The Daddy Decision

by Donna Sterling

  “It was very hard on Steffie.” He said it as if he himself had not been affected. But dark, pain-filled memories lurked in his hooded gaze, whether he wanted her to see them or not. “It might not have been as much of a shock if we had grown up on the streets,” he continued almost reluctantly, as if she’d somehow compelled him. “But my mother had worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family for a few years, and we’d gotten used to a fairly decent life. She lost that job suddenly—the lady of the house was displeased by something. We never knew what. The only place my mother could find work was in a rough, inner-city neighborhood. That’s where the INS agents caught her in a raid.”

  Laura’s heart went out to him and his family, but she knew he would detest her sympathy. A waiter set cups of aromatic coffee and plates of flaky, layered, honey-fragrant pastries in front of them. Cort bent his attention to his coffee, the heavy gold and black-sapphire ring on his hand glinting in the candlelight as he reached for the cream.

  “Is that when you began working for Anatole—when your mother was deported?”

  “Soon after the cash under the mattress ran out.” His mouth thinned in a sardonic twist. “Anatole paid well.”

  “How did you ever manage to get away from that life?”

  He held her in a dark, steadfast, piercing gaze. “How do you know that I did?” She stared at him, unsure of what he meant. “After all, how would a backstreet hood like me end up with twenty-some million dollars?”

  His insinuation hit home, and she tightened her mouth in anger. “Give me more credit than that. I know you, Cort Dimitri. At the age of twenty-two, you wouldn’t eat lunch meat from your own refrigerator unless you’d paid for it. You wouldn’t buy beer for your underage friends who’d tried dozens of times to bribe you. You wouldn’t allow illegal drugs in your house, and God help Steffie if she associated with anyone who used them. I will never believe you made your fortune in any unethical way.”

  A muscle moved in his cheek—the start of a smile, maybe—but his gaze remained hard and unreadable. “You’re still very naive.” A tense silence drew out between them, but he finally confided in a soft, gruff voice, “The last job I did for Anatole was a collections run. Gambling debts. I watched my older, more experienced cohort shatter a man’s kneecaps.”

  Horror washed through Laura. A hazy recollection returned to her—of Cort hot and trembling in the dead of night, hoarse gasps about bloody knees and baseball bats uttered in the throes of his nightmare.

  She reached across the table and covered his dark, strong, beautiful hands with hers, hurting for him in a vague, helpless way. She couldn’t think of how to express her wish that she could have saved him from all that horror without embarrassing him into silence. “How did you get away from Anatole?”

  He shrugged. “I turned in my notice.” He smiled, and she didn’t believe she’d ever seen a smile more devoid of humor. “He didn’t accept it very graciously. He threatened to put Steffie to work in one of his, uh, houses.” He raised his coffee to his mouth, but set it back down without drinking. “She was thirteen at the time.”

  Laura stared at him, appalled. She had no doubt what kind of house he’d meant. “You couldn’t have been more than seventeen yourself. What did you do?”

  “I left town with her. We caught a bus. Went to a friend of Thea’s. Eugene Petrandis, in Athens.”

  “Athens, Georgia?” A silly question, she immediately realized. She had, after all, met him there. Lived with him there.

  “Damn sure wasn’t Athens, Greece. Not that I hadn’t thought of going there. But we had no money for airfare, no passports and no idea of how to get in touch with my mother. Eugene finally found a way to reach her in Greece, but it took time.” He leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “Anyway, as you might remember, I worked in Gene’s bar for the next five years.”

  “Gene,” she said with a reminiscent smile. She remembered the quiet, white-haired man with the walruslike mustache from his few brief visits to the house.

  “He and Thea made all the difference in my life.” The hardness, she noticed, had left Cort’s eyes. “He lent me money for the down payment on the Hays Street house and cosigned the loan. And when I left Athens, he and a few other investors backed me financially in the idea I had for a sports bar.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He passed away six years ago. When he died, he left me his share of all the sports bars we’d opened together.” Cort shook his head, his stare unfocused. “I wish like hell he could have been around to see the price those bars brought as a national chain. He would have gotten such a damn kick out of it.”

