I got pregnant first, then met the father and got married.... Letter to Reader Title Page LILIAN DARCY Letter to Reader Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Epilogue Copyright

I got pregnant first, then met the father and got married....

And then fell in love—yesterday, Julie thought, her heart aching. Yesterday. Suddenly yesterday there it all was, as sharp and as clear as day, named and waiting for her: love.

She loved Tom Callahan, with all the completeness and breadth and depth of what that meant. She loved his body to the point of aching. She loved his tenderness and care. She wanted to be in his life forever, to belong with him, to belong in his heart. Most of all, she wanted him to feel that way about her.

But how could he? The prenuptial agreement alone bore witness to their shared caution in their marriage of convenience. It contained forty-seven clauses, reaching forward into an unimaginably distant future when their twin babies reached adulthood!

But it said nothing about what happened yesterday...and their overpowering physical hunger for each other....

Dear Reader,

September’s stellar selections beautifully exemplify Silhouette Romance’s commitment to publish strong, emotional love stories that touch every woman’s heart. In The Baby Bond, Lilian Darcy pens the poignant tale of a surrogate mom who discovers the father knew nothing of his impending daddyhood! His demand: a marriage of convenience to protect their BUNDLES OF JOY....

Carol Grace pairs a sheik with his plain-Jane secretary in a marriage meant to satisfy family requirements. But the oil tycoon’s shocked to learn that being Married to the Sheik is his VIRGIN BRIDE’s secret desire.... FOR THE CHILDREN. Diana Whitney’s miniseries that launched in Special Edition in August 1999—and returns to that series in October 1999—crosses into Silhouette Romance with A Dad of His Own, the touching story of a man, mistaken for a boy’s father, who ultimately realizes that mother and child are exactly what he needs.

Laura Anthony explores the lighter side of love in The Twenty-Four-Hour Groom, in which a pretend marriage between a lawman and his neighbor kindles some very real feelings. WITH THESE RINGS, Patricia Thayer’s Special Edition/Romance cross-line miniseries, moves into Romance with Her Surprise Family, with a woman who longs for a husband and home and unexpectedly finds both. And in A Man Worth Marrying, beloved author Phyllis Halldorson shows the touching romance between a virginal schoolteacher and a much older single dad.

Treasure this month’s offerings—and keep coming back to Romance for more compelling love stories!

Enjoy,

Mary-Theresa Hussey

Senior Editor

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

The Baby Bond
Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LILIAN DARCY

Since her marriage to an irresistible New Yorker over ten years ago, Lilian Darcy has divided her time between various parts of the United States and her native Australia. Her children hold dual citizenship, and in her writing she tries to embody the shared strength of the two cultures—heroism, warmth and down-to-earth values. Although new to Silhouette, she has written over thirty books for Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance line and is now looking forward to creating strong, passionate stories for a whole new set of readers.

Dear Reader,

When it comes to making babies, I’m a specialist. I only do the active kind. They can lift their heads the day they’re born. They run at ten months. By a year, they’re climbing the handles of the kitchen drawers as if they were rungs on a ladder. They’re curious, too. Will someone please invent a refrigerator lock that they don’t learn to unfasten within a week? I’m sick of cleaning large puddles of homemade spaghetti sauce off my kitchen floor.

As you can tell, my husband and I are still in the throes of the toddler years at my place. So when you read about babies in my books, you’ll know the memories are still fresh. Far too fresh. I asked my very dear mother-in-law a year or two ago, “When does it get easier?” “It doesn’t,” she said cheerfully. I gulped. Her eldest is forty-five.

Strangely enough, though, the question that haunts me most frequently as I contemplate my manic brood is not, “How do I get out of this?” but “Shall we have another one?”

Sincerely,

Chapter One

This, at last, was Loretta’s husband.

Julie had only a few seconds to marshal her first impressions of the man who had been married to her cousin. Tom Callahan was coming toward her across the polished hardwood floor of this spacious and blessedly cool office.

Her very soul ragged with fatigue and stress, she saw that he was tall, dark-haired, golden tanned, denim-clad and somewhere in his early thirties.

