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couldn’t do that, Jonah. I’m Catholic, remember?” She gave his arm a soft caress. “Besides, I love you. This is our baby.”
    “If your pregnancy is genuine,” he told her as he removed her hand, “I’m not the father.”
    “Of course you are.” The hopeful, beseeching quality of her expression faded into something harder. “I haven’t been with anyone else.”
    As Genaro retrieved his jacket, he considered taking her to the lab to be tested. If she had become pregnant by another man, her fetus could still prove useful. But Lorraine had an active social life, and her father was a prominent Atlanta attorney who thought the sun rose and set on his only child. She would be missed.
    “Well?” she demanded.
    “My dear, you’ve miscalculated. Your baby—if one really exists—isn’t mine.” He adjusted his sleeves. “I’m sterile.”
    “You’re—” She stopped and stared before she began to bluster. “What are you talking about? You never told me you couldn’t have kids.”
    “You never asked.” Genaro walked over to her. “Our arrangement is over. You have until the end of the month to pack your things and move out.” As she opened her mouth, he shut her up by backhanding her. The blow proved hard enough to knock her to the ground, but not enough to inflict permanent damage. He bent over her, caught her chin, and made her look at him. “The next time you resort to blackmail, first do the appropriate research.”
    He left Lorraine on the floor and walked out of the apartment.
    Genaro directed his driver to take him downtown before he picked up the phone and called his chief of security. “Void the credit balance left on Miss Lamar’s account.”
    “Yes, Mr. Genaro.” Delaporte, who had been with him for thirty years and had taken many such calls, didn’t ask why. “The overseas shipment arrived about ten minutes ago.”
    A great deal of money had changed hands over this particular shipment: much more than Genaro had originally wanted to invest. But he had been unable to resist the rarity and high quality of the product. Even if he had to store it for some time, he suspected that in a year or two he’d be in a position to make an enormous profit.
    “See that Dr. Kirchner attends to it,” Genaro said.
    He arrived on time for his two-o’clock appointment, and spent the next several hours going over the specs for the new lab with the architect and the foreman before he left to attend a charity dinner to benefit a local foundation for the prevention of neural-tube defects.
    “Jonah, we’re so happy you could make it.” The hostess, a forty-something, brassy-haired socialite whose younger, less fortunate brother had been born with spina bifida, took his hands in hers as she gave air kisses on each side of his face. “Where’s Lorraine?”
    “She couldn’t make it.” He scanned the crowded tables. “It looks like an excellent turnout this year, Jackie.”
    “We’re very pleased, although—as usual—we have a last-minute glitch. Bad weather grounded our guest speaker’s flight.” Jackie sidled closer. “Can I do a terrible, presumptuous thing and impose on you to fill in?”
    As much as he begrudged the time he wasted engaging in the practices of a prosperous, influential businessman, there was no other way to maintain the respectable facade. He agreed with a smile, and thirty minutes later stood before the dinner guests and spoke about the tragedy of genetic defects and the cures made possible by biotech research.
    “Earlier this year researchers in Texas published their discovery of a link between variants in three genes that regulate glucose metabolism in children born with spina bifida,” he told the guests. “Our geneticists are now working with that data in order to create a specific gene therapy that will correct these variants in utero. Once we have the cure, we can develop treatments for the other neural-tube defects, like anencephaly and encephalocele. No more