The Baby Bond

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“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.

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 come true.

Still shoeless, Julie heard him go. In a few seconds she could slip into her heeled pumps and catch up to him, but instead she stalled, needing more time to shake off the heaviness of sleep.

This high-ceilinged room was perched dramatically near the top of the house, with two huge windows that met at one corner to give the illusion that there was no wall between inside and out. The large, clear skylight added to the impression of space and nearness to nature. The room was simply furnished, in plain yet rich colors that offset the pale gold of the wood and the ancient, jewel-like patterns of a vibrant Turkish carpet.

Julie had trained in interior design and had just finished a three-month contract with one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious firms of architects, yet she itched to take notes about the look and feel of Tom’s vacation home. She knew he’d had a large hand in designing it.

Tom’s house reminded her that she hadn’t chosen interior design as a career because she wanted to gussy up corporate boardrooms, as she’d done at Case Renfrew.

She’d chosen it because she wanted to make homes for people. She wanted to make a place that worked for her clients, a place that reflected the best of who they were, the way Tom had made sure his house reflected him.

She wondered whether he was the hands-on type with everything, then realized with a shock of feeling that she knew the answer to this question already.

“I want the baby very much,” he had said, and she hadn’t understood until this moment how much that meant to her, what strength those words had given her.

She’d come up here this morning knowing almost nothing about him, too storm-tossed emotionally to begin to guess his reaction. She’d been terrified that he’d demand she hand the baby over entirely to him without a backward glance.

And then had come the shock of learning that Tom and Loretta were long divorced and he knew nothing about the surrogacy agreement. In that situation, she knew that many men would have treated her pregnancy as a disaster they wanted nothing to do with, something they’d pay to make go away.

Tom hadn’t. He’d taken both copies of the surrogacy agreement from her and calmly fed them into Marcia Snow’s sharp-toothed paper shredder.

But he didn’t shred me, my feelings.

He wanted the baby. He wanted to be involved.

Knowing this made Julie feel less alone than she’d been since before her father’s death almost ten years ago. She and Tom had said some harsh things to each other this afternoon. Thinking back, however, she didn’t hold anything against him and hoped he felt the same about her.

For pity’s sake, how could something like this not spark anger and hostility at some point? She felt none of that now.

Refreshed, wide awake, her nausea really gone for the first time in days, eager to hear what Tom had to suggest, Julie donned her shoes and went downstairs.

Julie gasped when she saw what Nick had done. The room, and the scene, looked perfect.

And the six-hour break had done something to the emotions of both of them. Peacefulness, respect, acceptance. They were having a baby.

It was getting dark, and the landscape outside was slowly mellowing to a blue velvet softness in which air and mountains and water become indistinguishable from each other. The large, airy house was very quiet—so quiet that a creak and a crack could be heard every now and then as the roof and external walls cooled after the hot summer day.

Nick touched a couple of switches to bring up golden pools of light, and then gestured at the laden table. “Let’s talk while we eat.”

As restless as a big cat while waiting for Julie to awaken, Tom had already set the food on the table, along with white wine for himself and a choice of juice or iced water for Julie, freshly poured into stemmed glasses. There were two tall red candles burning, and he’d found some flowers Barbara had arranged on the hall table and brought them in as a centerpiece—a small piece of craziness that fitted with the larger craziness to come.

If you were about to suggest to a near stranger that she hold your hand and leap with you off a sheer cliff of unknown height in pitch darkness, then you might as well set the scene in an appropriate manner.

He slid a chair back for Julie, and she sat opposite his place setting, close enough to touch him, wondering about the courtliness of his action. Was he simply safe-guarding the vessel that was carrying his child? It didn’t seem that way. The gesture had been fluid and natural, suggesting that courtesy came naturally to him.

He sat, then slid the casserole and rice to her, and she ladled them onto her plate gratefully. Hunger had made her stomach start acting up again. This looked and smelled hot and delicious. And salty.

Tom wasn’t saying much yet, but there was something very significant about being here with him like this, about to share a meal. Gradually, they were starting to build a relationship. It had to be that way. For better or worse, they were having a baby.

Tom’s next words, however, shattered any illusory sense of calm Julie might have been feeling. “I’ve thought about this now, and I know what I want,” he said.

He leaned his strong forearms onto the table. He’d rolled his sleeves to the elbow, as if about to get down to a tough physical job. There was strength and confidence to him, and he didn’t hesitate. His liquid voice contained all the authority of a businessman about to propose a merger...and perhaps that’s exactly what it was.

“There’s really only one answer. I want us to get married, Julie,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

Chapter Three

“Married!”

She’d expected all sorts of things, but not that. She’d been planning to agree to it all, too. A written acknowledgment that he was the father of the child? Sure! A contract stipulating partial custody on vacations and weekends? No problem! A shared say on issues such as schooling and TV privileges and dating? Why not! And if he’d proposed that the baby be ritually baptized at the age of eight months in a fire-walking ceremony performed by New Guinea highland tribesmen, she’d probably have given that idea respectful consideration, as well.

But marriage?

“That’s insane!”

“Is it?”

“Yes. You can’t be serious,” she stated.

“But I am. Absolutely.”

“That’s—”

“Consider the other options,” he urged. “I have. For hours. And however we might feel about them, we don’t have the right to put ourselves first in this situation. We have to think of the baby.”

“I am thinking of the baby!”

“Are you?” he demanded. “Let’s see.” He raised a long, tanned finger. “Number one, there’s abortion.” The word sounded blunt and ugly. “That sure as hell isn’t thinking of the—”

“Agreed,” she said sharply. “And I’ve already told you, that’s not an option!”

“So delete that. Number two, I thank you very politely for coming, and for your interesting news, and wish you a nice life. Our child then grows up with a test tube for a father.”