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“What?” Becki, one of the twins, groaned. “Please don’t tell me that good-looking guy is suing you or something.”
“Or something,” Savannah said, leading her friends into the living room, where they sat on the sofa and round-backed chairs, tucking their feet beneath them and getting comfortable, though they continued to stare at Savannah with rapt attention.
“He’s the father of this baby,” Savannah said, then looked from blond-haired, blue-eyed Lindsay, to the red-haired twins Mandi and Becki, to dark-haired, dark-eyed Andi. “I didn’t know it. He didn’t know it. But Barry did. Ethan had sperm cryogenically frozen for some reason when he was married. Apparently, my fear about getting a good father for the baby led Barry to search the banks of people who had sperm stored but weren’t donors. When he found Ethan’s name he knew we had our father because we knew Ethan to be a good man since I had worked with him. So Barry forged Ethan’s signature to get his sample mainstreamed into the donor banks to be used for my pregnancy.”
“Oh, boy,” Mandi said slowly, her blue eyes widening with each word.
“Yeah, oh, boy.”
“So, is this guy pressing charges?” Lindsay demanded.
Savannah licked her lips. “Not if I marry him.”
“You’re kidding!” Becki gasped, flopping back on her chair as if flabbergasted.
“It gets worse. His father is…”
“Parker McKenzie,” Andi said. A reporter who was part of a team that covered the Washington beat for several newspapers, Andi knew everybody on Capitol Hill. She had facts at her disposal that the general public wouldn’t have. She also knew backgrounds that frequently got forgotten. “He’s a senator who had to live down the pasts of a starlet mother and drug-using pro-football player father. His son’s sperm theft would be the final embarrassment of his career. But his son’s marriage, even a hasty marriage, would go virtually unnoticed.”
“That’s approximately what Ethan said,” Savannah confirmed.
“He’s right,” Andi said, combing her fingers through the mop of thick, blunt cut sable hair that fell to her shoulders. “A marriage would make this ‘problem’ a nonissue.”
“So you think I should marry him?”
“I don’t know what you should do—” Andi began.
“Marrying him virtually guarantees legal standing in a custody suit,” Mandi interrupted.
“He doesn’t need to marry her to get legal standing,” Lindsay said, as all eyes turned to the law student. “He has legal standing. He is the baby’s father. Actually, it’s probably more documented than if you had gotten pregnant because you were lovers. He doesn’t even need DNA tests. He has papers that prove his sperm created your baby.”
All eyes then turned to Savannah. “Does he have papers?” Becki asked.
“The Georgia State Police told me Barry forged Ethan’s signature to mainstream his sperm for use by the clinic. So, that’s one paper. They also had search warrants that let them roam the entire bed-and-breakfast looking for clues of where Barry might be. Since police don’t get search warrants from judges without a good reason, I’m assuming it’s all documented somewhere and that’s why Barry went into hiding.”
Becki caught Savannah’s gaze. “Do you know where Barry is?”
Savannah shook her head. “No. All I know is he called me and told me that he was leaving for a new job in Canada. Though he avoided telling me where the job was, I knew something was wrong. Then eight hours after he called, the police arrived and told me that when the clinic was auditing their procedures, they randomly chose my pregnancy to follow to make sure everything had been done properly. Apparently, Barry only got away because he saw what case they were going to audit and he left before they began pulling files. No one noticed he was gone until after they called Ethan. Because he had not originally been a sperm donor, they had to confirm he had reclassified his sample. Ethan, of course, had not. When they started putting two and two together with my pregnancy, Ethan’s reclassified sperm and Barry’s absence, it was already too late.”
“He does look guilty,” Becki said sadly.
“Yeah, he does,” Savannah agreed. “The ironic thing is that I don’t even know where to find him to tell him Ethan is dropping the charges if I marry him.”
“And just like that Barry can come home?” Mandi said skeptically. “No punishment, no problems.”
“He didn’t really do anything wrong,” Savannah insisted. “I’m the one who said I couldn’t do this without a guarantee that I would get a good father. He promised me a good father. He delivered.”
“Yeah, he delivered, all right,” Becki said. “He could have delivered you to a jail cell.”
