An Act of Persuasion

chapterR TEN



MARK LOOKED AT the birth certificate and frowned. So far nothing. He’d done only the most preliminary checking on the names. He’d run down all the obvious leads he was sure Anna had already tried. He always felt when you were after information a checklist approach was very helpful. Sometimes the process of taking something off the list as not viable was almost as important as finding information that was.

Typically, when you could cancel out all the obvious options, what you were left with was the answer. Only he was nowhere close to that with Anna’s parents.

What had that felt like? he wondered. The moment when she realized that not only had her parents abandoned her, but they had gone one step beyond that and had given her no road map back to them.

At least Sophie knew who her parents were. It probably hadn’t occurred to his daughter that she should be grateful she knew her mother loved her and didn’t want to leave her. Even though her father had had nothing to do with her other than cards and gifts for the past almost fourteen years, she was way better off than Anna had ever been.

Maybe he could get Anna to talk to her. Explain that Mark wasn’t the lowest form of humanity known to man.

She doesn’t want to have anything to do with you.

How could that possibly be? She didn’t even know him enough to not like him. At least he deserved a chance, didn’t he?

Mark groaned in the empty office, putting his face in his hands and wondering where the hell it all went wrong. A soft cough had him looking up.

Leave it to Ben to find him at his worst.

“Can I come in?”

He was standing politely just outside Mark’s office door. Mark imagined he looked clueless, because it was exactly how he felt. It wasn’t a sensation he was necessarily familiar with.

“Sure.”

Ben walked in and took a seat. “I’m here to take Anna to her doctor’s appointment.”

“She’s not back from her errands yet.”

“So I see.”

Right. The man was, like, Sherlock Holmes observant. He would have deduced that Anna wasn’t here based on her vacant desk. Mark felt foolish stating the obvious, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance of Ben possibly questioning him about what was the source of the no doubt nearly anguished expression on his face.

He knew what he looked like because he actually felt anguish. His daughter didn’t want to know him.

“What do you have her doing these days? Still just keeping her to the computer work, I hope.”

Right. Anna. That’s all Ben would ever want to talk about with him.

“Not quite, I’ve got this unsolved serial killer case. Seems the guy only goes after pregnant woman. I make Anna wear one of those Baby-in-Here T-shirts—you know, the ones with the arrow down her belly—and I send her about the city hoping to lure the murderer out of hiding.”

Ben didn’t as much as blink. “I’m sure there are others who find you entertaining, Sharpe.”

“But you’re not one of them. I know. She’s dropping off some packages for me.” Gifts he’d picked out for Sophie in advance of their meeting. Like any good strategist, as soon as he’d learned of his daughter’s feelings for him, he’d set upon a course to win her over.

He planned to start with pink Uggs. If need be, he’d end with a car she wasn’t old enough to drive yet. A desperate man had to take desperate measures.

“Thank you.” Ben eyed the certificate in Mark’s hand. No doubt trying to read it. His eyes narrowed as he obviously made out her name. “Is that Anna’s birth certificate?”

Mark opened the drawer of his desk and put the paper inside.

“It’s Anna’s business. That’s all you need to know.”

“She told me she made the decision to find her birth parents.” Ben frowned. “I didn’t realize you were involved.”

“It’s what I do.”

“It’s what I do. You can stop the investigation. I’ll take it from here.”

Mark laughed. At least this was a distraction. “You have got to be the most arrogant SOB on the planet. Your days of giving me orders are over, Tyler. Anna asked me to do this for her, and I’m doing it. Frankly, you stepping in here and trying to play the part of her hero is a little...dramatic for you.”

“I’m not trying to be anything. I’m going to marry her—she’s going to be my wife. If anyone should be involved in finding out about her past, it should be me.”

“Hell, I’m surprised you haven’t already. Not like you to leave questions unanswered about the people in your life,” Mark said. “But did you say marry her? Didn’t you guys have your first date this weekend? That’s a little bit of a stretch.”

“Not when she’s carrying my child it isn’t. It gives me...a head start, I believe you would call it.”

Mark assessed his former boss. The ruthlessness he’d seen during his days with him on the Farm was still there. Civilian life may have tempered it, but it hadn’t squashed it. He had no doubt now Tyler had simply listed Anna as a prime target. An asset to be cultivated with any means necessary.

Only love and relationships weren’t like war. Well, not exactly like war anyway.

“If you push her too hard, too fast, you’re going to lose her,” Mark warned.

“I don’t need love advice from you.”

No, and Mark wasn’t really sure why he was trying. He knew Ben would reject anything he had to say about Anna, but he couldn’t seem to keep his mouth shut.

“Maybe not. Hell, I wasn’t really any better at relationships than you. Other than the seduction part.”

“Yes, that habit you formed of identifying any woman I was attracted to and seducing her before I had a chance. Quite a skill that.”

