The Baby Bond. Lilian Darcy

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,