“That’s not what he intended.”
“Savannah, you’ve got to quit defending that kid,” Mandi said.
But Lindsay stopped her with a look. “Barry is Savannah’s brother,” she quietly reminded Mandi, but Savannah knew what she was really saying.
“He’s my only family,” she said, not needing to remind everybody of past tragedies. “Besides if I don’t marry Ethan, he could sue for custody. And he’ll win because I can’t fight the McKenzie money.”
“Oh, Savannah,” Andi said, jumping from her chair to rush over and hug Savannah. “I don’t think you need to worry about him suing for custody. These people can’t afford bad press. Even if you don’t marry him, I don’t think he’s going to try to take this baby away from you.”
“You think the baby’s safe?”
“I think that if you stand your ground, the McKenzies will settle for whatever you are willing to give them to keep this out of the papers.”
“I agree,” Lindsay said, obviously thinking this through from a legal perspective. “Fathers have more rights than they used to, but if the McKenzies try for custody it will end up as a lawsuit. And if what you’re saying is true, Ethan McKenzie can’t afford an ugly lawsuit any more than he can afford for this story to leak. You’ve got some leverage here, too. If nothing else, you can expose the truth.”
“Except you don’t have the papers that prove any of it, do you?” Becki asked.
Savannah shook her head. “No.”
“Then get them,” Lindsay said. “Don’t wait until the evidence is mysteriously lost or destroyed. Call tomorrow. Because whether you marry him or not, the papers that prove you used in vitro fertilization are your best bet for making sure Ethan sticks to any deal you guys make.”
“You mean I’m going to have to resort to blackmail?”
“It’s not blackmail,” Andi said, placing her hand on top of Savannah’s in a gesture of support. “Just insurance.”
“Yeah, insurance,” Becki said, putting her hand on top of Andi’s in a show of solidarity.
Though Savannah smiled and nodded, she wasn’t convinced this was the right thing to do. She was pregnant because of a forgery. She was getting married to cover up a theft. And she would be getting the papers to prove it all.
She couldn’t help but think that if the original two wrongs didn’t make a right, getting the papers that proved them would do nothing but cause more trouble. Still, she saw what her friends were getting at.
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Early,” Mandi insisted.
She nodded and tried to smile, but couldn’t. In spite of the fact that it seemed like the right thing to do, she had a really bad feeling about this. Particularly since Ethan said he could have the paperwork shoved to a back corner of a filing cabinet by seven o’clock tomorrow morning. Saturday morning. They were about to enter a weekend where offices would be closed and police would be busier than normal. It was no wonder Ethan was so confident he could quash this story. By Monday morning the paperwork would be gone and everyone’s memory would be dulled by rapes and murders and drug busts.
“I think I’ll call Barry’s boss at home. Tonight.”
Chapter Two
The next morning, when Savannah opened her door to Ethan McKenzie, birds chirped in the trees in the front yard of her yellow Victorian home. The flowers lining her sidewalk and in the beds surrounding the wide gray porch seemed to be yawning and stretching in anticipation of the new June day. The sun was in the final stages of rising, leaving a band of pale reds and muted blues along the charcoal horizon, but there was sufficient light that Savannah noticed the strain in Ethan’s face, the tautness of his muscles, the caution in his approach.
“Good morning, Savannah.”
“Good morning, Ethan,” she said, motioning for him to enter.
She didn’t blame him for being tense. A great deal was at stake in this bargain. Not just his father’s career and her brother’s future, but also the future of their baby. Fortunately for her, she had spoken with Barry’s boss and with her own attorney in Thurmont, so she also wasn’t worried about custody anymore. Within a few days, she would hold the trump card in her hands. Though the proof of how their child was created had originally hurt her, it would now protect her. Even if she didn’t make any deal with Ethan, those papers were her insurance that he wouldn’t take away her baby.
Knowing her child was safe, she now had to do whatever she could to free Barry and protect Ethan’s father.
“I’ve decided getting married solves both of our problems,” she said immediately, if only because Ethan’s expression indicated he had worried about her answer. “I appreciate that you didn’t push me last night. But even after a few hours to think about the situation, I couldn’t come up with a better solution. So I’m in.”
