For Their Baby

She looked from one man to the other, wondering if she could trust any of this. Was she being set up for some kind of fall?

She hadn’t researched Colby Malone, of course, since she hadn’t known whom David would consult. But she had used Google to research the heck out of David, and she hadn’t found anything squalid or dishonest. In fact, at worst, he appeared to have an over-active social conscience. All kinds of charity functions and do-gooder lawsuits, lots of sober interviews in boring, peer-reviewed journals.

So apparently the indiscriminate sex had been an aberration. What happens in the Bahamas, and all that.

She had pretty strong feelings about the importance of a father in a child’s life, but still. If David had turned out to be a true sleazeball, she would never have breathed a word to him about the baby. She’d work five jobs if she had to, rather than saddle her child with an untrustworthy, deadbeat dad.

But David clearly was, with the occasional lapse, a good guy. He had a right to know he was about to be a father, and he had an obligation to assume his half of the responsibility.

The two men waited, apparently patiently, for her answer. Malone never seemed to look anything but pleasantly confident, but David’s face was tight and wary. Suspicious. She wondered if he hoped she’d refuse to submit to the test—which he could take as proof that her accusation had been a con from the start.

She breathed through her mouth, so that she didn’t smell the coffee, which suddenly seemed too bitter.

She’d heard of this CVS thing, read about it somewhere, maybe, but she hadn’t paid enough attention. Why should she have? She’d never imagined it could matter to her. “Are there risks?”

Malone started to shrug, but David nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “The risks are very small, but I want you to understand completely. Colby brought some materials.”

Malone retrieved a colorful brochure from his briefcase. She took it from his outstretched hand, wondering where he’d picked it up on such short notice. Did his practice specialize in paternity suits or something?

She leafed through the brochure blindly, the words indecipherable through the haze in her brain.

“You don’t have to read it now,” David said. “Take your time. Obviously you can consult any physician you like while you make your decision, though, as Colby said, the test must be performed by someone we agree on. Colby has a few names to suggest.”

“Of course,” she said, and accepted Colby’s doctor list, printed on creamy, classy letterhead that said Diamante, Inc. Whatever that was.

The brochure was glossy and obviously expensive, as well. That meant the test wasn’t cheap. “Who will pay for this CVS test? I know you said you wouldn’t be drawn in before—”

“Since it’s in my interests to settle the problem definitively, one way or another, I’m willing to pay for it.” David waved the issue away, as if payment were sublimely unimportant.

And she knew, from her Google searches, that, to him, it was. A few hundred, a few grand, he’d never miss it.

Suddenly her anger surged back, full force. Well, bully for the big guy, to whom her pregnancy was the “problem.” The “mistake.” When he realized the baby really was his, he’d probably have Colby sue the condom company, and her child support checks would all come marked Trojan, Inc.

Jerk.

She slid the brochures into a neat stack, like folding a bad poker hand. She stood, pushing her chair back with a scrape that echoed through the nearly empty restaurant.

“Make the appointment,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER THREE

DAVID SAT in the waiting room of the obstetrician’s office, surrounded by pregnant women, hyperkinetic toddlers and hovering husbands. He hadn’t ever been so uncomfortable in his life.

It might as well have been tattooed across his forehead: I don’t belong here.

He flipped through the newspapers he’d found on the magazine table and tried to remember who was running in the upcoming special elections. But real life, or what he used to call real life a week ago, seemed remote. Kitty’s announcement had blasted him into an alternate dimension. He still met clients, took depositions, researched case law, but it all had the muted, out-of-focus quality of something seen through dirty glass.

And yet, this “baby” and “fatherhood” world didn’t seem real, either. That left him…nowhere. Suspended in some murky, slow-motion half-life.

He wondered if things would snap back into clarity when the results of the paternity test came through.

Or would life just get weirder still?

He glanced at the closed door through which the nurse had escorted Kitty at least forty-five minutes ago. Their cheek swabs had been done earlier, when they first got to the office. Now the CVS test was supposed to take no more than half an hour. Had something gone wrong?

He stood. He paced to the check-in window to see if he could glimpse anything going on down the halls. He couldn’t.

When he turned back, he saw that a little kid with a runny nose had stolen his chair. In the far corner, a woman who had to be about eleven months pregnant inexplicably burst into tears, and her husband knelt in front of her, apologizing and chafing her hands.

God. This was the waiting room of one of the most respected and most expensive obstetricians in San Francisco. David could only imagine what it must be like at a free clinic. No wonder Kitty had been so adamant that she wouldn’t go to a cut-rate place.

He checked his watch. Fifty minutes.

And then, suddenly, Kitty came through the door. For a second, her small, oval face was pale and oddly woebegone under the chaos of green curls—and then she spotted him. Instantly she rearranged her features into the feisty, chin-up expression he knew best.

But all the pride in the world couldn’t put the color back into her cheeks.

“Everything go okay?” He had already paid, days ago, so they had nothing to do but leave. He fought the urge to put his arm around her shoulders. She might be pale, but he knew she’d rather collapse on the carpet than admit any weakness.

“It was fine.”

They walked a few feet, and she stumbled over a board book some brat had left by the door. She reached out and used the wall to steady herself.

“How about if you wait here,” he said, “and I’ll bring my car around?”

“No, thanks.” The door to the obstetrician’s suite opened just a little way from the elevator, and she punched the down button quickly. “I’m all right. They said to take it easy, but no one said I needed a wheel-chair and a keeper.”

He wanted to ask her again how the test had gone, but the stiffness in her shoulders told him she wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. At least not with him. Once again that surreal detachment swamped him. How was it possible that he might be having a baby with this woman who wouldn’t even talk to him?

She spent the ride down adjusting the folds of her cloth purse to avoid making eye contact, as if he were some disreputable stranger who had crowded her and might ask for a handout.

He tightened his jaw and backed away to lean against the farthest wall of the glass elevator. Fine. If she didn’t want to talk, he knew how to be silent. He put his hands in his pockets and pretended to watch the luxuriant fern and ivy of the atrium slide by.

When they reached the ground floor, though, and the doors slid soundlessly open to release them, he saw her hesitate, her fingers tightening on the shoulder strap of her purse. And then it hit him. How had she gotten here this morning? And how was she going to get back? Her hotel was halfway across San Francisco, and he had no idea whether she could afford a cab.

Damn it. He should have picked her up. Or at least sent a cab to get her. He’d promised he’d handle the cost of this test—all the costs. But he hadn’t even thought about transportation. Obviously, he’d been spending way too much time in ivory-tower lawyerland. And she probably despised him for that, probably assumed he had been born to the cushy life and had always been smugly oblivious of details like this.

Ha. If she only knew.

“I hope you’ll let me give you a lift back to the hotel.” He smiled, working at sounding politely professional. Nothing judgmental, patronizing or overly familiar.

He seemed, thank God, to have hit the correct tone. She didn’t smile, exactly, but her face wasn’t as gray and hard as it had been upstairs. A little color had come back into her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m fine.”

“I’d like to.” He thought fast. “And it wouldn’t be out of my way. I have to meet a client over in that part of town, and—”