Lucy Monroe Cut Scenes

Remember...these are CUT scenes and to get the entire picture of Marcus and Veronica's relationship before their story in Goodness Had Nothing to With It, you need to read Come Up and See Me Sometime.

Veronica let her gaze slide from the dancers to the other patrons in the dimly lit bar. She wished she hadn’t come. Watching the couples around her only emphasized her own aloneness. And the Long Island Ice Tea she was drinking hadn’t done a thing to dull her anxiety over her and Jenny’s circumstances.

Of course it was only her second. Maybe if she had three, she’d start to experience some of that numbing forgetfulness alcohol was supposed to be known for. She took another long draw on the drink through her straw, marveling at how much like tea it really tasted. The bartender had warned her that it was made from pure alcohol, but she had a hard time believing it when she couldn’t taste anything.

“Good little girls don’t go out drinking on a weeknight, so what are you doing here, Ronnie?”
Her head snapped up so fast at the sound of that familiar drawl that she felt a pop in her neck.

“Ronnie!” he copied, mocking her shock. And without asking permission, he pulled out the other chair at her table, turned it around and straddled it before putting a bottle of beer down on the table in front of him. “So what is a good little girl like yourself doing here?”

It was the second time he’d used the term and she found it even more grating than the first. “I’m not a good little girl!”

His eyes widened in mock dismay and then he let his blue-eyed gaze travel over her body with insolent thoroughness. “I don’t know. You look pretty little to me. Are you saying you aren’t good?”

“Yes. I mean no.” She glared at him. Her brain didn’t seem to be functioning with its usual efficiency and she was just digging herself in deeper. She decided to take another tack. “I’m not little. It just seems that way to you because you’re a giant.”

He shrugged, appearing to lose interest in the game. “Tell me why you’re here.”

His demand sparked a moment of self-realization that had her blushing to the roots of her hair. She realized she’d come in the hopes of running into Marcus, just like some love-starved adolescent with a crush on the head quarterback. She wanted to sink through her chair, the floor and maybe a few feet of building foundation as well.

Instead, her tongue blurted out the truth, or at least part of it. “I heard you mention this place one day in the office and it sounded interesting.”

His eyes had narrowed and he was looking at her as if he was trying to read her mind. “I wouldn’t have thought this kind of joint would have appealed to your refined sensibilities.”

“Maybe my sensibilities as you call them aren’t all that refined. In fact, I’d hazard to say there are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Mr. Danvers.”

His mouth tightened when she used the more formal address and the already narrowed eyes became little blue slits. “I’m willing to find out, Ronnie.”

She swallowed. But before she could reply, he was on his feet. Was he leaving already? Had he come with a date? The thought left her so depressed, she didn’t at first notice the hand extended to her. When she did, she stared at it dumbly, trying to figure out what it meant.

She automatically started shaking her head before the slow beat of the music registered, but he ignored her protest, taking her drink from her hand and placing it on the table before pulling her from the chair and into his arms as he maneuvered them the few steps to the dance floor.

When they got there, he just swayed in place with her, pressing her body indecently close to his. She didn’t know if it was the Long Island Ice Tea or the shock of fulfilling a three-year-old fantasy that was responsible, but she didn’t so much as give a murmur of protest to the enforced intimacy.

She just let her body mold against his and closed her eyes. He didn’t say anything, but his thumbs lazily stroked the small of her back where his hands rested. She wasn’t really aware of their downward movement until she felt the palm of one hand cup her bottom in the most intimate and indecent caress she’d ever received in her life.

A shocked gasp escaped her lips, but she still didn’t pull away. This dance, this moment was so far removed from her other life, she put her entire energy to the task of focusing on it. She didn’t want to remember the cautious, protective woman she really was.

This might be the only time in her life she would be this physically close to Marcus and she wasn’t going to waste a minute of it. She didn’t consider how Marcus might take her acquiescence until she felt an unfamiliar ridge rubbing against her midsection and Marcus’s lips graze her temple.

“I want you, Ronnie. Now. Tonight. All night long.” The words were so like something out of one of her fantasies that she didn’t at first realize he’d actually uttered them until he asked, “Well?”

She let her head fall back so she could see his face. The look in his eyes mesmerized her.
“Wh-what?”

“I’m on a hair trigger here, Ronnie. Don’t play games. Either you want me, or you don’t. If you don’t, say so now before this goes any farther.”

