He needed to fix this mess of his own making. “Lilah, clearly I have made an error in attempting to ignore what happened between us after the Christmas fundraiser. We need to figure out a way to deal with it so we can regain a level working environment.”
“Damn straight, it happened.” She thrust the buttons through openings with fierce speed, the fabric flower pin on her shoulder nearly quivering from her barely contained energy. “Believe me, I’m not likely to forget.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration as the only answer pounded through his brain. “My life is complicated in so many ways by virtue of the Medina name. I wish, for your sake, things could be simpler, but they’re not.” Committed to his new course of action, he skimmed her hair free of her jacket. “I think we should consider an intimate friendship.”
Her eyes went wide and unblinking. She sagged back against the desk again, her mouth opening and closing twice before a burst of laughter sliced the air. Wrapping an arm around her stomach, she laughed harder. Her eyes squeezed shut as she shook her head from side to side in obvious disbelief.
“Lilah?” He tucked a knuckle under her chin and turned her face toward him. “This really will be the best option for us to work through this attraction until our lives return to normal.”
Her laughter faded, eyes turning somber. “At one time, I may have agreed with you. But it’s too late for that now, Carlos.”
Disappointment surged through him with more force than he would have expected for his ill-advised plan. He should have approached her sooner. Perhaps she held a grudge that he’d stayed away from her for so long.
Well then, he would dismantle her objections one by one. “I don’t agree.”
“You don’t have all the pertinent information.” She straightened to her full height, all of about five feet six inches, bringing her to his shoulder even in her heels. “I’m pregnant. Nearly three months along. And you’re the father.”
Pregnant?
Shock hit him square in the solar plexus. Followed by disbelief. Then jaded acceptance of her betrayal.
Just when he’d thought he couldn’t be any more disillusioned by how easily people could deceive others. A bitter laugh rolled around in his gut and burned a bilious path up his throat.
She crossed her arms under her breasts defensively. “If this is some kind of payback for my laughter earlier, I don’t appreciate it. I don’t find this in the least amusing.”
“Believe me, neither do I.” The scars on his back throbbed with a reminder of all he’d lost over twenty-five years ago during his family’s escape from San Rinaldo. He told the world the scars had come from a teenage riding accident. That lie was so much more palatable than the truth.
Her mouth went tight, her anger palpable. “This isn’t going to make much of a story to tell our child some day.”
“Our child? I think not.” If anyone had cause to be angry, it was him. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re just mistaken about which guy fathered your baby, because I would hate to think you would deliberately try to pass off some other man’s kid as mine.”
She slapped him, sharp, fast and stingingly hard. “You jackass.”
“Excuse me?” he asked, working his jaw from side to side to give himself a chance to weigh his words and tamp down his temper.
“You heard what I said. Believe me, that was the most benign word on my list right now. We may not be … friends … anymore, but I expected better from you than this.” She waved her hand through the air as if that could somehow sum up what had transpired between them a minute earlier. “You may be cold, but I thought you were a man of honor.”
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he held back the urge to call her on the accusation. She was pregnant—even if it wasn’t his. God, the thought rattled him, especially with the leftover surge of hunger for her still cooling in his veins. So much for friends with benefits.
He forced himself to reign in his anger. “Lilah, I’m sorry. But it is not my kid.”
She tugged her jacket into place again. “I won’t force you to love or acknowledge your child. This baby deserves better than that. He or she deserves better than you. I’ve completed my duty in doing the right thing and letting you know. Now you can go straight to hell.”
Something in her voice, the intensity of her anger set off warning bells in his brain. She truly thought the child was his when he knew that couldn’t be true. If she had the due date wrong by even a couple of weeks, he could see how she might draw that conclusion. Not that he could think of any other man she’d been seeing, but then he’d made a point of avoiding her since their night together.
“Listen closely.” He gestured toward her stomach. “That is not my baby, which means you do need to speak to the real father.”
A surprise bolt of jealousy shot through him as he fully grasped for the first time the fact she’d slept with someone else close to the time they’d been together. His mind scanned the hospital roster for … Damn it, no. He couldn’t go down that path right now.
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