Kitabı oku: «The Accidental Daddy»

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for Meredith Webber:

Excerpt

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

Endpages

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU MIGHT ALREADY be a father!’

Shock held Max Winthrop rooted to his chair, staring at his friend and fellow doctor in total disbelief.

Less than thirty minutes ago he’d stood outside the IVF clinic, trying to work out how he felt.

Uncertain?

Angsty?

Heaven help him, was there even such a word?

Get on with it, he’d told himself. You’ve made the decision, now walk in there and see Pete.

But there he’d stood, his mind flashing back seven years …

Seven years ago, filled with determination to beat a recently diagnosed cancer, he’d left something of himself here—a deposit for the future.

Back then it had been Step One of his ‘positive action’ programme, coming right before Step Two—Begin Aggressive Treatment.

Step Three had been Finish Treatment, followed closely by Step Four, Climb Mount Everest.

It hadn’t been a bad plan for a bloke in his mid-twenties who’d suddenly discovered he had an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and although his then fiancée had muttered a few doubts about Step Four on the plan, she’d agreed that he needed something special in the way of a goal.

He suspected Get Married had been her choice for ‘something special,’ although it had never been put into words.

Now, two fiancées and some serious life changes later, he’d decided the time had come to have his frozen sperm destroyed.

‘Why now?’ his friend Pete had asked when Max had finally made it in through the door.

Seven years ago Max had decided to use this particular facility because his friend Pete was working in the clinic.

Pete was now one of the co-owners, and a good part of the reason the clinic had become extremely successful in the competitive world of assisted pregnancies.

‘Why now?’ Pete asked again.

‘You should know that,’ Max finally answered. ‘You’re the one who told me it loses its motility the longer it’s kept frozen.’

‘So you’ve had a test and your little swimmers are okay?’ Pete probed.

‘Not exactly,’ he replied, ‘but if I do happen to find a woman who’ll have me, then I’ll tell her the risks and we’ll take our chances.’

‘Get tested first. I can do it here and now. Or get it done.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ Max said firmly. It made no difference now. Regardless, he wouldn’t be taking changes with long-frozen sperm. Besides, he’d spent the last few months debating this in his head, weighing up the pros and cons of future marriage, accepting, finally, that the women in his life were probably right. He wasn’t good marriage material.

Or family material.

Father material …

This last bit of the argument was the strongest, coming as it did from his own memories—the memory of the child he’d been when his adored father had left the family. It had been the final weight added to the ‘con’ side—the catalyst for this final decision. At times he still felt the pain of that time—and to inflict that on another child?

His child?

Maybe he wasn’t sure. Maybe that was why he’d rushed into preserving sperm before treatment all those years ago, but the years had made him even less certain he could cope with fatherhood. This final act was simply admitting it.

‘I’ve made the decision, Pete,’ Max added. ‘I want it destroyed.’

Pete shrugged, woken the laptop on his desk from its sleep and begun typing, sending a message to a printer somewhere in the bowels of the building.

He then used his phone to summon a lackey—a very attractive female lackey.

‘Jess, would you make sure someone in the cryo room gets the details on that printout I just sent through; then rustle up some coffee? Preferences, Max?’

Max gave his coffee order, then watched the delectable Jess leave the room.

‘Eyes off, old man,’ Pete said to him. ‘She’s engaged to one of our new staff members—a genius who’s going to make this company famous worldwide. Although …’

He paused, studying Max as if he were a newly inseminated egg.

‘Again, I have to ask, are you sure about this decision?’

Max had to laugh.

‘Just because I’ve decided marriage and children aren’t for me, it doesn’t mean I’ve become a monk. You’re a happily married man so you’ve no idea how many intelligent, attractive women there are out there who feel just as I do. They’ve decided, carefully and rationally, that marriage isn’t for them, but they’re happy to have no-strings relationships with men who feel the same.’

Pete nodded.

‘Not surprised at all,’ he said. ‘We’ve a couple of them working here. Women who love their work, enjoy their leisure time in all manner of ways and just don’t see marriage or kids as an imperative in their lives.’

Jess returned with the two coffees and a plate of wafer-thin almond biscotti. She put the tray on table by the window, assured Pete someone was working on his request and departed once again.

Max picked up his coffee, while Pete studied a message that had obviously come through on his mobile.

‘Drink your coffee, I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, as he headed out the door.

Watching him go, Max knew he’d made the right career decision. Not for him this office life, running a successful company but always being called in to solve this or check that. Working in a hospital was much the same, noisy pagers summoning him from one place to another. Private practice might be okay, but it had changed—less personal in so many ways.

So the lecturing he did, combined with research on the spread of infection in developing countries, plus hands-on work in the same area, was his career choice. It also gave him freedom to head off and climb the odd mountain when he needed to clear his head. He had no strings attached and it worked for him.

