Thomas didn’t know what he was going to do. He’d need to call his secretary and have her come over and bail him out. He reached for his cell phone.

  Behind him someone came up. He was sure they wanted the taxi.

  “I think this is what you’re looking for.” Thomas turned to find Meghan behind him. She was holding his wallet. “I called because I found your wallet on the floor in my bedroom.”

  He took it and paid the driver.

  “I called your office, but you’d already left. Your secretary only gave me your location when I told her I was your fiancée.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “This is a very important meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting is it?” Meghan said.

  “It’s a new client. If I close the deal, we’ll control a portfolio worth millions. It has a potential to grow into serious money after that.”

  “I suppose I should go so you can prepare for it. Good luck.” She turned and walked away.

  Thomas stopped her after three steps. She was no longer wearing the yellow sundress, but had changed into a white short-sleeve suit. Her hair looked like it did last night, with scores of curls cascading down from a grouping at the top of her head. He wanted to bury his hands in that hair and watch it fall about her neck and shoulders, but he remembered what had happened that morning.

  “About this morning,” he said when he reached her.

  “Don’t,” she said, raising her hands to ward off any apology.

  “You were right,” Thomas stated. “I forgot our agreement. It won’t happen again. I understand your motives for being a surrogate and I won’t infringe on them again.”

  “In the long run, it’s for the best,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Another taxi pulled up in front of the restaurant. Two men and two women got out. They looked up and down the street and then settled their attention on the two of them.

  “Is that your party?”

  “They’re right on time,” Thomas answered.

  “Do they know I’m your fiancée?”

  “Probably not you specifically, but they know I’m engaged.”

  “Then you’d better kiss me goodbye.”

  It was the last thing Thomas expected her to say. They were on a public street. When they stood in her doorway, she’d refused him, but in front of an audience it was all right. Maybe she thought it was controllable. It hadn’t been last night, Thomas thought. Street or no street, he didn’t trust himself to touch her lips. They were full and sexy, the most kissable lips he’d noticed in longer than he cared to admit.

  Thomas leaned forward and kissed her cheek. He held her a little longer than was necessary. Her hands clasped his arms and she whispered, “Good luck.”

  Pushing away from him, she adjusted her suit. “You look like you’re on your way somewhere.” He wondered if she thought he’d invite her to lunch. He could. He’d like to.

  “I have an appointment.”

  The way she said it made it seem as if she left something out.

  “With whom?” he’d asked before he thought better of it.

  “Dr. Rayford Armstrong at the Newburg Fertility Center for a consultation.”

  She couldn’t have knocked the wind out of him more successfully if she’d told him she was already pregnant.

  Thomas stood for a long time watching her walk away. She held her head high and walked like a model. She didn’t look back.

  Thomas didn’t remember the tickets he’d left for Meghan until he was sitting in front of her house, several hours after she’d left him on the street. He’d wanted to hear the results of her visit to the center, but when he knocked on her door there had been no answer. Apparently, she’d gone to the theater for the evening. He had always accompanied Ruth to the procedures. Thomas felt she needed his support at this time. Meghan wasn’t doing this under the same circumstances as his wife had, but Thomas thought he should support her as well.

  Thomas drove back to his apartment. Once there, he called Nina and Adam. He hadn’t checked in with them in a couple of days.

  “Have you talked to Meghan?” he asked after greeting them.

  “This morning, after you left for the office.” They knew he’d been at Meghan’s this morning. It felt like days ago.

  “Did you know she was going to the clinic today?”

  “We offered to go with her, but she said she wanted to do it alone.”

  Why didn’t she tell me? he said to himself.

  “Where is she now?” Nina asked.

  “As far as I know, she went to the theater.” He didn’t tell Nina that he was the one who supplied the tickets. Or that she was in the District, fifty miles away. He had no idea who she went with.

  “Why don’t you call her cell phone if you’re concerned?” Adam spoke.

  He looked at his watch. “The play has probably already started.”

  “Give her a call after it’s over.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  They dropped the subject of Meghan and after several more minutes of small talk, Thomas hung up.

  He walked about rooms he was familiar with, but looked at them as if he was renewing his acquaintance with them. Ruth had always come home from the procedure and gone to bed. Afterward, she’d taken it easy for a full day just to make sure. Meghan had gone into the District to attend a play.

  Thomas wasn’t sure if he should be glad or angry. He was nervous. Had the procedure worked? Thomas had asked himself that question several times as he watched the hours tick by.

  When his cell phone rang, for a moment he didn’t know what the sound was. He was surprised to find Meghan’s name on the display screen of his phone.

  He answered.

  “Nina called to say you were looking for me.”

  Dear Nina, he thought. One of these days I’m going to strangle her. “I wanted to discuss the procedure. We didn’t think you would go through it alone.”

  “Thomas, you misunderstood.” She didn’t elaborate and he thought she might not be alone. “I’ll explain it all to you later.”

