A Ruthless Proposition

by Natasha Anders

  He glared at Mrs. Clarke on his way out.

  “You and I will have words later about the type of riffraff you allow into my office, Mrs. Clarke,” he snapped, and the woman paled in response to his words. He was too furious to take even the mildest satisfaction in that reaction.

  Two hours didn’t do much to calm his temper. He found himself sitting across from Mike Grayson, still wearing the glare that felt like it had taken up permanent residence on his face. Mike had been startled to see his biggest client walk into his office earlier. Mike usually came to Dante, never vice versa. The fact that he had stormed into the man’s office defying their usual protocol spoke to Dante’s current frame of mind. He felt completely . . . discombobulated. He was annoyed with himself for not seeing this coming. Surely he should have sensed this mercenary streak in her? He usually had a better nose for these things. When she had signed that nondisclosure agreement without much protest, he had considered himself in the clear. But he had completely underestimated the lengths some women would go to for a little bit of his wealth.

  “I have to say, it’s a pretty fair deal,” the other man said. Exactly what Dante did not want to hear.

  “She wants a monthly stipend from the baby’s birth right up until its eighteenth birthday or until she marries, whichever comes first. She asks for only enough to take care of basic necessities: food, clothing, and medical bills—for the child, not for her. She asks for an increase to cover school fees and other necessities when the child is old enough. There is, of course, interest applied commensurate to whatever changes take place in the economy. And she wants these only if a paternity test proves that you are indeed the child’s father.”

  Dante’s jaw dropped. Why make that stipulation unless she was absolutely certain he was the child’s father? Had she sabotaged his condoms somehow? He immediately discounted that possibility. They had never left his possession, and he was always the one to don them, without exception. Ever. He couldn’t chance an accidental fingernail through the latex. He had learned that lesson the hard way, when he had caught one of his former lovers blatantly trying to break a condom while supposedly “fumbling” with it as she tried to sheathe him. Having escaped that particular trap, Dante had never allowed for the possibility again. No woman ever got her hands on his condoms.

  Which meant, if this baby was his, it was because his method of protection had failed. He had always known condoms were not 100 percent foolproof, but he had considered the risk negligible. Until now.

  He shook his head, disgusted with himself, with her, with the whole bloody world.

  “I don’t want to be a dad,” he growled. “Is there any way to get her to . . .” He couldn’t verbalize it. It made him feel like a louse.

  “Well, she’s got you covered there too,” Mike said, sounding almost admiring. “All you have to do is agree to these terms, sign this paper, and she’s happy to forget you were even there at its conception. All financial transactions will be done through your attorney and hers. The baby will have her name, and the father shall remain undisclosed. And the existing nondisclosure agreement ensures that she will never speak of your relationship in Tokyo.”

  “It wasn’t a relationship.”

  “Very well, your sordid encounter, then.”

  “Careful, Mike,” Dante warned. He had known Mike for years and they had a fantastic professional and personal relationship, but Dante’s mood was too uncertain at the moment to cope with the man’s irreverent sense of humor.

  “Hmm,” Mike hummed noncommittally. “Well, I think this is all pretty aboveboard. She doesn’t want a cent from you until you’re satisfied that the baby is yours, and even then she won’t expect payment to start until after the birth.”

  Okay, so Dante was willing to concede that maybe she wasn’t as mercenary as he’d first thought, and he was also willing to accept his culpability in the matter if, indeed, she did turn out to be pregnant with his baby. But she’d better be serious about not expecting anything more from him because he for damned sure wanted nothing to do with her or the baby. If he ever decided to have kids someday, the mother he chose for those children would be as far removed from Cleopatra Knight as night was from day. He would do his duty and pay whatever money she needed to raise her child. But that was it. No emotional commitments were required or expected of him, and he was satisfied with that.

  Cleo sat at her kitchen table staring at the damp stain on the wall above the refrigerator with a tub of melting ice cream forgotten in front of her. The front door opened and Cal stepped in, bringing with him the fresh smell of wind and rain.

  “Hey.” He removed his coat and tossed it carelessly over the back of the couch and grabbed a spoon from the drying rack on the sink before sitting down opposite her and helping himself to her softening chocolate-mint ice cream. “I don’t know how you can eat this stuff in the middle of winter. It’s freezing out there and you’re sitting in here eating ice cream.”

  She shrugged listlessly, barely hearing him. She sat with her cheek resting in the palm of one hand, one foot tucked beneath her butt and the other swinging in circles above the floor. She looked like a cranky child.

  “How did it go?” Cal asked softly, displaying more sensitivity than she would ever have given him credit for.

  “I got fired.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” She shrugged again.

  “Aw, man. Hon, I’m so sorry to hear that. What a complete dick that guy is! How could he fire you?”

  “He thinks I’m some . . .” She heard her voice thicken with tears. “I don’t know. Some opportunistic, mercenary, money-hungry bitch or something.” She shoved the ice cream aside and folded her arms on the table before burying her face in them and giving way to the tears that had been threatening all afternoon.

