He gestured toward the teeming, wet world that awaited them.
She joined him beneath the curve of the umbrella, her shoulder brushing his, and they both started walking, falling into step with one another after a few paces.
“How was your meal?” she asked after a short silence.
“Good. Yours?”
“Yeah, good.”
He glanced at her, but her head was lowered. They’d never been reduced to small talk; even at the very beginning of their friendship they’d always found plenty to say to each other. He felt as though he was being punished somehow. Frozen out with the silent treatment because he’d witnessed her in a moment of weakness last night.
“Alex—”
The world flashed white and a huge roll of thunder cracked overhead as the heavens opened even further, sending rain pelting down out of the sky. He operated on instinct, wrapping an arm around her waist and hustling her beneath the scant shelter of a nearby shop portico.
She shot him a startled look when he finally let her go.
“Can’t use an umbrella in a lightning storm,” he explained as he furled the soaked umbrella.
“No. Of course not.” Then, to his surprise, her mouth quirked as though she was suppressing a smile.
“What’s so funny?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been rescued before,” she said. “For a moment there I felt like I was in a Cary Grant movie.”
“Are you suggesting that I manhandled you?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Lucky I didn’t give in to my first urge to throw you over my shoulder, then.”
She laughed, her eyes crinkling at the corners attractively. He looked into her face and it hit him again that what she was planning was just plain wrong.
“Don’t do it, Alex,” he said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
She stilled, the smile fading from her lips. “Sorry?”
Rather than try to explain, he pulled the sheet of paper he’d rescued from the printer from his pocket and passed it over. She made a small distressed sound when she unfolded it and understood what it was.
“You’re panicking right now, and the last thing you should be doing is making irrevocable decisions,” he said.
Dark color flooded her face. “This is none of your business.” She crumpled the paper in her hand and glanced over her shoulder as though she was afraid someone else might have seen it.
“Someone has to point out the obvious—this is a mistake.”
Alex blinked, her brown eyes wide with shock at his bald pronouncement. “At the risk of repeating myself, this is none of your business,” she said.
Ethan knew she was right. She was a fellow partner, and he was stepping way over the line, but he couldn’t help himself. She deserved a million times better than what she was considering.
“I’m not going to stand by while someone I like and respect makes a mess of her life. Look me in the eye and tell me this is the way you want to have a child.”
She flinched, then her chin came up. “I’m not having this discussion with you, Ethan. Just because I had a moment of weakness while you happened to be around last night doesn’t give you a free pass into my private life.”
“Answer my question.” He took a step closer. “Or are you afraid to?”
He knew that would get her—he might not know what school she went to, but he did know that Alex prided herself on never retreating from a challenge.
She lifted her chin and eyed him angrily. “What do you want me to say, Ethan? You want me to admit that I’m desperate? That this is my last resort? Okay, sure. I am and it is. You want me to tell you that when I was a little girl and I dreamed of having a family of my own, never in a million years did I imagine myself picking his or her father from an online catalog? Absolutely. And if there was any other option on the horizon, there is no way in the world I would consider doing this. But there isn’t, and I refuse to sit on my hands while my last chance to have a family fades away.”
“It’s not fading away. You’re thirty-eight, not forty-eight, and there are hundreds of men who’d break a leg to meet a woman as attractive and together as you.”
She made a rude noise. “You think men are lining up to ask out a busy woman with a mind of her own who probably earns more than they do? Especially when there’s some young blonde thing in her twenties hanging around at the bar who only wants to have a good time?”
“You think all men are a bunch of morons who’d rather go out with a centerfold than a woman with a brain in her head?” he countered.
“You tell me—when was the last time you bypassed the beauty and went for the brain?”
“This isn’t about me. You’re copping out, Alex, and you’re going to regret it.”
“Don’t you dare judge me. You have no idea what it’s like to know that in a few years’ time your own body is going to take away your options. So don’t stand there and lecture me about what I’m worth or what I deserve. Life isn’t about what you deserve—it’s about what you can get and what you can live with. And I will not be able to live with myself if I don’t try to make this happen.”
She turned on her heel and walked into the rain.
“Alex,” he said, darting after her to pull her back beneath the shelter of the awning.
She jerked free of his grasp. “No, Ethan.”
She kept walking, her head down, her shoulders rounded against the force of the rain.
He swore under his breath—but he didn’t go after her. He’d already stepped over the line and he didn’t trust himself not to do it again.
She was making a mistake. But maybe he should have listened to his first instinct and walked away.
Maybe.
ALEX WAS DRIPPING WET when she returned to the office. Fran took one look at her and shot to her feet.
“I’ve got a towel in my gym bag.”
“Thanks.”
Alex had toed off her shoes and was peeling off her wet suit jacket when Fran returned.
“You’re soaked to the skin,” Fran said, sliding a mug of tea onto Alex’s desk and draping a towel around Alex’s shoulders. “I brought you something hot to drink.”
“Thanks. If you wouldn’t mind, there’s some dry cleaning in my car …?” She shivered as a trickle of cold water ran down her spine.
“Give me your keys, I’ll go and grab it for you.”
Alex gave her assistant a grateful smile as she handed over her car keys. “You’re the best, Franny.”
“I know,” the older woman said drily. “Won’t be a tick.”
She pulled the door shut behind her as she exited. Once she was alone, Alex let the smile fall from her face.
She still couldn’t believe that conversation. The things Ethan had said … The fact that he knew …
Her hands were shaking as she tugged her wet shirt from her waistband. She gripped them together, willing the trembling to stop.
He’d shocked her, that was all. She hadn’t planned to tell anyone that she was using a sperm bank, even her friend Helen, who lived in the apartment across the hall, or Samantha, whom she’d studied with. Once she was pregnant, she’d decided to simply claim the father was no longer on the scene. It