The Baby Bond. Lilian Darcy

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