To her amazement, he seemed to sag with relief. “And today we can finalize everything?”
“I think so,” she said, leading him into her kitchen. She wouldn’t tell him that after a short discussion with the clinic director about the right of an accused to see any evidence presented against him, he had agreed that she and Barry should be allowed access to the records once they secured legal authorization. She also wouldn’t disclose that she had contacted her attorney, Wallace Jeffries, who was in the process of drawing up legal documents. She was sure that behind the scenes Ethan was doing his level best to protect himself, too. He would be crazy if he wasn’t. And he would be naive to think she would go into this without precautions of her own. There was no need to discuss it. No need to threaten him. No need to tip her hand. Besides, if Ethan stuck to whatever bargain they made, she would never even use the information.
She led Ethan through the swinging door into her kitchen. Delicious aromas from freshly baked cinnamon rolls and coffee greeted them.
“Would you like something? Coffee? Maybe a cinnamon roll?”
Savannah watched Ethan glance at the syrupy rolls sitting on a plate in the center of her round table. “Did you just bake those?”
She grinned. “This morning.”
“Oh, God, please,” he said with a groan of pleasure. “Coffee and one of those rolls sounds like heaven.”
“Coming right up,” she said and gathered a plate, cup, saucer and appropriate silverware for her guest. For the first time since his arrival at her house the night before, she heard a tone of normalcy sneaking into their conversation and she desperately wanted to keep it. They didn’t merely need to be comfortable with each other to negotiate visitation fairly. They also needed to relax because they would be living together until after the baby was born. Somehow, they had to break through the awkwardness between them once and for all to make their lives bearable until they divorced.
Trying to lighten the mood, she said, “Marrying me is going to have some hidden advantages. I bake like no one you know.”
“So it seems,” he agreed, but his voice was oddly quiet. Almost reverent.
She turned and caught him staring at her stomach and recognition of what he was thinking sent a ripple of unease through her and breathed new life into the tension she had hoped was dying. Though they had both had less than twenty-four hours to acclimate to the fact that they were having a baby together, she had had five months to adapt to being pregnant. For him, all of this was still new and until he got accustomed to her pregnancy he would not be comfortable with her.
She licked her dry lips. “Pretty amazing isn’t it?”
His gaze didn’t move from her tummy. “Fascinating.”
“As my stomach grows, I realize the baby is getting bigger, becoming more developed, and it just sort of blows me away.”
“I can understand that,” Ethan whispered.
Savannah took a long breath and set the plate and utensils on the countertop. He sounded like an outsider looking in, and she realized that was the problem. As the baby’s father, he had as much right to be part of this experience as she had. Once he got those rights, once this pregnancy became as much his as it was hers, the awkwardness would vanish.
“Would you like to touch?” she softly offered.
Though he wore jeans and a simple shirt, he straightened in his chair as if he were wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase. “No. No. That’s not necessary. I’m sorry, Savannah. I don’t mean to be staring.”
She took a few steps closer to the table. “Ethan, this is your baby, too.”
His gaze fell to her stomach again. “I know.”
“And it’s good for you to want to be a part of things.”
He raised his dark brown eyes until they met hers. “You think?”
“Sure,” she cheerfully agreed, though her heart was beating a million miles a second because they were face-to-face with the intimacy that was actually the catalyst of their nervousness. When they worked together they hadn’t even been friends, just acquaintances. They never expected to be intimate, and didn’t want to be intimate, but they now couldn’t avoid it. So it was better to hit it head-on, because once they faced this, there would be nothing to be tense about anymore.
She lifted the loose T-shirt she wore over maternity jeans, exposing the smooth porcelain mound containing their baby.
But Ethan didn’t move. It hardly seemed as if he were breathing.
Savannah reached down and took his hand and placed it on her warm stomach. The baby picked that precise second to move. Slowly, gently, the tiny body shifted, causing a soft ripple across her tummy. Not something you could see, only something you could feel. Ethan’s gaze shot to hers.
“That’s him?”