And then he had reached her, and taken her hot hands into his cool ones. They looked at each other for a moment, their hands locked together, not yet knowing what to say, how to begin.

Despite the awkwardness, the engulfing pressure of his touch was like a lifeline.

Then carefully, as a tribute to the circumstances of this, their first meeting, he took her into his arms. It didn’t seem odd. On Tuesday, also, at Loretta’s sparsely attended funeral, Julie had found herself being hugged by strangers.

“Julie,” he said eventually. His voice sounded deeper and huskier than it had on the phone yesterday.

“Tom,” she managed to say.

He was strong, athletic. She could feel it in the hard, warm knots of muscle that filled out his upper arms and in the squared pectorals of his chest. She hadn’t expected such a powerfully physical man. It helped a little. Physically, right now, she simply needed the support.

As well, she had begun to realize just how strongly every detail, every attribute of this man would live on in her future. Distractedly, she had already registered that he was one of the best looking men she’d ever met. Now, detail added to detail.

His eyes were as dark and glowing as polished teak. His thick hair was the color of molasses shafted by sunlight. Just a tad untidy and too long on top, it was hair that could make a woman want to reach out and smooth it into place with a caress.

In his arms, she closed her eyes, drew a waft of his mellow male scent into her nostrils and felt the shaking in her limbs, in contrast to his quiet steadiness. He must have felt it also. His arms tightened and he said her name again, with his lips against her hair. She felt the warmth of his breath and heard the thud of his heartbeat.

“It was good of you to come up.” His voice resonated deep in his chest.

“I needed to,” she told him.

It was truer than he could yet know. He would know by the end of their meeting today. On the journey by plane and car from Philadelphia, she’d thought of little else. Tom Callahan’s part-time maintenance man, Don Jarvis, had brought her here from the Albany airport, and she’d barely managed to pass the time of day with the man. Fortunately, having given her his careful condolences about Loretta’s death, Don probably hadn’t expected much in the way of conversation.

Tom let her go at last, slowly, as if to make sure she had the strength to stand up. They stood facing each other, not touching any more but still standing close.

“This is hard,” he said. She could see in the twist of his face how much he meant it.

“It has to be, doesn’t it?” she agreed, her throat tight

“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport myself.”

“No, please! I asked you on the phone not to disrupt your schedule.”

“You see, when you called yesterday, I—” He broke off and shook his head, unable to find words, then reached back to wipe a lean hand around the inside of his open collar. “Look,” he began again after a moment, “I’m going to give my assistant, Marcia, the rest of the day off, then we’ll talk. We need to give this some time, and we don’t need interruptions from anyone. I’m so sorry you couldn’t track me down before the funeral.”

“Yes. So am I. I did try.”

“I was on the west coast for a couple of days.”

“And Loretta didn’t seem to have this address and phone number written down anywhere obvious. I looked through her papers a little, but there was a lot of other stuff to do, and—”

“I know you did,” Tom was saying. “And I appreciate it. This must have been a horrific few days for you. Just excuse me for a moment.”

He went to the outer office, and Julie heard the low vibration of his voice as he gave his assistant some instructions.

It gave her time to think, and to feel once more the growing unease that had begun five days ago, just hours after she had learned of Loretta’s death. Why had it taken her nearly four days to find any reference to Tom Callahan’s summer address amongst Loretta’s papers? He was her husband! Yet Tom himself had not seemed surprised that Julie couldn’t track him down.

Something was very wrong. Something didn’t gel.

Tired to the bone after five nights of shredded sleep, she sank into one of the two rust-brown leather armchairs facing the floor-length windows that overlooked Diamond Lake. The cool leather was as soft as cream. At once, the peace and beauty of the place started its healing work. Tom Callahan’s summer retreat stood on its own private island, surrounded by a bright mirror of limpid water, with the folded, forested Adirondack mountains beyond. She understood exactly why he had chosen this place. What she didn’t understand was—

He was back. He set a tray on the small table then pulled up the second armchair and sat down, his long thighs jutting from the leather seat

He’d brought coffee. Two steaming mugs of it. Her stomach rebelled, but she craved something to do with her hands and something to fill her mouth, so she answered his questioning look with, “Yes, thanks. Lots of cream. And some sugar, too, please.” Maybe the sweetness would keep back the nausea that had been rising in her all morning.

