The Baby Bond. Lilian Darcy

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Quickly, he had turned his attention to her face and had to fight back a gush of breath. In sleep, and after six hours of nourishing rest, she looked like a dream СКАЧАТЬ