He forced himself to continue speaking, to make her understand. “You’re right that the man deserves to know. And that man can’t possibly be me.” Not after what had happened to him that night on the run in San Rinaldo. Rebel bullets had killed his mother and nearly killed him while he tried to protect her. Tried. And failed.
He held up a hand to keep her from interrupting—or leaving. “The accident that caused my limp had other physical ramifications as well.” Carlos forced himself to say the words he hadn’t shared with anyone. “Lilah, I’m sterile.”
Two
Lilah had faced her fair share of shockers in her years as a city prosecutor and then administrator at the Tacoma hospital. Certainly learning Dr. Carlos Medina had been hiding his royal lineage had stunned her silly. But his words now beat all other surprising revelations, hands down.
Gripping the edge of the mahogany desk to steady her shaky world, she searched Carlos’s face for some sign of what possessed the innately honorable man to deny his own child.
Her hand still stung from her impulsive slap when he’d called her a liar. She hated the momentary loss of control then…and during his kiss earlier. No man affected her this way. She’d fought too long and hard not to be won over so easily like her mother. Yet a simple brush of Carlos’s mouth against hers and she’d almost ditched her panties again with this man.
A very virile man who now seemed intent on denying the consequences of their encounter.
“You’re sterile?” she repeated, wondering if perhaps she’d heard wrong. She must have heard wrong because she carried the living proof of his virility inside her. So either he was wrong or he was a coldhearted liar.
“That’s what I said.” He shifted his weight to one foot in a manner that to most would look casual. But after years of knowing him, she recognized the subtle way he favored his aching leg and injured back, something he inevitably did when he was under stress.
Carlos Medina was one of those docs with a godlike status around the E.R., the surgeon most likely to pull off a miracle when a gurney wheeled in the impossible. She’d noticed that most people only saw that glow of success and intelligence around him—when they weren’t noticing his obvious good looks. Not many people saw past that to detect the fallout of the intense pressure he put on himself. The shifting feet. The tendency to plant his spine against any vertical surface.
Except she could not think of that now. She had too much at stake to get sucked in by all the things she found compelling about this man, not the least of which were these small signs that he was human underneath all that cool professional brilliance.
“Why didn’t you say something when we were together that night?” she asked skeptically.
“I didn’t see the information as relevant since procreation wasn’t on our agenda.” His sardonic tone needled at her already tender nerves.
“But you used condoms…even if one failed in the hot tub.”
Just thinking of the combustible connection, their total loss of control threatened her balance even now. They’d started in his office, then raced to his home to spend the rest of the night together, awake and making the most of every moonlit minute.
“Safe sex has to do with more than pregnancy,” he pointed out practically.
Of course she knew that. She’d freaked when the condom broke, only partially calming down once he’d reassured her he was disease free. Yet in the back of her mind she’d heard the haunting sound of her mother’s sobs behind a closed bedroom door. Lilah had been a preteen at the time, but old enough to understand the gist of her parents’ fight.
Her father’s latest reckless affair had passed along a disease to his wife.
The STD had been treatable, thank heavens, but Lilah had been stunned by how quickly her mother forgave her husband for his infidelity. Again. And again.
Rather than forcing back the memories of her mom, Lilah embraced them for motivation to stand firm now. To push for answers. And to hold Carlos accountable. “This is your child. I don’t want money from you and I certainly have no interest in the whole royalty thing. I only want my baby to know his or her father.”
“That isn’t my baby.” His voice echoed with a surety she couldn’t miss.
His denial of his own child infuriated her all over again.
“All because of a riding accident when you were a teenager?” She wasn’t a doctor but something sounded off in his explanation, in spite of his utter confidence. Still, she couldn’t ignore the gravity in his voice, the set serious lines on his aristocratic face.
“The trauma from the accident, coupled with a postsurgical infection, left me sterile. I’m a doctor, in case you’ve forgotten.” He pulled a leather-bound book from the shelves and dropped it on the desk with a resounding thud. “But if you’re still in doubt, there’s a full chapter in here that discusses such complications. I’ll be more than glad to mark the pages for you. The fact remains, though, that your child must have been fathered by someone else.”
A shadow smoked briefly through his eyes, something dark and perhaps angry even, but was gone before she could confirm her impression.
If anyone deserved to be mad here, it was her. She wanted to shout her frustration. She was telling the father, whether he believed her or not. “Carlos, you aren’t listening to me. There is no one else,” she explained slowly, carefully, hoping he would hear the truth in her words even if it revealed her vulnerability in wanting only him. “There hasn’t been anyone other than you in eight months.”
A frown furrowed his forehead, but his silence encouraged her to continue.
“It is absolutely impossible for me to be pregnant with another man’s child. And believe me, I am pregnant.” Her voice shook for the first time. “I’ve seen the ultrasound. Our baby is alive and well.”
The enormity of how much her life had changed so quickly threatened to overwhelm her. She’d always managed to tackle anything life threw her way, whether it be law school at Yale or standing up to a state supreme court judge.
Never had the stakes felt more important than now as she fought for the tiny defenseless life inside her.
Carlos’s eyes relayed sympathy and, even worse, a hint of pity. “You really believe this.”
“And you really don’t.”
Finally, she heard and accepted what he’d been saying since she first told him about the baby. She’d anticipated a number of reactions and prepared her rebuttals as carefully as any legal brief. However, she certainly hadn’t foreseen this turn of events. Obviously his doctors had been wrong in their diagnosis of Carlos, and his refusal to even consider the possibility, his insistance on believing she’d lied, cut her to the core.