“Yes. I mean, I’m aware of that.”
“Good. As for the procedure itself—there are two standard methods. I’ll know precisely which method is preferable once I’ve examined you. Either is 99.99 percent accurate. Do you understand that, too?”
Sage opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
“Sage? Is that clear?”
She nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.
“There’s some discomfort. Nothing insurmountable but—”
“I know that, too.”
She was trembling again. Her voice was scratchy. Caleb felt his hands fisting.
“Either has a small risk for mother and child. Are you sure you understand that as well, Ms. Dalton?”
Caleb watched Sage. She’d gone from trembling to shaking.
“The risk for the baby. It’s very small, isn’t it? I mean, when you’ve—when you’ve done this test before, have the babies—have the babies—”
“To hell with this,” Caleb said, his voice sharp and clear.
“Mr. Wilde.” The doctor looked at him. “I just want to be sure Ms. Dalton comprehends the—”
“She comprehends. So do I. And that’s why there’s not going to be any test.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Doctor. We’re not going through with this.”
Two bright spots of color appeared in the white mask that was Sage’s face.
“Is this some kind of—of horrid game? Did you set this up just to see how far I would go to get you out of my life?”
Caleb got to his feet. “Get up.”
“Get up? Get up?” Her voice rose. “Do you think you can order me around? Jump me through hoops? You—you get the hell out of here, Caleb Wilde! I don’t want you here. I don’t need you here.”
“Yes,” Caleb said grimly, “you damned well do.”
“Mr. Wilde. Ms. Dalton—”
“Did you read the papers I gave you? Did you really and truly read them?”
“Every word.”
“Then you know that the risks are unacceptable.”
He was right. They were. But what choice did she have between the devil and the deep blue sea?
“This isn’t your decision.”
Caleb nodded.
She was right.
It wasn’t.
It was hers.
He had no legal standing here, except as his client’s representative...
And as the man who had abandoned her to that client’s coldly manipulative arrogance.
“You’re right,” Caleb said calmly. “Going through with the test isn’t my decision. Authorizing it is.” He looked at the doctor. “I am withdrawing that authorization. There will be no test.”
“You can’t do that,” Sage said.
Probably not. But he was the only lawyer in the room. Who was going to make a legal argument against him?
Caleb offered a thin smile.
“I just did.”
Sage got slowly to her feet.
“Damn you,” she whispered. “First you make it impossible for me to refuse the test. Then you say you won’t authorize it.”
“And I won’t.”
Sage looked at the doctor. “Can he do that?”
“Well,” the doctor said slowly, “well, I haven’t run into this situation before—”
“If you proceed, Doctor, we won’t accept the veracity of the results.”
“But the chain of custody hasn’t been broached.”
“I don’t know that. I didn’t supervise the collection of David Caldwell’s DNA.”
“It was properly done, Mr. Wilde. Ace Laboratory is—”
“Here’s the bottom line, my client will not pay for the test.”
“I’ll pay for it,” Sage said quickly. “How much does it cost?”
Caleb looked at her. “Four thousand dollars,” he said. “Have you got that kind of money?”
She stared at him. He could see a dozen different emotions warring in her eyes, everything from disbelief to anger to despair.
“I hope you can live with yourself,” she said in a broken whisper, “because you are the most despicable human being I’ve ever known.”
Caleb didn’t answer. He thanked the doctor for her time, told her to bill him for whatever costs had been incurred.
Then he took Sage’s arm, but she wrenched free of his hand. He reached for her again, clamped his fingers around her elbow and marched her out of the consultation room, out of the office, through the front door and to the sidewalk.
She dug her heels in and whirled toward him.
“Why?”
“I told you. The risks are too great.”
“What do you give a damn about the risks?” Her hair was coming free of the band that held it; she tore the band away and tossed the hair back from her face. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand anything about you!”
He gave a rough laugh.
“Hell,” he said, “welcome to the club.”
“You don’t get to make decisions for me,” she said. Tears still shone in her eyes but now, so did defiance. “I am responsible for myself.”
“I know.”
“I always have been!”
“Yeah. I figured that, too.”
“Then, what do you think you’re doing, interfering in my life?”
A warm gust of wind tossed a strand of her golden hair over her eyes. Without thinking, Caleb reached out, drew it back.
“Let me help you,” he said softly.
“This is insane. You work for—”
“Caldwell is my client. He pays me for legal advice, and I’m going to advise him that it’s preferable to have testing done after the baby’s born, when all a lab will need is a simple, non-invasive DNA sample.”
“He won’t accept that.”
“Yes,” Caleb said with grim assurance. “He will. I’ll see to it.”
