Throat tight at his rebuff, Kylie held fast to the money. She thought about going back and making a scene and tossing the bills at Conrad's feet. But she stopped herself. That would accomplish nothing.
She couldn't be so obvious.
To get what she wanted, she decided, she'd have to be sneaky.
And she had been.
Now, memory after memory washed over her, painful insights of her life coming into clear, sharp, and horrid focus. As an adolescent she'd felt cheated. And bitter. Hatred for Marla Cahill, her father's little darling, had burned bright in her chest. After the confrontation at the church, Kylie had seen Marla from afar and sensed that the girl who looked so much like her was as curious as she was about her half sibling. Marla traveled around the world, learned to sail in San Francisco Bay, attended cotillions, shopped in New York and Paris, spent Christmas vacations in Acapulco or the Bahamas or Aspen. She drove her own BMW and attended a prestigious private college her father had endowed with a library.
Kylie had been given cast-offs and icy stares. But once she'd gotten a little of her own back by managing, as she looked so much like her half sister, to dress up in one of Marla's cast-offs and charge an outrageously expensive dress at a small boutique to Conrad Amhurst. When she'd said breezily to the clerk, “Charge it to Daddy,” the eager salesgirl, her head filled with the commission she would earn on the floor length, beaded black sheath, had nodded rapidly, telling her that the dress was made for her as she'd rung up the sale.
Somehow Marla had found out, though, to Kylie's knowledge, she'd never ratted on her half sister and had only brought it up again when they were adults, when she'd come to Kylie with her plan.
Now, as she sat on the edge of the worn couch and looked up at Nick holding her son, she felt as if the world had dropped from under her feet. Yes, she'd been a scrappy girl, a stubborn woman, a person who had clawed and fought for everything she'd ever earned. But it had come with a price.
She flopped back on the cushions and stared at the ceiling. “I don't think I was a very good person,” she confessed to Nick. “In fact I know I wasn't.” She let out a long, deep breath as she thought of all the years she'd been envious of her half sister, of all the nights she'd lain awake thinking
Why me? Why doesn't my father love me?
Or the nights when a harder and uglier emotion had burned in her blood, pure, hot hatred for a privileged half sister who had grown up knowing a father's love. Kylie had fed on that hatred, becoming competitive with a sibling who acted as if she didn't know Kylie was alive.
“The truth is that I hated Marla, wanted to get back at her,” Kylie admitted, and remembered seeing Marla again here, in this very apartment.
“So what happened?” Nick asked. “How did you end up living as Alex's wife and pretending to be her?”
“That was a fluke, I think. It only happened because I didn't die in the wreck.” Her mind spun backward. “Marla couldn't have children and she found out that our father had changed his will, that he was cutting her out unless she came up with an heirâa boy. Cissy wasn't good enough.”
“That's unheard of today.”
“Conrad Amhurst lived by his own rules, liked playing games with people,” she said. “You said so yourself but he must not have known that Marla had the hysterectomy. Anyway, Marla approached me about having the babyâ
her
son. All I had to do was get pregnant, have the baby and give him up, to pretend that he was hers.” As she said the horrid words she cringed inside, thought she might throw up. “I know, I know, it's godawful. I was . . . very self-involved.” Standing, she walked to Nick and pried James from his arms. Gazing on her baby's precious face, his fuzzy hair and his tiny fingers, Kylie couldn't believe she'd been so heartlessly cold and calculating.
“That was all you had to do?” Nick said coldly.
“Yes. And keep my mouth shut.” Holding James she couldn't believe it of herself, but remembered all too clearly the day Marla had suggested the plan. “Marla had worked it all out, knew that she and I had the same blood type, had even talked a physician into falsifying the records.”
“Robertson.”
“Yeah, a family friend who wanted money funneled into his clinic and Bayview Hospital, as he owns a lot of stock in it.” Kylie's stomach turned sour as she settled into her favorite recliner, the chair Marla had occupied that fateful evening. She remembered the encounter as vividly as if it had been yesterday.
“I have a proposition for you,” she'd said as Kylie, surprised to find Marla in the hallway, had opened the door and Marla, in raincoat, umbrella, sunglasses and wide-brimmed hat, had breezed inside. If she found Kylie's habitat unappealing, she'd kept her opinion to herself.
“A proposition?”
“Yes.” Marla had set her umbrella near the door and pulled off her hat. Hair, cut similarly to Kylie's, had billowed around her face. Marla had stared at her, sizing up her half sister. “You've always gotten the shaft from Dad and I think I know a way to even the score.” Her green eyes had narrowed thoughtfully, her finely arched brows knitting.
“Why would you even care?” Kylie hadn't bought Marla's latent concern. Not for a minute.
“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 pregnantâartificially inseminatedâand, 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 thenâ”
“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.
“Did you?”
“For all the good that it did. It was too late by then. I was already about to deliver. Alex told me that if I so much as breathed that I would fight him in court, he'd make my life torture. I wouldn't have a chance to win with the team of lawyers Cahill Limited has at its disposal. They'd take everything from my past, all the mistakes I'd made, twist the facts around and make my life look worse than it was, throw it all in front of the court and prove that I was unfit to be a mother. By that time Conrad would be dead anyway and the money would be gone. The baby would be the biggest loser.” Kylie shook her head. “I can't believe that I bought Alex's bill of goods. You know, Alex even pointed out that this way, by giving my baby to Marla to raise, I would finally give my father something the old man had always wantedâa grandson. Is that convoluted thinking or what?” She felt the tears raining down her face. “I'd even convinced myself that I'd have other children, that I could give this baby up.”
“But you changed your mind.”
“Yes.” She looked up at him through the sheen of tears. “Oh yes. The minute I saw James in the hospital, the first time I heard him cry, I realized there was no amount of money that would keep me from him. I would take on the Cahill family and every lawyer they threw my way. I'd go into debt, do anything to keep James.” She saw the doubts in Nick's eyes and knew all they had was lost. “Look, Nick, I don't expect you to believe me.”
“I don't.”
“Fine. You can damned well think anything you want, but that's what happened.” Kylie couldn't fight the tears of shame that washed down her face as she looked at her baby, her precious baby, sleeping, blissfully unaware of her pain as he cuddled in her arms. “I'm . . . I'm so . . . sorry,” she whispered to him now. Blinking rapidly, dashing away the hated tears with the back of hand, she said, “People have died . . . because of what I've done.” Her head ached as all the jagged little pieces of her life came together, reminding her of a time in her life she'd rather forget. She forced her chin upward and met the fury in Nick's eyes with her own angry gaze. “I'm not the woman you thought I was. I'm not Marla.”