by Mindy Klasky
“I have.” He shook his head firmly. “It’s a lot easier than my leaving hundred-dollar bills lying around, isn’t it?”
There. She was blushing again. He knew that he’d made a mistake when he’d left her the money. Then again, if his misstep could bring that defiant sparkle to her eyes…
“Ethan,” she said, trying to give him back the card. “Really. This is too much.”
He closed his fingers over hers, trying to ignore the hum that her skin ignited in his. “Don’t say that. You’re going to need it. You have a lot of work ahead of you.”
“Work?”
“Daniel took care of the press yesterday. And they definitely know better than to try to get in here.” He paused, giving her a moment to think about what he was going to say. He felt guilty for having created the public spectacle that had already changed her life. His past was catching up with him—all those nights of flirting with the press, of tweaking his grandmother’s sensibilities, just because he could. If he hadn’t invested so much energy and effort into squiring meaningless women around town…
But he hadn’t known that he’d meet anyone worth leaving the games behind. He hadn’t known Sloane Davenport.
“You’re going to need a whole new wardrobe,” he said. “Invitations will come in once we announce the engagement, once we make it more official than this morning’s gossip columns. Cocktail parties, dinner parties… Your dance card will be full. Buy what you want. Just make sure that one outfit is…sedate.”
“Sedate?” She almost laughed, almost thought that he was teasing. But she could hear the tension in his voice. “Why sedate?”
He swallowed hard. “You’ll wear it to meet my grandmother. She can be…a challenge.”
Sloane almost laughed at the uneasy expression on Ethan’s face. She wasn’t afraid of Margaret Hartwell. She’d learned all about the woman, before the AFAA charity auction. As project coordinator, Sloane had discovered Margaret’s favorite drink was gin and tonic, with extra ice and three limes. She knew that Margaret preferred ballpoint pens to roller balls, that she chose black ink over blue. Margaret’s favorite color was green, and her birthday was January 5.
“I’m sure I’ll find something she’ll approve of,” Sloane said. Even if she had to look in the maternity section of the store.
Ethan nodded, as if he were checking off another item on his efficient to-do list. She watched as he crossed the kitchen, then opened a drawer to select a knife. He carved up James’s coffee cake with flawless efficiency, placing a generous slice on a plate and passing it to her.
“Oh, that’s too much,” she said. “I don’t usually eat breakfast.”
“Well, that will change now.”
She bristled at his peremptory tone. “I can decide what I want to eat and what I don’t want to eat.”
“You could, when you were making decisions for yourself. You’ve got the baby to think about now.”
She made a face. “And the baby wants me to eat cardamom coffee cake?”
“Good point. I’ll tell James to forget about baking for the next six months. Protein will be good for all of us.”
She thought about arguing—she liked cardamom coffee cake—but she knew that Ethan was right. In fact, she was secretly pleased that he was concerned about her and the baby’s health. And she loved the way that he said “all of us.” Loved it so much that she almost missed his question. “Did you get any sleep at all?”
The question was innocent enough—almost the same as James had asked—but it made her remember the feeling of Ethan’s arms around her, the heat of his hands burning through her cotton nightgown. She couldn’t control the blush that painted her cheeks as she fumbled for an answer. “Yes,” she managed. “After a while.” After he’d left. After the blood pounding in her veins had finally calmed to a dull roar. She forced herself to meet his gaze. “Thank you,” she said.
Thank you for waking me from my nightmare, she meant. Thank you for holding me when I felt like a lost child. Thank you for leaving, when I forgot my promise to myself, when I forgot that I can’t have you. Not until we’re actually married. Until I’m certain that this is real.
She wanted to say all that. All that and more. But the words jumbled together inside her head, tumbling over one another, until she wasn’t sure that she could ever make him understand.
“You’re welcome,” he said gravely.
She sighed in contentment. He did understand. Just as he had when they’d spent hour after hour sharing their thoughts, their secrets, their dreams.
