“I know how stupid that sounded.” This was why he needed Wendy. Why she was irreplaceable. Most of the time, he was too outspoken. Too blunt. Too brash. He had a long history of pissing off people who were easily offended. But not Wendy. Somehow, she managed to see past his mistakes and overlook his blunders.
The thought of trying to function without her here as his buffer made him panic. He wasn’t about to lose her over a baby.
“FMJ has one of the highest-rated on-site child-care facilities in the area. There’s no reason why you can’t continue to work here.”
“I can’t work here because I have to move back to Texas.”
As she spoke, she crossed to the supply closet in the corner. She moved a few things around inside and pulled out an empty cardboard box.
“Why on earth would you want to move to Texas?”
She shot him another one of those looks. “You know I’m from Texas, right?”
“Which is why I don’t know why you’d want to move back there. I’ve never once heard you say anything nice about living there.”
She bobbed her head as if in concession of the point. Then she shrugged. Rounding to the far side of the desk, she sank into the chair and opened her drawer. “It’s complicated.”
“I think I can keep up.”
“There’s a chance members of my family won’t want me to raise Peyton. Unless I can convince them I’m the best mother for her, there’ll be a custody battle.”
“So? You don’t think you can win the battle from here?”
“I don’t think I can afford to fight it.” Sifting through things in the drawer, she answered without looking up. She pulled out a handful of personal belongings and dropped them into the open box.
He watched her for a moment, barely comprehending her words and not understanding her actions at all. “What are you doing?”
She paused, glancing up. “Packing,” she said as if stating the obvious. Then she looked back into the drawer and riffled through a few more things. “Ford called yesterday to offer his condolences. When I explained, he said not to worry about giving two-weeks’ notice. That if I needed to just pack up and go, I should.”
Forget twenty-two years of friendship. He was going to kill Ford.
The baby squirmed. Wendy jostled her knee to calm the little girl, all the while still digging in the drawer. “I swear I had another tube of lip gloss in here.”
“Lip gloss?” She’d just pulled the rug out from under him.
If he’d had two weeks, maybe he could talk some sense into her. But no. His idiot of a partner had ripped that away too. And she was worried about lip gloss?
She must have heard the outrage in his voice, because her head snapped up. “It was my favorite color and they don’t even make it anymore. And—” She slammed the drawer shut and yanked open another. “Oh, forget it.”
“You can’t quit.”
She stood up, abandoning her task. “You think I want this? You think I want to move? Back to Texas? You think I want to leave a job I love? So that I can move home? I don’t! But it’s my only option.”
“How will being unemployed in Texas solve anything?” he demanded.
“I…” Peyton squirmed again in her arms and let out a howl of protest. Wendy sighed, sank back into the chair and set it rocking with a pump of her leg. “I may not have mentioned it before, but my family has money.”
She hadn’t mentioned it. She’d never needed to.
People who grew up with money had an air about them. It wasn’t snobbery. Not precisely. It was more a sense of confidence that came from always having the best of everything. It was the kind of thing you only noticed if you’d never had money and had spent your life trying to replicate that air of entitlement.
Besides, there was an innate elegance to Wendy that was in direct contrast to her elfin appearance and plucky verve. Yet somehow she pulled it off.
“From money?” he said dryly. “I never would have guessed.”
Wendy seemed too distracted to notice his sarcasm. “My grandfather set up a trust for me. For all the grandkids, actually. I never claimed mine. The requirements seemed too ridiculous.”
“And the requirements are?”
“I have to work for the family company and live within fifteen miles of my parents.” She narrowed her eyes as if glaring at some unseen relative. Peyton let out another shriek of frustration and Wendy snapped back to the present. “So if I move home now—”
“You can claim the trust,” he summed up. “You’d have enough money to hire a lawyer if it does come down to a custody battle.”
“I’m hoping it won’t come to that. My grandmother still controls the purse strings. The rest of the family will follow her wishes. Once she sees what a great mother I’m going to be, she’ll back off and just let me raise Peyton.” Wendy’s jaw jutted forward in determination. “But if it does come to a custody battle, I want to be sure I have enough money to put up a good fight.”
“I don’t get it. You’re doing all this for a cousin you barely knew? Someone you hadn’t seen in years?”
Wendy’s eyes misted over and for a second he thought that—dear God—she might actually start crying. She squeezed the baby close to her chest and planted a kiss on top of her head. Then she pinned him with a steady gaze brimming with resolution. “If something happened to Ford and Kitty, and they wanted you to take Ilsa, wouldn’t you do whatever it took to honor their wishes?”
All he could do in response was shove his hands deep into his pockets and swallow a curse. Damn it, she was right.
He stared at the adorable tot on Wendy’s lap, summing up his competition. He wasn’t about to lose the best assistant he’d ever had. He didn’t care how cute and helpless that baby was.
Peyton undoubtedly needed Wendy. But he needed her too.
Fighting the feeling of complete and utter doom—which, frankly, was a fight she’d been losing ever since the nanny had first handed her Peyton—Wendy glanced from the baby, to the open desk drawer and then to Jonathon.
She had so much to do, her mind couldn’t focus on a single task. Or maybe it was lack of sleep. Or maybe just an attack of nerves brought on by the way Jonathon kept pacing from one side of the room to the other, pausing occasionally to glower in her direction.
When she’d first started work at FMJ, Jonathon had made her distinctly nervous. There was something about his combination of magnetic good looks, keen intelligence and ruthless ambition that made her overly aware of every molecule of her body. And every molecule of his body for that matter. She’d spent the first six months on edge, jumping every time he came in the room, nearly trembling under his gaze. It wasn’t nerves precisely. More a kind of tingling anticipation. As if she were a gazelle who wanted to be eaten by the lion.
She’d forced herself to get over it.
And she’d thought she’d been successful. Only now that feeling was back. Either she could chalk it up to exhaustion and emotional vulnerability. Or she could be completely honest with herself. It wasn’t nerves. It was sexual awareness. And now that she was about to walk out of his life forever, she wished she’d acted on it when she’d had the chance.
Forcing her mind away from that thought, she stared at the open desk drawer. The lip gloss was gone forever, just like any opportunity she might have had to explore a different kind of relationship with Jonathon. The best she could hope for now was to gather