Mark couldn’t apologize for it. He’d taken too much satisfaction in it, even if it did make him a jerk. “Look, my point is I know you. I’ve seen you hunt down targets for months, hell, even years, with a merciless single-mindedness that always seemed to work. That was fine for terrorists. It won’t work for Anna. I’ve known her now for—”

“Three months to my six years,” Ben interjected. “We’ve had this conversation, remember? Please, though, do educate me on the subject of Anna.”

Mark sneered. “You know, at first I was worried about her. Worried she was at risk from being played by someone who is a master manipulator.”

“And you’re not?”

“No, but I’m not trying to fool anyone into thinking I love her just so I can get my hands on my kid.”

Ben made a sudden motion forward as if he wanted to attack, but then he must have remembered Anna would return shortly. No doubt she wouldn’t like the idea of her former boss strangling her current boss. Ben settled into the chair.

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he snarled.

“It doesn’t matter. Now that I know her better, I think she’ll see right through you. She’s smart, but beyond that, she knows you, too. She’ll see through your high-handed seduction methods if they are simply a means to an end and not born from real sincerity.”

Ben snorted.

“Fine. You go ahead and think you’ve got it all figured out. But I’m here to tell you if you screw this up, if you piss her off beyond forgiveness, then you’ll be a stranger to the child you say you want to know.”

“What would you know about it?”

“I have a child. A child I’m a stranger to.”

Mark watched Ben’s forehead crease as he tried to access the information he had on Mark. Maybe at one time he knew Mark had a child but that information had been deemed unnecessary and long buried back in his brain.

“I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“Well, it was pretty easy to forget considering I didn’t talk about her much.”

Or at all. There were no pictures in his wallet, not that an operative at that level would have carried any personal information anyway. Still, he didn’t have a picture of her anywhere period. The last time he’d even seen her was a year ago on her birthday. They’d had a Skype chat for a few minutes. She’d seemed bored with him. And the picture hadn’t been all that clear.

His daughter.

“What happened?”

Mark startled a little. A personal question from Ben? A question that had nothing do with gaining useful information for a specific purpose, but rather was a subject he was curious about? That was a first. Mark supposed the least he could do for this old colleague was to paint a picture of what not to do with Anna.

“Her mother was my college girlfriend. We dated most of my senior year. She was a junior. She expected to get married after I graduated. I expected to work abroad for the CIA. I guess she thought she was losing me. She told me... It’s so stupid when you think about it, what a man will be willing to believe to get his uncovered dick inside a woman. She told me she started taking the pill. She lied about it and got pregnant instead.”

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?

She watched as one woman basically rocked from side to side to gain enough momentum to get out of the chair she was sitting in after her name was called. A few of the other women with equal-size protrusions actually laughed along with her as she finally made it to her feet.

What the hell was funny about that?

Anna was counting on a basketball-size thing while these women were sporting Volkswagen Beetles. Cautiously, she glanced at Ben who sat next to her, seemingly unaffected by the women around him.

“You’re what? Six-two?”

“Six-one and a half,” he answered without hesitation as if he knew exactly what was going through her mind. “Don’t worry. The kid will fit. Barely.”

“Anna Summers.”

Anna lifted her head at her name. The nurse was smiling, holding a clipboard in her hand and waving her over.

Anna and Ben stood together. Something she wasn’t exactly expecting.

“Uh...”

“Can I come in with you?”

Awkward again. Anna thought back to the weekend when they had both attempted to act like the normal couple they weren’t and wondered if this would be like that. She thought about what she would be required to do for this visit. She already handed in her early-morning pee in a cup to the nurse so she was spared that indignity.

She had to get weighed—she could make him turn around for that. They would only pull up her shirt to poke around a bit. Then they would use the stethoscope to listen for the heartbeat.

Yes, he would want to hear that. A man who had come so close to losing his heartbeat would love the sound of a newly created one.

“Okay. But don’t go asking a ton of questions, all right? You’re not grilling the doctor like an enemy agent. This is my body, my pregnancy.”

Ben frowned and she knew he was currently dismissing the list of questions he’d already formulated in his head.

They were escorted into an office where Anna was asked to sit on the examining table and Ben sat in an uncomfortable chair in the corner. The last time they had been in a doctor’s office together it had been a very different situation.

The last time he’d been in a doctor’s office by himself he’d been making a life-altering decision without her. She couldn’t forget that.

Anna swallowed and started to wonder if what they were attempting to do was even possible. In the harsh light of reality, with the euphoria of her feelings stripped away she tried to imagine the two of them together.

Lying together in bed had been odd. Not horrible and eventually she had fallen asleep despite her desire not to, but it hadn’t felt natural.

Because it had been so new for them.

Maybe she was to blame for that. Not only hadn’t she shared her past with him, she’d also never done anything to change their future. She never suggested they go on a date. Never made any sexual moves toward him. Never once led him to believe she wasn’t completely content simply being his executive assistant.