He kept his eyes on hers as he said, “New beds can take some getting used to.”
There. That was another conversational gift. He was giving her an option. She could take the easy way out and say something simple and sly and sexy about new beds. They’d laugh together. She’d probably blush.
But he was inviting her to tell him something more. He was opening the door to a deeper conversation, to an admission about the roots of her nightmare. She swallowed hard, then raised her chin, meeting his eyes with a new-forged determination that felt almost like defiance. “You’d think I would have learned to adjust when I was a kid. I was in and out of a lot of foster homes.”
She saw the way he was listening to her. She was certain that he’d been about to pour himself a cup of coffee. Instead, he took a casual seat on one of the high stools, hooking his toes under the footrest. His voice was mild as he said, “That must have been difficult.”
Trust, Sloane had written. She wanted to trust the man who was going to be her husband. Respect. Partnership.
She needed to make those words happen before she could even tell him that she’d put them on the list, that she’d created a list in the first place. Trust. She raised her chin and said, “There was a woman I used to call Angry Mother.”
Ethan merely met her gaze. Sloane hurried on, before she could think about the fact that she had never told anyone about Angry Mother. “That was my third foster home. The house was a wreck, and the windows were all crooked inside their frames. It was freezing at night, all of January, of February. And every morning, Angry Mother told me I was bad, because I tried to sleep in my blue jeans. She put me back in the system because of that. She said I wasn’t good enough to keep.”
“I’m sorry,” Ethan whispered. “No child should have to experience that sort of thing.”
It hurt him to see the way that she swallowed, the way that she fought to meet his gaze. Then and there, he promised himself that he would never do anything to make her look that bleak again. Gently, he said, “Your parents…” He trailed off, giving her the option of picking up the words, of sharing more of her story, her past.
“I never knew my father. I think he was a lot older than my mother. He was long gone by the time I was born.” He watched Sloane’s fingers curl over her belly, as if she were protecting their baby from an ugly truth. Her voice was a lot harder when she said, “My mother was only seventeen when she had me. She was an addict and she’d already been in and out of treatment for three years when I came along. She stayed clean, though, the entire time she was carrying me.”
“She must have loved you very much.” He said the words because he knew they had to be true. It twisted his heart when Sloane shook her head.
“She put me into foster care before I was a year old.”
She tried to be matter-of-fact, but he heard the carefully trained acceptance in her tone. Old doubt was transparent in her eyes; it weighted down her shoulders. He tried to keep his own tone light as he contradicted. “But she put you first, for nine months. Keeping away from drugs for her pregnancy couldn’t have been easy, especially when she was only a child herself. She wanted you to be healthy. Safe.”
Sloane had never thought about it that way. All these years, she’d thought about her mother as a weak person, a sick woman, unable to face the new life that she’d created through her own mistakes. Sloane had never once seen her mother as strong or brave. Doing what she thought best, even when everyone
had turned against her, had left her on her own.
As Sloane met Ethan’s steady gaze, another piece of the puzzle dropped into place. “She wanted to get me back. She put me in foster care because she thought that she’d get better, that she’d get well enough for us to live together. She could have put me up for adoption, but she hoped…”
Hope. The word was a strange one when applied to Sloane’s childhood. Hope wasn’t a word that Sloane associated with the dark-haired woman she barely remembered. Hope wasn’t part of her foster family patchwork.
But it was, of course. It had been all along. That was why Sloane had named her internet work the Hope Project. That was why she had designed her system, to help children like she had been.
“Thank you,” she said to Ethan. “I hadn’t really thought about things that way before.”
She was warmed by his easy smile. “Glad that I could be of assistance.” He lifted the teapot that James had left on the counter, gesturing toward her mug. “Can I heat that up for you?”
She edged the stoneware closer to him. “You’re spoiling me.”
“That’s my intention.”
