Protected by Four: The secret baby

3

Becky

The lobby of Blackwood Dynamics smelled like money. Marble floors, a security desk that looked like it belonged in an airport, a receptionist who took one look at my wrinkled shirt and unwashed hair and decided I wasn’t worth a full smile.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, already reaching for the phone to call security.

“No,” I said. “But I need to see Adrian Blackwood. Tell him it’s about five years ago. Tell him it’s important.”

She hesitated, her hand hovering over the receiver, something in my voice apparently more convincing than my appearance. “I can have someone escort you out, or you can wait while I check with his assistant.”

“Please,” I said, and I heard my own voice c***k. “Please just tell someone.”

Maybe it was the desperation in my face. Maybe she’d seen enough people come through that lobby to know the difference between someone causing trouble and someone at the end of their rope. Either way, she picked up the phone.

Twenty minutes later, I was standing in front of a private elevator with a security guard on either side of me, and my heart was pounding so hard I thought I might be sick right there on the polished floor.

His office took up the entire top floor. Windows on every wall, the city spread out below like a model someone had built and left for him to look down on. Adrian was standing behind a desk the size of my kitchen table, and when I walked in, he looked at me the way you look at a stranger, which I suppose I was, to him.

“I’m told you said this was about five years ago,” he said. His voice was cool, controlled, nothing like the warmth I remembered from that bar. “I’m going to assume you’re one of the women my legal team warned me might eventually show up. If this is about money, you can speak to my lawyers. I don’t do this personally.”

The words hit harder than I expected. He thought I was here to extort him. Of course he did. Why wouldn’t a man like him assume the worst of a woman like me, showing up unannounced after five years with nothing but a name and a story he couldn’t verify.

“I’m not here for money,” I said, and my hands were shaking as I pulled out my phone. “I’m here because you have a son.”

Something flickered across his face, gone almost as fast as it appeared. “I don’t have children.”

“You do.” I found the photo, the one from Micah’s fourth birthday, his face lit up over a cake shaped like a dinosaur, and I held the phone out toward him across the desk. “His name is Micah. He’s five.”

Adrian didn’t move for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and took the phone from my hand, and I watched his face change as he looked at the picture. Really looked at it. His jaw tightened. His breathing changed. Because there was no denying it, not really, not when Micah had his exact eyes, his exact mouth, the same slight point to his chin that I’d stared at a thousand times without ever having a name to put to where it came from.

“This is impossible,” he said quietly, but his voice had lost all its coolness now. “We were together one night.”

“One night was enough,” I said. “I found out three weeks later. I didn’t know your last name. I didn’t know anything about you except your first name and the fact that you disappeared before I woke up. I had no way to find you, Adrian. I looked, in the beginning. There was nothing to look with.”

His hand tightened around my phone until I was afraid he might c***k the screen. “Five years,” he said. “You’re telling me I have a five-year-old son, and I’m finding out about it right now, standing in my office, because you happened to walk in off the street.”

“I’m not telling you this to hurt you,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come here at all if I had another choice.”

“Then why are you here?” His voice rose, sharp with a fury that I understood, that I might have felt too if our positions were reversed. “Five years of nothing, and now suddenly you need something from me. Money, I assume, since that tends to be the pattern with men in my position.”

I felt the last of my composure c***k down the middle. “Micah is sick,” I said, and the words came out broken, barely words at all. “He has leukemia. He’s in the hospital right now. The doctors say he might need a bone marrow transplant, and they said family history matters, they said a parent could be a match, and I didn’t come here for your money, Adrian. I came here because my son might die and you’re the only family he has besides me.”

The anger drained out of his face so fast it was like watching a light switch off. He set my phone down carefully on the desk, like his hands had suddenly forgotten how to hold anything.

“He’s sick,” he repeated, like he needed to hear himself say it to understand it was real.

“Cancer of the blood,” I said. “They’re starting treatment. I don’t know if it’s going to be enough on its own. I don’t know anything right now except that he needs help I can’t give him by myself.”

Adrian was quiet for a moment, staring at the photo still glowing on the screen between us. When he looked up at me again, there was nothing left of the man who’d accused me of coming for money. His eyes had the same look I imagined were on my own face every hour since Dr. Alvarez had first walked into that exam room.

“Take me to him,” he said. “Right now.”

“Adrian—”

“I don’t care about explanations. I don’t care about anything except getting to that hospital.” He was already moving, grabbing his jacket off the back of his chair, calling out to someone through the open door about clearing his schedule. “You said his name is Micah?”

“Micah,” I confirmed, hurrying to keep up with him as he strode toward the elevator.

“Then let’s go,” he said, and for the first time since I’d walked into that office, his voice cracked too. “Let’s go see my son.”