husband was older than me. We wanted kids. He couldn’t have them. So we went to a sperm bank.” She hesitated. His belly knotted, apparently realizing before the rest of him that a missile strike was headed straight for the space between his eyes. “The Hopewell General sperm bank.”
Thomas’s heart stopped cold.
Lia’s voice gentled, as though she knew that she was flipping his world up on its end. “I was artificially inseminated. I got pregnant. We were ecstatic.” Tears sparkled in her eyes again, and she struggled, her voice cracking. “Until he was killed in a car crash before Jalen was born.”
Ah, shit.
He waited, giving her time to collect herself, which was probably a mistake.
After a deep breath, she got it together enough to keep on kicking the ground out from under Thomas’s feet. “That was nine years ago. Now Jalen is sick and he needs your help, which is why I’m here. The end.”
It was the end, all right. The end of Thomas’s ability to stand upright with his knees nice and strong. Bracing his palms on his desk for support, he took his time lowering himself into his chair and wished he could handle this crisis as well as he handled the ones inside the operating room.
Think, man. THINK.
Didn’t Hopewell General have privacy policies in place to protect the anonymity of anonymous sperm donors?
Hell, yes.
He looked up to find her hovering over the desk, watching him intently, as though the world—their world—hung in the balance. Which, he supposed, it did.
“How do you know?” he wondered. “How do you know I’m the father?”
Her gaze wavered. “I … hacked into the hospital’s records.”
The words rattled around inside his head, making no sense. He tried to imagine what had to be involved in such a task—break-ins, firewalls, passwords, encryptions, decryptions and probably a whole bunch of other computer wizardry that he’d never heard of and could never understand.
“You … hacked into the records?”
“Yes,” she said, defiant now. “I’d do anything for my son.”
“You don’t just hack into—”
“You do if you’re an FBI analyst. And I hope you realize that I’ve just given you enough information to ruin my career and send me to jail for a long time. So I hope you’ll use it wisely.”
He was a bright guy, but it took his spinning thoughts way longer than it should have to coalesce into something coherent. “Hang on. You’re the hacker?”
Impatience leached into her voice. “Yes.”
“So what the hell were you doing with the chief of staff earlier, hanging out like you’re new BFFs?”
“They don’t want to put the hospital through the scandal of prosecuting me, so they’ve hired me to build a stronger security system.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
Her lips twisted a little, as though she, too, appreciated the irony.
They watched each other for a couple of beats, both wary.
“Do you believe me now?” she asked.
His answer took much longer than it should have. An automatic and emphatic Hell, no! should have been flying out of his mouth, but it seemed stuck in his throat. Crazy, right? He hadn’t signed up for a kid, had always taken steps to prevent producing a kid and wasn’t ready for a kid. Hell, maybe there really wasn’t a kid.
Maybe this complete stranger was looking for a baby daddy with resources to pay for the kid’s braces. Maybe she’d researched him and his family and knew the kind of money they had. Maybe she wanted to get rich quick on child support. Other women had certainly tried, unsuccessfully, to tap into his wallet over the years, so he wouldn’t be surprised. Plus, the hospital was up to its neck in scandals, and it wouldn’t do his personal reputation around here any good if he turned out to have a baby mama, not that he’d ever cared too much about people’s opinions of him, even his colleagues’.
And yet …
Hold up. There was no and yet, even if the idea of having a son tugged at some primal daddy thing inside him. He was too shrewd to be played for a fool.
“Why would I believe the word of an admitted hacker and felon who barges into my office to tell me I have a son but doesn’t have any proof? Or do you have proof? My bad.”
Flashing him a look withering enough to melt his spine, she reached into a skirt pocket, pulled out a smart phone, tapped a couple of buttons and handed it to him without a word.
Whereupon his limbs froze with sudden paralysis.
If he looked at that picture, there was a chance that his life would change forever. Except that, looking into Lia’s eyes, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d passed that point of no return a while back.
Taking the phone, he looked.
“Oh, my God.” His fingers tightened in a convulsive grip. “Oh, my God.”
The kid—Jalen; his son’s name was Jalen—was holding a disgruntled gray rabbit in his arms and smiling with delight into the camera. It would have been tempting to accuse Lia of somehow stealing a photo of Thomas when he was a child, but he’d never had a gray rabbit and certainly had never owned an Avatar: The Movie T-shirt.
The eeriness of it made his scalp tingle and the hair stand up on his arms.
He was looking into a younger version of his own face. The Mini-Me to his Dr. Evil. They could have been twins, separated by twenty-eight years.
They had the same chocolate skin with red undertones. The same point at the corner of their right ears. The same straight nose.
The boy’s eyes were keen and intelligent and …
Oh, man. Those were his eyes, looking back at him.
Hell, they even had the same right eyebrow, which was flatter than the left.
He stared, looking for differences, and there were some, but not enough. Jalen had his mother’s dimples and her high cheekbones, but he was, God help him, clearly Thomas’s son. And suddenly, he couldn’t look at the picture for one more second. Not one.
Too stunned to think, he handed the phone back to Lia, who gave him a moment by walking over to the window.
He stared down at his desk through the sudden blur of hot tears, and he couldn’t decide if he was mostly stunned, mostly angry or mostly …
Thrilled.
He was a father. Jalen was his son.
“I’ll want to meet him,” he told her. “After the DNA tests.”
He
