The Paternity Pact

by Cat Schield

  “It wasn’t fair to keep you apart. You deserve to know...” She paused. “Both of you.”

  “Because you want something from me?”

  She grappled with the instinct to fling angry words at him. This wasn’t how she’d wanted this encounter to go. Harley fought to subdue her unrealistic expectations. Had she really believed that after so much time had gone by, she could show up, drop this bombshell and then he would simply welcome her and Daniel into his life with open arms?

  “I don’t want anything from you.” She only wished that were true.

  Because while deep down she’d hoped he would be excited about being a father, rationally she knew he would process the situation with his mind before his emotions. Would he ever get to a point where he was able to embrace his boy and all the awesomeness that Daniel could bring into his life?

  “Your son, however, is a whole different story.” Her breath grew shallow as anxiety set in. This was the moment she’d imagined and dreaded. She straightened her spine, preparing to fight for her son’s happiness with everything she had. “He wants to know his father. And I hope that his father wants to know him.”

  Grant wasn’t the sort of man who acted or reacted with emotion. He would have to analyze the entire situation before he decided what to do. At this point, her best bet was to simply leave and let him sort through everything.

  “It’s late,” she said, easing toward the door. “I should go.”

  “Come by my office tomorrow at any time and we can run the paternity test.”

  Harley nodded, satisfied that she’d convinced him enough to take this first step. “We’ll do that.”

  “If the test proves I’m his father, then of course, I will do right by him. Financially and otherwise.”

  No hint of any emotion showed in his impassive expression as he said this and Harley’s frustration sparked at his reserve. She knew he wasn’t made of stone.

  During their weekend together, in addition to his passion, he’d shown her tenderness and affection. His smiles had left her breathless. Yet, at the end of their time together, when confronted by something that made him uncomfortable, he’d retreated into dispassionate logic. Just like he was doing now.

  “I don’t need your money if that’s what you’re thinking,” she huffed, letting her exasperation show. “I can support us. That’s not what this is about.”

  “I realize a shakedown isn’t your style.” He paused for a moment. “Although given what’s been going on with your family...”

  “Yes. Well.” She hated how he’d connected the Wingate family’s recent financial difficulties with her claim that he had a son. “This is all about my conscience and doing what’s right. I couldn’t continue to keep him from you and not feel guilty about it.”

  Her son needed and deserved to know his father.

  Overwhelmed by a sudden rush of emotion that sent pain lancing through her chest, Harley scrambled to leave before she burst into tears in front of him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, retreating toward the foyer, all too aware of the solid thump of his footsteps as he followed her down the long hall to his front door. He moved as if the burden of fatherhood rested heavily on his shoulders. She had her hand on the doorknob when Grant spoke again.

  “Is that why you left? Because you were pregnant?”

  Resentment flared as he reduced what had been a complicated time in her life down to a brief criticism of her decisions. He had no idea just how much she’d wanted to run into his arms and have him take her away from her mother’s overbearing ways, her heartbreak over her father’s illness and her family’s disappointment. But his rejection had stung more than all her other troubles combined.

  “No.”

  “You should’ve come to me.”

  She left his declaration unanswered and slipped through his front door. Before she reached the porch steps, she turned to glance at him over her shoulder.

  “Daniel is your son,” she felt driven to say. “You’ll see.”

  And with that, she raced away into the night.

  Four

  Grant remained stuck in place as the taillights of Harley’s car disappeared around the curve of his long driveway. The night’s breath flowed around him, the insects filling the air with their incessant buzzing. His gaze swept over the front lawn as if hoping to find something in the shadows that would help him make sense of the emotion raging through him.

  Wrestling with the urge to get into his car and follow her, Grant backed into his house, slammed his front door closed and sucked in several steadying breaths. When he raked his fingers through his hair, his hands shook.

  This was all impossible. He couldn’t be a father. They’d been careful. Mostly careful, anyway.

  That first time, he’d been in such a rush to slide inside her, he’d neglected a condom, and the sensation of her bare flesh against his had been so electrifying that he’d nearly come. But despite his rash behavior, he hadn’t been an inexperienced teenager. Grant had quickly recognized the danger and controlled himself to the point where he pulled out, rolled away and slid on a condom. The slip shouldn’t have been enough for her to get pregnant, but as a fertility doctor, he knew that when it came to creating life, the science wasn’t always predictable.

  A son.

  His son. Was it possible? It had to be. It would be the height of idiocy for Harley to lie to him about something so easily disproved. But what did this mean for him? For them?

  The first night they met, her impulsive energy had sparked something reckless and dangerous inside him. Never before, and not one time since, had he become so obsessed with a woman that he’d been drawn to take a stranger to bed. She was his Achilles’ heel. That much had become obvious as soon as he’d heard she was returning to Royal. His need to be with her hadn’t faded. In fact, given the way he’d been seconds away from making another mistake, his attraction to her surged stronger than ever.

