head of a very successful ad agency had something to do with it. “Why don’t you give me a price, and then I’ll tell you what I think of it?”
He wanted to tell her exactly what he thought of her, but he managed to maintain his control.
“Why don’t you start the bidding?” he suggested genially, but his smile fell short of his eyes.
“Bidding?” Marlene repeated. What was he talking about? Didn’t he have set rates? She was beginning to smell a setup. Her doubts about him continued to escalate.
But he was here, and she might as well see this thing through. “All right, how does a hundred dollars a day sound?”
Was she serious? Did she really intend to sell her child for a daily fee? Just what kind of a monster was she?
“A hundred dollars a day,” he repeated grimly.
Was that too little? It would help if he gave her some kind of a ballpark figure to work with. “Plus expenses.”
“Expenses?” This was getting worse and worse. Just how long did she intend to bilk them? “And for how long?”
Boy, talk about wanting to play a good thing out. “As long as it takes.” Her eyes narrowed. “Within reason, of course.”
“Reason?” He’d heard of unmitigated gall, but the worst offender he had dealt with was a humble saint in comparison to her. The burden of years of cleaning up after Derek finally took its toll, and he shouted, “I don’t think the word reason has anything to do with this.”
He had completely lost her. She had no idea what he was talking about, or why he had suddenly raised his voice to her, but she wasn’t about to take it.
“Why are you yelling?” she shouted back at him.
It was completely out of character for him. Generally he was the calm within the stormy family. Sullivan paused, but he couldn’t regain the control he sought. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I always yell when someone is trying to sell me a baby.”
Marlene’s lips formed a perfect circle as her eyes grew wide. She stared at him, utterly speechless for what was possibly the first time in her life.
Chapter Two
“W hat are you talking about?” Marlene demanded.
This whole conversation was taking on surrealistic overtones. Sell her baby? She’d moved heaven and earth and endured censure from people close to her to have this child. She would sooner sell her soul than sell her baby.
He could almost believe that the shocked indignation on Marlene’s face was genuine. But he had been privy to some elaborate double-dealing in his career, and he wasn’t about to let himself be taken in by a pair of wide indigo eyes and a full mouth.
His look cut her dead. “Don’t play innocent with me now, Ms. Bailey. It’s a little late for that.” His eyes narrowed. This had to be the dirtiest scam he’d ever come across. “I’ve seen some cool customers in my time, but you really take the cake.”
How dare he stand there, pontificating about some delusional thought that was floating through his head? She knew all she had to do was let out one scream and Sally would be punching out the numbers to the police on the telephone in the next heartbeat. But she didn’t want it to come to that. She was going to handle this hustler on her own.
“Listen, mister, if I had a cake, you’d be wearing it right now. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Aren’t you Mr. Spencer?”
Sullivan suddenly had an inkling that a horrible mistake had been made, and that he had been the one to make it. Some of his anger abated. He stared at her like someone who had opened the wrong door and found the tiger, not the lady, waiting for him.
“No, I’m not. Who’s Mr. Spencer?”
“John Spencer. He’s a private investigator—” Marlene stopped abruptly. “Why am I explaining this to you?” She certainly didn’t owe him an explanation. She didn’t even know who he was. All she did know was that he had to be deranged. Taking a step back, she raised her voice. “Sally—”
The woman had never gone more than a few steps into the next room. “I’m already calling 911,” Sally assured her as she hurried to the phone.
“No, wait,” Sullivan called out. It was an order, not a protest.
Like a feisty bantam rooster, Sally bobbed into the doorway. “Why should I?” she demanded. “The way I see it, you could be dangerous.”
Men had called him that, but the description had been issued across a bargaining table. It had never been applied to him in the sense that this small troll of a woman meant it.
He leveled a look at Sally that was meant to freeze her in her tracks. “Hardly.”
“I don’t know about that.” Marlene folded her arms before her as she regarded him coldly. “Most deranged people are dangerous to some degree.”
“I am not deranged.” Although after years of having to deal with Derek’s indiscretions, he probably had a right to be. Sullivan looked at Sally expectantly, waiting for the woman to go. “Ms. Bailey and I have some business to discuss, so if you don’t mind leaving…”
“Stay where you are, Sally,” Marlene ordered. Her eyes flashed as she looked at Sullivan. “We have nothing at all to discuss. How could I have any business with you? I don’t even know who you are.”
His eyes swept over her form. “In a manner of speaking, you do.”
If she hadn’t been waiting for Spencer, if overwhelming curiosity hadn’t kept her up at night and wiggled its way into the structure of her workday like a tenacious gopher burrowing its way through the ground, the thought wouldn’t have occurred to her. But it did, coming to her riding a lightning bolt.
Marlene’s mouth dropped open. Her hand splayed across her abdomen as if that could somehow protect the baby from this. In the last month she’d imagined the baby’s father over and over again. At times he was tall, dark and handsome, just like the man standing in her living room. But never once had she envisioned a ranting madman.
“You don’t mean that you’re…?” Her voice trailed away. She was unable, unwilling, to complete the thought and give it credence.
The last bit of doubt that she had in any way known the name of the donor disappeared. “No, my brother is.”
She didn’t understand how he could have known that, or what he was doing here. The Institute prided itself on secrecy and discretion. That was why she had chosen it in the first place, and why, eight months later, she’d been forced to hire a private investigator to uncover the information she now wanted. They had refused, politely but firmly, to give a name to her.
Marlene struggled to pull together the scattered pieces of information into the semblance of a whole. “Do you want to start this at the beginning?”
Sally drew closer until she was at Marlene’s elbow, an old, protective pit bull whose teeth were still sharp enough to be reckoned with. “Why don’t I just make
