms? A baby?
Romy’s baby. Another man’s baby. The steel band contracted once more.
His brows snapped together. ‘What,’ he demanded, ‘is that baby doing here?’
‘This is Freya.’ Romy put up her chin at his tone. Was that really all he had to say, after twelve years?
She was furious. With Lex, for daring to sit there, looking like that. Looking as if he had never kissed her, as if he had never made her senses snarl with the touch of his hand. As if he had never loved her.
With herself, for being so bitterly disappointed.
What had she expected, after all? That he would sweep her back into his arms? That the heat would still crackle between them, after twelve long years?
Fool.
‘I explained to Tim that I would have to bring her with me,’ she said in a voice quite as cold as Lex’s. She could do remote and chilly just as well as he could. ‘Didn’t he tell you?’
‘What?’
‘Tim said he would clear it with Willie Grant’s people.’
Lex wasn’t listening. Behind Romy, he could see the driver unloading pushchairs and carry cots and God only knew what else into the cabin. ‘What the hell is going on? You,’ he snapped at Phil, who froze guiltily. ‘Take all that stuff off right now!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Romy clearly, advancing down the cabin towards Lex. ‘Freya needs all that.’
Lex snatched off his glasses. ‘For God’s sake, Romy, you’re not seriously proposing to bring a baby along on a business trip?’
‘I don’t have a choice. I told Tim all this, and he assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem.’
‘No problem?’ he echoed in disbelief. ‘We’re on the verge of negotiating a major deal with a difficult client and you don’t think it’s a problem to turn up with a baby in tow? We’ll look totally unprofessional! It’s out of the question,’ he said with finality.
Romy was strongly tempted to turn on her heel and walk out, but if she did that, what would happen to Tim, and the deal the whole team had worked so hard on?
Drawing a breath, she struggled to keep her temper under control. ‘I was under the impression that you wanted someone from Acquisitions to accompany you?’
‘I do want you,’ said Lex, and for one horrible moment the words seemed to jangle in the air, a bitter parody of the ones he had once murmured against her skin.
I love you. I want you. I need you.
He folded the glasses he wore when working at a computer and put them in the breast pocket of his shirt. ‘I just don’t want a baby.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Romy, ‘but you can’t have me without her. What do you want me to do, leave her on the tarmac?’
Lex scowled. ‘Haven’t you got…I don’t know…childcare or something? What do you do when you’re at work? Or is Acquisitions doubling as a nursery these days?’
Romy set her teeth at the sardonic note in his voice. ‘She goes to the crèche at the office.’
‘There’s a crèche?’
‘Yes, there’s a crèche,’ she said, holding onto her temper with difficulty.
‘One of Phin’s projects, I suppose.’ Lex looked disapproving. His brother had reluctantly joined the company after their father’s stroke, and Lex had put him in charge of staff development. It was meant to be a token position, but he was always coming across initiatives in unlikely places nowadays.
‘I believe so,’ said Romy in a cool voice. ‘It’s one of the reasons Gibson & Grieve is such a popular place to work.’
‘Well, then, why can’t the baby go there?’
‘Because we’re going to be away overnight, and the crèche closes at six. I don’t know anyone else I can leave her with, especially not at this short notice. Tim only rang a couple of hours ago. I explained all this.’
Freya was getting heavy, and Romy shifted her to the other hip as she glared at Lex in frustration. Part of her was almost glad to find Lex so unreasonable. It made it easier to pretend that he was just a difficult boss.
Easier to forget how warm his hands had been, how sure his lips. How a rare smile would illuminate that austere face and warm the cool grey eyes.
‘I don’t think you quite realise how difficult it has been for me to get here this morning,’ she went on crisply. ‘I’m here because Tim seemed to think that it was important, but if you’d rather go on your own, that’s fine by me.’
A muscle was working in Lex’s cheek. ‘It is important. I need someone who’s up to speed on the details of the acquisition.’
‘Then perhaps you would prefer to rearrange?’ she suggested, and Lex made an irritable gesture.
‘No, we’re going today. I understand from Tim that Grant’s not that keen on the deal, and it’s taken long enough to get him to see me. If we start messing around and changing dates, it could jeopardise the whole deal and I don’t want to do that. We’ve been working on this too long to throw it away now.’
Romy said nothing.
Lex glared at her. There was only one choice, and they both knew it.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, bring all that stuff back,’ he snapped at Phil, who exchanged a look with Nicola and went back down the steps into the rain to collect everything that he’d just stashed back in the boot of the car. ‘Tell the pilot we’re ready to go as soon as you’re clear. We’ve wasted enough time this morning.’
Annoyed, he smacked the lid of his computer down and directed another irritable look at Romy. ‘You’d better sit down,’ he said, pointing at the seat opposite him. ‘And the baby.’
‘Freya,’ said Romy, not moving.
‘What?’
‘Her name’s Freya.’
Her chin was up, and the dark eyes looked directly back into his.
And Lex felt the world shift around him, just as it had done all those years ago. She was closer now, close enough for him to see the fine lines starring her eyes, and he struggled to hold onto his conviction that she was just tired and untidy and nothing special.
But his gaze kept catching on the lovely curve of her mouth, and when he looked back at her he had the horribly familiar sensation of falling into those eyes. Lex had never understood how so rich and dark a brown could be so luminous. He wasn’t a fanciful man, but it had always seemed to him as if light glowed in their depths, warming and beckoning.
How could he have thought for a moment that she wasn’t as beautiful as ever?
Twelve years ago, he had fallen into those eyes, heedless of the consequences. He had lowered his guard and made himself vulnerable, and there was no way he was going through that again.
Lex willed himself not to look away, but he had himself back under control. He could do this. All he had to do was think about the deal. That was all that mattered now, and the fact was that he needed Romy. Without Tim Banks, she was his connection to Willie Grant, and he wouldn’t put it past her to take the wretched baby and walk off the plane. She always had been stubborn.
‘Very well,’ he said tightly. ‘You and Freya had better sit down.’
‘Thank you,’ said Romy, and sat down opposite him, calmly buckling her seat belt and settling the baby-Freya-on her lap.
Lex’s jaw worked as he regarded her with a kind of baffled resentment. She was mighty cool considering that he was Chief Executive and she was just a temporary employee, and a far from senior one at that.