The Baby Bond. Lilian Darcy

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “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 СКАЧАТЬ