The kid—Jalen; his son’s name was Jalen—was holding a disgruntled gray rabbit in his arms and smiling with delight into the camera. It would have been tempting to accuse Lia of somehow stealing a photo of Thomas when he was a child, but he’d never had a gray rabbit and certainly had never owned an Avatar: The Movie T-shirt.
The eeriness of it made his scalp tingle and the hair stand up on his arms.
He was looking into a younger version of his own face. The Mini-Me to his Dr. Evil. They could have been twins, separated by twenty-eight years.
They had the same chocolate skin with red undertones. The same point at the corner of their right ears. The same straight nose.
The boy’s eyes were keen and intelligent and …
Oh, man. Those were his eyes, looking back at him.
Hell, they even had the same right eyebrow, which was flatter than the left.
He stared, looking for differences, and there were some, but not enough. Jalen had his mother’s dimples and her high cheekbones, but he was, God help him, clearly Thomas’s son. And suddenly, he couldn’t look at the picture for one more second. Not one.
Too stunned to think, he handed the phone back to Lia, who gave him a moment by walking over to the window.
He stared down at his desk through the sudden blur of hot tears, and he couldn’t decide if he was mostly stunned, mostly angry or mostly …
Thrilled.
He was a father. Jalen was his son.
“I’ll want to meet him,” he told her. “After the DNA tests.”
He waited for some sort of refusal or outrage, but there was none.
“Okay,” she said.
Good. She was savvy enough to know that the legalities had to be observed in cases like this. He liked that.
“I want to be part of his life.”
This time, her agreement took a little longer in coming. She looked startled, as though she hadn’t thought quite so far ahead.
“Well,” she began.
“That’s not up for debate.” Later, when his thoughts weren’t buzzing like wasps in a jar, he’d have to give some thought to how he could go from not knowing he had a son to insisting on a place in his son’s life—all within the space of ten minutes. For now, all he knew was that boys needed fathers, and he planned to be a great one. Just because he’d missed the first several years of Jalen’s life didn’t mean he’d willingly miss any more. “Understand?”
A curt nod was his only answer.
Those details thus concluded, they stared at each other in shell-shocked silence.
Then some of his anger at being blindsided like this began to surface. It wasn’t about the child or the money. It was about this woman he’d never seen before having the power to walk into his life and rearrange it, as though she’d swiped her hand across the chessboard, ruining a game well in progress.
“You’ll want child support, I suppose.”
Much to his surprise, she looked shocked. “Child support?”
Wow. She was good with the innocence and outrage. He’d have to remember that. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Money?”
“My God,” she cried, “weren’t you listening? I don’t want your stupid money! I need your kidney!”
For the second time that day, the world dropped out from under him.
Healthy kids didn’t need kidneys. Neither did mildly sick kids.
When he finally got his voice to work, it was an embarrassing croak. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Jalen’s in kidney failure.”
The color bled out of Thomas’s face, leaving it a sickly gray in jarring contrast to the brown of his throat. After a second or two of indecision, he slipped into that medical zone and tried to take charge, the way that doctors do. That air of confidence used to reassure her back in the early days, but that was before she realized that, more often than not, doctors didn’t know a damn thing about getting Jalen better.
“Polycystic kidney disease?” he demanded.
Like it mattered at this point. “No. He had a terrible case of E. Coli about two years ago, and that ruined his kidneys. Put him into kidney failure.”
Undaunted, he plowed ahead. “Who’s your doc? We’ve got a great specialist on staff—”
Was he for real? Or was it just that he couldn’t comprehend a world where his larger-than-life medical connections and abilities didn’t win the day? Whatever his issue was, Jalen was running out of time and she was way out of patience.
“We don’t need a specialist. We have a specialist. Lots of them. And Jalen has been on dialysis for almost two years, and he’s not doing well. Do you get that, Dr. Bradshaw? If I want my son to live—and I do—then I need to find him a compatible kidney quick, fast, and in a hurry, because my kidneys aren’t a match, and neither are anyone’s in my family. All of whom, by the way, live on the West Coast and have already been tested. And you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t want my son to sit on the transplant list for another two years, waiting for a match to materialize out of nowhere.”
“But—”
Something inside her head snapped. Jalen was knocking pretty hard on death’s door, and this fool wasn’t coming up to speed fast enough. Hell, if she gave him another minute, maybe he’d start yammering about going back to square one and getting another opinion about whether Jalen had renal failure at all. Maybe he’d suggest a dose of amoxicillin to see if that got Jalen back on his feet.
Didn’t he understand how hard she’d fought to get this far? Didn’t he know that she was desperate and overwrought and had nowhere else to turn? What more did she have to do?
Losing it completely, she smacked her palms on top his desk and leaned down to get in his face. “Don’t but me! My son is sick! He’s going to die! Do you want me to beg? Is that it? Well, here it is. Help me. You’re my only hope. You’re my only hope! You’re my only—”
“Okay.” There was a flash of movement, and then, suddenly, he was on his feet, turning her to face him and grabbing her biceps to keep her from crumpling to the floor. The next thing she knew, he was in her face, instead of the other way around, soothing and reassuring. “Shhh, Lia,” he murmured. “It’s okay. You don’t have to do this by yourself anymore. It’s okay. I’ll help you. It’s okay.”
Hysteria had her around the throat, ready to suck her under, but she gasped in a shaky breath and tried to hold it off. Just for a little while longer, until she was certain she’d heard right and wasn’t getting her hopes up only so they could be smashed on the rocks.
“Y-you believe me?”
He stared at her and then, slowly, nodded.
“You’ll be tested to see if you’re a match?”
“If the DNA test first confirms that he’s my son, then yes.”
Could it be this easy? After all her struggles to get to this point?
She stared into his eyes, determined to root out any trickery.
There was none. Only his unwavering gaze, absolute and determined. And she knew, suddenly, that they had real hope now, she and Jalen. Better than that, they had a powerful ally. Thomas Bradshaw would help them in their fight against this terrible enemy, who had so many more resources than they did.
The relief was so sharp and overwhelming that