Not want him? Was the man insane? She’d wanted him since the first day Alex had introduced her to his newest employee. But believing he wanted her was another thing entirely. “You want me?” she asked, just to make sure she hadn’t been hearing things.

She had drunk one whole and the good part of a second Long Island Ice Tea after all.

“Want you? My body’s vibrating with it, or are you going to pretend you can’t feel the evidence pressing against you?” Using the hand that still cupped her bottom, he pulled her into even closer contact, emphasizing his point.

“Don’t play coy with me, Ronnie.” His voice was guttural, like he was mad, but his eyes and body said something else. “You can barely keep your eyes to yourself in the office. You want me. You’ve been panting to know what it would be like between us and baby, I can promise you, it’ll be good. Real good.”

She wanted to argue his insulting claim that she’d been panting after him, but she couldn’t deny the truth. She had and he knew it. More importantly, he seemed to want to do something about it.

She’d come to the Broken Boot tonight with the idea of drowning her sorrows in drink. Melodramatic, but true. However, the prospect of staving off reality with the pleasure of Marcus’s body sounded much more appealing. And though she might question her own sanity in the morning, she wasn’t going to let that stop her from grabbing the brass ring tonight.

Too many things in Veronica’s life were uncertain right now. She had no idea what the future would bring and she would not allow the fact that Marcus had an often stated no ties, no commitments policy regarding women stop her from taking what little joy she could find in today.

She looked into his eyes, sure hers revealed her need to him. “Yes. Please. Make it good.”

Marcus felt Ronnie’s soft little body stir against him and waited to see if she would waken. The little brown wren should be exhausted. They’d spent the dark hours exploring her newly discovered sensuality.

He thought a very explicit four letter word that described what he’d been doing to her for the last five hours to a T.

She’d been a damn virgin. What woman in today’s age had never had sex at the age of twenty-three? Veronica bloody Richards, that’s who. And Marcus wouldn’t be lying there swearing at himself if he’d been able to stop once he found out this astonishing bit of information. No, the knowledge that he was going to be Ronnie’s first lover had nearly made him ejaculate prematurely for the first time since puberty.

Far from stopping, he’d been irresistibly determined to give her the best possible first time a woman could have. If her sobbing, screaming multiple orgasms were any indication, he’d succeeded. There had only been one moment when everything had been touch and go. She’d begged him to love her and he didn’t deal with that word. He’d learned very young that love was just the excuse people used to do stupid things.

He’d made sure Ronnie knew what they were engaging in had everything to do with male-female hormones and nothing to do with some esoteric concept that inspired poetry and foolish sacrifice. She’d agreed and he’d been lost.

Lost to a buttoned up, shy little virgin. Only she hadn’t been buttoned up or shy in his arms tonight. Ronnie’s passion easily matched his own, sometimes surpassing him in her vocal needs. Maybe waiting so long for the first time had left her with a lot of pent up desires. Whatever the cause, he’d never shared his bed with such a passionate, imaginative lover.

But his head was telling him to do so would be a big mistake. It was easy to believe you loved your first lover, or so he’d been told. Ronnie was so intense and private, he hated the thought she might imagine herself in love with him and end up getting hurt when their affair ended. As all affairs eventually did.

Unlike Alex, the thought of marriage and babies made Marcus shudder. He wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment and didn’t know if he ever would be. Taking responsibility for someone else’s life made you vulnerable and he’d promised himself he would never be vulnerable again when he was ten years old.

Ronnie stirred and so did Marcus. Not his whole body, just the part that had gotten him into this mess to begin with. Small warm fingers curled around his growing male flesh and his thoughts started to scatter.

“You’ve got to be sore, honey.” Hell, seasoned lovers who had long since left their virginity and any claim to innocence behind got sore after a long session of loving with him.

An hour later, he followed her into sleep thinking that virgin or not, no way was he giving up this kind of pleasure with his little brown wren.

Veronica stared at the small white stick lying innocently on the cracked Formica countertop of her bathroom vanity with the same trepidation she might face a poisonous snake wrapped around the base of her toilet bowl. She couldn’t quite work up the courage to look at the small indicator box midway down the stick - the little square that would show a single blue or pink line. Blue meaning yes, her entire world would change as she knew it. Pink. She prayed for pink, but like so many of her prayers lately, the answer was a resounding no. The indicator line had turned blue.

