A Bond Between Strangers. Scarlet Wilson
groaned. This wasn’t what he’d hoped for. Worse than that, this wasn’t what his attorney had hoped for.
When they hadn’t been able to find Tabitha, the attorney had suggested trying another tactic. They needed to build a case for Carter to keep the baby that some other woman was currently carrying.
The genetics might be obvious. But some judges took pity on the poor woman implanted with the wrong baby and the possible risks to her health. This woman wasn’t a willing surrogate. This woman had thought she was getting a baby of her own.
In a way, it was lucky they’d only found out at around the twenty-eight-week mark. By that point she had been visibly pregnant and it had been too late for termination—no matter what the reason.
Carter needed to build a case for himself. He needed to prove he could be an able parent. And with no current partner, that could be difficult. Sometimes judges, rightly or wrongly, didn’t look favourably on male, single parents. So his attorney had suggested he find the egg donor.
It shouldn’t be too hard—he’d already seen her photograph and knew her most basic details via the clinic database. But he only had a few days to do it. The newspapers had already got a whiff of the story and any day now it was going to be front-page news. So he had to find her quickly. All he had to do was persuade her to side with him in court. Maybe even pretend to have a vested interest in this baby.
What sort of woman would give up their eggs? What woman would choose to be an egg donor? There had to be a good reason for it and Carter hoped he could find it.
He glanced down the plane towards Lily. Now he understood the comment about ‘being a natural blonde’—she wasn’t. But that didn’t explain her eye colour. In the clinic photograph her eyes were green. But today they were definitely brown.
Something twisted inside his gut. Could she have lied about something like that? Her eye colour had been one of the reasons that they’d picked her—that, and her Ivy League education. Eye colour had been important because Tabitha had green eyes too so it meant a closer match to them.
Carter felt the plane beginning to circle. Dan stood up and walked along the plane, giving everyone a number. The first-timers were going to go first. Some of them were tandem-jumping with an instructor, so Carter edged up the bench out of their way.
He found himself next to Lily and she unsuspectingly gave him another wide grin. ‘I didn’t know you were a fellow jumper.’ She smiled. ‘I thought you came to find a woman.’
‘I did.’ He looked at her closely. Was she wearing contacts? Brown ones?
Lily shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. This light-hearted flirtation suddenly felt different. Maybe it was being stuck in the back of a plane with a virtual stranger who was looking at her oddly. But something about this was making her uneasy.
She bit her lip. ‘Then who is she?’
Carter fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the rumpled photograph. ‘She’s Lily Grayson.’ He pushed her shoulders forward a little to read the writing across her back. ‘“Here Comes Lily”—I take it that means you.’
Lily took the photograph from his hands, staring at the person on the paper. She recognised the photograph immediately and knew exactly where it had come from. In the photograph she looked different, her hair was brown with curls. ‘That seems like years ago,’ she murmured.
‘More than three years, to be precise.’
She jerked at the edge to his words. He was sitting so close to her. It was hard to hear in the back of the aircraft and his lips were brushing her ear. Nothing about this felt right.
Her stomach started to churn. This had to be about egg donation. It was the only place she’d used that photograph. Was something wrong? Had a baby been born with some horrible disease from an egg she’d donated?
‘What’s with the eye colour?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘In your profile you said you had green eyes. But today…’ he leaned right in so their noses were almost touching ‘…your eyes are definitely brown.’
She drew backwards and wrinkled her nose, shaking her head. ‘Who are you—the eye-colour police?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I didn’t think the green eyes went well with my new blonde look, so I changed them.’
She looked at his stunned face. ‘What? You haven’t heard of coloured contacts? Or, did you think I’d lied in my clinic application?’
She stared at his serious face and leaned backwards. All of this was making her uncomfortable. As far as she knew, she didn’t have any genetic disorder than would cause problems for a baby. So why on earth would he be looking for her? And more importantly, why did he have to be so darned handsome? ‘What exactly do you want, Mr Carter?’
‘I’m looking for someone to help me.’
‘Help you do what?’
‘I want you to help me get my baby back.’
CHAPTER TWO
THIS couldn’t be happening. Lily’s stomach lurched. Here she was, stuck in the back of an aircraft, with some nut. The only way out was to jump, and right now they were nowhere near the landing zone. She couldn’t have made this up.
She tried to edge along the bench a little, away from crazy John Carter. All of a sudden the flirtation was lost. She didn’t want to swap jibes with him any more. She wanted to get as far away as possible.
The aircraft started to circle—maybe they were closer to the landing zone than she’d thought—and one of the instructors pulled open the side door, shouting instructions to the petrified jumpers.
The air swept through the cabin, taking whatever words John was trying to shout in her direction with it. She shook her head and tapped the side of her helmet, hoping he would understand.
This would give her some time. Some time to plan a way to get away from him. Her eyes shot over to Dan, hoping he would see the panic on her face and help her out. But he gave her a huge grin, obviously thinking the flirtation between them was continuing. He walked down the plane, repeating everyone’s number.
Seven. She was number seven. Carter was number nine. She could lose him in the sky.
She jerked as some fingers squeezed hers. ‘We need to talk,’ he mouthed at her, then pointed downwards. ‘On the ground.’
She nodded wordlessly. As soon as her feet touched the ground she intended to grab the first vehicle back to the airfield and leave as quickly as possible on her Ducati. She would leave her clothes in her locker.
Her mind churned. What kind of idiot came looking for an egg donor? Wasn’t she supposed to be left alone?
She’d had reservations about putting her photo and details on the clinic’s private website, but she’d been assured that only clients who had passed all the psychological tests would be given access to the site. Only people who were preparing for treatment and needed to select a genetically compatible donor.
Plus the fact no other clinic had paid the same benefits as the San Francisco clinic. She’d managed to wipe out most of her college debts by donating eggs on three occasions. Ivy League colleges like University of Pennsylvania didn’t come cheap. And egg donation had seemed like a simple and humanitarian way to fund it.
And it wasn’t like she was the only one. Seven of the nursing students in her class had all been on the clinic’s database. Clients loved Ivy League women. They paid top dollar for them.
Lily cringed at the memory. It had been more than three years since her last egg donation. It had seemed so easy at the time. Help some couple to have the child they’d always wanted and pay off her college debts, with no lasting damage to herself. She was young and healthy. She wasn’t in a