An Act of Persuasion(46)

Helen. He never once thought of her as devious or manipulating. He’d never really given her that much credit. He could only imagine she’d been scared out of her mind for lying. If he’d been listening to her, really listening to her, he was certain he would have known what she was trying to do. Hold him. Keep him. But back then half of all his thoughts were firmly locked in the future. Not enough of him had been in the present to know he was being set up by a really bad liar. A setup that had major consequences.

“What did you do?”

“I proposed,” Mark snapped. “What the hell do you think I did? Helen was a nice girl. She came from a good family. She wasn’t...sneaky. She was just desperate. I mean, it’s hard to get all righteous on a woman who got pregnant because she loves you that much.”

“But you didn’t marry her.”

Mark shook his head. “No. A couple of months into the engagement, she could see that while I was making all the right motions—I applied for the FBI instead of the CIA, filled out a few applications for law school—I wasn’t happy. She told me she screwed up and that she knew she didn’t want to live with a man who would always want to be somewhere else. She promised she would raise our daughter with love and never let her know how she was conceived. Then she returned my ring accompanied by an application for the agency. I never looked back.”

“Until now.”

“Yep.” Until now. Now, he was here and Helen was dead and his daughter didn’t want to see him.

“Do you regret it?” The question wasn’t judgmental. Ben was merely curious.

“No.” He had to hack the word out of his throat, but it was the truth. “No, despite how it ended, I never would have given up those years. Makes me a son of a bitch, doesn’t it.”

Ben shrugged.

“Anyway, that’s what I’m doing here. In Philadelphia.”

“Really? Not here to steal all my employees, then?”

“Oh, that, too. I understand you have a couple of investigators who work for your troubleshooting group. My plan was to steal them, as well. After I secured Anna. But that’s for sport. You understand.”

There was a semblance of a smile. “So you are here to reconcile with the mother and get to know your child?”

The sadness and regret that had weighed Mark down for the past few months bubbled up like fresh sparkling water then quickly fizzled out. Those feelings he’d once had for Helen were a long time ago. He wasn’t sure how strong they had been, but they hadn’t been nearly strong enough to hold him to her. No, he never would have come back for her.

“The mother, Helen, is dead. I’m here because my daughter needs her father now. Even though she doesn’t actually realize that yet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. Which is why you can believe me. Don’t screw this up with Anna. If you really want her and the child, you’re going to have to be honest with her. At the end of the day if you can’t love her, then she deserves someone better. Someone who can give her what she needs. You’re going to have to live with it.”

Ben stood as the door to the outside office opened.

“That’s where you’re wrong. You had a choice and you took it. I’ve already made my choice and I’m not going anywhere.”

Anna entered the outer office and stopped. She took in the scene of the two men together in the same room and her face took on a suspicious expression. Slowly she approached and opened the door.

“Everything cool in here?”

“Yes, we were speaking as I was waiting for you,” Ben said. “We have your appointment and I didn’t want to be late.”

Anna turned to Mark. He thought of a hundred things he could say that would make Ben’s life difficult in that moment. Things like, Watch out, Anna, it’s a trap. But he couldn’t do it. He felt a sudden affinity for Ben. For all his posturing about what he was or wasn’t going to do, they both knew that in the end it would be Anna’s decision.

Which meant Ben was in a place he’d never been before...out of control. For that the man deserved Mark’s sympathy.

* * *

THEY SAT IN the waiting room of the doctor’s office with several other pregnant ladies. Anna studied the belly sizes of the only just pregnant, mostly pregnant and really pregnant women. Glancing at her own stomach she thought it was definitely bigger than it had been three months before, but, man, it couldn’t get as big as some of these women, could it?