Nausea and cold fear rolled over her in waves that stole her breath and made the world go black around the edges.

She woke up in a heap on the worn linoleum of the bathroom floor. Too weak to move at first, she laid there contemplating this new complication in her life. Pregnant. With Marcus’s baby. Could it get any worse? What in the world was she going to do? Marcus had been fanatical about birth control. He’d made his views on commitment and family very clear.

He still didn’t know about Jenny or her illness. Marcus thought Veronica lived on such a shoestring because she was tight with money. He was clueless about the strains and stresses that tormented her when they weren’t together. And that was partly her fault, because when she was with Marcus, he made her laugh and he made her forget.

The nights they spent in each other’s arms were her one outlet to sanity, the glue that was holding her otherwise dangerously cracked control over her emotions together. But everything came with a price and hers was that little blue line. How could she follow through with her plans to raise the money necessary for Jenny’s treatment when she was pregnant with Marcus’s baby?

She’d have to tell him, about the baby and about Jenny. A small flicker of hope burned inside. Maybe, just maybe, he’d offer to help. Perhaps he would lend her the money for Jenny’s treatment, or cosign a loan for her. He’d want to help out financially with the baby, wouldn’t he? Or would he expect her to get rid of it?

The nausea grew acute and she sat up far enough to lean over the toilet basin and be sick. No. He couldn’t want her to do that, but she didn’t know. They’d never discussed issues like that. They spent their time together laughing and making love, or according to him – having sex. Very good sex. Sex that made her forget her own first name, but sex just the same.

She forced herself to her feet. She had to get it together or she would be late for work. She would talk to Marcus later tonight. They had a date after she went to visit Jenny at the hospital. The fact that complications unrelated to the blood transfusion had kept Jenny in the hospital had only added to Veronica’s sense of hopeless despair.

A sense that had led her to making a final, difficult decision regarding how she would raise the money she needed to get Jenny treatment. Only that decision was in jeopardy because somehow Marcus’s birth control had failed. They’d never had a condom break, but then no form of birth control was absolute...except abstinence. And she certainly hadn’t been practicing that around Marcus.

Veronica listened to the masculine laughter filter from Alex’s office and something in her died. Like an idiot, she’d made it obvious she was upset to Marcus. Hearing his fervently negative view on the prospect of fatherhood and marriage had torn the small bit of hope she’d nursed since confirming her pregnancy earlier from its moorings.

But the final blow had come when instead of following her and trying to work it out – Marcus had remained with Alex. And they were laughing. Most likely about her and what a naïve ninny she had been to think she could compete with the Cherry’s of this world.

Veronica bit her lip in an effort to control her tears as she watched Jenny lying almost deathly still in the hospital bed. She would have done anything, including selling corporate secrets, to give her little sister a chance.

The only alternative available included a medical treatment not yet approved in the United States – a treatment developed by an eminent European physician that did not guarantee Jenny would live, but gave her a fighting chance at making it past her sixteenth birthday.

Remembering the day the doctor had told her about the treatment pulled Veronica’s thoughts around to her argument with Marcus over working late that night. Which inevitably led to thoughts of Marcus period. And those thoughts caused a crack in the wall Veronica had constructed to hold in her pain.

She loved him, but he had only been interested in a brief fling. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want commitment, had absolutely no interest in the responsibilities of a family. He knew nothing about Jenny or Veronica’s overwhelming and growing desperation to do something, anything, to save her sister.

He hadn’t asked about her life outside their time together and she hadn’t volunteered any information. And hadn’t his words in Alex’s office the other day affirmed she’d made the right decision in withholding her innermost self from him?

After all, what was the point in telling a man who saw you as a convenient sexual outlet that you had responsibilities that would send him running fast and furiously in the other direction? Selfishly, she had wanted as much time with Marcus as she could take before the inevitable break-up.

Inevitable not only because he would move on to another woman, but also because once he discovered she’d sold information to John Harrison – he would never want to see her again.
He couldn’t possibly understand her desperation. He didn’t love like she did. He couldn’t begin to comprehend the emotions that had prompted her to approach John Harrison for the money necessary to provide Jenny with a chance at life. Marcus was unfailingly loyal to CIS and their boss, Alex Trahern.