Savannah inclined her head and suppressed a smile. “Or her.”
The baby moved again and Ethan grinned. “Or her,” he agreed, then laughed out loud. “My God, I can’t believe it. I’m going to have a baby,” he said, his voice dripping with awe.
“Technically I’m going to have the baby,” she said, stepping away because she was experiencing weird sensations, none of which had anything to do with her pregnancy. Staring into Ethan’s affection-filled brown eyes, she had felt as if she were bathed in warmth. Her skin felt silky and tingly at the same time, and she wanted nothing more than to lose herself in the moment.
Which wasn’t just wrong, it was dangerous. She didn’t really know Ethan’s full intentions about their child, but she did know he wasn’t marrying her because he loved her. With all the hormones floating around in her system and the loneliness that often consumed her, it would be very easy for her to misinterpret his affection for the baby as affection for her. She had to keep up her guard. Not lose her head. Not do something foolish.
She lowered her top to cover her tummy and turned to the counter again to retrieve the dishes and utensils. Quietly, she took them to the table. When she turned again to get the coffeepot, Ethan stopped her with a hand on her forearm.
Again, the silky feeling floated through her.
“You don’t have to wait on me. I can get my own coffee. You sit.”
Their gazes locked and, once again, Savannah felt she could get lost in his eyes. Almost black and warm with emotion, they held her as surely as the grip of a hand. She reminded herself that their baby inspired the tenderness she saw in Ethan’s eyes. She told herself it had nothing to do with her, but that didn’t stop the flood of recognition that flowed through her. Whether it was wise or not, at this precise moment she wasn’t thinking about the baby. She was thinking about how attractive he was. How awful his divorce had been. How genuinely kind he had been to her when her parents died. What she was experiencing was an appreciation for him as a man.
Tall and lean, he had the structure and solidness of someone upon whom she could depend, and his behavior backed that up. He hadn’t demanded she marry him. He hadn’t waved his family’s money or position to threaten her. He had asked her to marry him and given her time to think it through because he was intelligent, responsible and fair. For Savannah that was every bit as sexy as his compelling dark eyes, beautiful black hair and the cute little cleft in his chin.
Perhaps if the situation were different, if she had met him on the street and didn’t have any prior association with him, she might want to flirt with him, wishing he would ask her out, wondering what it would be like to be his wife. Instead, they did have a connection, she didn’t dare flirt with him. And in a few days or weeks, whatever timeline they decided this morning, she would be his wife.
The thought shot a shiver through her and she backed away from the table. If she didn’t watch herself, she could end up in big trouble here. She could easily fall in love with this guy and end up completely brokenhearted.
When Savannah stepped away from the table, Ethan rose to get his coffee from the pot on the counter. Lifting the container, he noticed his hand was shaking and he knew why. When he put his palm on her abdomen, he felt a zing that had nothing to do with the baby he was touching and everything to do with Savannah. Logically he knew that was because he hadn’t really touched a baby. He had touched her. He had stroked the soft skin of her tummy. And he felt a hundred emotions he had no right to feel. Appreciation. Wonder. Awe. And affection. He could put his genuine affection for Savannah down to having worked with her for two years, and he did, but he wasn’t so foolish as to not realize that with very little help his feelings for this woman could explode.
And that would be trouble.
He had exonerated her, and he wasn’t pressing charges against her brother. In return, she was helping him cover the problem so that the press didn’t hurt his father. They were working together amicably, but that didn’t mean he should relax with her. He didn’t really know that she wouldn’t take advantage of this situation to extort money. But even if she was sufficiently cleared of that, he couldn’t afford to get emotionally involved with another woman.
Unfortunately, if he got any more appreciative of Savannah, he wouldn’t merely be involved, he would be smitten. Then he would give her anything she wanted when they divorced, and that took him back to his bottom-line suspicion. Savannah might not have helped her brother cook up the scheme to get a part of the McKenzie money, but now that she had her foot in the door there was no telling what she could demand. Though he didn’t believe Savannah was greedy, he couldn’t completely leave himself and his family unprotected, either. Which meant he couldn’t act upon any feelings he had for Savannah beyond what was appropriate.