She flushed at the purr beneath his words. She would have gulped down her tea, but she knew that it would burn her tongue. She settled for using her fork to tamp down stray crumbs from her coffee cake. When the silence ticked a dozen points closer to unbearable, she blurted out, “What about you? You said that your grandmother raised you?”
Damn. Ethan would rather spend the morning teasing her, bringing out that blush on her cheeks. He’d even prefer talking about her past, navigating the thicket of her tangled family ties. Turnabout was fair play, though. “My parents got divorced when I was seven. Neither of them was prepared to raise a…challenging child alone, so Grandmother stepped in.”
“Challenging?”
“Let’s just say that I didn’t like to follow the rules very much.”
“Didn’t?” She raised her eyebrows and extended her hand toward him, so that her engagement ring sparkled in the morning sunlight. “I don’t think that’s changed very much, Mr. Hartwell. You and rules still seem to be pretty much strangers to each other.”
“Why change when something’s working for you?” he retorted with a shrug. She should smile more often. It brought out the sparkle in her eyes.
“Seriously,” she said, taking back her hand before he could think of something distracting to do with those long fingers. “What sort of trouble did you get into?”
“Let’s just say that my grandmother ended up on a first-name basis with the principal.” Sloane’s lips quirked in amusement. “At all five schools I attended.” She grinned. “And the Coast Guard commander who tracked down my sailboat when I tried to run away from home.” She laughed. “For the third time.”
He’d gone too far there. Told too much. Sloane wasn’t a fool; she obviously heard the darker story beneath his joking. She immediately seemed to grasp that no boy caused that much trouble unless there was something very wrong in his life. A frown ironed a crease between her eyebrows. “Why so desperate to get away?”
He still could laugh it off. It wasn’t too late to make up something ridiculous about being a bad boy, about playing a rogue-in-training. He had planned to keep things light, to make everything easy, for another three weeks at least, until the prenatal testing could be done.
But Sloane would remember this conversation when he finally told her the truth. She would recall all the things he’d told her, and the huge, important things he’d left unsaid. She would conclude that he had lied to her, by omission, at the very least. He took a deep breath, wishing that it was late enough in the day to break out a bottle of Scotch, to fortify himself for this conversation that he absolutely did not want to have, that he’d never wanted to share with anyone.
Sloane felt Ethan’s mood shift, as if a cloud had scudded across the sun. Even though he didn’t move, she felt him withdraw from her. For just a heartbeat, she thought that he was going to slip beneath the mask of Bachelor of the Year, to shift back to the good-times-guy she had read about in the paper, the one who belonged at AFAA charity auctions every night of the year.
Instead, he reached for her hand, folding his fingers around hers with an urgency that sent her heart leaping into her throat. “Sloane,” he said. “We have to talk.”
She forced her lips to turn up at the corners even though the fake grin made her throat ache. “No good conversation ever started that way.”
She tried to pull her hand away, but he wouldn’t let her go. Instead, he took a deep breath, then exhaled on a count of five. “I wasn’t an only child, Sloane. I had a brother and a sister, but they both died, before I was five. That was what pulled my parents apart. That was why I spent so much time acting out.”
She heard the sorrow behind his words, still raw after all those years. She blinked, taking in the grand kitchen, the fine mansion that surrounded her. Of course, money truly couldn’t buy happiness. It hadn’t been able to spare the Hartwells from tragedy. “What happened?” she asked, her mind skirting over a dozen terrible accidents.
“My brother and sister were born with a genetic mutation, trisomy. She lived for almost three years, but he survived only a few days.” Genetic mutation.
The words were ugly, frightening—all the more so for the irony that Ethan’s company was Hartwell Genetics, a forerunner in creating cures for terrible diseases. No, Sloane realized. It wasn’t ironic at all. Those poor siblings were the reason that Hartwell Genetics flourished. Ethan had devoted his life to saving other families the agony that his own had suffered. Ethan, and his grandmother, too. How long had the company been in existence? How long had they fought to find a cure?
