“I have an appointment, but—”
“Lindquist is a breast specialist. I know him pretty well. I’ll give him a call and get you in right away—”
“No.”
“Em, you can’t put it off.”
“You said there’s no reason to assume the worst.” Even though that’s exactly what she’d done and why she was here in the first place.
“And I stand by that. But why worry any longer than necessary?”
“I’m taking care of that. And it’s not really what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“There’s more?” Now he looked confused and concerned and she couldn’t blame him.
“Finding the lump made me think long and hard about my own mortality,” she said.
“You’re young. There’s no reason to borrow trouble.”
She didn’t have to borrow it. Trouble had a way of finding her. “I’m not concerned about myself.” She took a deep breath and forced herself not to look away. “It’s my baby.”
“Baby? I didn’t know—” He stopped as the dots started to connect.
“Our baby. She’s eleven months old.”
“She? A girl?”
Em nodded. “Her name is Ann Marie. Annie.”
“Ann is my mother’s middle name,” he said, as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Marie is my mother’s middle name. It seemed fair.” Even if it would never feel right after the choice her mother had forced on her.
He ran his fingers through his hair. “What the hell are you saying?”
The calm before the storm was over. “I’m telling you that you have a little girl.”
“If I believed you—”
“If?” Now it was her turn to be shocked. The thought that he would question the facts had never occurred to her. At least not consciously. But somewhere deep inside she’d probably suspected. Otherwise she’d have called him instead of meeting face-to-face so that he could see she was telling the truth. Annie’s future depended on it.
“Why should I believe you, Em? You were the one who walked away. And before you did, you never said a word about being pregnant.”
“You never gave me a chance.”
“It’s my fault?” He held up his fingers. “Two words. I’m pregnant. That’s all you had to say.”
“It wasn’t that easy.” Not after that horrible time when she was little more than a child herself.
“For the sake of argument, I have to ask—why are you telling me now?”
“Because of the lump,” she said, twisting her fingers together. “If something happened to me Annie would have no one. I couldn’t stand that.”
“So this is about you?”
“No, it’s about our daughter.”
His gaze narrowed as suspicion swirled in his eyes. “Why should I believe you after all this time? What are you after, Em? What do you want from me?”
Emily hadn’t believed it was possible to hurt more than she had the night she’d tried to tell Cal Westen about his baby, but she was wrong. His second rejection was twice as painful because of Annie. How could he reject that sweet baby girl? The innocent child who was depending on Em to take care of her. That’s all she was trying to do in spite of what Cal thought.
“I was wrong not to tell you right away,” she admitted.
“You think?” Sarcasm rippled between them.
“I’m hoping you won’t punish your daughter for my mistake.”
“There’s no reason I should believe she’s my daughter. I always used protection when we were together. It’s not something I take for granted.”
“Me, either,” she said. That long-ago mistake made her pretty cautious. “I don’t know what to tell you except I guess the condom broke.”
At that moment Rhonda Levin walked in. Emily had seen the E.R. nurse manager from time to time when she worked here at Mercy Medical. The plump, brown-eyed, bleached blonde looked at each of them, narrowed her eyes, then settled her gaze on Cal.
“You’re on, Doc. Paramedics are bringing in car accident victims. One of them is an eleven-month-old with head trauma. Whatever is going on here will have to wait. ETA, three minutes.” Rhonda gave them a pointed look before walking out.
The baby coming in couldn’t be in better hands, Emily thought. If it were her daughter there’s no one she’d trust more than Cal. But he was looking at her now as if he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her.
“The condom broke? Come on, you can do better than that.” Apparently he planned to use his three minutes to grill her.
“Did you read the directions? It’s not guaranteed one hundred percent,” she said.
“The percentage of security is in the high nineties,” he shot back. “Again I have to ask why I should believe you’re not trying to pass her off as mine.”
Emily had pictured this scene in her mind and not once had it included the part where he doubted Annie was his child. Now she knew how naive that was, because he was within his rights to question it. But tell that to the anger building up inside her.
She glared at him. “If you can ask me that, it’s clear you never knew me at all. I’d never lie to you, Cal. Especially about something like this.”
It felt like déjà vu all over again when she turned and walked out on him, but this time her heart was breaking for Annie, too.
* * *
Two days after Emily Summers had turned his life upside down, Cal sat in a booth at Coco’s coffee shop on Eastern Avenue near the 215 Beltway and wondered whether she’d show up. If she’d changed her cell phone number he wouldn’t have been able to contact her at all. She no longer lived at the address where—too many times to count—he’d picked her up for dinner and brought her back to make love to her. When she walked out on him, he’d missed her.
When she walked out on him again yesterday, he’d gone to work on that eleven-month-old. Fortunately the head trauma was superficial and the few stitches would eventually be covered by her hair and she’d probably have no memory of the ordeal. But he wasn’t lucky enough to forget Emily’s words: Our baby. She’s eleven months old. He’d never known her to lie, and she’d looked sincerely surprised and angry that he hadn’t believed her.