  Cal rubbed a hand up and down her back as she cried, her sobs quiet and her tears plentiful.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed after a few long moments of cathartic crying. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll figure it out, Cleo.”

  “I have no job, no savings . . . how can I take care of this baby? I can’t move in with Luc and Blue. It would be so unfair. Just when they’re starting to get their lives sorted out, along comes the family failure with another setback for them.”

  “Don’t think like that,” Cal said. “Think solutions. Not problems.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” she asked, her voice seething with frustration. “How am I supposed to ‘think solutions’? What solutions? There are no solutions right now, Cal. So how about just letting me wallow for a few lousy moments?”

  “Wow.” He sat back and took another spoonful of ice cream. “I’m going to assume that’s the pregnancy talking.”

  “It’s not the pregnancy,” she denied, as even more tears threatened. Where was this endless supply coming from? Surely she should have run dry by now. “It’s everything. You’ve never really grown up, Cal. You don’t know how to deal like an adult. So all you have are these preppy teen words of advice that don’t mean squat in the real world.”

  “And this is mature behavior?” he fired back, waving his spoon up and down in her direction. “This crying-fest, while you lash out at someone who cares about you instead of at the real object of your frustration.”

  “And how am I supposed to lash out at him? He had me kicked out of his office before I even had a chance to properly talk to him.”

  “What, like, literally kicked out?” His eyes widened.

  “Called security and had me escorted out of the building,” she confirmed, and his jaw dropped.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. I felt so . . .” The tears overflowed again as she remembered the mortifying moment she was marched out of his office and back to her own desk. “Humiliated.”

  “That guy needs his ass kicked! Tell your brother about it.”

  “No.” She could hear the panic in her own voice. “No, Ca
l. Luc doesn’t hear about this. He’s not to know who the father of this child is.” She was too embarrassed to let Luc know what a colossal mistake she’d made with Dante, and she couldn’t ruin a friendship he held dear.

  “But what will you tell him about your job?”

  “I’ll tell him I quit or something. It’ll be easy enough for him to believe of his loser sister.”

  “Come on, hon,” Cal said. “That’s hardly fair. This wasn’t your fault.”

  “Please just leave it for now.”

  Cal nodded reluctantly and Cleo reached over to squeeze his forearm gently.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you, okay?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry I wasn’t grim enough to suit the occasion.”

  She giggled wetly at the lame joke, and Cal grimaced before reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief.

  “Jesus, blow your nose,” he said. “Look at the state of you. You’re such an ugly crier, Cleo.”

  “Shut up,” she laughed, and blew her nose gustily. At that moment she just appreciated his presence so much that she couldn’t hold back an impulsive hug.

  “Thank you. Sometimes I just don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  By ten the following morning, Cleo was still lounging around in her robe and pajamas. She had no real desire to do much. She felt flat. She’d spent the better part of the morning hugging the toilet bowl, vomiting, and now she felt completely wrung out. Her stomach still uncertain, she gingerly padded to the sleeper couch that Cal had, for once, made up before traipsing off to parts unknown earlier that morning. He always disappeared for hours on end doing God knows what, God knows where. Cleo had been relieved to see the back of him that morning because his relentless and oblivious good cheer was driving her up the wall.

  She was thinking about attempting to eat some food when a knock sounded on the front door. She frowned, not used to being here during the day and not at all sure who it could be. They had an intercom security system, so knocks at the door without advance warning were extremely rare.

  The knock sounded again, and she pushed herself up from the couch. She paused for an instant to get the nausea under control, before making her way to the front door. There was no peephole, so she’d have to go the other route.

  “Who’s there?” she called through the door. There was a long moment of silence during which she wondered if the person had moved on to a different apartment.

  “Me.” The voice, only slightly muffled by the thin wood of the door, was instantly recognizable, and Cleo froze. When she didn’t respond for a full minute, the knock sounded again, loud and authoritative and so damned like him she wondered how she hadn’t guessed who it was from the sound of the knock alone.

  “It’s me, Damaso!” he growled. “Open the damned door.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  She could practically feel his incredulity through the wood.

  “I said no. Go away.”

  “I will not leave until we have settled this matter.” He sounded pretty adamant, and she chewed on her lip indecisively.

  “I didn’t think there was anything to settle. You’ve made your mind up.”

  “I refuse to discuss this through the door. If you do not open it, I will kick it down. I don’t imagine it will take too much effort, the wood is so thin.”

  “We can’t all have fancy walnut oak doors,” she said with a sneer, and he was right: the wood was pretty thin if she could hear him sigh through the door.

  “I will count to three. If you do not open the door, I will—”

  She clicked her tongue irritably and snatched open the door. Only after she stood facing him in his bespoke-suited splendor did she remember that she wore fleecy, polka-dot pajamas with a fuzzy pink robe and pink-and-white bunny slippers. Her hair was a mess, and she probably looked pretty washed out after that morning’s puking session. And the way he stared at her told her everything she needed to know about how truly awful she looked.

