The Baby Bond

“Early days, then,” he said. His voice sounded a little strained at the mention of his ex-wife.

“Yes.”

She gave a tight smile. Early days, and the cause of enormous upheaval in her life. A rethinking of everything in almost every waking moment for days. She was already deeply attached to the life that grew inside her. That didn’t make sense, the way things had started out, but it had happened. She knew that she’d become a part of something important, something that mattered more than anything else, and if Tom could not respond to that and give her what she wanted...

“The nausea doesn’t matter,” she told him firmly. “This baby is the most important thing in the world to me, right now.”

She managed to disguise the unnamed threat in her words, and he responded at once.

“That’s great,” he said. His face softened. “Babies are such incredible packages of hope and love and potential, aren’t they? I’m really happy for you, Julie.”

“Mmm.” She dared to smile at him. He understood. It gave her a warm surge of hope. They could work something out, pull the right solution out of this mess.

Then his gaze flicked to her ringless left hand. His smile gave way to a tiny frown, and her stomach churned again. No, she wasn’t married. She didn’t even have a boyfriend. He’d know why soon enough.

“Hey.” He’d seen that she was struggling again. He was bending down, coaxing her to her feet. “Is this okay? I’d like to get you outside for some fresh air. I had my housekeeper leave us lunch. I can bring it out to the balcony. There’s a breeze off the water, and it’s shady and cool.”

“That sounds great.”

He sounded great. So tender, and so concerned. To have someone care about her physical well-being was so unexpected and so wonderful that it threatened to completely break down the nervous tension, which was all that had kept her going since Sunday. She’d been feeling so alone!

He was holding her from behind, his hand curved like a warm velvet cuff around her forearm. The soft chambray of his shirt covered her bare arm. She could feel the heat of his body against her back through the fine fabric of her cream blouse, and for a moment she let herself sway back, surrendering her weight to his support.

For the first time she fully understood the meaning and significance of the child that grew inside her.

Cradling her in the curve of his arm as he led her through the house, Tom felt his unwanted attraction to her surge again. So she was pregnant! It made sense of the way she looked. There was a secret source to her beauty, which couldn’t quite be explained by adding up her features and assets, since it came from deeper inside her. He felt the swollen fullness of one breast against the crook of his arm and knew that soon she would look as ripe as some lavish tropical fruit.

He wondered why she wasn’t married and why she hadn’t even mentioned a man.

A moment later, she retched, pressed her fist to her mouth and fought hard for control.

“Easy. easy,” he soothed her, as if talking to a nervous colt. “Just take it slowly and keep hold of those crackers!”

“You seem to know,...” she paused and chewed desperately, “a lot about this!” Julie got the words out safely.

“So I should,” he answered her. “I’ve got six younger brothers. I spent months of my childhood on cracker patrol.”

“Six?” She knew at once that Tom’s mother must be more heroic than any warrior.

“And one who’s older.”

“And no girls?”

“No girls,” he agreed cheerfully. “After about number four Mom stopped minding. She figured she and Dad just didn’t have the chemistry in that department, and what the heck, she liked boys anyway.”

“I like boys, too,” she said. “I just about was one, as a kid. A classic tomboy, that is.”

“Yeah, I thought you might have been.” he muttered under his breath.

They reached the balcony. Julie hadn’t taken much notice of the route. Mostly, she’d been looking hard at the floor. Hardwood in some places, slate in others. A couple of large, expensive squares of Turkish carpet. Somehow, she hadn’t guessed that he would be quite so well off and so obviously successful.

Now, Tom settled her in a slat-backed wooden patio chair and promised, “I’ll be back with lunch, okay?”

“Okay,” she nodded.

He was right. It felt a lot better out here in the open.

This balcony didn’t face the dock where she’d arrived. Instead, the light dazzled on the water just beyond a crescent of sandy beach and a shelf of vibrant green lawn, edged with colorful plantings of annuals. A cool breeze blew, combing away the heavy heat, teasing her with its fresh breath on her forehead and cheeks.

Tom was back a few minutes later with turkey club sandwiches crammed with filling, plain iced soda water and a huge bunch of sweet green grapes.

“Mom lived on these, too, I seem to recall.” He grinned.

“I’ll try one.”

Julie pulled a grape off its stem and bit down on the taut, satiny skin. At once it burst in her mouth, and she tasted the flood of sweet juice. Heaven! He gave a grin of sympathy and took a bite of sandwich, revealing teeth that were even, pearl-sheened and perfect.

Then suddenly, now that they were settled, the tension was in the air again. They ate in silence for several minutes before Tom spoke at last. “You seemed shocked to hear that Loretta and I were divorced,” he said. “Was she spinning you a line about us planning to get back together?”