Another confirmation this was also the right decision.

Until Pete strode back into the room, obviously flustered, clutching a small metal container not unlike a miniature silver flask and a sheaf of paperwork.

And delivered the blow that had Max stuck in his chair.

‘Max … mate, I don’t know how to tell you this. This is unbelievable. Unbelievable that it’s happened, and that it’s happened to you. Max … I just need to say it. You might already be a father.’

Aware that he was probably doing a very good impression of a stunned mullet, Max could only stare at his friend.

Finally he got it out. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘There’s a mistake with the cross-match,’ Pete croaked.

‘You want to explain?’

Max heard his voice as if it came from someone else. Icy cold. Controlled. Not his.

‘The cross-match … Names matched to codes, verified every step of the way. But your name has the wrong code on it. They’ve checked and there’s a matching mistake. Your code with another name on it. But, hell, Max, yours has been used.’

‘My sperm has been used?’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say. It might even be a mistake—it has to be a mistake—though how it happened, I have no idea. But it’s been used. There’s a pregnancy.’

Could a life change so completely so quickly?

He stared at his friend. Pete stared back in consternation, then stood and walked to the window. He barked into his phone, demanding more information.

Max stared at his back, then down to the folder on the desk. He flicked it open.

A name … details …

Pete turned, saw what he was looking at and snatched the file away.

They stared at each other.

Shock eased and words came. Demands. Anger

He rose to his feet, coffee forgotten as he tried to absorb this impossible news. Icy anger.

‘There’s b-been a m-mix-up,’ Pete stammered. ‘Honestly, Max, this never happens—the checks and balances … I’ll find out how and why, but right now—’

‘You’re saying someone’s having my baby! Who?’

‘I can’t tell you that—it’s bad enough it’s happened. I mean, we’ll have to tell the woman when we sort out just what’s happened. God, this could ruin us!’

‘Ruin you? Ruin the clinic? What about me?’

‘And the poor woman who thinks she’s having her dead husband’s baby …’

Anger had him pacing—back and forth in front of the desk. But … Dead husband. The two words that brought Max to a halt, to loom over the desk once again.

‘What do you mean, dead husband?’

Pete looked up at him, his face pale and haggard.

‘Her husband died shortly after he was here, and she finally decided to use the sperm—have his child.’

‘The fact remains she’s having my baby,’ Max growled. He raked his hair. ‘Hell. Do we …?’ He was struggling to get his head around it. ‘Do I need to know? Does she need to know?’

‘There’s no way we can do that,’ said Pete. ‘The DNA … it’s yours, not his. That has so many implications …’

It did. Implications were all he was seeing right now, and he didn’t like any of them.

‘I need to meet her,’ he said at last, trying to think logically. ‘I need to speak to her. How far gone is she? Is the pregnancy viable?’ So many questions …

Pete recovered enough to straighten in his seat, colour returning to his face.

‘Max, you need to leave this to us. We’ll sort it. Somehow. This business is all about confidentiality. I’ll see her, I’ll explain—keep you right out of it.’

‘Keep me right out of it when it’s my baby you’re talking about?’ He couldn’t get his head around the words. My baby.

This didn’t make sense. Why the surge of certainty? Why the instant knowledge that if this was his baby, he wanted to be involved?

Maybe the rational decision he’d walked in here with hadn’t been so rational after all.

And he’d seen the file.

‘It’s Joanne McMillan,’ he said, watching his friend’s face. ‘Dr Joanne McMillan.’

‘You can’t know.’ Pete clutched his file in horror, his colour fading even further. ‘You shouldn’t have seen. Forget it. We need to talk to her—explain. I need to see her, not you.’

‘Oh, no! There is no way some woman is going to have my baby without my at least meeting her—checking her out.’

‘But it won’t be your baby—don’t you see that?’ Pete held out his hands in a plea to his friend. ‘You’ve told me you don’t want children. You’ve made a rational and reasoned decision about it and come in to have your sperm destroyed. The best way to treat it is to consider you made an anonymous donation.’

‘No way!’ He hardly knew what he was saying; he only knew it was a basic, instinctive truth. ‘This is my baby—and while I might not want it, at least I need to see it’s going to a good home. I do have some responsibility. I should have some say in the matter. As she’ll want to know—want to check me out surely.’

Light-bulb moment!

‘You said you’d go and see her to explain. Why don’t you let me go? You can make an appointment for someone from the clinic who needs to see her and I’ll go.’

‘And do what?’ Pete demanded.

‘I’ll work that out when we meet. I imagine she’s going to be so shocked to learn what’s happened she’s not really going to care who the father is, not right away. And if she’s happy to go along with the anonymous donor thing and I decide she’ll do as a mother, then, okay, I won’t tell her.’ ‘Of course she’ll do as a mother—she’s a doctor, a paediatrician, in fact. She’ll make an excellent mother.’

