Clay Barrett watched his cousin, Andie McCreary, push her food around on her plate. He knew she was trying to make it appear that she was eating, but he wasn’t fooled. He’d also noticed that she’d refused both wine and a cocktail.

“Everything all right?” their waitress asked.

Andie shot the waitress a smile, one that tried its best to be bright. “It’s wonderful. Thanks.” Then she bent her head earnestly over her plate and pushed the food around a little more.

Clay cast about for the right opening. “You know, it’s worked out surprisingly well, your running the office. I’ll be frank. I didn’t expect it to.”

Andie looked up at him, her brown eyes unnervingly direct. “I know you didn’t. You let me stay on when you took over because Uncle Don asked you to give me a chance.”

Her frankness surprised him a little, but he recovered quickly and admitted in a cautious tone, “That’s true.”

Don and Della Barrett had adopted Clay when Clay was ten years old. The love and gratitude he felt toward them was the cornerstone on which his life was built. There was very little he could refuse either of them.

Andie added pointedly, “But you kept me on because I run Barrett and Company better than you ever thought it could be run.”

“Right again.” Clay tried a smile.

Andie didn’t smile back. “I’d be difficult to replace.”

“No argument.”

Andie caught her inner lip lightly between her teeth. It seemed to Clay that he could hear what she was thinking: are you going to replace me?

But she didn’t say the words aloud. A few other things still remained to be said first. They hadn’t quite worked their way around to those things yet. But they would, very soon now.

Andie concentrated on her plate again. Clay looked at the sleek crown of her head and thought of the past, of their rivalry when they were growing up.

Andie had been the family darling, the lovable one, the mere fact of her existence enough to get her anything she wanted. Clay was the achiever. He showed his worth by what he did.

Their resentment of each other had been as natural as breathing. They’d disliked each other on sight, from the day the Barretts had adopted Clay. And they went on disliking each other, right up to the day Clay left home, on full scholarship, for UCLA.

When Clay left, he’d been eighteen and Andie had been seventeen. Clay hadn’t come back for ten years, except to visit. But then last April his father had suffered a heart attack. At the family’s urging Clay had decided to return right away to Northern California to take over his father’s one-man accounting and investment-consulting firm.

When Clay stepped in at Barrett & Co., his cousin Andie had been the office manager there for two years. Clay had been absolutely positive that he and Andie wouldn’t last a week as a team.

He’d been dead wrong. In the years that Clay had been away, his willful, unfocused cousin had grown up.

Clay was stunned to discover that Andie was absolute dynamite at her job. She could work circles around any of the topnotch clerks and assistants he’d used in L.A. at the major international firm where he’d been clawing his way up through the ranks for five years.

Andie kept ahead of the work load. She was pleasant and businesslike. The clients adored her. And if she remembered how she and her new boss used to squabble and fight when they were teenagers, she never mentioned it or let it affect their working relationship.

Yes, it had worked out. It was still working out, in spite of the change in Andie the past couple of months.

Andie pushed her plate away, giving up the pretense that she would eat the food on it.

The waitress appeared again. “All done?”

Andie nodded. Clay ordered coffee. The waitress looked questioningly at Andie.

Andie shook her head and murmured, “Nothing more for me.”

“You can bring the check, too,” Clay said.

The waitress went about her business, pouring Clay’s coffee and bringing the bill. Andie fiddled with her water glass and watched the busers and the hostess, the waiters and the other customers, anyone but Clay.

Clay studied Andie, noting, as he was always doing lately, the faint shadows, like tender bruises, beneath her eyes, the grim set to her pretty mouth. She seemed thinner than before, and there was a tautness about her.

At the office, she was as wonderfully efficient as always, maybe more so. But the charm and the openness that Clay had believed as much a part of her as her gleaming nearly black hair and her easy, musical laugh, were gone. For the past several weeks, Andie had burned with a determined kind of heat.