“Not watching your weight?” Tom teased carefully, adding a large dollop of cream to her mug.

“Not at the moment.”

He was, though, Tom realized. Not watching her weight, but watching her body. She was beautiful, even handicapped by the fatigue and stress that had put slate-blue shadows beneath her blue eyes and tightened her long, graceful limbs.

Her wheat-blond hair was looped on her head so that a few tendrils fell in long, bouncy curves. He wanted to wind his fingers through them. Her skin was as smooth and warm-hued as ripe apricots, with just the airbrushed hint of dappled gold freckles across her nose. And she had the most incredibly warm, generous mouth he’d ever seen.

Tom shifted and sent a spoonful of sugar fanning across the tray. It didn’t matter. The mess was nothing. It was all contained on the tray. He dug into the sugar bowl and got another, but the clumsy action disturbed him all the same.

He hadn’t thought at all about what Loretta’s cousin would be like. He definitely hadn’t considered the possibility that he might find her in any way attractive. Perhaps the low, emotion-filled music of her voice on the phone yesterday, during their painfully clumsy conversation, should have told him something.

He didn’t want to be attracted to her. He was a free man emotionally, and no one who knew him would question his right to that freedom, but he didn’t want this difficult meeting to get any more complex than it had to be. For both of them, this was about endings, not beginnings. After today, it was doubtful they’d ever need to meet again.

He pushed his physical awareness of her aside, stirred the sugar into her coffee and handed it to her.

Determined to get to the painful heart of this as quickly as possible, he said, “You told me it was a car accident. Was it quick? Was she at the wheel?”

“It was instantaneous, the police told me. For both of them. The car was traveling at over ninety miles an hour.”

“Both of them?” Tom queried automatically, though he wasn’t really surprised. Not if he recalled all those times in the past when he’d thought Loretta was alone and she hadn’t been.

Julie fisted a hand in front of her mouth and cleared her throat. She had no choice but to tell the truth. “There was someone else at the wheel,” she said huskily. “A man.”

The words tasted like cardboard. She had wanted to get all this over quickly, yes, but had expected a little more opportunity to prepare him...and herself. Small talk meant nothing at a time like this, but it had its uses. Tom Callahan, on the other hand, clearly preferred to look things in the face.

Her stomach twisted. A gulp of coffee didn’t help. Made things worse, in fact.

This was Tom’s wife they were talking about. Sure, the marriage had had problems. Loretta herself had admitted that. She’d talked about it in exhaustive, passionate detail. Their separation. Their attempts at reconciliation. The baby they’d both wanted—the baby that hadn’t come, even after infertility treatment.

But despite all of this, Loretta was still Tom’s wife, and as of last week there was every hope of the two of them successfully resuming their marriage. Or so Julie had believed up until last Sunday. Now, she was far from sure.

“His name was Phillip Quinn,” she said, unable to blur the truth with tact. This was a truth you couldn’t blur. “And according to his family, Tom, they were lovers. I’m...so sorry.”

She forced herself to look at him, steeled against what she expected to find—the sight of despair and shock written in the dark good looks of his face. It was hard enough for her to contemplate—hell, it just didn’t make sense! But for him...

Instinctively, she reached out to take his hand, and he let her, until she realized how she was chaf ing it, pulling the tanned skin back and forth across the well-shaped muscles and sinews. Then she practically dropped his hand onto the arm of the chair. In the background came the sound of Don Jarvis starting the motorboat again. She assumed he was taking Tom’s assistant back to shore.

“I’m sorry, too,” Tom said, his voice low and steady. “That two people should die that way. Ninety miles an hour! That’s a heck of a speed to be traveling, and on city streets.”

