“I really don’t. Not a lot. But I need your help.”
Now that was something. The powerful and pampered daughter of Conrad Amhurst had needed her. For the first time in all of Kylie’s pathetic life. Kylie had been wary, but hadn’t been strong enough to tell the rich bitch to go to hell and leave her alone.
“She outlined this bizarre plan,” Kylie admitted to Nick, shuddering inwardly as she remembered how easily she’d been seduced into going along with the scheme. “She wanted me to get pregnant—artificially inseminated—and, once I was certain I was carrying a son, hide out until she could take him off my hands.” Oh, Lord, it sounded so awful now, so horrid. “Marla planned to wear padding for six or seven months, the kind TV actresses wear, first a tiny one, then larger as the pregnancy went on, until I was in labor and it was time to make the switch.”
“What if you were carrying a girl?” Nick asked, clearly skeptical.
“That . . . it wasn’t an option. She wanted me to terminate, to get an abortion and start again but I refused. I told her if I ended up with a girl, I’d keep her.” Kylie turned tortured eyes to Nick. “But you have to understand I didn’t want a baby, not even . . . not even this one.” Her voice lowered. “And I was so anxious to get back at Marla for all those years she was the princess, I refused to go along with the artificial insemination and of course I upped the ante.” Her lips twisted when she remembered how she’d demanded more money from her sister.
“Of course.” Nick’s face had turned hard as granite. “So you slept with her husband and bargained away your child.”
“That’s about the size of it,” she admitted, her voice cracking. Tears flooded her eyes and throat. Guilt and recrimination tore at her soul. How could she have been so callous? So cold? So heartless? She brushed a kiss across James’s downy crown. “I felt that I’d really gotten one over on Marla.”
“By sleeping with her husband.”
“And doing something she couldn’t. I even . . . oh . . . I even think Alex looked forward to our time in bed together. There was something about him, an anger when he . . . well, when he kissed me. It was as if . . . as if he wanted to get back at her. We both had this vendetta against her, or at least that’s what it seemed like.” She shuddered when she thought of the nights she’d spent in Alex Cahill’s bed, the satisfaction she’d felt that she was having sex with her spoiled half sister’s husband, the pride Kylie had felt that she could give him and her father what Marla was incapable of. She’d finally bested her half sister.
“And you got pregnant,” Nick said without inflection.
“Yes. Within two months.” She blinked rapidly. “We were lucky. As soon as possible, we had tests checking the sex of the fetus and voilà, Conrad Amhurst was assured of a grandson.”
“Son of a bitch,” Nick muttered, his lips flat over his teeth. He walked to the window and peeked through the blinds. “So you went along with everything.”
“I’d planned to. But then . . . I felt the baby kick and . . . the further into the pregnancy I got, the more I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t give up my child. I couldn’t abandon him the way my father abandoned me and . . .” She frowned at the irony of it all. “For the first time in my life, as soon as James was born I realized that there was something more valuable than money.”
“Come on Kylie, or Marla, or whoever the hell you are. Don’t play this cornball reformed sinner role with me, okay? I’m not buying it. How much were you supposed to get once the old man kicked off?”
She winced.
Nick crossed the apartment and stood over her, his expression dark and filled with contempt. “Tell me, darlin’ . Just how much is Conrad Amhurst’s baby worth?”
Closing her eyes as she held James, she said, “A million. I agreed to do it for a million.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“But then—”
“Don’t tell me, you wouldn’t take a nickel for him,” Nick sneered and Kylie wanted to die. The heater in the apartment clicked on, blowing hot air and she thought she heard the sound of a door opening in the hall.
“No,” she admitted, shaking her head. “I won’t lie. I upped the price.”
“Holy shit.”
“To three million.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he snarled and she knew she was destroying everything they’d shared, every tiny dream of happiness she’d ever had with him.
“What happened? Did they agree to pay you?”
“Eventually.” At the time, in Alex’s Jaguar, Marla had laughed at her. Alex had been stricken. He’d smoked and driven past Golden Gate Park where Kylie had seen a mother pushing a stroller, the baby sucking on a pacifier and trying to pat a floppy-eared dog tugging at his leash. The mother looked frazzled, trying to deal with baby and dog, but at that moment Kylie had realized she was lying to Marla and Alex. No amount of money would replace the love she felt for this baby growing inside her, the desire to love and be loved back.
“You’re worse than she is,” Nick accused. “Worse than Marla.”
Kylie felt as if he’d slapped her. “Probably,” she admitted. “But when I went into labor, I knew. I’d convinced myself before I had the baby that it would be best for him to grow up with two parents, in a lifestyle that few people can have, that Marla and Alex weren’t bad parents, lots of kids had worse . . . Oh, yeah, right.” She snorted at her own naiveté. “Alex had pointed out that the baby, raised as a Cahill, wouldn’t want for a thing, whereas if I were to keep James, he’d be raised in a single-parent household with a woman who was struggling to make ends meet and always working. I’d never see the baby anyway and he would suffer.”
“What was your response?”
“I told him to go to hell,” she said, remembering the horror on Alex’s face as Dr. Robertson had walked into the private room where the labor pains were becoming so intense she couldn’t think.