LITMIR.BIZ

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he said. “Five and a half years ago, when we were pursuing our options, my semen was banked there. Not three months ago. Someone was bribed, Julie, and my signature on that surrogacy contract of Loretta’s was forged. I didn’t give my permission for anything like this!”

      Julie was shaking. Shaking so hard that Tom saw it and couldn’t stand it. “Hey, hey...” he said, and tried to take her in his arms again.

      A baby. Their baby. And yet, until an hour ago, they’d never met. It was...earth-shattering.

      “Let me go, Tom.” She meant it, too. She was fighting him off.

      “Sure you’re okay?”

      “Yes. And we need to talk this out.” She splayed her fingers onto the table for support, battled to gather her thoughts, then straightened and said, “First, I’m going to keep the baby. There’s no question of that. That’s got to be the ground rule in whatever we work out!”

      She lifted her chin and her blue eyes glittered, as if she was daring him to question the statement. He did, too. This was too important to take at face value. “What will a baby do to your life?” he said.

      She wasn’t fazed. “What it does to any single mother’s life, I expect. It’ll change my plans, change my priorities, change my finances. Change everything.”

      It could have sounded too blunt and too cold, except that he saw the way her hands had come to curve around her stomach. She wasn’t even aware of the gesture, but he understood it. She was already protecting the child, thinking of its well-being.

      “Okay,” he said a little more gently, biding his time. “And are there any more of these ground rules of yours?”

      She sighed shakily. “That I don’t know, Tom. You tell me. There’s the surrogacy contract. The most important reason I came up here today was to persuade you to tear it up. But since you’re telling me that Loretta forged it in the first place and you knew nothing about it, I guess that’s not going to be a problem?”

      Not a problem? Tom rebelled violently, but said nothing.

      “Loretta had led me to believe that you’d be ecstatic about becoming a father. I thought I might have had a fight on my hands. But obviously that’s not going to be the case. I’m glad,” she admitted, and her face twisted a little. “I might as well tell you, a fight over an issue like this is something I wasn’t looking forward to!”

      Again, he rebelled. She was acting as if his part in this was over and as if all the decisions were hers. That wasn’t true, not by a long shot! An awareness of what he wanted, what was right for him, began to crystallize inside him. He might have had no inkling of its conception, but this was his child, too!

      “No!” he told her. “Absolutely not!” She gasped, and he said bluntly, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking anything is resolved, Julie. You’re assuming that because I knew nothing about the baby before, I don’t want anything to do with it now. But that’s not true. I want this baby in my life. I want it very much!”

      

      Tom sat on the balcony watching the shadows lengthen and the light begin to change across the lake. In his left hand, he cradled a glass in which the level of whiskey was sinking far too fast.

      He lifted the glass to his lips and took a tiny sip, determined to nurse the drink as long as he could. He really needed to think.

      He’d told Julie so, and she’d agreed that they both needed space. She was looking so drained he suggested she lie down in one of the spare bedrooms his housekeeper kept ready for family visits. If she’d been any less exhausted, she might have argued, but she was practically dropping in her tracks by the time he got her upstairs.

      That was nearly an hour ago, and he hadn’t heard a sound from her. He hoped she was fast asleep. Pregnant women needed it.

      And pregnant women who’d been through what she had this past week probably needed it in triplicate.

      Tom felt torn in two. The knowledge that he had fathered a child, albeit unknowingly and through medical technology, was pulling at the most primitive part of his maleness. He felt virile, earthy and powerfully potent. Complementing this was an instinctive need to nurture and protect and provide for.

      And yet, on some level, he still didn’t quite trust Julie. She was Loretta’s cousin, after all.

      Loretta.

      He’d assumed Julie wanted to see him out of a need for closure, and he’d welcomed her for that reason. He needed closure himself on the subject of his ex-wife’s life and death. After all, they’d been married for nine years. But closure wasn’t going to be easy now. Loretta had left a typical legacy—one of drama and mess and a huge potential for ongoing conflict.

      Yet Loretta Nash Callahan had never been an evil person. Her father’s callous abandonment of his wife and child when Loretta was deep into the hormonal turmoil of adolescence had left its mark, as had the financial struggle that followed.

      Attractive and ambitious, Loretta had snared a job as an anchor on a rather tacky local cable TV station at the age of twenty-one. But it had never led to more glamorous work with a major network, as she’d hoped, despite the fact that, as he learned afterward, she’d slept with all the right people.

      If motherhood had come, perhaps her stalled career would have mattered less. Perhaps there’d have been no affairs.

      But Tom wasn’t convinced of this. Loretta always had a problem with her priorities. And her principles.

      Was Julie Gregory cut from the same cloth? he wondered. Did she have the scent of his money in her nostrils? A seasoned campaigner would have no trouble collecting big time in this situation.

      Tom knew that, if it came to the crunch, he’d pay for the baby if he had to. Pay to be allowed to give it the sense of well-being and belonging and permanent, rock-solid love he knew in his heart was so important.

      He thought of his brother Adam, who’d gotten embroiled in a bad relationship last year and had a child now. A baby daughter, after all those Callahan boys. And poor Adam didn’t have a clue where the baby or the mother had got to. They’d skipped town without a word. It was an ongoing source of pain to him and to the whole Callahan family, particularly Mom and Dad, who ached for their lost first grandchild, just a few months old.

      Tom knew he’d pay Julie whatever she asked if she threatened something like that. He’d support her in luxury for the rest of her life.

      “No!” he said. “She’s not like that!”

      Someone who smiled like a cute tomboy of a kid, someone who wrapped her hands around her belly to protect his baby...

      He began to prowl, thinking of the woman who was carrying his child. The woman he’d met for the first time just hours ago. There was something about her. Was it her looks? She was pretty, beautiful, even, but her looks weren’t model-perfect as Loretta’s had been. And looks said nothing about character.

      What was it that made him want to trust her, then, despite the deliberate cynicism the business world had bred in him over the years? It had to be more than her effect on his senses, didn’t it?

      He wasn’t sure. Given a situation like this, how could anyone trust their own judgment?

      “But you do, Tom, ” he told himself. “Against all good sense, there’s something about her, and you trust her. So accept that, and go with it, and work out what you want.”

      That wasn’t hard. I want the baby. I want him in my life from the beginning, from now on, and I want to know that I’m not ever going to lose him.

      Or her. He didn’t mind either way.

      And insistently, no matter what options he played out in his mind, there was only one solution that really satisfied him. A bold, make-or-break solution that he’d be crazy to suggest and she’d be crazy to agree to. After another

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