Boardroom Baby Surprise

“No.” Morgan shook her head, sure that she had heard him wrong. “You’re n—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Her water broke, releasing in a gush to form an unbecoming puddle on the polished parquet floor. The secretary let go of Morgan’s arm and jumped back, anxious to protect her Marc Jacobs pumps from harm. The people seated around the table gasped in unison, pulling back in their seats, as if Morgan’s condition were contagious. Only the man who claimed to be Bryan moved. Swearing richly half under his breath, he stalked around the table toward her.

“Sorry,” Morgan whispered, though she felt more mortified than apologetic.

She would have left then, turned and run away—or waddled as the case may be—but as her luck would have it, another contraction began to build. She angled away from him, hoping to make it to the reception area’s couch to wait out the worst of it. She made it only one step before grabbing the door frame and sagging against it. Using the other hand to support her abdomen, she fought the urge to whimper. Nothing was going as planned. Nothing had gone as planned in a long, long time.

“Britney, call an ambulance,” the big man barked. To Morgan he said, “I take it you’re in labor.”

Labor? She was being wrenched apart from the inside out. None of the books she’d read, none of the classes she’d taken had prepared her for this kind of pain. But she nodded, worried that any attempt at speech would release not only a whimper but a wailing shriek. God, she hurt.

She needed to sit down. She needed some of the drugs she’d learned about in her birthing class. She needed her mother. Only one of those things was an option now, but before Morgan could wilt to the floor, she was scooped up in a pair of powerful arms and carried into the office that was one door down from the conference room.

He settled her on the leather couch and returned a moment later with what looked to be a balled-up trench coat and a glass of water. He positioned the trench behind her head on the arm rest and then thrust the glass at her. Morgan wasn’t interested in water. For that matter, she doubted she could keep it down. But she dutifully took it and pretended to sip from the glass. His rigid demeanor told her he wasn’t the sort of man who stood for being defied. And while she generally wouldn’t stand for being bullied, she was in no shape to put him in his place.

“The ambulance will be here any moment,” the secretary said, peeking around the semi-closed door.

“An ambulance really isn’t necessary,” Morgan began. Not to mention that it would be expensive for someone who had just lost her health insurance along with her teaching job when the school year had ended a week earlier. The economy being what it was, the district didn’t have the funds for extras like music.

The worst of the contraction had passed, so she swung her legs over the edge of the couch and planted her feet on the floor. She would go now, exiting as gracefully as her condition allowed. Her car was in the parking ramp adjacent to the building and she could be at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital in less than twenty minutes, assuming the traffic lights and her finicky compact car cooperated.

What stopped her wasn’t the big man, even though he took a lurching step in her direction, but the framed picture on the wall just to the right of the door. In it two men stood arm in arm, one dark and brooding, the other fairer and far less serious. Morgan blinked. She knew those smiling eyes, that windblown brown hair and carefree expression. By turns sweet and silly, this was the man with whom she’d spent seven lovely and, for her, uncharacteristically reckless days in Aruba.

Bryan.

She must have said the name aloud because when she glanced over, the man’s gaze also was on the photograph, his mouth compressed into a line so tight that it was hard to tell where his top lip ended and the bottom one began.

“You do know him,” she accused, pointing to the photograph. “You do know Bryan Caliborn.”

“I am Bryan Caliborn,” he proclaimed a second time. “That’s Dillon, my younger brother.”

Dillon…

Brother…

The words registered slowly, poking through a haze of disbelief. Though a part of her wanted to dispute them, the proof—all six-feet-something of it—was literally standing before her, his arms crossed, his expression ominous and intractable.

Bryan…rather, Dillon—the man who’d fathered Morgan’s baby, hadn’t given her his real name. This wasn’t exactly the kind of revelation a woman needed to hear with motherhood a few centimeters and a couple of hard pushes away. It made Morgan wonder what else he had lied about. What other truths he had obscured with his beguiling kisses and those impeccable manners she’d found every bit as seductive as his smile.

In her best schoolteacher’s voice, she demanded, “I want to see him.” For good measure, she added, “And don’t you dare tell me I need to make an appointment. As you can see, I’m not in any condition to wait an hour let alone a week or two.”

“It’s not possible,” the real Bryan had the audacity to say. She opened her mouth, intending to let loose with a blistering retort. Before she could, though, he said, “Dillon’s dead.”

Anger abandoned her, evaporating like water on hot asphalt. Bewilderment took its place—bewilderment and a couple dozen other emotions that swirled around in a dizzying mix. Since her legs threatened to give, Morgan backed up to the couch, sinking onto its cushions.

