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. Worry lines. And his mouth was tight. Almost rigid. As if it’d been a long time since he’d smiled.
Thinking of Ryan McCall as human, however, would be yet another mistake, and she’d already made enough of those.
Inside, she was feeling a lot of things. Foolishness for believing this visit would actually alleviate her fears. Anger, mostly directed at herself, for thinking he might have answers. And a sickening dread that all of this could turn even uglier than it already had.
“Explain Dr. Keyes,” he pressed. “A cloned embryo of my son. And finally, your ‘Dr. Keyes can’t be right’ comment.”
Delaney stared at him and considered the few options that she had. Clamming up until he backed down was one, but he didn’t look like the backing-down type. She studied his eyes.
No. Ryan McCall definitely wouldn’t let her walk away from this.
A second option was to sling off his grip and try to muscle her way out of there. She was fairly good in her kickboxing class, but in a physical battle with this man she’d probably lose big-time. Ryan McCall had a good four inches on her and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds. Judging from the fit of his azure-blue pullover shirt and black pants, that fifty pounds didn’t include much body fat, either.
Of course, her final option was to tell him the truth. There was just one problem with that. She didn’t know the truth. Still, he was right. She’d barged into his home. She’d demanded to see a photo of his son, and then she was trying to leave without so much as an explanation. If their situations had been reversed, she’d be blocking his exit exactly the way he was blocking hers.
Figuring she would need it, Delaney drew in a long breath. “Two days ago, a representative from a medical watchdog group called me. He said the New Hope clinic that I used to become pregnant might have done some illegal medical experiments. This group was compiling data so they could request that the Justice Department conduct an investigation.”
Judging from his silence, he was considering her words. “Did this representative have any proof of the allegations?”
“If he did, he didn’t share it with me. He asked about the procedure I’d had done, and when he mentioned that the clinic might have altered embryos, I talked to Dr. Keyes. Keyes wasn’t sure, but he claims a late embryologist might have done some experiments, and that I might have received… Well, you know.”
He pondered what she said. “Keyes could be lying.”
“He
