“Tell me,” she said softly.
“You already know.” His voice was without intonation, though she sensed a restrained violence in his words. “I am the father of the child in your womb. The child that would have been Kay’s.”
Ivy swallowed hard. “And the sex?” she whispered.
“It is a boy.”
A little sound broke from her throat and she put her hand over her mouth. It was, Damian thought coldly, one hell of an act.
“I tried to tell you I was pregnant. That you were the father. You wouldn’t listen.”
“I am listening now.” Damian sat back and folded his arms. “Tell me again, from the beginning. I want to hear everything.”
She did, from the moment Kay proposed the idea until the moment she’d confronted him in his apartment, though there were some parts—all right, one part—she left out.
She didn’t dare tell him that. Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
But she went through all the facts, pausing to answer his questions, biting her lip each time he shook his head in disbelief because, in her heart, she still shared that disbelief.
What Kay had asked of her, what she’d agreed to do, was insane.
“Why?” he said, when she’d finished the tale. “Why would Kay ask you to be a—What did you call it?”
“A gestational surrogate. Her egg. Your—your sperm.” She knew she was blushing, and wasn’t that ridiculous? The procedure Kay had planned, even the one they’d actually ended up doing, was about as intimate as a flu shot. “And I told you why. You wanted a child. She knew she couldn’t carry one.”
Damian shot to his feet. “Lies! I never said anything about a child. And she didn’t know if she could carry one or not.”
“You asked me to tell you everything. That’s what I’m doing.”
She gasped as he hauled her to her feet.
“The hell you are,” he snarled. “What did she pay you for your role in this?”
“Pay me?” Ivy laughed. “Not a penny. You kept Kay on a tight allowance.”
“Another lie!”
“Even if you hadn’t, I’d never have done this for money.”
“No,” he said grimly. “You did it out of love.”
“I know you can’t understand something like that but—”
“I understand, all right. You hatched out a plot between you. You’d have a baby Kay didn’t want to have, she’d use it to force me into marriage. And when she divorced me, the two of you would split whatever huge settlement a shyster lawyer could bleed out of me.”
Ivy jerked free of his hands. “Do you have any idea how much I earn in a day? How much I’ll lose by not modeling for the next five or six months? Hell, for the next couple of years?”
“Is that why you took an assignment today?” he said, sneering. “Because you have so much money you don’t need any more?”
“That’s none of your business!”
“You’re wrong,” he said coldly. “From now on, everything about you is my business.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“What did I just say? Starting now, everything about you is also about me.”