“He’s dead?”

Bryan’s head jerked down in a nod.

“But how? When?” She asked the questions, needing to know even though the answers really didn’t matter. What would they change? Not only was she about to become a single mother, her baby would never know his or her father. She swallowed a fresh wave of nausea. For that matter she hadn’t known her baby’s father.

“Six months ago. A skiing accident in Vail, Colorado.” The words came out stilted, made curt by grief. Or was that some other emotion lurking in those onyx eyes?

“I…I didn’t know.”

“Neither did I.” He glanced meaningfully at her stomach. “Where did you and Dillon meet?”

“Aruba. Last August.”

She’d gone there alone, using the tickets she’d bought her folks for their thirtieth wedding anniversary. They’d never had a honeymoon. Morgan had wanted to give them one as a surprise. Before she could, though, they’d died in a fluke carbon monoxide accident at their home. Though she wasn’t one to make excuses for her behavior, her grief helped explain why someone as levelheaded as she usually was had fallen for the faux Bryan’s advances in the first place. She’d been lost, lonely. He’d been charming and a distraction from bitter reality.

“And you…spent time with my brother?” One brow arched in disapproval as Bryan once again glanced at her abdomen.

“Yes.”

If she’d felt awkward and conspicuous before, she felt doubly so now. She stood, intent on leaving this time, though where exactly she would go beyond the hospital she hadn’t a clue. She was between jobs, between homes and in a strange city without family.

A pair of emergency medical technicians arrived before Morgan could get to the door. They carried black bags and were pushing a gurney.

She held up a hand. “Oh, this really isn’t necessary. I can get to the hospital on my own steam. My contractions aren’t that close together.”

Even as she said this another one began. Just how many minutes had passed since the last? She didn’t dare chance a glance at her wrist now.

“It is necessary,” Bryan objected. “Assuming what you say is true, that child is a Caliborn.”

“Assuming—” She gritted her teeth, and not because of the contraction. She would have stalked out then, but one of the technicians, a kind-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair and a bushy mustache, laid a hand on her arm.

“Let’s have a look at you first, okay? We wouldn’t want you to have that baby while you’re stuck in traffic on Michigan Avenue.”

He reminded Morgan of her father, which was the only reason she let him lead her back to the couch.

Once she was seated, the EMT knelt in front of her and pulled a blood-pressure cuff from his bag. As it inflated over her upper arm, she glanced at Bryan, who stared back at her stone-faced. She was coming to know that expression. She could only imagine what he was thinking.

Damn Dillon! Damn him for doing this. And damn him for being dead!

Bryan wanted to throttle his little brother, pin him in a chokehold like he used to do when they were kids and pound some sense into him. Only he couldn’t. Knowing that reopened a wound that had just barely begun to heal. Why did Dillon have to go and get himself killed?

Bryan still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that Dill was gone, buried in the family plot at Winchester Memorial Gardens alongside their paternal grandparents and a spinster great-aunt. How was it possible for someone that vibrant and full of life to die? Half the time Bryan wanted to believe that his younger brother was simply off on another one of his irresponsible jaunts, charging his good time to Bryan’s accounts.

He’d done that often enough after burning through his own trust fund by his late twenties, Vail being the last wild excursion. Bryan had been furious when his credit card company had called to confirm the charges. Only the best accommodations and restaurants for his little brother. He’d dialed Dill at the luxury hotel where he was staying in a suite that was costing Bryan a few grand a night, and left him a blistering message.

“Grow up, already!” he’d shouted into the receiver. “You’re thirty, for God’s sake. You have a position at the company if you’d ever deign to work. You need to start earning your own way and stop mooching off me. You do it again and I swear, Dill, I’ll call the police.”

Of course, he wouldn’t have. But he’d been so furious.

Now, sitting in his office looking both terrified and lovely as she answered the EMT’s questions and cringed her way through another contraction, was one doozy of an example of his little brother’s foolishness. As per usual, it would be up to Bryan to clean up the mess. He’d done that Dill’s entire life. Apparently, that applied posthumously, too.

He scrubbed a hand across his eyes. This mess was going to be harder than the others, assuming Morgan wasn’t lying about her baby’s paternity. That was a possibility given the Caliborn family’s net worth. She probably thought she had a big payout coming. Given the state of his brother’s finances, she was in for a rude awakening. Unfortunately, determining the truth wasn’t as easy as requesting a DNA test. It wasn’t because the father in question was deceased. Bryan’s DNA could be used to confirm a biological link between the baby and the Caliborns. That was precisely what had him hesitating. He was in no hurry to go through that…again.