  He realized it now. She couldn’t have gone through a procedure. She had a consultation. In order to complete the procedure, she’d have to have all the papers signed and everything in place. They’d signed nothing thus far.

  Thomas sighed heavily, letting out the breath he was holding in. He’d forgotten the steps necessary to go through an implantation. When it happened for real, he planned to be there.

  “How was the play?” he asked, searching for something else to say.

  “Great, funny, not to be missed,” she teased.

  Thomas heard noise in the background. She was in her car. He could hear the wind outside as she drove.

  “Are you on your way home now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “In fact, I’m just passing your apartment. Evelyn and I are almost home.”

  “Evelyn?” So she wasn’t alone.

  “She’s my neighbor and friend.” Thomas heard a muffled voice in the background. “Evelyn says thank-you for the ticket. She enjoyed the play.”

  “My pleasure,” he answered, relieved that Meghan had chosen a female friend to go with her. Why it should matter, he wondered, but refused to think about at this moment.

  “How was your meeting? Did it go well?”

  “It did. I got the contract.”

  “Great.” She sounded happy for him. “You’ll have to go out and celebrate.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to him. The people at his office were glad when he returned to give them the news. The legal department would follow up and get all the details signed and sealed. He’d been more interested in Meghan and what she was doing. When they left that night, Thomas had pleaded exhaustion. Instead of going home, he’d driven straight to Meghan’s house, only to find her gone.

  “I need to talk to you soon.”

  He wanted to be there for her.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “At the jogging track?” she suggested.

  “I’ll pick you up. We can drive there together. And I’ll spring for the juice.”

  Thomas’s silver sedan was becoming a familiar sight in front of Meghan’s house. She was waiting for him when he arrived early the next morning. For a moment Meghan peeked through the window. She loved looking at him. He wore shorts and a T-shirt with no sleeves that stopped at his midriff. His bare arms and legs were strong and powerfully built.

  As he headed for the door, Meghan pulled it open and walked out. She stepped onto the porch, wearing blue jogging shorts and a top that was little more than a jogging bra.

  “Ready?” he asked. Meghan noticed him admiring the amount of skin she was showing, but he said nothing and made no attempt to touch her.

  “I’m ready.”

  They walked down the steps. “Do you have a change of clothes in there?” she asked.

  He glanced at the car. A lazy smile curved his mouth. “Do you mind?”

  She shook her head. “I have an idea, though.”

  “What?”

  “Instead of us going to the park, why don’t we go on my route?”

  “Through the streets?”

  She nodded.

  He put his arm out in a gesture for her to precede him. “When in Rome.”

  Meghan started her run. Baltimore was a city of contrasts. Some streets ended at the harbor. Anything from small inclines to steep hills could be found. The route Meghan took was an ever-changing path of concrete. She started out at a fast pace. Thomas matched her.

  “Am I slowing you down?”

  “This is a good pace,” he said.

  She didn’t usually talk when she jogged. Jogging was a solitary sport. It was an exercise for the mind and the body. It was to calm the mind, free it to work on problems while the body was awake, instead of doing the job only when the conscious brain slept.

  There was a routine to her workout. It didn’t involve stretching, or warm-ups, although she never began a run without doing those things. This routine was waving and smiling at the people along her route. While she didn’t come down the same streets at the same time every day, she did see the same people often.

  “Hello Ms. Shaw.” Meghan waved to a white-haired lady sitting in a window on the second floor. She smiled and waved back. Glancing at Thomas, she explained, “She can’t walk, but her mind is sharp.”

  They ran another block. Up ahead, Mr. Gonzalez came out of his market. In front of it were baskets turned on their sides, spilling fruits and vegetables like a horn of plenty. He saw her and immediately ducked inside the store.

  “Someone who doesn’t like you?” Thomas asked.

  “Just wait,” she said.

  As they reached the store, he stepped out and held out two bottles of water.

  “Thank you,” Meghan shouted, taking them and continuing her run. She handed one to Thomas, who laughed at the choreographed way she and Mr. Gonzalez worked. “When I first met him, he slipped me one of those huge cupcakes with heaps of icing on top for Suzanne. After I started jogging this way, he’d come out and pass me a bottle of water.” Meghan didn’t tell him that three days after she discovered the cupcake, she had returned and paid for it. And she would pay him for the water the next time she shopped in his store.

  Together they ran, keeping pace with each other. Meghan smiled and acknowledged more people along the route. She pointed out some of the buildings, giving Thomas a little history of the area. By the time they got back to her house, he was breathing hard.

  “Did I go too fast?” she asked.

  “No…no,” he said, puffing.

  Meghan smiled. “Understand what I mean about the streets?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said.

  “Come on in. I’ll get you a glass of water.” They’d finished the bottles Mr. Gonzalez had given them halfway through the course.

  “I brought the juice,” Thomas said between breaths.