  Her throat constricted at the sorrow in his gaze. “I’m sorry you lost him. And I’m sorry about your mother’s death, too. She was a lovely woman. I remember Steffie flying to Greece last year for her funeral. I wish I could have gone.”

  With a little jolt of surprise, Cort remembered Steffie mentioning that Laura had met their mother when she’d returned to the States for brief stays—after she’d married a fairly well-to-do Greek businessman. Steffie had already graduated from college by that time, and Cort himself had been too immersed in his fledgling businesses to see his mother as much as he’d wanted to. The fact that Laura had met her and remembered her with fondness touched him deeply.

  But what touched him even more was the realization that he’d told Laura the sordid truth about his past—a truth that not even Steffie fully knew about—and the warmth hadn’t left her gaze. He hadn’t been able to bluff her into thinking the worst about him, either. Of course, he couldn’t make too much out of her warm regard for him. That warmth had its limit.

  And that limit grated on him more than ever.

  Because, over the course of their conversation, a very basic truth had crystallized in his heart. He loved her. He loved her now, and he’d loved her then, from the very first time she’d touched him.

  If he hadn’t loved her, he wouldn’t have let her go. He would have defied her parents and their ultimatum, which would have forced her to drop out of college. He would have shackled her to him with marriage, babies and obligations. And by the time she realized that she didn’t really love him, that she had nothing in common with a penniless thug from the wrong side of town, she couldn’t have found it in her heart to leave him.

  But he had loved her, even if he hadn’t allowed himself to call it that. So he’d let her go. He’d let her find her rightful future as a free, unencumbered, college-educated woman.

  And time had proven him right. She’d realized she hadn’t really loved him at all.

  The honorable thing now would be to finish his business transactions with her and let her go back to her life. But he wasn’t a saint, or a Boy Scout, or even a particularly good man.

  He wanted her. The years he’d spent without her had been etched in stark black and white, and more often, gray. She brought bright, vivid color to his life. Softness. Sweetness. She made his heart sing, his blood race. She lit a soul-stirring passion in him that no one else ever had or ever could. He wouldn’t let her go again—not until she made it very clear that she was finished with him, once and for all.

  He hoped to delay that eventuality for as long as humanly possible. Which meant he couldn’t, under any circumstances, make the same mistake Fletcher had.

  He tried to force a smile, but knew he didn’t quite manage it. His need to touch her, to hold her, had grown too great. Rising from his chair, he murmured, “Let’s dance.”

  She rose and took his hand. As he ushered her through the crowded room toward the dance floor, a young couple stood up to leave from a table in front of them. The woman held an infant wrapped in blankets.

  Cort wasn’t at all surprised when Laura stopped beside her, murmuring in soft, lilting tones. The woman peeled back the blankets and showed her the baby. Laura gazed with such tenderness and awe and palpable longing that something powerful moved in Cort’s chest. The couple soon ambled past them, and Laura’s wistful gaze followed.r />
  A treacherous yearning squeezed Cort breathless. He longed to banish the wistfulness from her eyes; to infuse her with that tender, loving glow. To be a part of that glow. To cause it, to bask in it. He wanted to give her everything—everything—she desired.

  The moment they reached the small, vacant dance floor, he pulled her into his arms, solidly against him, with a little more force than was strictly civilized. She didn’t seem to mind. Her arms went around him. Her body molded to his. He buried his face in her golden hair, inhaled its misty-rose fragrance and shut his eyes. They swayed to the rich, soft piano music in the same way they’d always danced—a slow, rhythmic shifting of their bodies in subtle, sensual synchrony.

  He hungered for her.

  And he hungered for the life they could have together.

  “Laura,” he breathed, his hand coursing down the velvet-smooth contours of her naked back. “Why do you want a baby so much?”

