The Sergeant's Baby. Bonnie Gardner
paled visibly, her olive skin taking on a greenish cast, and Danny figured he’d hit the truth right on the mark.
He should have felt good about that, but it wasn’t the triumph it might have been. After all, the woman had lied to him, even though it had been by omission. And if he hadn’t just happened to walk into her classroom this morning, she might have kept right on doing so.
Ally swallowed, or maybe she gulped, then she swallowed again. “What do we have to settle?”
Ally wasn’t that dense, so obviously she was still trying to stonewall him. “Give it up, Ally. That’s my baby you’re carrying.” He’d wanted Ally from almost the moment they’d met, and now he wanted the child. And it would require more than an on-the-knee proposal to get that to happen. Hell, he’d been there, done that, and the wedding hadn’t happened.
Ally grew paler yet, if that was possible. “No,” she protested. “She’s mine.”
“She? You mean you already know what you’re having and you hadn’t even bothered to tell me I am going to be a father?” Danny said, disgusted.
“I’m not sure what sex the baby is, but I thought it would be easier to think of it as a her.”
She stopped. Why was she explaining to him? “It takes more than being a sperm donor to be a father,” Allison countered.
She might not have realized it, but that pretty much cinched things for Danny. She had all but admitted the baby was his.
“So, is that what you had in mind the night you paid for my services?” He didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered.
Appearing none too steady on her feet, Allison sank slowly back to the couch. “I didn’t pay for…services,” she said weakly.
Danny arched an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. You might not have paid me, but you damn sure paid somebody. Did you get your money’s worth from that bachelor auction?”
Allison gasped and reacted as though he’d slapped her in the face, but the color that had drained from her cheeks had begun to return. “That auction was for charity,” she protested.
“Oh, so you’re telling me that your showing up to bid on me was a convenient accident. There’s no way you can convince me that you just happened to be hundreds of miles away from here and in Florida the very Friday I was drafted into that…” He groped for the right word. “That…blasted auction.” To even finish the thought was too absurd.
“‘Coincidence’? Is that the word you’re looking for, Danny?” His indecisiveness had apparently allowed Ally to find her voice. She went on. “Yes, it was a pure coincidence. I was in Florida, at Hurlburt Field, for a conference. I just happened to run into an elderly lady as I was on the way into the dining room for dinner. She said that her niece was supposed to have come with her and couldn’t come. She offered me her extra ticket.
“It seemed like fun,” she added, shrugging. “I was facing a long night alone in the hotel before I could get my flight out in the morning, so I took the ticket. I didn’t know you’d be there. If I had, I would never have…” She let her voice trail off.
“I just wanted a way to kill an evening. I didn’t have anything to read, and I’d gotten tired of staying inside and watching television…to keep from running into you,” she added in a voice so low that Danny almost didn’t hear it.
That admission proved to him that Allison wasn’t nearly as over him as she claimed to be. “So you decided it was time to have a baby, and you knew that I’d be a willing sperm donor. Well, I have a news flash for you, Allison. I didn’t donate anything to you. What you took, you took under false pretenses. My half of the DNA of that baby—our baby—was stolen! I wonder what a judge would have to say about that!”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t what?”
“You wouldn’t take this to court,” Ally said weakly. How had it come to this? What had seemed like such a simple solution to her need to be a mother had suddenly become very complicated. There was no way she was going to give Danny any more ammunition to use against her. “Besides, we used protection.”
“Which you could easily have sabotaged!” Danny countered.
Ally rolled her eyes. She started to say something, but bit back her retort. She didn’t want to argue. “Go away, Danny. Leave me alone,” she said tiredly.
She had to get herself together. Maybe she had been wrong in sleeping with Danny when they were no longer together, but she’d sensed that they’d still had a connection even after two long years apart. She’d hoped that they might be able to reconnect, create a future for themselves this time.
Then he’d ruined it all, assuming that by sleeping with him, she had suggested that she would change her mind about giving up her career and all that she held important. He’d told her that he wanted to take care of her, as if she were a child, incapable of thinking and doing for herself. The pure arrogance of the man!
Until that moment, Ally’d had such high hopes that they might still have a future. Then she’d heard him utter those words. He didn’t know that she’d heard his confident declaration that night while she was asleep—or so he’d thought. In the cold light of the morning after, she’d known that they weren’t going to make it as a couple.
Until Danny changed his attitudes, they couldn’t be together.
“Please, Danny. Leave us alone. All this anger and stress aren’t good for…the baby,” she murmured. She hated to play the baby card, but it was the only thing she had left. And she didn’t have the energy to deal with anything else tonight.
Maybe not ever.
“Okay, Allison. You win for now, but this is in no way over. Not by a long shot.” Danny pushed himself to his feet and headed for the door, but then he turned back and looked at her over his shoulder. “I will be back to finish this.”
That was what Ally was afraid of, but she wasn’t going to say it. She didn’t need to provide Danny Murphey with any clues to what she was thinking, anything that he might use against her later on.
She watched, vainly trying to keep her lips from trembling. She managed to keep from breaking into tears until he’d gone, then she hurried to the door and locked it.
As she walked away, thinking she should have been relieved that Danny was gone, a sudden barrage of pounding against the door almost gave her a heart attack, and she clutched at her throat as she tried to get her heartbeat to return to normal.
“Come on, Ally. Open up.”
“No,” she shouted through the door. “I can’t deal with anything else today.”
“I forgot something,” Danny called.
Ally closed her eyes and drew in a deep, weary breath. If she didn’t let him in, he’d make enough noise to disturb the neighbors. They’d been okay with her unwed status, but she wasn’t sure her standing in the neighborhood would be enhanced by Danny’s making a scene.
She glanced around the room for what he might have left. “I don’t see anything, Danny. What is it?”
“Let me in.”
She just couldn’t continue to let Danny bother the neighbors, so she reluctantly opened the door. He seemed to fill the doorway with his handsome presence, and Allison instinctively stepped back. “All right, get it and get out. What did you forget, anyway?”
“This—” he said, grabbing her by the shoulders and hauling her to him.
Chapter Three
Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but the moment he stepped out the door, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight until he’d tasted her lips again.