‘You have got to be joking!’ Max muttered. His mind was heading off on all sorts of tangents. How could he feel protective of … his sperm? A stranger’s pregnancy? All he knew was that he was.

‘You and I both remember men and women from our university days who would make appalling parents,’ he told Pete. He was sounding a lot less flustered than Pete right now, more in control. ‘Medical training doesn’t include extensive courses on good parenting, and even if it did, it wouldn’t have got through to people like Mike Wills, whose eyes were on the dollar signs right from the start, or that daffy woman who was always forgetting her handbag or her lecture notes and kept losing her car in the car park. Can you imagine how she’d be with kids? “Now, did I have two or three of them when I left home?” she’ll be saying.’

He was talking drivel, but it was helping him back towards a semblance of normality. It was strengthening his determination to meet the woman who would be the mother of the child he hadn’t wanted to have.

‘How far along is the pregnancy?’ he demanded, and then, as Pete didn’t answer, he grabbed the file and flicked it open. And almost reeled. ‘That’s … It’s due in two weeks! Pete …’

‘You’re not supposed to know,’ Pete bleated, but he’d lost control and he knew it.

‘Make an appointment for me to see her today—you can spin some story to get me in there.’

‘Max—’

‘Now!’

‘But it’s all confidential.’ Protest getting weaker.

‘Until your clinic screwed up!’

‘I’ll get to the bottom of it,’ Pete promised, but Max had picked up the phone and handed it to him.

‘Getting to the bottom of it might protect your clinic in the future, but it’s not doing a damn thing for me or this woman. Phone her!’

Pete stared at him for a long, helpless moment—and then made the call.

‘Jess will give you the details,’ he said as he set down the receiver and slumped back down in his chair. ‘And leave Jess your information so I can keep in touch with you. That’s if I can’t find an unsealed window and take a leap from it.’

‘You’re on the second floor—you’d probably only break a leg.’

Slipping her feet back into the sandals she’d discarded under her desk, Joey heaved herself upright so she could walk out through the waiting room with her favourite patient. With her arm around the just-teenager’s shoulders, she opened the door into the waiting room.

‘Now, you behave yourself,’ she said to Jacqui. ‘Go to your own GP if your insulin levels are playing up and phone me if you’re worried about anything at all. You’ve got both my numbers.’

‘Thanks, Joey,’ Jacqui responded, turning to kiss the specialist on the cheek. ‘You take care yourself and have a rest before the baby arrives.’ She grinned, then added, ‘That’s if there is only one!’

Smiling at the girl’s remarks, Joey saw her out and was about to return to her office to check who was next on her patient list when she registered the man sitting in the corner of the waiting room.

A tense man, although, for all his tension, there was something about him.

Something disturbing.

Physically disturbing.

Special …

She continued into her office, hoping she hadn’t been caught in mid-step, gazing at him instead of ignoring his presence.

But she obviously hadn’t ignored his presence for it seemed as if every detail of his physical appearance had registered in her brain.

Even sitting, she’d been able to tell he was tall—a rangy man, with brownish-reddish hair. A swatch of it hung across a high forehead. Dark eyebrows above eyes that had seemed to be studying her, a fine, neat nose and lips—

Surely to God she hadn’t just noticed his lips—hadn’t noticed how well shaped they were …

Pregnancy brain!

She’d put it down to that—as she put all the silly things she was doing lately down to it.

Settling carefully behind her desk, she lifted her phone.

‘There’s a man in the waiting room,’ she muttered to Meryl, her receptionist and the mainstay in her life right now.

‘He’s from the fertility clinic—some kind of rep, I suppose. They phoned and made an appointment for the end of the day.’

‘End of the day? He’s going to sit there while I see another four patients?’

‘Apparently,’ Meryl said, sounding so completely unfazed by the man’s presence that Joey realised she’d have to pull herself together.

Difficult when every time she brought a patient in, or walked a family to the door, she’d see the man.

So?

She was beautiful!

He wasn’t sure why this should surprise him, but it did. Dark hair and pale, creamy skin—hugely pregnant and looking very tired, but still beautiful.

The receptionist had told him he couldn’t get an appointment until the end of the day and suggested he go off and get himself a coffee somewhere, but he’d felt he needed to stay—to see her—to hear the chat in the waiting room. It had all been positive. In fact, from all accounts she was an angel set down on earth, a miracle worker, and so kind, so caring, so …

He’d certainly got the picture her patients and their parents painted of her—seen her kindness as she’d shown the young teenager out, although offering her private phone number when she was about to have a baby?

Surely that was above and beyond the call of duty!

Pete had told him she was a paediatrician, so he wasn’t surprised to see the waiting room with its big cane basket full of brightly coloured toys and the prints from Alice in Wonderland on the walls. A welcoming, non-scary place for kids.