“He won’t. And I can’t get on with my life until—until this is behind me. I have to find a place to live. Get a job. Make plans for my baby. And how can I do any of that if I wake up every morning, knowing Caldwell is going to phone me, check on me, that he’s going to be there like a shadow, all the time?”
“I’ll take care of that.”
Sage shook her head. The tears in her eyes dampened her lashes, then began to trail like tiny diamonds down her cheeks.
“Why?” she said. “Just answer that one question, okay? Why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“You didn’t think so yesterday.”
He smiled. “Maybe I’m a slow learner.”
“You mean it, don’t you?” she said, her voice filled with disbelief. “You’re really going to convince him to leave me alone until after my baby is born.”
“Yes.”
“But why would you do that?”
A muscle knotted in his jaw. How could he have known what was real and what was a lie and have refused to admit it for so long?
“Because I think you’ve been telling the truth all along,” he said quietly.
Her eyes widened. He reached out, started to cup her face, then dropped his hands to his sides. The last time he’d felt like this—head clear, heartbeat spiking—he’d been about to drop into the darkness of an endless plain in Afghanistan.
It was, he knew, the way his mind and body prepared for whatever lay ahead.
“The baby,” he said, “isn’t David’s.”
Silence. Then Sage drew a shaky breath. “No.”
Caleb nodded.
“I asked you this yesterday,” he said. “Now I’m asking it again.” He reached out to her, cupped her shoulders. “
Sage. Is the baby mine?”
He waited, knowing this was the question he should have asked from the beginning, not phrased it as a throwaway line the way he’d done yesterday but asked with concern and meaning.
“Tell me the truth,” he said softly. “Is this my child?”
Her mouth, the mouth he still remembered as tasting like the sweetest honey, trembled.
She sighed, and everything a man could dream or imagine or, dammit, fear, was in that soft, perfect sound.
“Yes,” she said, “it is. I’m carrying your child.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
CALEB had heard people describe transitional moments in their lives in ways that struck him as overblown, even foolish.
He knew that sayings like “the world stood still,” or “the earth shifted,” or that all-time favorite, “time stopped,” were metaphors.
Still, what logical man wouldn’t smile a little at such creaky old saws?
Now, hearing Sage’s sigh, seeing the darkness in her eyes, he knew that none of those phrases were overblown, and they certainly weren’t foolish.
They were accurate because if the earth hadn’t just shifted under his feet, Manhattan was in the midst of an earthquake.
He had asked a question he’d never imagined asking, and the answer was a life-changer.
He knew he was supposed to say something, but what? His brain was on hold, his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth.
In a movie, he’d have said, “I love you, Sage. Marry me, and we’ll live happily forever after.” And she’d have thrown herself into his waiting arms and said, “Yes, oh yes, I will!”
Music up, roll credits.
Except this wasn’t a film, he wasn’t Tom Hanks and she wasn’t Meg Ryan.
This was real life, they hardly knew each other except in the biblical sense of the word—and that was what had gotten him into this situation in the first place.
A rush of ice water seemed to pour through his veins.
He wasn’t interested in marrying anybody, not for a long, long time. And when he did, it wouldn’t be to a woman who was, basically, a total stranger.
So, it wasn’t a proposal that came out of his mouth. It was something far more basic.
“You said you were on the pill.”
“I was.” Her words were clipped. “And it’s 99.9 percent effective, says the little brochure that comes with it.”
“Yeah. Okay. But—”
“But it turns out I’m that one percent. Sorry. That point-one percent.” She made a sound he suspected was supposed to be a laugh. “Terrific, right? A thing works virtually all the time...except when it doesn’t.” She looked at him, saw the expression on his face and her chin came up. “You know what? If you didn’t want to know, or if you don’t want to believe me, you shouldn’t have asked.”
She was right.
And the amazing thing, or maybe the not-so-amazing thing was, he believed her.
On a pragmatic level, why else would she have been fully prepared to take the CVS test?
And on a level that had nothing to do with pragmatism, Sage was the woman he’d held in his arms that fateful night. No matter what her “arrangement” with David Caldwell, Caleb knew she wouldn’t lie, especially about something like this.
“I believe you,” he said quietly. “It’s just—it’s a lot to take in.”
Sage wanted to say something clever and pithy, but remembering her own initial reaction to seeing those little test strips turn blue took the fight right out of her.
“I know.” Her voice was low. “I absolutely know.”
He nodded. “So, we have to talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You’re pregnant,” he said flatly. “I’m responsible for that pregnancy. Seems to me we have a lot to talk about.”
She wasn’t surprised.
Caleb Wilde wasn’t only a man who’d just learned something shocking, he was a lawyer. He’d have a speech to make, probably papers for her to sign.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. With one huge difference.
Thomas Caldwell wanted to force himself into her life.
Caleb Wilde would want to keep himself out of it.