“Yes.” Julie wasn’t surprised that he had zeroed right to what concerned them both. There seemed no point in softening the reply.

“How well did you two know each other?” It sounded like an accusation. “How close were you?”

“She saved my life when I was nine.”

And it made her sterile, although neither of us knew that then.

“That’s close,” he agreed slowly.

“It is. Or it was. And I’ve felt that debt to her, felt my gratitude to her ever since, even during the years we didn’t see each other,” Julie said, then found herself telling the story as if she’d known Tom for weeks instead of less than an hour.

“She was sixteen when it happened. Our families were vacationing together at a small ski resort in Vermont. We’d rented a little cabin. Nothing luxurious. We were skating one evening, and I fell. A kid came past and ran right over my left arm with a hockey skate. It tore open an artery—I still have the scar—and about ten minutes later, the big storm they’d been forecasting came down with a bang. They couldn’t get me farther than the little local hospital.

“Nothing could fly in, either. The airport and helipad were both closed for more than forty-eight hours. I’d lost a lot of blood, and they were out of a match for my type. Out of O negative, also, which anyone can take safely. Loretta’s blood was the only match they could find in a hurry. She gave me two pints, one that night and one the next morning. More than was really safe for her, but only just enough to pull me through.

“Two days later she came down with toxic shock syndrome. In all the drama, she’d forgotten she was finishing her period. She got to be more ill than I was, far more ill, Tom. You know what happened to her. You know how badly her tubes and ovaries were scarred.”

“Yes.” He nodded, his face tight. “The doctors told us that was what made it impossible for her to conceive. I didn’t realize, though, that you were involved.”

“Involved? It was my fault.” Her voice rose.

“No.” He shook his head urgently. “That’s way too extreme, Julie.”

“If I’d known.... If my parents had known what it would ultimately cost her to give me that blood...”

“But you didn’t know. How could you?”

“And yet Loretta never once said to me, ‘It’s your fault.’”

“Yes,” Tom agreed quietly. “She did have moments of surprising heroism sometimes.”

“She seemed like a heroine to me then, when I was nine. She told me a couple of months ago that she’d gotten a kick out of the drama—”

“Yes, I can imagine that.” He gave a faint, crooked smile.

“But that doesn’t take away from what she did and what it cost her!” she said angrily.

Tom’s hostility towards his ex-wife was coming through loud and clear, and blood was thicker than water. Just exactly why had Loretta been so desperate that she would lie about the state of her marriage to Tom, anyway? Suddenly, Julie distrusted him.

“She wasn’t spinning me a line,” she told Tom hotly. “She may have lied about your divorce, but she did want you back! You said so yourself.”

“Not exactly. But we’ll let that pass. She wanted me back so badly that she’d taken a lover in order to forget me, is that it?” he questioned.

His reasoning floored her. Yes, how could Loretta have gotten involved with another man at such a time? But she ignored it and attacked.

“So badly that she was prepared to have another woman bear a baby for her just to make you a father. I don’t know what the truth is about your marriage or your divorce, Tom Callahan, but this baby I’m carrying is yours!”

Chapter Two

Telling him in anger was the worst way possible. Julie hadn’t intended to do it that way. After all, she wanted him to understand. It was a bombshell of an announcement to make out of the blue, since she had evidence mounting every minute that he knew nothing about any of this. She could hardly condemn his white-hot reaction.

“That’s... That’s... Damn it to hell, what is this?” Tom sprang to his feet and began to prowl the balcony, then spun on his heel to face her. She had lightning flashing in her blue eyes, but he was angrier, and his first thunderstruck reaction was plain, old-fashioned disbelief. “Some kind of scam you’ve cooked up between you?” he accused. It was the only thing he could think of that could make sense.

“Scam?” she shrieked.

“There’s only one reason Loretta wanted us to get back together, Julie,” he told her bluntly. “And that’s because after she left me five years ago—with another man, and not the first, either, although I didn’t know that at the time—the business my brother Pat and I had been putting our guts into for years finally began to pay off. We made millions within a year of Loretta’s and my separation. She kicked herself from that moment on for not hanging in there a bit longer. She wanted my money, that’s what she wanted, and the baby—if there is a baby! I mean, hell, how can there be? The idea of the baby was just her last-ditch attempt to get her hands on my spending power.”

“What do you mean ‘if’ there’s a baby? You can’t be suggesting I’d make this up! Make up something like this? Our child? Growing inside me?”

They glared at each other. It seemed impossible to Julie that this was the same man who’d cosseted her nausea so tenderly and capably just minutes earlier. And yet... And yet...