Sloane suddenly realized what Ethan was going to say next. Her fingers clutched at her blouse, closing over the delicate life that grew inside her.
No. She had to be wrong. Ethan was fine. He didn’t have…what was it? Trisomy? It couldn’t kill every child in the family. It couldn’t put an end to the entire Hartwell line. It absolutely, positively couldn’t affect the baby she had already come to love so much.
She forced herself to ask, “It runs in your family, then?”
He nodded, his hazel eyes nearly black. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were making a solemn vow. “Sloane, I never meant for this to happen. I never intended to have children at all. You know I took precautions—” His throat closed around that last word, and all she could do was clutch his fingers where they still grasped hers. He steadied himself with another deep breath, and then he squared his shoulders. “There are tests now. They can do amnio at fourteen weeks.”
“Fourteen,” she said, trying to absorb everything he had told her. That left three weeks hanging in the balance. Three weeks of not knowing.
He nodded, raising his free hand to her cheek. “That was why I told you I wanted the paternity test. That is what I really need to know.”
Sloane felt light-headed. She had been so worried that Ethan didn’t trust her. She had tried to convince herself that his insistence on a paternity test was to protect himself, to protect the Hartwell family fortune. Now, her heart leaped at the notion that trust wasn’t the issue at all. Ethan did believe her.
But any relief was crushed by darker thoughts. Their child could be in the worst kind of danger. She pulled away from his caress, extracting her hand from his grasp. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t want to worry you. I didn’t want you to be afraid.”
“Ethan, I think this is something worth worrying about! This disease has destroyed your family! I had a right to know!”
“How was that supposed to work?” he snapped. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Marry me? And by the way, our babies might all die’?”
She heard the self-hatred behind his words, recognized the emotion for what it was. Nevertheless, she said, “You could have held off on the ‘marry me’ part! At the very least, you could have told me the truth!”
; “You don’t understand! I watched this thing ruin my parents’ marriage! I watched it tear them apart! I wanted to prove that I could do this. That I could be better than they were.”
“All the more reason that you should have told me, Ethan.” He started to interrupt, but she pressed on. “You’re right, you know. Our story can be different from theirs. I’m not your mother. You’re not your father. Our baby isn’t your sister or your brother.”
She saw that his immediate reaction was to fight. As she watched, though, he swallowed one retort, then another. He spread his fingers across the granite countertop, as if he were seeking strength from the cool stone. He nodded slowly, and then he said, “You’re right. I should have told you. And in the interest of full disclosure now, you should know that I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Morton for three weeks from tomorrow. I’ll need a copy of your obstetrician’s reports from your other visits. I want to get those to Phil tomorrow morning.”
“Phil?” She could think of about a dozen things wrong with Ethan’s request, but the first word to splutter from her lips was the unfamiliar name.
“Phillip Morton. He’s the leading obstetrician in D.C. He knows my family history. He’ll take over your case now.”
She wanted to say that she was perfectly content with her own doctor. She wanted to say that she had everything under control.
But she didn’t.
She’d only been to the doctor once since finding out she was pregnant. That was all she’d been able to afford. She swallowed hard and met Ethan’s eyes, fully aware of the fact that she was about to make her own uncomfortable disclosure. “Fine. I’ll switch to Dr. Morton. But there aren’t a lot of records. I’ve only been to the obstetrician once.”
He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d slapped him. “What?” he asked, half expecting to find that he’d misheard. A woman as fiercely devoted to her unborn baby as Sloane… Only going to the doctor once in her entire first trimester? “Standard medical protocol—” he started to recite.
She cut him off. “Standard medical protocol has insurance. At the very least, it has a job. I’ve been doing everything that I’m supposed to do,” she said. “I’ve read all the books, and there are all sorts of communities online. I was very active in one of them before…”
