And he—he was a sperm donor.
Except his “donation” had not come from a test tube but from time spent in his arms, from caresses and sighs and pleasure….
Sage glared at herself in the mirror.
Pathetic to think about any of it. Stupid and pathetic, and proof, if she needed it, that the books she’d been reading were right.
Pregnant women were often at the mercy of their hormones and their emotions.
She took her lipstick from her purse. She was going to need more than lipstick. Good thing she’d brought blusher and a compact of pressed powder.
It was time to disguise the pallor, the dark circles, and to transform herself into a woman Thomas Caldwell could not intimidate.
She might be stupid about men and sex but she wasn’t stupid about everything else. She knew why he’d chosen the St. Regis for their meeting.
In a city of elegant hotels, the St. Regis was in a class all its own. The place damn near smelled of arrogance and money.
If you were a one-percenter, it reminded you that life was good. If you were stuck with the rest of the world in that ninety-nine-percent slot, it humbled you. Put in your place.
No question, David’s father was certain he knew where she belonged. To him, she was a scullery maid straight out of a bad nineteenth-century novel: broke, unwed, pregnant and desperate.
Well, three out of four wasn’t bad.
But she wasn’t desperate.
Things would be difficult but they’d be doable. Everything was doable, if you tried hard enough.
Bottom line? Caldwell didn’t know her at all. He hadn’t known his own son, not the real David, or he’d have admitted that he could never have fathered her baby.
Thomas
Caldwell wasn’t big on truth.
She had no idea how he’d found out she was pregnant, either.
She suspected he’d had private detectives doing their best to dig up dirt about her, once he saw how close she and David were. Maybe he’d kept them on, after David’s death. And they’d followed her. Tapped her phone. For all she knew, they could have dug through her trash, found the discarded pregnancy tests.
It didn’t matter.
She knew only that Caldwell had started phoning weeks ago, demanding she admit she carried his grandson—God, what a terrible thought!—and that she agree to sell the baby to him.
Of course, he wasn’t fool enough to phrase it that way.
He talked about Providing What David Would Have Wanted For His Child. You could almost see the caps in the air.
When that hadn’t worked, things got grim. How much did she want for the baby? One million? Two? Four? Five?
Sage dabbed blusher on her cheeks. The effect, bright pink against fish-belly white, made her look even worse. The attendant must have thought so, too, because she stepped up, silently offered a handful of tissues.
“Thank you,” Sage said, and wiped the stuff off.
She’d given up telling Caldwell how wrong he was, that the baby was not David’s. She’d stopped taking Caldwell’s calls. Ignored the messages he left.
And it had paid off.
Last week, he’d couriered her a letter.
You win, Ms. Dalton, he’d written. I’m done trying to change your mind. My attorney has drawn up a document stipulating that you absolve me of any and all present and future claims of lineage and inheritance. Sign it in his presence and mine, and in the presence of witnesses, and you will not hear from me again.