He took a sip of coffee and glanced at his watch for the umpteenth time. Eight-fifteen and almost dark outside. She’d picked the place—neutral territory—because she’d refused to give out her address. That implied a lack of trust, which was pretty ironic when you thought about it. She was passing her kid off as his and he couldn’t be trusted?
Still, if there weren’t doubts in his mind, he wouldn’t have set up this meeting.
He looked up and saw Emily walking toward him. After all these months and this stunt she was trying to pull off, how could one look at that face tie him in knots? Her mouth was made to be kissed. Those full lips had turned him on more times than he could count and thoughts of running his hands through her dark, shiny hair had fueled more dreams than he wanted to admit.
She stopped by the table. “Cal.”
“Have a seat.” He indicated the booth bench across from him.
She was wearing a thin-strapped yellow tank and white capris. Her flip-flops matched her shirt and gave him an unobstructed view of her coral-painted toes. Sexiest feet in Vegas, he thought, again feeling stupid for the gut-level turn-on that he couldn’t control. Apparently he hadn’t outgrown his fatal flaw. Attraction to a deceitful woman had cost him big time and here he was again.
“So what did you want to talk about?” she asked. “You made your feelings pretty clear. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing left to say.”
“Maybe you don’t think so, but I wasn’t finished when you walked out the other day.” He forced himself to relax his grip on the coffee mug in front of him. “Would you like something?”
“Just to get this over with.” Her big brown eyes were defensive and still as beautiful as ever.
“Okay, then.” He met her gaze and asked
the question that had been gnawing at him since she’d left the E.R. “If she’s my child—”
“Your daughter’s name is Annie.”
Without acknowledging that, he continued, “Why didn’t you tell me I was going to be a father?”
She let out a breath and her gaze wandered out the window, to the congestion of cars on Eastern, waiting to turn left onto the Beltway. It was cool inside, but he knew on the street it was still more than a hundred degrees. This was Vegas and it was July. Hot was a way of life. But hot didn’t do justice to how he felt.
“Do you remember the last time we were together?” she asked, sliding into the place across from him.
“Yeah.” Of course he did. “One minute everything was fine, the next you said we were done. A guy doesn’t tend to forget something like that.”
One corner of her mouth curved up, but not from amusement. “A guy like you doesn’t forget because you’re always the one who ends things. It was different with me and that bothered you.”
The fact she was right didn’t help. He liked women, and they returned the favor. He did end things before anyone got serious. So sue him. But with Em he hadn’t been ready for things to be over.
“It came out of left field.” That’s all he’d admit.
Her eyes looked big and brown. Innocent and hurt. “Were you there for the last conversation we had?”
Maybe. “Refresh my memory.”
“I know how you feel about commitment.”
“We never talked about it,” he protested.
Her expression was heavy on the scorn. “Every woman at Mercy Medical Center and probably the Las Vegas metropolitan area knows you don’t make promises.”
“Being a doctor is a demanding profession.”
“I’m not talking about dinner and a show on Saturday night. Your aversion to responsibility, liability, obligation or dedication on a long-term basis is legendary. You’re as shallow as a cookie sheet.”
“That’s harsh.”
“But true. I knew that when we first went out. I was fine with it. I didn’t want anything permanent, either. It worked as well for me as it did for you. Maybe more.”
“So what was this conversation we had?”
“All I said was—wouldn’t you like to have children someday? You’re a pediatrician, and it’s not a stretch to assume that you might want to have one of your own.”
“Okay.” He vaguely remembered.
“Do you recall your response?”
“Not in detail.”
“I do.” Shadows made her eyes darken even more. “You did five minutes straight on what wasn’t going to happen. And I quote, ‘Nothing could compel me to ever tie myself down in any way. If you want to get on the commitment train, I’ll see you off at the station.’ You told me you never wanted strings. In a fairly firm and deep voice you added, ‘There’s no set of circumstances known to man that could make me change my mind.’”
Ouch. Yeah, he remembered now. The speech should be familiar since he’d given it so many times. “Okay.”
Frowning, she tipped her head, studying him as if he was an alien from another world. “I was trying to gently bring up the fact that I was pregnant. Your stay-single-or-perish soliloquy didn’t exactly make it feel safe to do that.”
“It’s not about comfort. It’s about what was right. Maybe I was a jerk—”
“Maybe?”
He ignored that. “Any time after that you could have called, dropped me a line, left a message on the answering machine. Something to the effect—‘Cal, I’m going to have a baby. Thought you should know. Catch you later.’”
It wouldn’t be the first time a woman tried to manipulate him by lobbing the pregnancy bomb. One that turned out to be a lie, the first of many before it had finally ended.
Emily looked small and tense in the big booth across from him. He couldn’t see her hands, they were in her lap. He remembered that when she was nervous, she twisted her fingers together. Peeking under the table to see if that had changed wasn’t happening.
“In your world—a man’s world—that would be the way. But not in mine. You made it clear how you felt and there was no way I was going to burden my baby with a father who didn’t want her.”