“But—” Her hands splayed convulsively.

“Did you think it would come as a shock?” he said quietly. “Did you think it would hurt me?”

“Your wife and another man? Of course I—”

“Julie, Loretta was unfaithful to me five years ago. More than once. That’s why—partly why—we split up. Our divorce was a long way from being friendly, and it’s been finalized for three years. I’ve seen her twice since, both times at her insistence, and both times it’s been ugly. She was once a big part of my life, yes, and no one deserves to die that way and that young, but I can’t bleed for Loretta now, and if she did have a lover and was happy with him in the moments before she died, then I’m glad for her. Maybe she was starting to accept it at last.”

Divorced. Tom and Loretta were actually divorced? And Julie knew that Loretta hadn’t accepted it at all. The house, the whole earth seemed to rock, and Tom Callahan’s face, with his teak dark eyes fixed so intently on Julie’s expression, turned a pretty shade of golden yellow then faded altogether.

She felt him grab the hot coffee mug from her limp grip just in time, then she sank into the supportive depth of the chair. Her eyes were closed, her mind whirling.

She didn’t for a moment doubt the truth of his words. They made far too much sense. Divorced for three years. It was why, in the pathological chaos of Loretta’s apartment—the apartment Julie had assumed was Tom’s Philadelphia home, as well—it had taken her so long to find a reference to his Diamond Lake phone number and address. It explained the sense of uneasiness she’d had as she began to sort through Loretta’s things, and the mounting certainty that the whole situation was not as she’d believed it to be.

Loretta had lied. She’d lied big-time. To herself, perhaps, as much as to everyone else.

“A rocky patch,” she had called it. “A temporary separation. We both just needed space. But if I could give Tom a baby. He’s always wanted kids, and I’m so ready to be a mom, Julie. So ready. My career at the cable station means nothing. I just want Tom, and his baby, and to be a family. I know it’s what he wants, too.”

Pacing in her apartment, two months ago, like a caged animal.

“This infertility thing is killing us, Julie, and it’s strangling our marriage. Slowly, like...like a pair of hands just gradually squeezing together, tighter and tighter. We both agreed it was best to take a break over the summer while I started looking for a surrogate mother. That’s why Tom has gone to the lake. We worked out the contract before he left.

“We just couldn’t stand what we were doing to each other, you see. We were both hurting so bad we’d just lash out over nothing, and then realize and cry and apologize and make promises and break them again two days later. The idea of surrogacy and the terms of the contract are about all we’ve agreed on in weeks. Taking a break is the right thing.”

Why had she lied like that? She had changed Julie’s whole life with those lies.

“Julie, are you all right?” Tom’s voice, dark and low, came out of the mist that enveloped her.

She struggled to open her eyes and banish the dizziness in her head. A couple of deep breaths brought control, but her stomach was turning over. The nausea again.

“You look terrible,” he accused, concern etched onto his face.

“Yes... I’m pregnant.” She waited for a reaction, every muscle and nerve ending coiled. She doubted what Loretta had told her on this issue, too. Perhaps Tom did know. But the loaded word didn’t trigger a flash of understanding. Instead, it only deepened his look of concern.

And he didn’t waste any time clucking in sympathy. “I’ll get dry crackers and water,” he said, already on his feet. “Salted potato chips, too. Don’t move, okay? It’ll take just a minute.”

She tried to get up, to say something polite, but he’d already gone. She stayed where she was, fighting hard against the rebellion in her stomach. Over the past few days, it had gotten to be a more and more familiar feeling.

She wondered how Tom had been able to recognize the symptoms and prescribe the remedy so quickly. A week or two ago, Julie herself wouldn’t have had any idea just how desperately a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy could need crackers and chips.

It had to be fatigue, as well, of course, that had made her nausea get so bad so fast. As Loretta’s closest known relative—almost her only known relative—Julie had been the one to make all the arrangements, deal with the practicalities. No close friends of Loretta’s had shown up with offers of assistance, either. Julie had worked alone from early morning until late at night for days.