And that was fine with her.
* * *
He suggested they go to his hotel.
She thought of the ugly suite with its pretensions of grandeur and shook her head.
“Forget that. There’s a coffee shop right next to the subway station.”
“Right,” he said calmly. “What better place to discuss the fact that you’re pregnant than a coffee shop? We can always elicit advice from the waitress.”
She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t pregnant, they were. But she knew that wasn’t true; men talked about being pregnant in TV sit-coms, where they were always thrilled to find out they were on their way to becoming fathers.
This was real life, and she knew, firsthand, how that went.
“I don’t like your hotel room.”
“You haven’t seen it.”
“Of course I saw it. Just yesterday.”
“Caldwell made those arrangements, not me. I’m staying at—”
“I don’t care where you’re staying. I don’t want to go there.”
Caleb raised an eyebrow. “What is this, a turf war?”
“Of course not,” she said quickly—except...it was.
No way was she going to give him any kind of psychological advantage.
“Fine,” he said grimly. “We’ll go to your place.”
The scene of the crime, she thought, and felt a rush of color flood her face.
“We can talk here. I mean, we don’t have much to talk about. I already told you, I’m not going to ask anything of you or—”
His hands closed on her elbows and he raised her to her toes. New Yorkers, whose day-to-day survival skills made them blind to almost everything, flowed around them like water around a boulder in a stream.
“This isn’t about you or me,” he said, each word clipped. “It’s about this—this situation we created.”
“It’s a baby,” she said, trying to keep her voice from quavering, “not a situation.”
“You know what I mean.”
“What I know,” she said, “is that I’ve already reached a decision.”
“You made that decision without consulting me.”
“You’re not part of this.”
He laughed, although the sound wasn’t pleasant.
“You’re carrying my kid. I intend to do the right thing about him. Her. It.”
Hell, he was getting lost in syntax, and what did syntax matter at a time like this?
“The right thing.” She looked at him. “What, exactly, does that mean?”
“You want an honest answer?” For the first time, he looked less than certain. “I don’t know. And that’s what we have to talk about.”
She nodded.
And, dammit, he thought, were those tears rising in her eyes?
A fist seemed to close around his heart. She looked so young, so lost, so vulnerable.
Without thinking, he bent his head and brushed his lips lightly over hers.
A mistake. He knew it instantly, even as her mouth softened under his.
Kissing her brought back unwanted memories. Her taste. Her feel. The rightness of having her in his arms...
Caleb turned away. A taxi was heading toward them. Perfect timing. He hailed it, then looked at Sage. Her face was pale. Her mouth was trembling. He wanted to kiss her again...
“Let’s go,” he said briskly.
A moment later, they were en route to Brooklyn.
* * *
H
er neighborhood didn’t look any better than the last time.
In fact, it looked worse.
Half a dozen overflowing trash cans stood at the curb. One had fallen over and garbage lay strewn beside it.
A pack of boys, sixteen, maybe seventeen years old, were lounging in front of the building. Two of them elbowed each other as Sage stepped from the cab.
Caleb was right on her heels.
One look from him, the kids turned away.
He figured that what he was feeling—a growing anger to replace the foolish tenderness or whatever you wanted to call it that had overtaken him outside Fein’s office—was showing, loud and clear, on his face.
He grasped Sage’s elbow, marched her up the steps, into the misery of the entry hall, then up the dark, creaking stairs to her apartment.
“Keys,” he said, ignoring the roll of her eyes as she handed them over. Once inside the living room, he wasted no time on niceties and pointed to the sofa. “Sit.”
Sage folded her arms.
“Did you hear me? I said—”
“Do I look like a poodle to you?”
Dammit, as angry as he was, he wanted to laugh, but he wasn’t that foolish.
Instead, he bared his teeth in a cold smile.
“Very funny.”
“No,” she said, “it isn’t funny at all.” She strode past him to the kitchen, banged open cupboards, took out a mug and a box of tea bags, filled a kettle with water. Caleb, following after her, muttered something under his breath, snatched the kettle from her hand, slapped it onto the stove.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m making tea. Herbal tea.” She looked up into his eyes, fluttered her lashes, gave him a smile sweet enough to cause a sugar high. “Why? Did you want some?”
Was she deliberately trying to infuriate him? He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her...
Or maybe haul her against him and kiss her until sense was the last thing either of them needed.
Hell.
Where did logic go when he was with her? It seemed to disappear like smoke on a breeze. He couldn’t let that happen. Again. Once was enough. More than enough. Just look where it had taken him...
Taken them.
Harlequin Presents January 2013 - Bundle 2 of 2: The Ruthless Caleb WildeBeholden to the ThroneThe Incorrigible Playboy Page 9
