She gaped at him. “Are you trying to bribe me?”
“I’m trying to make you more agreeable.”
“And you think if you give me a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars, I’ll give you what you want in a visitation agreement?”
“I was thinking more like a few million.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re insane! I have a plan. I don’t need your money! I don’t want your money. I want to do what’s best for the baby. So should you.”
He studied her. She could all but see the wheels turning in his head as he came to terms with the fact that this situation wasn’t about money. In his world, everything came down to money. She couldn’t even fault him for trying to find her price—though she did want to deck him. The truth was, she didn’t even want child support. But she figured it was a little too early in the game to tell him that. His brain would have to work so hard to process it that he’d probably have a stroke.
“We’re going to need a written agreement.”
For ten seconds, she wished he hadn’t seen her that morning at the law office. But while her dad had been in prison for something he hadn’t done, she learned wishing for things to be different didn’t change them. Plus, she hadn’t given up on Plan B, convincing him he didn’t want a crying, pooping, spitting-up baby destroying the peace of his life. And that would take more tact and diplomacy than she could muster tonight.
“Okay. But we should have a few more conversations to see what we both want before we even try to get anything on paper.”
He considered that. “Agreed.”
He headed for the door. Though Avery gave him a pleasant smile as she saw him out and said goodbye, another alternative jumped into her brain.
If she couldn’t make him see a baby didn’t fit into his life, there was a risky Plan C. She could tell him that her dad had been in prison and remind him of the can of worms that would be opened once the press started digging into the life of the woman pregnant with his child. They both knew he wouldn’t want that kind of media attention any more than she did. If anything would send him scurrying away from her, it would be the horror of that much negative attention from the press.
There was just one little problem with Plan C—
When she told him about her dad, she’d also be handing him the ammunition to take her child, or to at least keep her and her little one in New York City. All he would have to do would be tell the court he wanted to keep his child away from Avery’s ex-con dad.
Then even if she kept custody, she’d be stuck in New York, away from the people she wanted to help.
Away from the dream she had nurtured and worked for since she was fifteen.
If Plan C went south, it could ruin her life.
THE NEXT MORNING, a quick knock on Jake’s office door brought his gaze up from the documents on his ornate mahogany desk, the desk that had once belonged to his dad. Because the list of people his secretary would let down the corridor to his office was slim, mostly family, he automatically said, “Come in.”
His brother Seth opened the door and poked his head inside. As tall as Jake and with the same dark hair, Seth hadn’t gotten their mom’s blue eyes, and had irises so brown they were almost black. Especially when he got angry.
“I won’t ask you if you’re busy. I know you are, but can I have five minutes?”
Jake sat back on his soft leather office chair. “Sure. What’s up?”
Seth walked to the seat in front of the desk. “Just curious if you’re really going to offer Mom a job. I mean, it would be kind of fun to watch, but there are twelve people on the board who don’t want us giving an office and a paycheck to family members who aren’t actually coming into work.”
“Since when did you start caring about what the directors think?”
Seth winced. “Since they began calling me because they don’t want to insult you by questioning your judgment.”
“The way they used to call me when they wanted to complain about Dad—”
He left the sentence open, giving Seth the opportunity to mention if the directors had told him anything about their father, a man whose business practices had been so sketchy they’d teetered on the edge of illegal. Ten years had given Jake a chance to fix most of their dad’s messes, to argue him into working fairly or to quietly go behind the scenes and make amends with contractors their dad had threatened to ruin. But Jake didn’t want his brother, his sister and especially not their mother to know what a cheat and a thief Tom McCallan had been. Not to preserve their dad’s reputation, but to finally shake it off. He didn’t want to remember that his dad had emotionally abused him and Seth until his brother had all but dropped out of their family. He didn’t want to remember the times his father had publicly humiliated him. He just wanted to get on with his life.
Seth didn’t say anything, and his facial expression remained casual.
Jake breathed a silent sigh of relief. Obviously, with Tom McCallan gone the directors believed as he did: the past was the past. It was time to move on.
He caught Seth’s gaze. “Pete Waters doesn’t like the idea of me hiring Mom either. He thinks she’ll be underfoot and that she doesn’t have any real skills. But I had a talk with her this morning. I told her there might be a possibility of a job, but she really had to work.”
Seth winced. “How did she take that?”
“I think she felt becoming chairman of the board was her due, and a job, though interesting, is a step down.” He shook his head. “I’m hoping that going to Paris will make her see she doesn’t want any of it. That she’s useful enough working with her charities.”
“That’ll make the board and Pete happy.”
Jake sighed and sat forward on his chair again. “Speaking of Pete, there’s something else I have to tell you.”
“About Pete?”
“No. About the lawyer I was dating from his office.”
Seth grinned. “The hot redhead.”
Jake grimaced. It was typical of Seth to judge a woman by looks alone. Though he had to admit Seth had hit the nail on the head with his description of Avery. She was hot, and talking to her the night before had made his head spin. Especially, looking at her stomach and knowing that baby was his. Feelings he’d never before felt had grabbed his chest and squeezed until he couldn’t ask the things he should have asked. Like for a DNA test and a good explanation about why she’d kept her pregnancy from him.
“Yes. She’s pregnant.”
Seth’s mouth fell open. “Holy hell. And the baby’s yours?”
“She says it is.”
“No