  Stupid reckless lust. That’s all it was. But the overwhelming power of the longing that had blasted through him when their lips collided demonstrated that underestimating such strong desire would be unwise.

  Especially now that they shared a son.

  Even though he’d refused to take Harley at her word and demanded a paternity test, deep down he believed Daniel was his son. Harley wouldn’t make the mistake of crossing him a second time with a lie of that magnitude. She might be impulsive and emotional in her actions but she wasn’t a fool.

  Which meant he was a father.

  The magnitude of this unexpected reality kept him up most of the night as he pondered all the ways he intended to work his new responsibilities into his life. He imagined all the firsts he would get to experience. First bedtime story. First lost tooth. First day of school.

  This list drove home all the firsts he’d missed. First smile. First word. First step. Grief swelled as he pondered what Harley had stolen from him by her actions. Anger followed but was quickly pushed aside and determination stood in its place. No matter what, he would be an integral part of his son’s life going forward.

  His resolve strengthened throughout the night, and by the time he entered his clinic the next morning, Grant no longer cared that his staff would be wildly curious about the woman he’d instruct them to usher into an exam room as soon as she and her son arrived. They wouldn’t ask why he was running a paternity test on Harley’s son because they knew better than to question anything he did. But that wouldn’t stop them from being curious and gossiping amongst themselves.

  He caught himself jumping every time his phone rang announcing the arrival of a new patient and wished he’d pinned down a time when Harley would arrive. As the morning wound down, he began to wonder if she’d show at all. Maybe he’d been wrong to assume her claim that he was Daniel’s father had been truthful.

  Just before lunch, he exited an exam
room after a consultation and found one of his nurses waiting for him. His gut twisted at the bright curiosity in her brown eyes, but he kept his expression bland and professional as she directed him to the room where Harley and her son waited. Thanking her, Grant headed down the hall. Hand on the doorknob, he strove for calm before entering the room.

  Although he shouldn’t have expected to glimpse any resemblance between himself and a four-year-old child, a trace of disappointment slipped into his awareness when he spied the child for the first time. Daniel had dark blond hair and his mother’s green eyes. There was nothing of the Everett family nose or chin...no physical attributes whatsoever that could prove the boy was his son. That he’d imagined he’d feel some sort of instant connection irritated him. He was a scientist. That’s not always how genetics worked. The truth was buried in the boy’s DNA.

  “Good morning,” he declared formally, meeting Harley’s gaze as he sat at the desk. “Thank you for coming in.”

  She looked slightly taken aback by his professional demeanor, but nodded. “Of course.”

  “Hello, Daniel. My name is Dr. Everett,” Grant said, introducing himself. “What we’re going to do today won’t take but a couple seconds, and then you and your mother can get on with the rest of your day.”

  He pulled out one of the DNA test swabs he’d put into his pocket at the start of his day. He’d already taken a sample from his own cheek and would add it to the one he took from Daniel for the lab to process. He rolled his chair to within easy reach of where Daniel sat beside his mother.

  Grant extended the swab and said, “I need to take a sample of your cells from the inside of your cheek. So you need to open your mouth.”

  The boy met his gaze with the stony stare that seemed far too mature for his age. Grant ground his teeth and regarded the stubborn child, unsure what to do. He was accustomed to his patients doing what he told them. For several seconds, the two stared at each other, neither relenting, and Grant noted his respect rising in grudging increments.

  “Does he know why you brought him here today?” he asked, indicating the test swab.

  Was the boy worried about being sick? Or did he sense Grant’s tension and mistrust him because of it?

  “I told him we needed to visit you because you were going to run an important test and that it wouldn’t hurt.”

  The boy tracked the exchange between the adults with the sharp focus of someone struggling to understand the undercurrents in the room.

  “You need to open your mouth,” Grant repeated, wondering what he could do if the boy continued to resist. “I need to swab your cheek.”

  The standoff continued and Grant began to feel uncomfortable beneath the boy’s unflinching regard. In frustration, he glanced toward Harley who watched the entire exchange with a thoughtful expression.

  Grant raised his eyebrows at Harley, demanding that she step in. When she caught his eye, she seemed to shake herself and nod.

  “Daniel, honey, can you please open your mouth so Dr. Everett can touch that little cotton swab to the inside of your cheek. It won’t hurt.”

  At last, the boy opened his mouth, not to give Grant the opportunity to pop in the swab, but to release a string of words in a foreign language. Recalling that Harley had been in Thailand for the last few years, Grant guessed it was Thai.

  “We need to run a test,” his mother explained in English, demonstrating that the boy was bilingual. “Would you be happier if I did it?”

  Another string of foreign words came out of the boy’s mouth.

  “Doesn’t he speak English?” Grant asked, impatience building as the boy’s defiance continued.

  Grant’s familiarity with children stopped shortly after conception. Once the pregnancy was deemed viable, his part was done and the mom-to-be became the responsibility of an obstetrician. If asked which part of his vocation he preferred, Grant would always choose science over the handholding his patients often required as they negotiated the deeply emotional journey from infertility to parenthood.

