work and practice and effort to teach herself how to appear bold and outgoing when inside she was often shaking. It was quite a task to hide her nervousness and make people feel at ease, but she had learned to push past her anxieties and concentrate on the customer and the task. Now this man was making her forget all her hard-won lessons. More to the point, he was making her aware of herself as a woman, which was totally unacceptable.
“What do you want from me, Mr. Rollins?” she asked.
He stared into her eyes and then shook his head. “Ms. Hammond, I regret to tell you that we have a problem, a big one, and it doesn’t involve paintings or auctions, either. The fact is that it has just come to my attention that you are the mother of my baby,” he said. “We need to do something about that.”
Jackie’s eyes widened. Her breathing stopped. She slipped one hand over her throat.
“What?” she finally managed in a whisper.
He shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. “I probably should have led up to that a bit more slowly, but…you donated eggs at one time?”
Her eyes widened. She gripped the arms of her chair as if squeezing something hard could turn back time. “Yes, once, but only to my cousin,” she said weakly. Her cousin, Trish, had given birth to a girl, and Jackie’s four-year-old niece, Chloe, was a sweetheart. And she was the only result of Jackie’s donation. “You’re not trying to tell me that you and Trish…I wouldn’t believe that, no matter how good looking you are. She’s madly in love with her husband.”
The man’s left brow had raised slightly when she told him he was good looking. “Never had the honor of meeting the lady,” was all he said. “And it was my late wife who gave birth to my little girl.”
Jackie felt suddenly sick. “I don’t understand.”
“That makes two of us, Ms. Hammond.”
“There must be some mistake.”
“There was. Apparently your donor eggs were implanted in my wife without your permission. I’m terribly sorry about that.”
A baby. There was another baby with her DNA, another child she would never get to hold as her own. Chloe had been one thing, she had been voluntary, but this…
Jackie pushed her chin up, her hair falling back as she gazed up at the man with the unreadable eyes. “Why should I believe you, Mr. Rollins?”
“Why should I lie to you?”
“I don’t know, but I…there might be a reason that hasn’t occurred to me yet.”
“I assure you that I’m telling the truth, even though I wish it weren’t so. I do, of course, have proof.”
He reached into the pocket of his navy sport coat, the movement making the muscles bunch beneath his white shirt.
Jackie blanched. How could she even notice such a thing at a moment like this? She turned her attention to the paper Steven Rollins was holding out.
“What is that?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“It’s the paperwork showing which eggs were used to bring about my wife’s pregnancy. And this other paper matches those very eggs to you.”
Jackie’s hand shook as she took the crisp white pieces of paper. She read the words, which blurred before her eyes.
“How could this have happened?” she asked herself out loud.
“I’ve asked myself that, but there just aren’t any good answers.”
Biting her lip, Jackie nodded and dared to glance up into the dark eyes of the tall man beside her. He didn’t look happy.
“It’s very…very generous of you to come to me with this news. You didn’t have to. I would never have known.”
“Possibly.”
She could tell by his expression that he had considered not coming to her.
“Why did you come?”
“Believe me, my reasons for being here today are anything but altruistic, Ms. Hammond. Suzy isn’t a lost puppy that I was willing to return to the original owners if they showed up when I placed a sign in a store window. I would have liked nothing better than to leave you in the dark. But other people knew. At least a few at the hospital did. These kinds of things have a way of leaking out.”
“So here you are.”
“Yes.” The word seemed to have been forced out of him. He leveled a long, dark stare at her. She noticed that his jaw was hard and square, the skin taut over the bone. He had the look of a man’s man about him, the kind of man many women would have paid to have stare at them. But she wasn’t like most women, and being studied this closely by Steven Rollins made her breath kick up hard in her chest. Her heart was doing sprints. She wanted to squirm.
“What exactly do you want from me, Mr. Rollins?” She managed to keep her voice reasonably firm, even though she knew her knuckles were clenched on the chair so hard that they were undoubtedly white.
He pushed off the desk and rose to his feet, intimidatingly tall. “I want your name on a different piece of paper, Ms. Hammond, stating that you relinquish all rights to my daughter,” he said quietly, in a voice that brooked no arguments. “And I want your word that you will never try to see her or contact her. And you, in return, will have my word and my name on a legal document stating that I will never darken your door again. That’s why I’m here. That’s exactly what I want from you. Now, do we have a deal, ma’am?”
Jackie had never been a person who argued. She had spent her life being accommodating. She had spent her girlhood trying to please a man who could not be pleased and jumping to do his will in the rare moments when he even noticed her. She had never had anything or anyone who truly belonged to her in any real sense. So yes, she had donated her eggs to Trish and been happy to do so. Chloe was worth the hurt of knowing she could never call the little girl her own. But now here was this man, trying to stare her down, trying to force her yet again to give in and be good, to do the easy thing as she had always done.
Somewhere there was a child, a baby, who through accident had come from her body, Jackie thought. A child she would never even have the chance to see the way she saw Chloe.
She stared up at Steven Rollins.
“You think you have the right to do this.”
For a moment his eyelids flickered. Then it was as if his whole body turned to steel. “I know I have the right. Suzy is mine. You didn’t even know about her. I didn’t have to come here.”
Jackie studied the rigid line of his jaw. “But you would have had to live with the fear that someday I might find out.”
“Yes.” He bit the word off, and she understood that it was hard for him to admit as much to her. It was obvious that his child meant a great deal to him.
“How old?”
“What?” A muscle twitched in his jaw. He shook his head.
“How old is…is Suzy?”
He hesitated, as if even sharing that much was too much. “She’s one.”
“A baby. Still a baby.” With all the things that came with a baby—smiles and giggles and soft skin and a baby powder scent. Unconditional love and acceptance of those who cared for her. Sweetness. Innocence. A child who wouldn’t exist if not for those eggs she had donated. A part of herself. Jackie almost closed her eyes, the longing was so overwhelming.
“You’ll sign?” Steven Rollins’s strong voice broke into her thoughts and she looked at him. For a moment she thought she saw a flash of fear and pain in his eyes.
He had lived with his baby for a whole year. She was precious to him. She was, in fact, his and his alone. Suzy Rollins was out of reach for the woman who had unwittingly helped to give her life. Suzy would