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swallowed his slippered steps as Clay followed, to find his mother, wearing an ecru Eve Stillman dressing gown, her feet tucked up into the corner of a powder blue chair of watered silk.
    It was like stepping back twenty years. Coming and going in their separate adult pursuits, they had little occasion to cross each other's paths except when dressed in street clothes. Gone now were the impeccable suits, high heels and jewelry from the woman curled protectively into the corner of that chair. Clay again experienced the strange sensation he'd had in the hall. He wanted to bury his head in her lap and be her little boy again.
    But her face stopped him.
    “We were having a glass of white wine to soothe the frayed nerves,” his father said, crossing to fill his glass from a crystal decanter while Clay took the chair that matched his mother's. “Would you like one?”
    “No, none for me.” Sardonically he thought, wine, tricky wine.
    “Clay, we assume nothing. Not yet,” his father began. “We are still waiting for your answer.”
    Clay looked at his mother's anxious face, at that guardian-like pose which cried out that she didn't want to learn what might be true. His father stood, swirling the wine around and around in his glass, staring at it, waiting.
    “It looks like Catherine is right,” Clay confessed, unable to tear his eyes away from his mother's shifting expression, her widening eyes which gaped momentarily before seeking her husband's. But Claiborne studied the expression on his son's face.
    “Are you sure it's yours?” Claiborne asked forthrightly.
    Clay worked his hands against each other, leaning forward, studying the floor. “It seems so.”
    Stunned, Angela expressed what both she and her husband had been thinking for the past several hours. “Oh, Clay, you didn't even know her today. How can it possibly be true?”
    “I only met her once, that's why I didn't recognize her at first.”
    “Once was apparently quite enough!” Claiborne interjected caustically.
    “I deserve that, I know.”
    But suddenly Claiborne Forrester, father, became Claiborne Forrester, counselor. Silently he took up pacing for a moment, then stopped directly before his son, brandishing his wineglass as he often brandished a finger at a client too quick to admit his guilt. “Clay, I want you to make damn sure you are the man responsible before we take this thing one step further, do you understand?”
    Clay sighed, stood up and ran four lean fingers through his hair. “Father, I appreciate your solicitude, and . . . believe me . . . when I first found out why she was here, I was just as surprised as you. That's why I took her out for a ride. I thought maybe she was just some kind of gold digger trying to stake a claim on me, but it seems she isn't. Catherine doesn't want a thing from me, or from you, for that matter.”
    “Then why did she come here?”
    “She claims it was all her father's idea.”
    “What! And you believe her?”
    “Whether I believe her or not, she doesn't want one red cent from me.”
    His mother said hopefully, “Maybe she's had a sudden attack of conscience for blaming you unjustly.”
    “Mother,” Clay sighed, gazing down at her. How defenseless she looked with her makeup cleansed off this way. It broke his heart to hurt her. He crossed to her chair, reached down to take both of her hands. “Mother, I won't make much of a lawyer if I can't cross-examine a witness any better than that, will I?” he asked gently. “If I could honestly say the baby's not mine, I would. But I can't say that. I'm reasonably sure it is.”
    Her startled eyes pleaded with her son's. “But, Clay, you don't know anything about this girl. How can you be sure? There could . . .” Her lips quivered. “Could have been others.”
    He squeezed the backs of her hands, looked into her despairing eyes, then spoke in the softest of tones. “Mother, she was a virgin. The dates match up.”
    Angela wanted to cry out,