  “Your hair . . .”

  She stared at him in complete bewilderment. Why would her hair be the first thing he noticed about her? And then she remembered. She reached up a trembling hand to run a hand through her short, sleek bob, trying to recall if the pink she and Cal had applied to the bleached tips of her hair the night before was particularly vivid.

  “I figured I didn’t have to look like a corporate drone anymore,” she said, shrugging slightly.

  “It’s pink.”

  “Only the tips.”

  He finally dragged his horrified gaze from her hair down the rest of her body.

  “Did I disturb your sleep?” he asked, looking truly confused.

  “I didn’t see the need to get dressed when I don’t have a job to get ready for.”

  “And you did not consider going out to look for a new job?”

  Jeez, rich people really had no clue how the real world worked. He sounded way too judgmental for her liking, and she bristled defensively.

  “I just got fired from my previous position yesterday. I haven’t had time to sit down with the classifieds to job-hunt yet.”

  He nodded and shoved his hands into his coat pockets as his gaze roamed around the small, slightly dingy, and far-from-tidy interior of her apartment.

  “This place has lousy security. A student type in baggy jeans and a Rastafarian cap simply let me in. Held the door open and waved me through.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think he might have been on something,” he said, voice ripe with disapproval.

  “If it’s who I’m thinking of, then he was very definitely on something.” Young Isaac from down the hall was always high. Cleo didn’t know how he managed to get any studying done. Dante’s brow furrowed in response to her words.

  “And you feel safe in this dump?”

  “Why are you here?” she asked, refusing to answer any more of his questions.

  “May I sit?” After a brief hesitation, she nodded. He glanced around the room again before heading toward the kitchen table and turning to wait for her there. Once she joined him, he dragged out a chair, ushered her into it, and took his own seat. A little flustered by the gentlemanly gesture, she waited for him to speak. But he didn’t say anything for a long time and merely stared at his loosely folded hands resting on the table in front of him.

  She shifted uncomfortably before he lifted his eyes and trapped her with that intense gaze of his. She froze beneath that stare, feeling like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “I know.”

  “How far along are you now?” he asked. She couldn’t help it; she allowed her hand to drop to her abdomen, still in awe that there was a life in there.

  “Twelve weeks,” she whispered. “This week her eyelids started to grow in properly.”

  “‘Her’?” he asked gruffly, and she shook herself out of her reverie to focus on him again.

  “The baby’s a ‘she’ this week. Last week a ‘he.’ Last week was exciting; she—or he—started making fists. Can you imagine this little life, barely the size of a prune, with tiny hands that can make fists?”

  “Can you feel it doing all that? Making fists and stuff?” he sounded fascinated despite himself.

  “No, I can’t. I’ve been reading this week-by-week pregnancy book. It’s really good.”

  There was another long, awkward silence as Cleo tried to figure out if she could say or do anything to convince him to leave. “I wish I had security guards too,” she said wistfully, and he glanced up at her in surprise.

  “So that you can kick me out?” He sounded amused rather than offended.

  “I want you to leave,” she admitted. “I don’t like having you here in my home.”

  “I came to tell you that I agree to your terms. I’ve signed your documents. If I am the father of that baby, I will pay an amount toward its support.”

  “You won’t try to take her from me?” Cleo verbalized her worst
fear on a whisper.

  “No. Your baby doesn’t interest me. You don’t interest me. I want you both out of my life as quickly and quietly as possible.”

  Well, she’d always known that was how he would feel, but the rejection still stung. She felt the pain more for her baby than she did for herself. She’d known the stakes going into this thing with Dante Damaso, but the baby was an innocent in all of this, and now would never have a father to love her and protect her. Still, he was cold and ruthless and would undoubtedly make a lousy father. She’d grown up without a dad, and while she was a mess at times, she’d turned out mostly all right. Luc barely remembered their father either; the man had stuck around for five years and had skipped out on his family less than a month after Cleo’s birth. Their mother, never the most stable of creatures, had gone on a downward spiral after that, and five years later had dumped her children with their grandparents and swanned off to Asia. None of them had seen or heard from her again, and Luc and Cleo had received word of her death soon after their grandparents had passed. Luc flew to Nepal, where she died, and took care of the funeral arrangements. He returned with a few boxes of her personal items, and that had been that. A sad and lonely ending to a sad and lonely life.

  “Why didn’t you send your attorney to take care of the matter?” she asked Dante. “You didn’t have to come in person.”

  “I wanted to make it perfectly clear that this is all there will ever be between us, just a financial agreement benefitting the child should it happen to be mine.”

  “Got it,” she murmured. As if she needed that obvious fact spelled out to her.

  “And I wanted to add that perhaps I was a little . . . hasty in firing you.”

  “Hasty? Try unfair,” she corrected. “And harsh. You treated me like a criminal. Do you have any idea how humiliating it was to be escorted out by your thugs? I didn’t get to say good-bye to anybody, and I heard rumors that maybe I’d been caught stealing.”