There was more to do. Loretta’s apartment was still in chaos. It would have been easier to have someone to share the task with, but Loretta’s father had walked out years ago, and her mother—Julie’s aunt Anne—had died when Julie was eighteen. Aunt Anne had outlived her brother, Jim, Julie’s beloved father, by just five years. As for Julie’s mother, Sharon, Loretta’s aunt by marriage...

Well, Mom was very happy these days, so perhaps it wasn’t fair that Julie felt totally brushed aside and unable to ask for help when she needed it. Mom’s second husband was a thirty-seven-year-old would-be actor, still waiting for his big break, and Sharon Gregory was more obsessive than any stage mother in chasing opportunities for him.

She’d kept dad’s last name when she remarried purely so she could describe herself as Matt Kady’s agent without revealing a conflict of interest. And she seemed to hate the fact that Julie, at twenty-three, proved her old enough to have a grown child.

It was this new distance from her mother that had given Julie the final push she needed to leave California and return to Philadelphia, where she’d lived until the age of nine. And that, of course, was how she’d gotten close to Loretta again over the past three months, after they hadn’t seen each other in more than thirteen years.

Gotten close? She was starting to doubt that now.

“Here.”

Tom was back, with a huge glass of iced water, a freshly opened packet of saltine crackers and a package of chips. Strange chips. He apologized for them at once, while Julie was chewing on her first cracker, feeling the salt begin to settle her stomach.

“I’m sorry about these.” He held up the packet. “Unfortunately they’re Bovril flavored.” His expression was so full of pained regret that Julie almost laughed.

“What is Bovril?” she managed faintly, taking them anyway. The saltines weren’t quite salty enough. Maybe the chips would settle the craving.

“It’s this strange brown drink they have in England,” Tom answered, playing the moment for all it was worth. He could see that Julie badly needed a break.

“Hot and sort of beefy,” he went on. “I was there on business last month and... Well, you see, I have this running gag with my brother Liam. I’m on a mission to find the world’s most bizarre snack foods for him to try.” He grinned, as if he hoped to coax a smile from her as well. “He’s sixteen, and comes up here from Philly a lot in summer.”

“And what did he think of these?” Julie asked, her attention caught now.

It felt almost as good to break their fraught conversation with this moment of lightness as it felt to break her nausea with the crackers. He was doing it deliberately, distracting her with nonsense and she was deeply grateful for his perception.

“He hasn’t tried them yet. He’s working up to it with the safer flavors,” Tom explained, deadpan. “So far he’s tackled ketchup, roast turkey with stuffing and pickled onions, if I remember correctly.”

“Oh. Yummy. Pickled onions, huh?”

Yes! There it was! Tom thought. It didn’t last long. Like a shaft of sunset light breaking through piled clouds and then fading, it was there for just a moment, but the effect of it practically knocked his socks off. Wide and radiant, lighting up her whole face, putting a tiny crease on either side of her pert little nose so that he noticed the freckles again and got a vivid image of her as a kid—a tomboy of a kid who caught frogs and climbed trees and whistled through her finger and thumb.

“To be honest,” he admitted, still watching her, “they all taste mainly of salt.”

“Really? Salt is what I want.”

Julie picked up a cracker and took a bite. Her stomach and taste buds, much to her surprise, approved. She decided to take turns. Cracker. Chip. Water. Slowly.

Tom was watching her. Had been for a while, she knew. “You’re having a hard time.”

“Just these past few days.”

“How far along are you?”

“Not far. About six weeks, the way doctors count it. Four weeks from when I, uh, conceived. I only took the test last Friday. Loretta... never knew.”

“Early days, then,” he said. His voice sounded a little strained at the mention of his ex-wife.

“Yes.”

She gave a tight smile. Early days, and the cause of enormous upheaval in her life. A rethinking of everything in almost every waking moment for days. She was already deeply attached to the life that grew inside her. That didn’t make sense, the way things had started out, but it had happened. She knew that she’d become a part of something important, something that mattered more than anything else, and if Tom could not respond to that and give her what she wanted...

