A Bond Between Strangers. Scarlet Wilson

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      Carter hesitated—obviously for a fraction too long because Dan slid an arm around his shoulders. ‘It’s for charity.’ He tapped him on the chest. ‘And I know you, you wouldn’t want the charity to lose money because they didn’t have enough people to do their jump.’

      Carter sighed. ‘I’ll do it on one condition.’

      Dan raised his eyebrows, ‘And what’s that?’

      ‘You help me find this girl—Lily Grayson. Someone at the hospital where she works told me she was doing a jump here today.’ He’d pulled the crumpled photograph from his pocket. It was already looking dog-eared. He’d printed it from his computer off the clinic’s website.

      Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you looking for Lily? Has she done something wrong?’ Almost immediately Carter sensed the vibe. The protective vibe. He’d be wise not to say too much if he was looking for help.

      ‘No—nothing’s wrong. She’s done something really good. I just wanted to thank her.’ Not strictly true, but it was the best he could do at short notice.

      Dan looked over Carter’s leather-clad figure. ‘Better get changed, then. Lily’s up in the next jump—you can thank her then.’ He pointed in the direction of the lockers, ‘Take one of my suits, they’ll fit you fine. But be quick, we need to be ready to go in five minutes.’

      Carter strode over to the lockers, stripping off his leather jacket and unfastening his trousers. He found alternative clothes in Dan’s locker and pulled them on before donning the red flight suit and matching helmet. He glanced back around the room. There were several women there. But all had their helmets hiding their hair and faces. Hopefully Dan would point Lily out once they got in the plane.

      He spent the next few minutes checking his parachute and signing his paperwork. Since he’d done it so many times before it was all routine to him. He caught sight of the purple-suited figure scrambling onto the plane ahead of him. What was that writing on her back?

      He moved through the crowd until he was closer to Dan. ‘Which one’s Lily?’ he asked as they stepped into the aircraft.

      The rest of the party was all sitting along the sides of the plane, ready for take-off. Dan looked up. ‘Far end. Purple flight suit, pink helmet. This is her twentieth jump.’

      The engine and propeller started up, filling the back of the aircraft with noise. Carter felt a lump in his throat. She was Lily?

      The one woman he’d met in the past year that he’d had even the vaguest connection with? It seemed unreal.

      Worse than that, it was a disaster. She was as much a daredevil as he was. Twenty jumps? She’d almost matched his record. Plus, a matching Ducati.

      He groaned. This wasn’t what he’d hoped for. Worse than that, this wasn’t what his attorney had hoped for.

      When they hadn’t been able to find Tabitha, the attorney had suggested trying another tactic. They needed to build a case for Carter to keep the baby that some other woman was currently carrying.

      The genetics might be obvious. But some judges took pity on the poor woman implanted with the wrong baby and the possible risks to her health. This woman wasn’t a willing surrogate. This woman had thought she was getting a baby of her own.

      In a way, it was lucky they’d only found out at around the twenty-eight-week mark. By that point she had been visibly pregnant and it had been too late for termination—no matter what the reason.

      Carter needed to build a case for himself. He needed to prove he could be an able parent. And with no current partner, that could be difficult. Sometimes judges, rightly or wrongly, didn’t look favourably on male, single parents. So his attorney had suggested he find the egg donor.

      It shouldn’t be too hard—he’d already seen her photograph and knew her most basic details via the clinic database. But he only had a few days to do it. The newspapers had already got a whiff of the story and any day now it was going to be front-page news. So he had to find her quickly. All he had to do was persuade her to side with him in court. Maybe even pretend to have a vested interest in this baby.

      What sort of woman would give up their eggs? What woman would choose to be an egg donor? There had to be a good reason for it and Carter hoped he could find it.

      He glanced down the plane towards Lily. Now he understood the comment about ‘being a natural blonde’—she wasn’t. But that didn’t explain her eye colour. In the clinic photograph her eyes were green. But today they were definitely brown.

      Something twisted inside his gut. Could she have lied about something like that? Her eye colour had been one of the reasons that they’d picked her—that, and her Ivy League education. Eye colour had been important because Tabitha had green eyes too so it meant a closer match to them.

      Carter felt the plane beginning to circle. Dan stood up and walked along the plane, giving everyone a number. The first-timers were going to go first. Some of them were tandem-jumping with an instructor, so Carter edged up the bench out of their way.

      He found himself next to Lily and she unsuspectingly gave him another wide grin. ‘I didn’t know you were a fellow jumper.’ She smiled. ‘I thought you came to find a woman.’

      ‘I did.’ He looked at her closely. Was she wearing contacts? Brown ones?

      Lily shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. This light-hearted flirtation suddenly felt different. Maybe it was being stuck in the back of a plane with a virtual stranger who was looking at her oddly. But something about this was making her uneasy.

      She bit her lip. ‘Then who is she?’

      Carter fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the rumpled photograph. ‘She’s Lily Grayson.’ He pushed her shoulders forward a little to read the writing across her back. ‘“Here Comes Lily”—I take it that means you.’

      Lily took the photograph from his hands, staring at the person on the paper. She recognised the photograph immediately and knew exactly where it had come from. In the photograph she looked different, her hair was brown with curls. ‘That seems like years ago,’ she murmured.

      ‘More than three years, to be precise.’

      She jerked at the edge to his words. He was sitting so close to her. It was hard to hear in the back of the aircraft and his lips were brushing her ear. Nothing about this felt right.

      Her stomach started to churn. This had to be about egg donation. It was the only place she’d used that photograph. Was something wrong? Had a baby been born with some horrible disease from an egg she’d donated?

      ‘What’s with the eye colour?’ he asked.

      She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘In your profile you said you had green eyes. But today…’ he leaned right in so their noses were almost touching ‘…your eyes are definitely brown.’

      She drew backwards and wrinkled her nose, shaking her head. ‘Who are you—the eye-colour police?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