“So, when do you want to get married?” he asked, taking his coffee to the table.
She shrugged. “I need two weeks to help my friends create a schedule and train them so they can run the bed-and-breakfast for the months I’m gone. Plus, we’ll need time to get a license and do whatever else is required to get married in Maryland.”
“That makes sense. How about the Saturday after next, then?”
She nodded. “The Saturday after next,” she said, playing with her silverware as Ethan helped himself to one of her delicious-looking cinnamon rolls, if only to give her a few seconds to acclimate. He knew her entire life was being turned upside down, but there was no help for it. Getting married was the only way to protect his father.
“So…have you told your parents?”
He glanced at her. “I’m not going to.”
She gasped. “You’re not?”
“Not on your life. I discussed this with Hilton last night,” he said, referring to Hilton Martin, family friend of the McKenzies, owner of Hilton-Cooper-Martin Foods and a man Ethan knew Savannah very much liked and respected. “And he agrees that there is no reason for my parents to know. Actually, their not knowing will help keep the scenario safe for them. Because they don’t know the truth, they won’t ever be lying to the press.”
“That makes sense,” Savannah agreed quietly.
“Yes, it does. The fewer people who know, the better,” he began, but he suddenly realized something he should have thought of immediately and he almost groaned. “Savannah, did you tell anyone how you got pregnant?”
Obviously realizing why he had asked, Savannah grimaced, “This isn’t something you share with the general public, so I only told the four women you met last night and Olivia Brady.”
“Olivia Brady? From Hilton-Cooper-Martin Foods?” Ethan said, stiffening with fear that his perfect plan had a big hole in it.
“I didn’t actually tell her everything when I had lunch with her in March. I tried, but she thought I was only considering getting pregnant and she never let me finish the story.”
Ethan relaxed. “So, that’s good, then. At the very least it’s manageable. We can say we bumped into each other while you were in Atlanta, realized we were head over heels in love and keep the story as pure as the driven snow.”
“I wouldn’t call this story as pure as the driven snow,” Savannah said, again playing with her silverware. “It’s a lie.”
“Yes, but it’s a necessary lie,” Ethan insisted. “What about your friends?”
“What about my friends?”
“What did you tell them?”
For this she looked him right in the eye. “I told them exactly what you told Hilton Martin.”
Understanding the comparison she had deliberately made, Ethan sucked in his breath. He couldn’t criticize her for telling her friends because he had confided in Hilton. “Do you trust them?”
Savannah gaped at him. “Of course, I trust them! I trust them enough that they’ll be running my business for six months.”
“This is different….”
“I don’t see how. Besides, even if I hadn’t wanted to talk with them about this last night to get my bearings, I would have had to tell them something to give them a reason for why I was marrying somebody they didn’t know and pulling up stakes. But only for six months. Not forever. Which immediately would alert them that something was wrong. There was no way I could have lied to them.”
“Right. You’re right. And I’m sorry.”
“Okay.”
Looking at Savannah’s angry face, Ethan suddenly felt like the villain. And he wasn’t. Her brother was. He wouldn’t be coercing her into marriage if it weren’t for her brother.
Nonetheless, guilt swamped him because he was asking a great deal of this woman. Then concern for her safety struck him next. What the hell was he doing upsetting the mother of his child? But continued fear about her friends hit him last and when that wave came it was a tsunami because it was a deal breaker. He wasn’t afraid one of them had already leaked her secret. Up to now the details of her pregnancy were highly personal for Savannah, a secret easily kept among friends. But now that the information had real value in the tabloid marketplace, Ethan knew any one of those four women could decide to sell this story. Which would make getting married pointless. If even one of them wasn’t as trustworthy as Savannah believed, this plan was dead in the water.
Still, not wanting to upset her with any more questions about her friends, and knowing she would be biased anyway, Ethan decided he wouldn’t say another word, but would check out her friends on his own.
“Why don’t you go change while I call my attorney to see what we have to do to get married in Maryland.”
“We have to see an attorney for that?”
“Well, we’re also going to need to have a prenup drawn up. Nothing extravagant, just one that says what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.”