  “Of course, he does,” Harley said, “but he’s unhappy with me for dragging him back to America and taking him away from his friends and all the people he knows in Thailand. This is his way of coping.”

  It seemed less like coping and more like punishing his mother, Grant mused as he handed the swab to Harley. “Maybe you should do it.”

  As if this was what Daniel had been waiting for, as soon as his mother presented the swab, he opened his mouth wide and let her gather the sample. Grant was torn between amusement and annoyance as he secured the sample. The seconds that followed were tight with awkward tension.

  “The test will take forty-eight hours to run,” he told Harley, getting to his feet. “I should probably take your number so I can let you know the results.”

  She stood as well and handed him a Zest business card. He slipped it into his pocket and turned to Daniel. What did he say to this child who was in all likelihood his son? Retreating into professionalism, Grant stuck out his hand to the boy.

  “It was nice meeting you, Daniel,” he said, realizing that the next time he saw the boy he’d know for certain that the child was his.

  Daniel received a nudge from his mother before saying in his clear young voice, “You have gray hair, so you must be really old. Are you a grandpa?”

  * * *

  Harley smothered a groan as Daniel’s question hung in the air. Leave it to her son to strike at the heart of what had caused Grant to reject her five years earlier. Her gaze strayed to the touch of gray in Grant’s temples. In her opinion, the premature change in color added even more distinction to his already elegant appearance.

  “Dr. Everett is too young to be a grandfather,” Harley declared, shooting Grant an apologetic smile. While she was accustomed to her son’s outspoken personality, his directness wasn’t always well received. “As you can see, Daniel has inherited my tendency toward bluntness.”

  “He’s curious,” Grant replied. “Nothing wrong with asking questions.”

  No doubt Grant identified with his son’s curious nature and could keep up with the myriad of things Daniel wanted to know about far better than Harley could. Thank goodness for the internet so she could look up fact-based questions. Others had been more difficult to answer. Her father had suffered a second stroke two years earlier and passed away. When she talked about him to Daniel, her son wanted to understand why people died. She’d struggled with an explanation he could grasp and his follow-up question of who he would live with when she died nearly broke her heart.

  After saying their goodbyes, Harley herded her son from Grant’s office. As they headed home, she found herself grappling with the consequences of telling him about Daniel. Her son deserved a father, but she wasn’t sure that Grant had any idea what it took to be a parent, much less be the sort Daniel needed. Would Grant love him unconditionally and be willing to sacrifice anything to make Daniel happy? If he displayed any reluctance to be in his son’s life, her decisions about the future would be clear.

  But what if Grant embraced his new role? The man might be driven by logic, but when something penetrated the shell around his heart, he was capable of a deeply emotional response. Grant wouldn’t be indifferent to his son. Pondering this new reality pained her in a way she hadn’t expected.

  Daniel was her whole world. Since finding out she was pregnant, he’d been her top priority, the reason she did everything. With Grant accepting that he was Daniel’s father, he’d surely want to have some say in how his son was being raised. A whole new batch of anxiety besieged Harley as she realized she would have to share her son. Not only that, but the decisions she made surrounding Daniel were no longer going to impact just the two of them. Grant also had a stake in the boy’s future. How had she not considered this before?

  By the time Harley received the call she’d been waiting for, she’d worked herself into a complic
ated state of dread and hope. Seeing Grant’s number light up the screen, she gripped her phone tight and barely heard his greeting above the blood pounding in her ears.

  “The test confirms that I’m Daniel’s father,” Grant said, delivering the official results in a dispassionate tone, which was at odds with someone who had just discovered he had a son.

  Harley knew better than to take his lack of reaction at face value. No doubt he’d require time to absorb the news and was determined to proceed in a reasonable manner. “We should get together and discuss how to handle the situation going forward,” she said, meeting his objectivity with steady composure.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” he agreed. “Are you free for dinner tonight?”

  The thought of spending the evening with Grant sent a thrill rocketing through her, but she shut down her strong reaction. She needed to put her son’s needs ahead of her own.

  “Tonight should be fine. I just need to confirm that I have a sitter for Daniel.” She’d briefed Jaymes on the situation with Grant and her friend had offered to watch Daniel any night this week. “What time would you like to meet?”

  “How about I pick you up at seven?”

  She agreed and gave him Jaymes’s address, then spent the rest of the afternoon figuring out what to wear.

  Five hours later, Grant’s navy blue Mercedes came to a halt in her friend’s driveway. Harley had been waiting for him and slipped out the front door before he’d extricated himself from the driver’s seat.

  Harley wasn’t expecting any drama tonight. Grant hadn’t given her any indication that he intended to be anything but civilized and logical, but her anxiety levels had still been sky high all day.

  Instead of waiting for her by his car, he met her halfway up the walk. Her knees quivered as his ocean blue eyes took in her appearance. The man’s imposing masculinity was attributed as much to the force of his keen intelligence and innate charisma as his daunting height and impressive physique. He positively oozed confidence.