  Meghan laughed at his obvious discomfort. “Maybe you’d better bring it in. If you can walk,” she added.

  “And I thought I was in great shape.”

  Meghan wasn’t about to touch that. She couldn’t help but stare at him, though. Despite his comment, he moved easily. Her eyes followed him as if they were hungry for sight. His shirt was wet, plastered to his back, outlining the contours of the skin beneath it. Meghan forced herself to turn away before she got to the length of his legs, the sheen of sweat that turned his skin golden brown, the hard muscles that bunched and relaxed as he walked.

  She opened the door, not waiting for him to get his bag. Inside she did her cool-down routine, but it wasn’t working today. Getting a glass of water, she drank deeply.

  “You run that route every day?” Thomas said, coming into the house and dropping his bag in the center of the room. He followed her into the kitchen, carrying a small cooler.

  “Not always. Sometimes I take different routes.”

  “And you appear to know everyone you passed.”

  “It’s a friendly neighborhood. Isn’t your neighborhood friendly?”

  “I don’t know. I never jog though my neighborhood.”

  “Isn’t it considered…proper?” She used her hands to put air quote marks around the word proper.

  “No, it’s just that there are places we go to jog.”

  Opening the cooler, Thomas removed two bottles of orange juice. He offered her one. Meghan took it. Grabbing a towel, she dried the slushy ice and the water dripping from it. Thomas stood gulping his down, water trickling onto her floor.

  Meghan wanted to laugh. He might live in a community where a weed was dead meat, but here he was plain folk.

  And she liked that.

  Chapter 7

  An hour later they were still sitting in her kitchen. Meghan had made a light breakfast and the two of them ate it at her kitchen table. Thomas had her laughing over stories of his childhood and horror stories of him expanding his business. His father had given him a challenge and he’d turned that challenge into the business he now ran.

  “Speaking of business,” she said. “Don’t you have a job to get to?”

  “Is that your way of telling me I’ve overstayed my welcome?”

  “Not at all. But you do have a business to run,” she said.

  “I took the morning off.”

  “You did?” Meghan wondered why. She got the impression that he didn’t often take days off. He was the type who worked no matter what. Had he done it to spend time with her?

  “I wanted to hear about yesterday.”

  “What about yesterday?”

  “Your consultation. You didn’t go to the same place where Ruth and I went.”

  “I had some questions. I wanted to talk to a professional about them. I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Then why did you take the morning off?”

  “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to move after jogging with you.”

  The smile that spread over his face took the innuendo out of his words, but Meghan wondered if there was a double meaning lurking in there anyway.

  “What were your questions?” he asked.

  “They weren’t that serious. I just wanted to understand what was involved, how long the procedure takes, those kinds of things.”

  Meghan thought back to yesterday. The Newburg Fertility Center was housed in a beautiful old redbrick building in downtown Baltimore. A grand circular archway welcomed visitors and employees to what once had been a single-family home. The inside had been cut up, renovated, redone, made over, until all but one vestige of the original interior remained. Only the outside facade remained intact. And thankfully, no one had ever decided to carve a name into the frieze. Only a staked sign in the ground outside indicated the address. The directory inside listed the vast number of businesses and their subsequent suite numbers.

  Meghan knew which suite she was going to. Number 305. She took the staircase. It was the one item inside that remained unchanged. It wound up both sides of the grand foyer to a landing and then continued upward to the second floor. To reach Suite 305, she had to go up another level that was at the end of a long hall. Offices flanked one side and an overlook of the floor below the other.

  Meghan had carefully researched this fertility center. The Internet was full of information. And she found a forum where she could ask questions. She’d joined under an alias and had been on it almost exclusively for days. She’d met a group of women she never knew existed. They’d given her advice and cautions. They’d even invited her to join them for a face-to-face meeting. Meghan thought better of that. She didn’t need them finding out that she was the fiancée of Thomas Worthington-Yates.

  She turned the handle of a dark wood door with Suite 305 in gold lettering on it. The inside was bright and cheery, with light blue wallpaper and chairs covered in a coordinating fabric. There were no other patients waiting.

  “Ms. Howard?” the receptionist greeted her with a smile.

  Meghan nodded. She immediately understood that there were never any waiting patients. Appointments were staggered so there would be no overlap.

  “You can come right in,” the receptionist said.

  Like magic the door at the end of the wall opened and a uniformed nurse waited for her. Meghan was ushered into an office where a kind older man stood up and clasped her hand.

  “Please be seated,” he said.

  Dr. Rayford Armstrong was in his fifties. He had silver hair, blue eyes that were tinged with gray and soft hands. He stood only an inch or so above her five feet six inches.

  Meghan took a seat and looked at him across his clean desk.

  “I’ll run through the procedure, tell you the success and failure rates, what you can expect. If you have any questions, interrupt at any time.” He spread his hands in an inviting gesture, then steepled them as if he needed time to get his thoughts together.