Sounded pretty cold when she said it like that. “You didn’t give me a chance to react with all the facts. If I’d known you were pregnant, we could have talked about it—”
“You talked. I listened and got the message. So shoot me for not wanting to hear any more.”
“Until now,” he reminded her, his gaze sliding to her breasts.
“Yeah.” She shifted her shoulders as if to relieve the tension and keep from shattering. “When I found the lump, it forced me to go to the bad place and think about what would become of Annie without me.” She met his gaze. “Her biological father—commitment-phobe and all—is the lesser of two evils.”
“Careful, flattery like that will turn my head.” The words oozed sarcasm because her low opinion of him rankled.
He was a stand-up guy; he saved lives every day. Some women actually called him a hero. Emily wasn’t one of them. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
“Look, Cal—” She settled her hands on the table, twisting her fingers together in that all-too-familiar way. “What you and I think of each other is irrelevant. Annie’s future and her welfare are the only things that matter.”
“Have you seen the specialist?” he asked, pushing away any reference to a child he still couldn’t believe was his.
“Not yet. My appointment is next week. With my primary care physician. A majority of sites on the Internet that I checked said that’s the place to start. I’m seeing Rebecca Hamilton. She delivered Annie.”
He hated to admit it, but that was the other reason he’d called. In spite of what she’d done—what she was trying to do—the thought of Emily being sick bothered him. But what if she was lying about the lump?
“What is it you want from me, Em?”
“I don’t want anything.”
He gripped his half full mug of cold coffee. “How do I know the baby is mine?”
“I’m more than willing to do a DNA test if that will put your mind to rest.”
He didn’t think there was a test in existence that would do that, not since seeing her again. “That would probably be a good idea. I’ll set it up.”
“Okay, then.” She nodded.
“Okay.”
If she was trying to pull a fast one, she wouldn’t agree so easily to the test. That silenced some but not all of his doubts because being made a fool of wasn’t high on his list of things to ever do again.
He’d been a teenager the last time a female had worked him over. She’d said she was pregnant and he’d believed her, married her. Months went by and she didn’t show, although she jumped his bones at every opportunity. When he found out there was no baby, he knew she’d been trying to get pregnant. Her lie was exposed but he also believed her when she said she’d done it for them, so they could be together. He’d also taken it seriously when he vowed to stay together for better or worse. And worse was what he got. After that she got more creative with manipulation while their marriage died a slow and painful death. When that chapter of his life was over, he’d erased the word commitment from his vocabulary.
Ever since, he’d been careful about protection during sex. Because it bordered on obsession, the thought of a child had never occurred to him. That still didn’t absolve Emily of fault here. She’d had a duty, an obligation, to tell him that she was going to have a baby. Too much time had passed for him to believe the child was his. She was just another woman trying to make him dance to her tune.
“So we’ll wait and see what the test says,” he told her.
“I have no doubt that it will confirm what I’m telling you. And I’m sorry I waited so long to do that. But I need to know she’ll have her father to take care of her. If the need arises. I’m not asking for myself, but for Annie.”
“So we have a plan.”
“We do.” She slid out of the booth. “Let me know when and where to take her for the test.”
He stood and looked down at her. “Okay.”
She nodded and turned away, walking between the row of booths and the swivel seats at the counter. His gaze dropped to the unconsciously sexy sway of her hips. Something tightened inside him, an ache he hadn’t even been aware was there.
“Em?”
She stopped and looked back at him. “What?”
And he said something that hadn’t consciously crossed his mind. “I want to see your daughter.”
Chapter Two
Emily paced the living room of her ground-floor apartment waiting for Cal. Could have knocked her over with a feather when he’d called for a meeting. As angry as he was, she hadn’t expected a father/daughter face-to-face until the DNA was done, so his asking to see Annie had really surprised her.
She heard an enraged wail coming from the hall and hurried to find Annie crawling—at least trying to—out of her bedroom. The little girl was in a sleeveless, white, full-skirted, lacy dress, which obviously felt like parent torture. Her knees kept getting caught up in the hem, which minimized forward progress and maximized frustration. Judging by the decibel level of the cry, her frilly frock was getting on the only nerve she had left.
Em picked up the dynamic bundle of energy. Her golden curls framed a round face with huge blue eyes and healthy, rosy cheeks.
“Hey, baby girl. I’m sorry about the dress. It’s not your style, but your daddy will be here any minute and I know you want to impress him. Put your best foot forward, so to speak. Tough to do when you’re not quite walking, but you get my drift. Dazzle him with your abundant charm, which you get from him, by the way.”
“Unh,” Annie responded, then wiggled and squirmed to be let down.
Emily complied. Carefully, she set the child on her feet, holding on to a chubby hand while Annie promptly plopped on her behind. “Putting your best foot forward needs some work, baby girl.”
When she tried to crawl, her knee got tangled up in the skirt again and there was a screech that could shatter glass or set off all the dogs in the neighborhood.
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