Balancing Peyton on her hip, she wedged the box under her arm only to find Jonathon blocking her route to the door.
“You can’t go.”
“Right. The car seat. I can’t believe I forgot that.” She turned back around, only to notice the diaper bag as well.
She blew out a breath. Okay. More than one trip after all.
“No,” Jonathon said. “I’m not letting you quit.”
Turning back around, she stared at him. “Not letting me? How can you not let me? If I quit, I quit.”
“You’re the best assistant I’ve ever had. I’m not going to lose you over something this…” He seemed to be searching for the least offensive word. “Frivolous.”
She raised an eyebrow. “She’s a child, not a frivolity. It’s not like I’m running off to join the circus.”
There was something unsettling about the quiet, assessing way he studied her. Then he said, “If keeping this baby is really so important to you, we’ll hire a lawyer. We’ll find the best lawyer in the country. We’ll take care of it.”
She felt her throat tighten, but refused to let the tears out of the floodgate. Oh, how tempting it was to accept his help. But the poor man had no idea what he was getting into.
“You should know, my family is extremely wealthy. If they fight this, they’ll put considerable financial and political weight behind it.”
“So?”
She blew out a long breath. The moment of reckoning. She always dreaded this. “Leland is my mother’s maiden name. I legally took her name when I left college.”
Jonathon didn’t look impatient, the way some people did when she explained. That was one of the things she liked best about Jonathon. He reached conclusions quickly, but never judgments.
“My father’s name—” Then she corrected herself. “My real last name is Morgan.”
Most people, it took a couple of minutes for them to put together the name Morgan with wealth and political connections. She figured as smart as he was, it would take Jonathon about twenty seconds. It took him three.
“As far as I know, none of the banking Morgans live in Texas. That means you must be one of the Texas oil Morgans.”
He didn’t phrase it as a question. His tone had gone flat, his gaze distant.
“I am.” She bit her lip, not bothering to hide her cringe. “I should have told you.”
“No. Why would you have?” His expression was so blank, so unsurprised, so completely disinterested, that it was obvious, at least to her, that he cared deeply that she’d kept her true identity to herself. His calm, direct gaze met hers. “Then Senator Henry Morgan is…”
“My uncle.” In the interest of full disclosure, she nodded to the baby gurgling happily on her hip. “Peyton’s grandfather.”
“Okay then.” He stood with his hands propped on his hips, the jacket of his suit pushed back behind his hands. He often stood in that way and it always made her heart kick up a beat. The posture somehow emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and the narrowness of his waist all at the same time.
Despite his obvious disappointment, he immediately went into problem-solving mode. He stared at her blankly, then left the room abruptly. A moment later he returned with a copy of the Wall Street Journal. He flipped the paper open, folded it in half and held it out to her. “So, Elizabeth Morgan is your cousin. The baby’s mother.”
It was an article about her death. The first Wendy had seen. She didn’t need to read it to know what it would say. It would be carefully crafted. Devoid of scandal. Bitsy may have been an embarrassment but Uncle Hank would have called in favors to make sure the article met with his approval. That was the way her uncle did business, whether he was running the country or running his family.
Jonathon frowned as he scanned the article. His eyes crinkled at the edges as his face settled into what she thought of as his problem-solving expression. But if he could figure a way out of this one, then he was smarter than even she thought he was.
“It says here she is survived by a brother and sister-in-law. Why don’t they take the baby?”
“Exactly,” she said grimly. “Why not? It’s what every conservative in the country will be thinking. Those conservative voters made up a huge portion of Uncle Hank’s constituents.” And they weren’t the only ones who had that question. It was no secret that their grandmother, Mema, didn’t approve of modern families. In her mind, a family comprised a mother and a father. And possibly a dog. Mema would want Hank Jr. to take Peyton. And what Mema wanted was generally what the family did.
She may have been in her late eighties, but she was a wily old dame. More importantly, she still controlled the money.
“It’s so frustrating,” she admitted. “This wouldn’t even be an issue if I had a husband I could trot out to appease my grandmother and Uncle Hank’s constituents.”
“You really think that’s all you need?”
“For my family to see me as the perfect mother?” She gave a fake, trilling laugh. “Oh, yes, a husband is the must-have accessory of the season. The richer, the better. Optional add-ons are the enormous gas-guzzling SUV, the Junior League membership and the golden Lab.”
“And it’s really that simple?”
“Oh, sure. That simple. I’ll just head over to the laboratory and whip up a successful husband out of spare computer parts. You run out to the morgue and steal a dead body I can reanimate and we’ll be good.”
His lips quirked in a smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners, just a hint of cockiness. The expression gave her pause, because he wasn’t laughing at her joke. No, she knew this look too. It was his I’ve-solved-the-problem look. “I think we can do a little better than that.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said it yourself. All you need is a rich, successful husband.”
For a moment she just stared blankly at him, unable to follow the abrupt twist the conversation had taken. “Right. A rich, successful husband. Which I don’t have.”
“But you could.” He smiled fully now. Full smiles were rare for him. Usually they made her feel a little breathless. This one just made her nervous. “All you have to do is marry me. I’ll even buy you a dog.”
Having never before asked a woman to marry him, Jonathon wasn’t quite sure what reaction he expected, but it wasn’t Wendy’s blank-faced confusion. Or maybe that was a perfectly normal reaction under the circumstances. After all, it wasn’t every day a man proposed to his assistant for such transparently selfish reasons.
For a long moment, she merely stared at him, her blue-violet eyes wide, her perfect bow mouth gaping open in surprise.
She wasn’t just surprised. She was disconcerted. His proposal had shocked her. Maybe even offended her. On some deeply intimate level, the thought of marriage to him horrified her.
Not that he could really blame her. Despite his wealth, he was no prize.
She was going to say no, and he couldn’t let her do it. He needed her. Quite desperately, if the past seven days had been any indication.
“I’m not proposing a romantic relationship,” he reassured her, hoping to make his proposal seem as benign as possible.
“Obviously,”