She had toyed briefly with the idea of going to Alex and asking him for a loan. The thought would never have entered her mind before he started showing a more human side when he met his wife, but even Isabel hadn’t been able to convince him to give up his plans for revenge. Veronica had given up the idea of asking her hard boss for help before it had even fully formed.

She forced her exhausted limbs to take her further into the hospital room and laid her hand on Jenny’s frail arm. The parchment thin skin still pulsed with life and Veronica vowed fiercely to protect that life. She laid her other hand over her lower belly – just as she would protect the new life growing within her.

She hadn’t told Marcus about that either and had no plans to do so. She could not face the possibility that he would ask her to get an abortion. Even if he didn’t, she had no doubt he wouldn’t want anything to do with the child. He’d made that clear enough in Alex’s office.

She had told him about her actions regarding Hypertron however. She’d left a letter, including her resignation, on his desk. He would find it in the morning. She could not allow her actions to affect his job at CIS. Only four people had known the details she shared with John Harrison regarding the St. Clair takeover - Alex Trahern, his wife, Marcus and herself.

She didn’t think Alex would suspect Isabel, but he might suspect Marcus and she wasn’t going to let that happen. Her confession would guarantee Marcus’s relationship with Alex would stay intact just as it would effectively destroy her own chance of ever seeing the man she loved again.

Marcus numbly read the letter in his hand one more time. The words made no more sense to him than they had the first nine times he’s read it. It had to be some kind of joke. No way in hell would his little brown wren have sold confidential information to John Harrison. Not Veronica Richards, recent virgin and even more recently the passionate lover that had made him consider commitment for the first time in his adult life.

He’d been playing with the idea of asking her to move in with him while she’d been planning this. He crumpled the letter in his fist, the crackly sound of paper mixing with his labored breathing. His chest was tight; his throat felt thick; his eyes burned with an alien moisture he refused to acknowledge.

She’d said she was sorry, but she hadn’t said why. She hadn’t even said goodbye. The letter burning a hole in his hand confessed to corporate espionage; it assured Marcus and Alex that no other confidential secrets had been leaked; it condemned the writer. But nowhere in the multitude of little black letters on white paper was there any acknowledgement of the relationship that had obsessed Marcus for the last four weeks.

He erupted out of his chair, slamming the armrests with both fists and sending it careening into the wall behind him.

Timeless minutes later he stood in the middle of his office, breathing heavily, sweat soaking his shirt and stinging eyes that raked over the devastation around him. Papers were everywhere. Every piece of furniture in the room, except the large desk holding his computer, was turned over and out of place. Shards of glass decorated the carpet below the window where he’d thrown the heavy silver pen cup from his desk.

His knees buckled and he found himself kneeling amidst the destruction of his office, his jaw aching from the pressure he put on it to keep the primal roar of pain throbbing to be voiced inside.

He’d given more of himself to Ronnie than any other person in his life. He’d been subtly angling for more commitment for the past three weeks. She’d resisted his urges for her to spend the night at his apartment. She’d avoided any discussion of personal issues. He’d thought she was just shy, or maybe nervous about giving too much of herself when he’d said he didn’t want a commitment.

He’d tried to show her differently. He’d made love to her with everything he had it in him to give. He’d made their relationship obvious to Alex, wanting her to see that he wasn’t ashamed of what they shared.

He remembered telling Alex he wouldn’t be in the other man’s position for anything and he’d meant it. If he’d had to choose between making the woman pregnant with his child happy and a client, the client would have been history. The thought of Ronnie pregnant with his child brought that primal roar closer to the surface.

He’d intended to tell her he cared about her, that he wanted her to live with him.

She’d betrayed the company, but she’d betrayed him more completely. Every time she gave her body so sweetly to him, it had been a lie. She hadn’t been giving him anything but empty pleasure. The look of adoration in her eyes when she looked at him had been a lie too. A woman didn’t abandon a man she adored. She didn’t lie to him. She didn’t leave without saying goodbye.

He hadn’t hurt this much since his dad had publicly chosen his reputation over his son when Marcus was ten years old.

Marcus had dismissed his dad from his life that day, but he’d be damned if he was going to let Ronnie go.

If it took him the next five years, he was going to track her down and he was going to make her tell him why. She was going to have to say goodbye to his face. Until then, she still belonged to him and he was going to find her and make sure she knew it.

Scenes Cut from Come Up and See Me Sometime