His Shotgun Proposal. Karen Toller Whittenburg

hell I can’t. You’ve just accused me of being the father of your baby. I think that gives me a little say in where you go from here. Cut to the chase, Abigail Jones. The Desert Rose has been your destination for months. There’s no good reason to balk now, when you’re so close to your goal.”

      Oh, he was arrogant. And maddening. And sure of himself. And wrong, wrong, wrong. He was also so handsome it made her chest hurt. “Fine,” she said, mainly because her choices at the moment were extremely limited and because she was weary all the way to the roots of her hair. “But I’m not staying.”

      He just looked at her, coolly disbelieving. “Your display of reluctance is duly noted. Now, get in.” Then he got in on the driver’s side and started the engine.

      Abbie debated her options and decided that kicking truck tires would be about as pointless as any other show of defiance. She thought about climbing into the back of the pickup and tossing out her luggage as haphazardly as he’d tossed it in. She could be in Dallas in an hour, in Little Rock an hour after that. But now that she knew who he was, now that she’d told him the truth, sooner or later, in one place or another, she’d have to face him again. And now was as good a time as any. He was a jerk, but he might as well learn straight away that she was no coward.

      She scooted in beside Brandi and slammed the door.

      “…AND WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT? Right in the middle of the presentation, the thing breaks and all my careful planning vanishes as quickly as the available balance on my credit card!”

      Mac changed gears and merged into the lane of traffic while bubbly Brandi filled the stilted atmosphere inside the truck with chatter. He wished he hadn’t insisted she come with them, wished he’d never pretended an interest in her at all, wished he could yell mightily at Abbie, who was all but hugging the passenger side door in a wretched silence. Not that she deserved even the slightest hint of his compassion. She’d set him up, dammit. Laid her trap so cleverly he’d practically begged to walk into it.

      A baby.

      Well, it wasn’t his baby, that was for sure. No way in hell was she going to pin this on him. No, sir. Uh-uh. No two ways about it. She’d already admitted she was a liar. Claiming there was a boyfriend with her at the airport. Ha! That had been her first mistake.

      No, choosing him as her target had been her first mistake. He was no gullible Gus, ready to accept her claim as truth, her accusations for fact. She was grasping at straws if she believed he was so easily duped. He knew what she was after—the Coleman name, the Desert Rose ranch, the royal heritage of a lost prince of Arabia. Most likely Jessica had been manipulated into filling in all the blank spaces of his life that Abbie hadn’t been able to ferret out on her own. No doubt, Abbie knew the story of his past as well as he did, himself. He wouldn’t be surprised to discover she had a scrapbook containing all the newspaper clippings that made up his history—Rose Coleman’s storybook wedding to Ibrahim El Jeved, the crown prince of Sorajhee. The birth of a son, Alim, now called Alex. The birth of twins, Makin and Kadar, whose names were later changed to Mac and Cade. Ibrahim’s murder. Rose’s banishment and reported death. The rescue of three young princes by their uncle. The success of the Coleman-Grayson business partnership. The prime Arabian stock bred and trained on the Desert Rose. The secrecy, the speculation, the scandals of the royal family of El Jeved.

      Mac figured Abbie knew it all, right down to the last decimal point in his personal bank account. Oh, yeah. She’d snowed Jessica, somehow, and gotten close enough to find out all she needed to know to seduce him. Sweet, innocent little Abbie had a calculating heart and a devious agenda. Well, he’d be damned if he’d give her even a penny for her trouble, much less his name and heritage. It wasn’t his baby. It couldn’t be his. One night? A million-to-one chance? No. No. She didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. He knew her type, had been badly burned before, and it was not a lesson he had any intention of repeating.

      He should have made her find her own way out to the ranch. But some masochistic impulse had made him order her to get into his truck, had urged him to punish himself at the same time he let her know, in no uncertain terms, that he was nobody’s fool. Chances are, though, even had he tried to send her on her way, she’d have beaten him home. Women like her always had a backup plan.

      “Even the best-laid plans can’t guarantee success,” he said pointedly, for Abbie’s benefit. “Sometimes a scheme is doomed from the inception.”

      “My, my, don’t you have a cynical attitude,” Brandi observed in cheery tones as she rubbed her shoulder against his arm. “But, as it turned out, I still managed to snag the account. There’s more than one way to get a man to say yes. Isn’t that right, Abbie?”

      Abbie raised her head and for a second, her eyes locked with Mac’s before she turned away. “Frankly, I’ve never thought a man was worth that much effort.”

      Brandi laughed and blithely continued on with her chatter while Abbie returned to staring out the window and Mac fumed over her haughty tone of voice. She had no business taking the offensive like that, sounding wounded, somehow, in spite of the sting in her words. He heartily wished he’d left both women on the curb at the airport. “Four Seasons hotel,” he said, relieved to see the hotel come into view.

      “So soon?” Brandi lurched forward to see, jostling Abbie in the process.

      Mac wanted to grab her arm and tell her to be more careful. Abbie was pregnant, for Pete’s sake. But then he had no right or reason to think Abbie needed his protection. Or to give it, if she did. Truth be told, he should be thanking Brandi for providing him the protection of her chatter this far. “I’ll walk you in,” he said, as he parked in a No Parking space in front of the hotel, opened the door and stepped out.

      Brandi slid out of the seat after him, not offering so much as a glance at Abbie, much less a word of goodbye, chattering instead to Mac like some silly magpie.

      Abbie was the one who said a warm “nice to have met you,” even though she’d been mainly ignored throughout the trip. Mac felt irritated by one woman’s lack of manners and by the other one’s innate courtesy. And on top of it, he recognized a strong thrust of concern at the weary note that echoed in Abbie’s voice. Probably part of her act, a link in the plan to claim his future for herself and her baby. Well, she’d find it rough going. He had experience with women like her and their end-justifies-the-means attitude. It’d be a cold day in the Sahara before he set himself up to play the fool again.

      When he got back into the truck cab, a full twenty minutes had elapsed. Most of it while he stood inside the lobby listening to Brandi as she did her best to persuade him to return later for cocktails, dinner and a late-night dessert in her room, but mainly while he watched the truck, making sure Abbie didn’t get out and signal for a cab. He didn’t know why he should care if she did. The sooner she figured out her little plan had run smack into the proverbial mountain, the better off both of them would be.

      “I didn’t much figure you’d have the good sense to slip away when I gave you the chance,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. “Your kind never does.”

      “My kind, as you put it, does better at escaping when your kind leaves the keys in the truck.” Anger flashed in her eyes and he met it with cool deliberation. “Besides, if you were so anxious for me to leave, why didn’t you let me go at the airport instead of dragging me all the way into town?”

      “I was only trying to be accommodating.”

      “You were demonstrating to me that responsibility isn’t your forte. Fine, I got the message. Now, take me back to the airport and I’ll be out of your life for good.”

      “If it wasn’t for Jessica, I’d do just that and call your bluff, but good.”

      She looked down at her stomach. “You think this is a bluff?”

      Easing the pickup into the flow of traffic that was always heavy in downtown Austin, he felt the sting of her righteous—now, there was a misnomer—anger and smiled lazily. “You’ll find I’m not one to mince words,” he said. “And I don’t take kindly