Peekaboo Baby. Delores Fossen
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Oh. God. He’s so small,” she said, her voice a breathy whisper. Her bottom lip didn’t quiver. It began to shake.
She began to shake.
And she adjusted her purse again so that it was in front of her chest.
“Yes.” Ryan had to swallow hard before he could continue. Not just because of her extreme reaction, but because he didn’t need the image in front of him to visualize his son’s face. It was there. Always there. Burned into his memory and his heart. “Adam was born ten weeks premature.”
We almost lost him, Ryan nearly added.
It was an automatic addendum he’d used often in those first days after Adam’s birth and his stay in the neonatal unit. Those words had proved to be all too prophetic.
Because they had lost him.
“When the accident happened,” Ryan added. He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help. “My son had only been out of the hospital a few days.”
And Ryan was suddenly so sorry he’d opened all of this again. Hoping to undo his mistake, he reached out, snatched the picture from her, put it back where it belonged and slammed the drawer.
“All right. Observation time’s over. Start talking. Why are you here, Ms. Nash?”
She shook her head in an almost frantic gesture. “It’s hard to tell from the picture. You’d think it’d be easy, but it isn’t. It isn’t easy at all.”
Because she looked and sounded on the verge of losing it, and because he wasn’t stupid, he stood and grabbed her purse. She made a sound of surprise, part gasp, part outrage, but Ryan didn’t let that stop him. He rifled through the leather bag to see if she’d indeed brought a gun with her.
No gun.
Just the normal things that might be found in a woman’s purse. A wallet, keys, comb, pen and some toiletry items. Oh, and a blue pacifier in a clear plastic case.
Hardly the tools of a would be killer.
She grabbed her bag from him and put it back as a shield in front of her. But not before he saw the circular wet splotch around her left breast. Specifically, the blotch centered around the somewhat prominent outline of her nipple. Her focus followed his to see what had captured his attention, and she actually blushed.
“I nurse my son,” she said, obviously not comfortable with the topic. “And I’m late for his feeding.”
Ryan wasn’t exactly comfortable with it either, but there wasn’t anything comfortable about this visit. “Then, maybe you should go to your baby instead of being here?”
“The sitter gave him a bottle. I called her on the drive over.”
And that brought the conversation to a temporary grinding halt. It took a moment for Ryan to ask what he knew he had to ask. “Why did you react that way to my son’s picture?”
She shrugged in a sort of dismissal that didn’t change anything. Every muscle in her face was tight and doing battle with each other. “It doesn’t matter. Dr. Keyes can’t be right.”
Ryan took a moment to try to process her mumblings and that name, but there was nothing in his memory to process. “Who the hell is Dr. Keyes?”
“The fertility specialist I used. I can’t have a child on my own. I had to use a donor embryo to become pregnant with my son.”
“So?” Ryan said, since he had no idea what else to say. This little talk had taken a bad turn somewhere, and he didn’t think it would get back on track anytime soon. Still, he wasn’t about to send her on her way until he learned what this visit was all about.
“So, Dr. Keyes…” She paused, and what little color she had drained from her face. She stared at him. Well, in his direction anyway. Long moments. But Ryan wasn’t sure she was seeing him at all. She seemed to be involved in her own private, intense debate that occupied all of her mental energy.
“I have to go,” she said.
She whirled around and had made it halfway to the door before Ryan could catch up with her. He stepped in front of her to block her path so she couldn’t leave.
“Finish that thought about Dr. Keyes,” he insisted.
He saw more of that intense debate, and she must not have cared much for the conclusion she silently drew. “There’s no reason to finish it. I’m sorry I bothered you. I’m sorry for everything.”
Again, she started for the door. Tried to step around him. But Ryan did some maneuvering of his own until they were face-to-face. Since she was easily five-nine and was wearing heels, they were practically eye-to-eye, as well.
He caught her scent. Not just her rain-soaked clothes, either. Her scent. Something rich and female. Like her tears and her trembling lip, it awakened responses inside him that he’d long since buried.
And he intended for them to stay buried, too.
It was a man-woman thing, he assured himself. And it felt more intense than it actually was because he’d gone so long without sex. His thirty-two-year-old body was simply urging him in a direction he had no intention of going.
Ryan pushed her scent and his primal response aside and stared at her. “Talk,” he ordered.
“Trust me, you don’t want to hear this.”
And judging from her adamant tone, he believed her. But that didn’t stop him. “Tell me anyway.”
She gave a weary sigh, and her head dropped down. “Dr. Keyes thought maybe my donor embryo… Well, he thought it might have been cloned.”
“Say what?” Because Ryan had to know what was going on in her eyes, he cupped her chin and lifted it.
He didn’t like what he saw.
She was afraid. That fear didn’t do much to calm his own suddenly raw nerves.
Her lashes fluttered down, or rather tried to, but she fought it and maintained eye contact with him. “Dr. Keyes believes I might have given birth to a cloned embryo of your son.”
Chapter Three
The moment Delaney heard her own words, a cloned embryo of your son, she realized what a stupid mistake it’d been to come to Ryan McCall’s estate.
Mercy, what had she done?
She’d let the exhaustion, fear and her quest for the truth gnaw away at her, and it had obviously damaged her common sense.
Delaney pulled back her shoulders. She had to get out of there, and she wouldn’t wait for her host’s permission, either. She stepped around him and started walking.
Ryan McCall reached out, fast, and slammed the door in her face. Not only that, he squeezed himself into the meager space between the door and her, blocking her exit.
“Did you think I wouldn’t want an explanation after a bombshell like that?” he challenged.
“That’s the problem—I didn’t think. And I shouldn’t have come,” Delaney countered, hoping it would suffice.
It didn’t.
When she reached for the doorknob, he snagged her wrist. Alarmed at the physical restraint, she stared at the grip he had on her and then snapped her gaze to his face. She had seen that face a hundred times in the newspapers, and yet he didn’t look much like those images that were often plastered in the business section.
Oh, the confidence and the renowned aloofness were there, etched in those glacier-blue eyes. In that almost harshly angled olive-tinged face. Those attributes were even there in his slightly too long but fashionably cut sandy-blond hair. Brad Pitt meets The Terminator. But what the photos had failed to capture were the small things that made him human.
There were tiny lines at the corners of his eyes.