  She didn’t answer at first, and he lifted his head to gaze down into her face. Sadness glistened in her honey-brown eyes. “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “Try.”

  For a reason she didn’t quite understand, Laura felt too emotionally vulnerable right now to talk about her quashed dreams. But the compassion in his gaze, the caring warmth of his embrace, the caress of his strong, familyiar hand, summoned the words from deep inside of her.

  “I want someone of my own. Someone I can love, and who will love me...always.” Her throat closed, and she choked out a laugh at her own silliness. “I want to be a team mom. A room mother. Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. The tooth fairy!” She blinked away a foolish prickling behind her eyelids and pressed a trembling smile against the side of his neck. “Most of all, I want to be the one he’s calling when he wants his mama.”

  She lapsed into throat-aching silence.

  He gathered her closer, his arms strong and comforting. The song ended. Another one started. His jaw grazed her temple. And his hot, tremulous whisper warmed her ear. “I can give you a baby, Laura.”

  A stillness overcame her. A heady, daunting stillness. “Wh-what?”

  He shifted her in his arms and forced her to meet his serious, heart-stopping gaze. “I want to father your baby.”

  Her breath, it seemed, had left her. She felt stunned. Shaken. “Father my—” Panic flooded her then like an incoming tide. She was half in love with him now. What chance would she have of guarding her heart if they shared the miracle of childbirth? If they had a baby to bind them closer? “No, no, that...that won’t work. I could never—”

  “Shh.” He touched a finger to her lips. Intensity simmered in his eyes. “Don’t answer now.” His dark face slanted across hers, then he kissed her with such sweet, lingering tenderness that her mind clouded, her blood warmed, and she could have wept “Think about it,” he urged. “Just think about it.”

  She couldn’t help but do that very thing. She thought about it as he guided her off the dance floor, tossed money on their table, wrapped her coat around her and swept her to the door. She thought about it as he helped her into his car, and on the long, chilly drive home.

  She could have a baby—Cort’s baby.

  When the force of her clashing emotions stoked too great a pressure inside her, she nearly gasped into the tense, leather-scented darkness of his car, “I don’t understand why you’re offering me this. You don’t want a child.”

  “I do.”

  “You never did before!”

  “I wasn’t ready then. I am now.”

  “Why?”

  He was silent for such a long while, she thought he had no answer. When he spoke, his voice emerged low and gruff. “Because I want someone of my own. Someone I can love. And who will love me.” The heat of his gaze radiated through the winter darkness. “Always.”

  Emotion clogged her throat again. He was repeating her words, she knew, but he said them with such feeling she couldn’t doubt he meant them.

  She’d never heard him talk of love before. It made her heart clench with dangerous longing. “But I live in Memphis, and you’re in Atlanta. How could we both share in our child’s day-to-day life? I want him to be close to his father. To forge a tight bond. And even if you manage to do that from several states away, he’d always be saying goodbye to one of us. He’d always be missing one of us.”

  The silence ached and throbbed between them.

  “A child would be damn lucky to have a mother who thinks like that, Laura. Who loves him enough to care about who he’s missing.” He shook his head in silent reflection. “How could I not want you as the mother of my children?”

  And she felt herself falling, falling. Deeply. Hopelessly. Headlong...

  “We don’t have to live that far away from each other,” he said. “We can figure something out.”

  It was true. She could move closer to him. Nothing tied her to Memphis. She could work just as well, if not better, in Altanta. And she could have his son, his daughter, who very well might have his hair, his eyes, his smile.

  A son. Or daughter. Hers and Cort’s.

  A keen, painful, joyous yearning expanded her heart. And she knew, in that moment, that she had been fooling herself. She wouldn’t have had Fletcher’s baby, wouldn’t have gone through with their parenting plan, no matter how he’d felt about her. Cort’s reappearance in her life had canceled out that possibility.