He was right to ask her why she had held on to her feelings for so long. She couldn’t have said she fell in love with him immediately after starting work, but certainly after two years she’d pretty much locked up her heart against anyone else. Four years was a long time to hold on to something that big.

In those four years she’d worked with him, talked with him, joked with him and battled with him. All the while telling herself that what they had was good enough. It was better than most marriages, she thought. They had each other’s backs. They didn’t play games. They enjoyed each other’s company. They didn’t hurt each other intentionally.

What a crock of shit.

She hadn’t given him anything of herself. Her fears and her hopes. Only her brain and her time and her caring. That wasn’t love. That was the illusion of it.

He’d been her work husband. She’d been his work wife. They had settled into professional married bliss. What he probably thought constituted a fine working relationship. Yet, she thought it was something more. Something that entitled her to be part of his decision-making process when it came to his health. How naive of her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes, fine.”

“You’re quiet.”

“So are you. I thought maybe being in a doctor’s office...” She was deflecting. Ben wouldn’t let something like his near-death scare result in a permanent phobia of doctors or their offices. He was too practical for things like that.

“Trust me. This in no way reminds me of my doctor visits.” He pointed to the pictures on the wall, which featured a steady progression of a growing fetus inside a woman’s uterus.

Finally the nurse came in to weigh her and Ben dutifully turned around. Then she took Anna’s blood pressure and glanced at the chart as she was writing it down.

“Blood pressure is a little elevated. Can you think of any reason for it?”

I’m embarking on a relationship with a man who I thought I loved for maybe six, but definitely at least four years, only to realize now I’m not sure what love is. Also, I’m going to have his baby.

“No, not really.”

“Well, it’s not too high. Nothing to worry about, but we’ll want to keep an eye on it.”

“Okay.”

“You can undo your pants and lift up your shirt. The doctor will be in shortly.”

The nurse left and the silence in the room grew worse. She forgot about the unbuttoning the pants part. The truth was there was nothing she would like better than to unbutton her pants. The push of the material on her stomach was making her want to pee and the grim reality was the pants were too tight before she’d needed to pee.

“Do you need me to turn around again?”

How awkward would that be?

“Hi, Doc, here is the father of my child. But I really don’t like him to see me without my pants on so I’m going make him face the corner. You cool with that?”

“No, that’s fine. Can’t be squeamish, right?” She undid the buttons of the casual black pants she’d worn and as soon as the zipper slid down she let out a sigh of relief.

“Getting too tight?”

“Mmm. Just a bit.”

He stood then and moved toward her, looking down at the belly still covered by what she called her granny whites because they were becoming the only underwear that fit. She looked down to see what he saw and the round bump that was now her stomach was glaringly obvious.

“It’s huge,” she moaned.

“It’s not. It’s a little mound.”

“I’m a porker already and it’s only month four.”

“It’s barely there. It’s not like your stomach was exactly flat before.”

That took a moment to process. “Are you saying I was fat before I was pregnant?”

He huffed and mumbled something about women under his breath. “You were not fat. At all. But if memory serves, and trust me it serves me too damn well these days, you had a little...a gentle roundness to your belly.”

“You are so dead.”

“I mean, come on, Anna, you have to admit it’s not like you could bounce a quarter off the damn thing.”

“You need to stop. Right now.”

He opened his mouth then shut it again.

“That’s right,” she nodded. “We’ll just pretend this didn’t happen.”

“I liked your stomach,” he said quietly. “I like it better now. Can I touch it?”

Could he touch it? No! Again, weird. Ben Tyler touching her stomach...that was filled with his baby that he put there because they had sex. Sometimes it was hard to remember that night because she thought about how she had been with him and what she’d done with him that she’d never done with anyone before. Almost like it hadn’t really been her.

Then other times it was impossible to forget. How easy it all felt. Like they had been doing it for years.

“Please.”

Anna held her breath and gave a tight nod. She leaned back a little on the table to give him access and watched his large hand descend on her lower belly. Skin touched skin. She could feel the warmth immediately and it seemed to heat up her whole body like he was some faith healer laying hands on her and she was being cured.

Then he started to make slow circles with that hand, pushing a little against her flesh, stroking a lot until his fingers dipped under the waistband of her embarrassing underwear. She looked at him, ready to question what he was doing but his face was intent on the place his hand covered.

Color rose in his cheeks and she could see his nostrils flare. Not that he was the only one impacted by his touch. Her heart started to pound heavier and her legs shifted in reaction to his touch. She could feel herself grow damp and she thought about what it would be like for him to slide those fingers a little lower, just a little lower...

“And how are we today?” the doctor asked as she entered the room.

“I’m the father!” Ben announced while he jerked his hand out of her panties.

The small and serious looking OB/GYN smiled. “Let’s hope so.”