And Clay had to face facts here. It was the end of February, for God’s sake. Tax time was upon them. Barrett & Co. was enjoying a brisk business. And it was going to keep getting busier until April fifteenth. If Andie flaked out on him, Clay was going to have problems.

And if Clay had problems, his father, who only worked a few hours a day now, would be drawn back into the business full-time. Don didn’t need that kind of pressure, not anymore. That kind of pressure could cause another heart attack. And another heart attack might be the end of him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Clay.” Andie’s voice was tight.

Clay realized he’d been silent too long. He looked up at the beamed ceiling overhead.

“God, Andie…” He breathed the words softly and in them he heard all of his own worry and frustration.

“I’m not going to let anybody down,” she said slowly and evenly, as if she was afraid he might not understand the words. “I swear to you. I can handle this.”

The moment of truth was upon them. He demanded, quietly, “And just what is this?”

Her mouth twisted. A spark of anger lit her eyes. All at once, the old rivalry was there again, rising up to poison the air between them.

“You know. Don’t pretend you don’t.” She spoke in a low, intense whisper. “I’ve seen you watching me lately, measuring me, putting that razor-sharp mind of yours to work on the changes in me. We might as well be kids again, the way you’ve been following me with those eyes of yours.”

Clay stared at her, understanding exactly what she meant. When they were kids, he had watched her. She was always doing things she shouldn’t and he was always finding her out. He’d caught her pawing around in Granny Sid’s bureau drawers when she was nine, smoking one of her father’s Roi Tans when she was eleven and riding on the back of Johnny Pardo’s Harley Davidson when she was fifteen.

“I never ratted on you.” The childish words were out of Clay’s mouth before he knew he would say them. They were words from the old language they had shared growing up, the language of their rivalry and mutual resentment.

Andie answered in the same vein. “You never had to rat. You knew. You knew everything. I hated you for that, for watching and knowing all the ways I messed up, while you were so perfect and did everything right.”

“Andie…”

“No.” She chopped the air with a hand, then dragged in a breath. Her eyes shone with tears that she wouldn’t let fall. She looked up at the beamed ceiling, just as Clay had a few moments ago, as if seeking whatever he had sought there.

At last she lowered her chin and met his gaze across the table. “I’m sorry. I promised myself I wasn’t going to do that.”

“What?”

She sighed and the saddest hint of a smile tugged the corners of her mouth. “Act like a brat.” She waved a hand on which a gold bracelet of delicate linked hearts gleamed. “Prove to you that I’m still the flaky little twit I was when we were kids.”

“I know you’re not.” He spoke with firm conviction.

She peered at him sideways and in the dim light, for a single instant, she almost looked mischievous. “Meaning I was a flaky little twit back then?”

He looked at her, not speaking, realizing he’d more or less put his foot in it.

She echoed his thoughts. “Cautious Clay puts his foot in it once again.” She called him by the name she used to taunt him with back in the old days.

He tried to look accusing. “You set me up for that one.”

She let out a teasing chuckle. “I certainly did. And it’s all right. You only said the truth. I was a flaky little twit when we were kids.”

“A very charming flaky little twit.”

Two spots of color appeared on her pale cheeks. “Well, thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome.” He felt absurdly satisfied to have heard her laugh, to have been the cause of her blush, however faint.

They were quiet for a moment. But it wasn’t a bad silence, Clay thought, with some relief. Somehow, resurrecting their old antagonism had reminded them of what their current professional relationship often made them forget.

Beyond being a boss and an employee, even beyond the actual fact of being cousins, they were family. They were connected—not by blood, since Clay had been adopted—but through the people they both loved and through a shared past.

“Hell. Andie.”

“Go ahead. Ask it.” The last traces of her teasing laughter had fled. Her eyes were haunted again, her expression resigned.

There was nothing else to do but say it. “Are you pregnant?”

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Yes, I am. Are you going to fire me?”