  Because she’d fallen in love with Cort, all those years ago, and again when she’d seen him at Steffie’s, and at least a hundred times since. Deeper and deeper in love she fell, every time she was with him.

  Why should she fool herself into believing otherwise?

  He had offered to father her baby. She could allow herself that much of him...couldn’t she? Couldn’t she?

  He guided the car into his driveway, between the towering oaks and magnolias, and parked in front of the house she already knew so well. The house she would tailor into “the place she most wanted to be.”

  She wouldn’t be living here, though. Cort didn’t love her, and she would never stand in his way of finding love, or torture herself by maintaining too close a daily contact. But her child could live here part of the time.

  Her heart ached as much as it rejoiced.

  Cort switched off the engine, climbed out of the car, strode around and opened her door. She took the hand he offered, strong, steady and somehow comforting. But his face...ah, his face. Taut, intense, determined.

  Fear pulsed through her. She loved him too much. And loving Cort had once nearly destroyed her.

  He swept her up the steps to his house with an iron-strong arm around her. Doubts skittered in her stomach. He unlocked the door, drew her inside and pushed the wool knit coat from her shoulders. It fell heedlessly to the floor of the entrance hall.

  “Laura.” He invoked her name like a gruff, earnest prayer, and held her shoulders between reverent hands. “Don’t be afraid. I know what you want for your child. I want the same things.”

  She wished so much to believe that it could work. Strength and sureness emanated from him. And heat. And a heart-thrilling hunger...

  “Come to bed with me,” he implored in a torrid whisper, his gaze searing her. “Let’s go upstairs, Laura. Let’s make a baby.”

  She felt dizzy with longing. “We...we have to plan,” she hedged. “Make arrangements.”

  “There’s nothing to arrange. We don’t need a damn clinic or some petri dish.” He gripped her hips, and his thumbs swept in caressing arcs up and down her abdomen. “If a baby’s going to grow inside you, I want to be the one to put it there.”

  Ardent heat flared in her. She wanted him. Wanted him! And she wanted his baby. Fear wouldn’t stop her.

  Cort saw the decision flash in her gaze; felt the change in chemistry. He’d seduced her into this moment, he knew. He’d used every inducement, pressed every advantage, to lure her here.

  He’d won his chance. But only a chance.

  Please, God, make it count.
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  Fierce need drummed like a driving beat in his temples, and his vision wavered with rays of heat. He thrust his arm around her back, caught her behind the knees and swept her up into his arms. She clung to him, her eyes dark with desire, her hair cascading over his arm, her maddening dress pushed high on her thighs.

  He carried her to his room. To his bed.

  And he worshiped her there. He feasted on her there. He stripped away her clothes, piece by piece, and filled his hands, his mouth with her. She writhed and arched and moaned and filled her hands, her mouth with him.

  She goaded him into desperation.

  Feverish with need, he pinned her beneath him, gritted his teeth and pushed deep, deep, into her. Fierce, hot pleasure took his breath. Stunned him. Electrified his blood.

  He thrust harder. Slower. Slick, hot and deep. Rhythmic.

  And she transformed, as he’d known she would, into a purely sensual being—striving to prolong each penetration with voluptuous undulations; shifting positions to maximize sensation; meeting him thrust for jarring thrust

  She riled him into savagery. Sweat dripped into his eyes. Groans rolled from his throat. He saw her through a passionate haze. Beautiful. So damn beautiful.

  He forced her legs higher around his waist, levered his body for deeper access and drove with serious intent. He loved her. He needed her. He wanted his baby inside of her.

  Her mouth opened. Her body moved with each deliberate, jolting thrust. And her dazed, heavy-lidded gaze sought his.

  Pressure mounted within him. Her moans turned to sobs, then cries, and she jackknifed against his chest. Her velvet heat gripped him with tight contractions and pleasure pierced him, possessed him. He planted his seed deep within her.

  Please, God, make it count.

  Please, God, make her mine.