The Baby Surprise. Victoria Pade

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СКАЧАТЬ you sure there’s only two possibilities?” he asked then.

      “For who could be Harley’s father? I’m just relaying what I’ve been told—Harley’s dad is either you or Brian Rooney.”

      Devon Tarlington nodded, then shook his head yet again, clearly having trouble believing this.

      But in spite of that he said, “I can’t go to the lab tomorrow, I have a business meeting that’ll take most of the day. How about Wednesday?”

      “Okay.” She was grateful that he wasn’t putting up more of a fuss. She had been worried that he might refuse and she hadn’t had a contingency plan if he did.

      “And the baby—did you say he’s with you and your sister now?”

      “Yes. We share a house and he’s staying with us.”

      “Is that all right with you and your sister?”

      Again his concern for someone other than himself earned him points with her. “My sister and I are crazy about him, so yes, it’s okay that he’s with us.”

      Devon Tarlington seemed to hesitate then and whatever was going through his mind must have disturbed him because the frown lines were back between his brows before he said, “Maybe I should meet him.”

      “It probably wouldn’t do any harm,” Keely agreed.

      He sighed once more, obviously struggling fiercely with the possibility of fatherhood. “How about tomorrow? In the evening?” he suggested.

      “That would be fine,” she answered, working to fight the slight eruption of excitement she felt at the prospect of seeing this man again herself, an excitement she knew she had no business feeling.

      And since she didn’t really have anything else to say to him, she stood to go. “Thank you for not hitting the ceiling,” she said as she did.

      Devon Tarlington stood, too, and walked her back to the front door. “I couldn’t very well hit the ceiling with you. You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?” he asked with a hint of that smile that he’d flashed so easily before he knew what she was there to tell him.

      “No, I just wasn’t sure what kind of a reaction I might find. I didn’t think this would be particularly welcome news.”

      “Yeah, it probably would have been better to hear that Miss Keely Irish-Eyes Gilhooley had looked me up for something a little more tantalizing,” he agreed in a deep, devilish tone that let her know he’d returned to the teasing he’d greeted her with, albeit more subdued. “But it was nice to meet you anyway.”

      “You, too,” she countered, still trying to hide just how nice it was.

      “I’ll probably need your address for tomorrow night,” he said then, as if it had just occurred to him.

      “Oh. Yes, you probably will need that.”

      She took another of her business cards out of her purse, wrote her address on the back and handed it to him, watching as he read it simply because she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

      “This is close by,” he said when he glanced from the card to her again.

      “It took me about ten minutes to get here.”

      “So all this time you’ve been right under my nose and I didn’t even know you were there.”

      “Well, not right under your nose, but not too far from here. About six blocks.”

      “Strange to think of that,” he mused for no reason she understood.

      So, rather than commenting on it, she said, “Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

      “Bet on it,” he answered decisively as she said goodbye and left him standing in the doorway.

      And as she returned to her car, Keely wondered if he’d forgotten that he was coming to her place to meet his potential son rather than to see her.

      But it gave her a dangerous little thrill just the same.

       Chapter Two

       C larissa Coburn.

      That was a name Devon had hoped never to hear again. And by the next morning, as he went through photographs he’d taken of wild boars in Africa in preparation for his meeting with a gallery owner, he still wasn’t happy that he’d had to.

      He considered Clarissa—hands down—the biggest mistake of his life. A mistake he’d already paid dearly for. And now he had to wonder if it was going to haunt him forever.

      She’d seemed so perfect for him when he’d met her at a bar in Denver. Dancing on a table, she’d caught his eye immediately, and then she’d literally fallen into his lap and asked him out to dinner.

      He’d accepted, of course, pleased by his good fortune and flattered by her initiative. He’d liked her. She was beautiful—tall and leggy, well built, blond, sexy as hell. Not to mention smart and witty and a natural flirt who sucked him in before he even knew she was flirting with him.

      Over dinner they’d discovered that they were both free spirits, ready to pack up at a moment’s notice and take off—Devon for work, Clarissa for any reason. To Kenya. To Alaska. To east Asia—they’d both been to some of the farthest reaches of the globe and intended to see even more of it.

      They’d found that they shared the same likes and dislikes in food, in music, in movies. They even had similar plans for the future—neither of them were interested in marriage or family until much later in life.

      They’d just plain hit it off, which had led to them spending the next three months together.

      Three wild months during which Devon hadn’t thought about anything but Clarissa. Three months during which he hadn’t cared if anyone else in the world existed.

      Three months during which Clarissa hadn’t thought about anyone but Clarissa, or cared if anyone but Clarissa existed, too.

      Because that was also Clarissa.

      She was a hedonist—that’s what she’d said about herself. And she’d proved it again and again. If she wanted something, she made sure she got it. If a whim struck her, she followed it. And whatever felt good to her at any given moment was what she did.

      Who cared about the consequences? That was something else she’d said more often than he could count. If there were consequences she didn’t like, she just didn’t accept them. Or she let someone else deal with them….

      “Apparently even if the consequence was a baby,” Devon muttered to himself as he began to put the pictures he’d chosen into his portfolio.

      An eight-month-old baby.

      An eight-month-old baby who could be his….

      That possibility hadn’t even begun to seem real to Devon yet.

      A baby…

      He СКАЧАТЬ