“Just tell me, Julie,” he said quietly, holding his hands away from his sides like a Dodge City sheriff about to go for his guns, “Just tell me.” He raked her with his dark eyes. “You came back to Philly a few months ago, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You were getting to know Loretta again. And since her death you’ve been going through her things, sorting out her life. You said yourself she was killed in her lover’s car. She told you we were just recently separated, but I can show you a copy of our divorce decree, and it’s three years old. From what you’ve come to know of her, do you really take everything she told you at face value now?”

“No, I don’t,” Julie retorted. “You’re right. What she told me is as full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese, but she’s not me, okay? I’m for real. It took me a lot of soul-searching to agree to what she wanted, although, heaven knows, I owed it to her after what the consequences of my accident had done to her body. And I made her think about it, too. I told her to really think about whether she wanted to have a baby this way, and she convinced me she did.

“I didn’t conceive this child to come into the world unwanted. I could never have done that! When I went to that clinic in Philly and conceived a baby with my egg and your sperm, I was acting in the belief that I was creating a being who’d fulfill the dearest wish of two people who, at heart, loved each other and were meant to be together.

“I’ve read enough about infertility to know how it can rip loving couples apart. From every word Loretta said, I believed I’d be nurturing a baby who’d make something right between the two of you, so that when I gave it up to you and Loretta after birth, it would be a blessing for all of us. That was the only way I’d have done it, and now to hear you talking about a scam!

“Like it or not, this baby is yours, Tom. Yours and mine, and most of why I’ve come up here today is so we can talk about what we’re going to do about it!”

“You mean you want to get rid of it?” he demanded.

“No! That’s the last thing in the world I’d ever consider. Damn you, why are you suddenly treating me like a—”

“Sorry. I’m sorry,” he interrupted urgently. He’d flashed out in anger, but with the small part of his rational brain that was still in control he knew that conflict wasn’t going to help. “But this has hit me like a ton of bricks.” He was fighting to make her understand. “I knew nothing about it, okay?”

“But I have the surrogacy contract in my bag.” Her hands were curled around the edge of the table so tight that her knuckles were white. “It has your signature on it, and it’s dated this past April. Less than three months ago. Loretta said that you both agreed on it before you came up here, and that you’d agreed she’d spend the summer finding a mother. And at the clinic, too, there was a frozen batch of your—You must have agreed for artificial insemination to—”

“Yes,” 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 three hours of wrestling with the question, and his whiskey long gone, he knew he was going to suggest it anyway.

Someone was shaking Julie gently. Swimming out of deep sleep, she was totally disoriented. When she dragged her heavy lids open, she found that most of the light had gone from the unfamiliar room. All she could see was the shadowed bulk of a man’s head and shoulders inches from her. A pair of liquid brown eyes glinted beneath impossibly thick lashes.

Tom Callahan.

At once, Julie was fully awake.

Then she realized something else. She wasn’t dressed.

Julie scrambled into a sitting position then dived off the bed in search of her blouse. “If you’ll leave now,” she whispered, “I’ll get dressed and be down in a minute.”

“Fine,” Tom agreed, his voice careful. “Barbara, my housekeeper, left a casserole this morning, and I’ve heated it up. We can talk over our options while we eat.”

He got himself out of the room with almost indecent haste. His groin ached. On entering the dim twilight of the room to waken her, he hadn’t seen that she was undressed. Since six he’d been wondering about rousing her, and had finally set a deadline for nine. He was impatient. They needed to talk.

But at nine, he’d found her still so deeply asleep that she hadn’t stirred at the sound of his voice, so he’d instinctively knelt by the bed and reached for her shoulder. Only when skin touched skin had he realized she was wearing a silk spaghetti-strapped slip and very little else.

Even then, it had taken some seconds for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light and to then take in just how much of her he could see. She had such gorgeous skin, satin smooth and tanned pale gold. There were some more of those tiny tomboy freckles on her shoulders, too.

And her legs! He’d been astounded to realize how long they were now that he could see all the way up.

All the way up, to the most delicious little piece of female rear end he’d ever seen in his life. It was covered only by a pert triangle of satin and lace, because her silk slip had ridden up, and the way it had twisted around her showed off the sleekly curved tuck of her waist. Her pregnancy wasn’t showing yet.

Correction. Her pregnancy wasn’t showing at her waist.

His gaze had moved farther up and come to a screeching halt at two pouting swollen breasts, barely contained inside a saucy wisp of cream lace beneath the loose silk of her slip. It would have been a distinctly sexy bra even when she’d bought it, but still he was quite sure that back then it hadn’t looked anywhere near so low-cut as it did now.