“The nausea doesn’t matter,” she told him firmly. “This baby is the most important thing in the world to me, right now.”

She managed to disguise the unnamed threat in her words, and he responded at once.

“That’s great,” he said. His face softened. “Babies are such incredible packages of hope and love and potential, aren’t they? I’m really happy for you, Julie.”

“Mmm.” She dared to smile at him. He understood. It gave her a warm surge of hope. They could work something out, pull the right solution out of this mess.

Then his gaze flicked to her ringless left hand. His smile gave way to a tiny frown, and her stomach churned again. No, she wasn’t married. She didn’t even have a boyfriend. He’d know why soon enough.

“Hey.” He’d seen that she was struggling again. He was bending down, coaxing her to her feet. “Is this okay? I’d like to get you outside for some fresh air. I had my housekeeper leave us lunch. I can bring it out to the balcony. There’s a breeze off the water, and it’s shady and cool.”

“That sounds great.”

He sounded great. So tender, and so concerned. To have someone care about her physical well-being was so unexpected and so wonderful that it threatened to completely break down the nervous tension, which was all that had kept her going since Sunday. She’d been feeling so alone!

He was holding her from behind, his hand curved like a warm velvet cuff around her forearm. The soft chambray of his shirt covered her bare arm. She could feel the heat of his body against her back through the fine fabric of her cream blouse, and for a moment she let herself sway back, surrendering her weight to his support.

For the first time she fully understood the meaning and significance of the child that grew inside her.

Cradling her in the curve of his arm as he led her through the house, Tom felt his unwanted attraction to her surge again. So she was pregnant! It made sense of the way she looked. There was a secret source to her beauty, which couldn’t quite be explained by adding up her features and assets, since it came from deeper inside her. He felt the swollen fullness of one breast against the crook of his arm and knew that soon she would look as ripe as some lavish tropical fruit.

He wondered why she wasn’t married and why she hadn’t even mentioned a man.

A moment later, she retched, pressed her fist to her mouth and fought hard for control.

“Easy. easy,” he soothed her, as if talking to a nervous colt. “Just take it slowly and keep hold of those crackers!”

“You seem to know,...” she paused and chewed desperately, “a lot about this!” Julie got the words out safely.

“So I should,” he answered her. “I’ve got six younger brothers. I spent months of my childhood on cracker patrol.”

“Six?” She knew at once that Tom’s mother must be more heroic than any warrior.

“And one who’s older.”

“And no girls?”

“No girls,” he agreed cheerfully. “After about number four Mom stopped minding. She figured she and Dad just didn’t have the chemistry in that department, and what the heck, she liked boys anyway.”

“I like boys, too,” she said. “I just about was one, as a kid. A classic tomboy, that is.”

“Yeah, I thought you might have been.” he muttered under his breath.

They reached the balcony. Julie hadn’t taken much notice of the route. Mostly, she’d been looking hard at the floor. Hardwood in some places, slate in others. A couple of large, expensive squares of Turkish carpet. Somehow, she hadn’t guessed that he would be quite so well off and so obviously successful.

Now, Tom settled her in a slat-backed wooden patio chair and promised, “I’ll be back with lunch, okay?”

“Okay,” she nodded.

He was right. It felt a lot better out here in the open.

This balcony didn’t face the dock where she’d arrived. Instead, the light dazzled on the water just beyond a crescent of sandy beach and a shelf of vibrant green lawn, edged with colorful plantings of annuals. A cool breeze blew, combing away the heavy heat, teasing her with its fresh breath on her forehead and cheeks.

Tom was back a few minutes later with turkey club sandwiches crammed with filling, plain iced soda water and a huge bunch of sweet green grapes.

“Mom lived on these, too, I seem to recall.” He grinned.

“I’ll try one.”

Julie pulled a grape off its stem and bit down on the taut, satiny skin. At once it burst in her mouth, and she tasted the flood of sweet juice. Heaven! He gave a grin of sympathy and took a bite of sandwich, revealing teeth that were even, pearl-sheened and perfect.

