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blithe enough about jacking off and handing over the tube of milky liquid, until one day he was waiting for a bus near a medical clinic. A pregnant woman came out and sat on the bench near him. He remembered looking at her sidelong. He didn’t know how pregnant she was. She was round, but not waddling. Five or six months, maybe. No husband with her. He’d wondered a little disapprovingly why not. A pregnant woman shouldn’t have to wait for the bus. What if it was full and she had to stand? Or she got jostled and bumped hard against the sharp edge of the seats? There were punks who hassled lone women on buses. And then he’d thought, Oh, my God. She might not have a husband, or a boyfriend. She could be pregnant with my baby.
He’d sat there in shock, trying not to stare but unable to help sneaking looks. Of course the kid she was carrying wasn’t his; that was stupid even to think. What were the odds? The sperm bank supplied fertility clinics all over the country and even abroad. Not just locally.
But it could be.
Man, that had given him cold chills. After that he’d stuck to donating blood when he was desperate. It wasn’t as if the money had been that fabulous. He pretended to himself he didn’t even notice the pregnant women who seemed to be everywhere.
It was a couple of years before an obviously pregnant woman didn’t seem to light up like a neon sign to him, and before he succeeded in putting from his mind the fact that probably some of his sperm had been put to use, that at least a few babies had been born that were blood of his blood.
And now, he thought as he stood outside himself and watched while he went through the motions of politicking, he’d met one of those children. Sierra Lind.
The question was, what was he going to do about it? About her?
Had she meant it when she said she didn’t expect anything? That she wouldn’t tell anyone he was her father if he didn’t want to acknowledge her?
Maybe. He thought she did mean it now. Which wasn’t to say she wouldn’t change her mind.
It would matter less later, once he’d won the election, if he could put her off.
He felt cold-blooded even thinking that.
Even if Sierra kept her mouth shut, what about her foster mother? Ms. Malone had started dubious and moved right along to mad because all she could see was that he was hurting her precious chick’s feelings.
And he had. Jon didn’t like to remember the wounded look in those blue eyes or the pride with which Sierra—his daughter—had carried herself when she assured him that he had no obligation to her. Sierra might even believe that she’d been operating on mere curiosity, that she had no secret wish for him to hold out his arms and gather her into the bosom of his family. But he knew better. She’d lost her mother, and her only other relative didn’t want her. She’d gone to extraordinary effort to find him. Of course she hoped, desperately, that he would feel an immediate bond. Curiosity to match hers.
So…what did he feel?
He had no idea.
No surprise, even after having downed a shot of straight Scotch while watching the late-night news, that he couldn’t sleep.
The day had been muggy enough that he’d left the ceiling fan running. He slept naked, the moving air cooling the sweat on his body. Lying on his back, arms crossed behind his head, he gazed at the pale square of moonlight that fell through the open window onto the bed. Most of him was in the dark, leaving only his knees, calves and feet exposed by that cool light.
He wondered if she was able to sleep tonight. What had she felt, meeting him? Anything in particular? Had there been some sort of recognition, on a cellular level, or did she imagine there was? Was she lying awake right now, too, hungrily remembering his face or the pitch of his voice and the set of his shoulders, deciding which bits and pieces of him had been echoed in her by the genes that had imprinted her?
He muttered a soft imprecation. Those long, skinny arms and legs… He’d gone through that phase. In middle school he’d taken to hunching and hunkering low in his chair, because he towered over everyone. He’d been ridiculously, embarrassingly skinny. PE was a nightmare for him, when he was required to wear shorts that exposed stick-thin legs. Jon smiled a little, thinking about the boy he’d been. A boy with size-thirteen feet that sometimes seemed to be only loosely attached to him. Getting interested in girls, and knowing he looked ridiculous to them.
Sierra’s body still wasn’t quite finished, but she hadn’t looked as if she was clumsy, not the way he’d been. But maybe she had been when she was younger. He wouldn’t be surprised. By sixteen, he’d finally been gaining some muscle, some coordination. By twenty, he guessed Sierra would be a beauty, model-slender and graceful. Did she know that, or still despair?
She had to be smart, or she wouldn’t have been able to track him down. He had a feeling Ms. Malone hadn’t helped. She’d radiated too much disapproval. So Sierra was enterprising, too. Creative. He’d never heard of a kid using DNA to find a sperm-donor father. And she must be a dreamer, or she wouldn’t have embarked on her plan in the first place. He’d been driven, but he wouldn’t call himself a dreamer. At that age, he’d been engaged in ice-cold warfare with his father. Sometimes he thought his every decision had been made in anger and rebellion. He’d been consumed by that anger.
Sierra’s decisions were being made in grief and loneliness.
“Damn,” he whispered to the moonlit room.
His mind drifted. What would Mom think of her? He knew. His mom would be shocked at first, that he’d sold sperm, that she had unknown grandkids out there. She would look as disapproving as Lucia Malone had. But she would love Sierra, given her innate dignity and vulnerable eyes the exact color of his.
His sister, Lily, would, too. Although it would be awkward explaining to her two kids why they’d never met—or even heard of—this cousin.
After the election…
Jon gritted his teeth. That was almost three months away. Three months, during which Sierra would believe her father didn’t want anything to do with her. He wasn’t her father, not in any meaningful sense. There had never been any such expectation of him. Her mother had known the deal when she purchased sperm. He should be able to feel detached.
He couldn’t.
She might not be his. There was clearly a relationship to his mother—the DNA test confirmed that. But he probably had dozens of second and third and fourth cousins he didn’t know. Either he’d have to give a DNA sample, or they’d go to the sperm bank or fertility clinic together and ask for confirmation.
But he knew. He knew.
And he also knew he couldn’t live with himself if he turned away from that girl.
Election or no election.
“IT’S OKAY if he doesn’t call.” Sierra sat on one of the two tall stools at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, watching as Lucy put together a salad to go with the leftover casserole she was reheating. The teenager’s arms were akimbo on the tiled bar. Lucy heard her feet lightly bumping the cabinet as she swung her legs. Sierra was always in motion, even when she was at rest. “Really,” she said, convincing neither of them.
Chopping a carrot, Lucy said, “Give him time.”
Behind her reassuring facade, she roiled. The son of a bitch had better call. Or she was personally going to hunt him down.
Wham. She wielded the knife with unnecessary force. Wham.
No, she didn’t blame him for being shocked. She did blame him for being so careless with something as personal as sperm. She couldn’t imagine giving away her eggs. Men, of course, were a whole lot more likely to strew their sperm hither and yon with no thought for consequences. Except he’d known darn well that his would produce consequences. That had been the whole point, after all.
She didn’t even know why she was so mad. Her sympathies had—somewhat—been with him when this started. What Sierra had done was outrageous. It should