Then suddenly, now that they were settled, the tension was in the air again. They ate in silence for several minutes before Tom spoke at last. “You seemed shocked to hear that Loretta and I were divorced,” he said. “Was she spinning you a line about us planning to get back together?”

“Yes.” Julie wasn’t surprised that he had zeroed right to what concerned them both. There seemed no point in softening the reply.

“How well did you two know each other?” It sounded like an accusation. “How close were you?”

“She saved my life when I was nine.”

And it made her sterile, although neither of us knew that then.

“That’s close,” he agreed slowly.

“It is. Or it was. And I’ve felt that debt to her, felt my gratitude to her ever since, even during the years we didn’t see each other,” Julie said, then found herself telling the story as if she’d known Tom for weeks instead of less than an hour.

“She was sixteen when it happened. Our families were vacationing together at a small ski resort in Vermont. We’d rented a little cabin. Nothing luxurious. We were skating one evening, and I fell. A kid came past and ran right over my left arm with a hockey skate. It tore open an artery—I still have the scar—and about ten minutes later, the big storm they’d been forecasting came down with a bang. They couldn’t get me farther than the little local hospital.

“Nothing could fly in, either. The airport and helipad were both closed for more than forty-eight hours. I’d lost a lot of blood, and they were out of a match for my type. Out of O negative, also, which anyone can take safely. Loretta’s blood was the only match they could find in a hurry. She gave me two pints, one that night and one the next morning. More than was really safe for her, but only just enough to pull me through.

“Two days later she came down with toxic shock syndrome. In all the drama, she’d forgotten she was finishing her period. She got to be more ill than I was, far more ill, Tom. You know what happened to her. You know how badly her tubes and ovaries were scarred.”

“Yes.” He nodded, his face tight. “The doctors told us that was what made it impossible for her to conceive. I didn’t realize, though, that you were involved.”

“Involved? It was my fault.” Her voice rose.

“No.” He shook his head urgently. “That’s way too extreme, Julie.”

“If I’d known.... If my parents had known what it would ultimately cost her to give me that blood...”

“But you didn’t know. How could you?”

“And yet Loretta never once said to me, ‘It’s your fault.’”

“Yes,” Tom agreed quietly. “She did have moments of surprising heroism sometimes.”

“She seemed like a heroine to me then, when I was nine. She told me a couple of months ago that she’d gotten a kick out of the drama—”

“Yes, I can imagine that.” He gave a faint, crooked smile.

“But that doesn’t take away from what she did and what it cost her!” she said angrily.

Tom’s hostility towards his ex-wife was coming through loud and clear, and blood was thicker than water. Just exactly why had Loretta been so desperate that she would lie about the state of her marriage to Tom, anyway? Suddenly, Julie distrusted him.

“She wasn’t spinning me a line,” she told Tom hotly. “She may have lied about your divorce, but she did want you back! You said so yourself.”

“Not exactly. But we’ll let that pass. She wanted me back so badly that she’d taken a lover in order to forget me, is that it?” he questioned.

His reasoning floored her. Yes, how could Loretta have gotten involved with another man at such a time? But she ignored it and attacked.

“So badly that she was prepared to have another woman bear a baby for her just to make you a father. I don’t know what the truth is about your marriage or your divorce, Tom Callahan, but this baby I’m carrying is yours!”

Chapter Two

Telling him in anger was the worst way possible. Julie hadn’t intended to do it that way. After all, she wanted him to understand. It was a bombshell of an announcement to make out of the blue, since she had evidence mounting every minute that he knew nothing about any of this. She could hardly condemn his white-hot reaction.

“That’s... That’s... Damn it to hell, what is this?” Tom sprang to his feet and began to prowl the balcony, then spun on his heel to face her. She had lightning flashing in her blue eyes, but he was angrier, and his first thunderstruck reaction was plain, old-fashioned disbelief. “Some kind of scam you’ve cooked up between you?” he accused. It was the only thing he could think of that could make sense.

“Scam?” she shrieked.

“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 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.”

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