But it was the woman herself who drew his attention, appearing at the door to her rooms to summon in the next small patient, always greeting the child first, then the parent, ushering them in, speaking directly to the child or adolescent all the time.

Her dark hair was pulled ruthlessly back into a knot on the back of her head, but from the tendrils escaping to frame her face, or dangle enticingly down the back of her neck, he could tell it was curly.

He felt a pang of sympathy for her as she followed a little group through the door, for she’d put one hand behind her and was rubbing just above her left hip.

Thirty-eight weeks … Why was she still working?

Money worries?

A string of questions rattled in his head.

Surely he wouldn’t be expected to help out financially—it was all a mistake, and not his mistake.

But this was his child. If she needed financial help, how could he deny it?

His child?

What was he thinking?

But when she appeared again, he found himself staring, riveted by the bulging belly.

That was his baby in there.

The baby he’d decided he wasn’t ever going to have for a whole fleet of excellent reasons.

This woman was having his baby.

His gut churned, then she glanced his way, flashed a smile at him and other bits of him reacted as well.

From a smile?

He smiled back although it was probably such a poor effort she might not have recognised it. But here he was, the man who, not so many hours ago, had made the final, definite ‘no children in my future’ decision, getting twinges of attraction—well, more than twinges—towards a woman carrying his child.

She’d been doing okay until he’d smiled. Admittedly, she’d sneaked a glance at him every time she’d walked into the waiting room, but apart from registering that he was a very attractive man—and her body registering the same thing in a most inappropriate manner for someone eight-and-a half-months pregnant—she really hadn’t been taking that much notice.

The smile changed everything.

The smile made her think of things she’d long given up considering.

Like sex?

It had to be her hormones, all out of sync now she was getting so close to giving birth. The man was a total stranger—someone she’d never see again in her life. And so what if he was talking to Sam Wainwright, a hyperactive six-year-old, and actually calming him down …

But the smile had lightened the tension she’d read earlier on his face, and revealed strong white teeth, framed by those well-shaped lips—

Get out of here! Get your mind back on the job. Do not go out the door again—get Meryl to send the next patient in.

Disobeying the orders from the sensible part of her brain, Joey pushed herself to her feet and went to the door.

‘Your turn, Sam,’ she said, pretending to a professionalism she was far from feeling, her eyes drawn to the man who now was pulling coins from behind Sam’s ear.

‘Can Max come in with me and Mum?’ Sam asked, smiling up at the man, who, fortunately for Joey as she’d been struck dumb, smiled at the boy and explained it wasn’t his turn yet.

Of course his voice would be just that tad husky, just the kind of male voice that had always got her in.

Joey closed her eyes and prayed for sanity.

A little bit of sanity—surely not too much to ask for!

It came, in reaction to Sam seizing one of her legs and hugging hard, protesting that he didn’t want her to go away, even for a little while.

Sensing he was genuinely upset—and assuming she’d fall over if she tried to walk—Joey eased Sam off her leg and squatted, uncomfortably, so she could look into his freckled face.

‘But I have to go to hospital to have the baby, then stay home to look after it for a bit,’ she reminded him. ‘We talked about it, and you know Dr Austin, who’ll be seeing you while I’m away.’

She ran her hand over his hair, and in a moment of complete insanity added, ‘Maybe once I have the baby, you can come and visit me in hospital and meet it.’

She was about to struggle back to an upright position when a firm hand with long, strong fingers grasped her elbow and helped her up, the husky voice murmuring, ‘And think what havoc he could wreak in a maternity ward,’ in her ear, as he made sure she was balanced before releasing her arm.

But she wasn’t thinking of Sam, or the chaos he could cause. She was trying very hard to work out why the touch of a stranger had made the hair on the back of her neck stand up and a shiver travel down her spine.

The kind of shiver she hadn’t felt for seven years …

The kind of shiver David’s touch had given her …

Somehow she managed to get Sam and his long-suffering mother through the door and close it behind them, but the feel of the man’s fingers on her arm lingered, and something very like excitement skittered along her nerves.

He should leave right now, Max told himself. He’d seen the woman. Pete could contact her about the mistake. Even from the small interactions with her patients that he’d witnessed, he could tell she was competent and caring.

That was really all he needed to know. The baby was nothing to do with him.

So why were his eyes drawn to her belly whenever she entered the room?

Why did he feel the gut-wrench thing—the ‘that’s my baby in there’ reaction—whenever he looked at her?

Because she was attractive?

Because he was drawn to her in some in explicable way?

Because he was having an almost primeval reaction to the news that this was his baby?

All those reasons were dumb. He could go now, forget this had ever happened, and if Pete told her—when Pete told her—about the mix-up, he needn’t mention who the father was.

As for the woman—well, she was attractive, there was no denying that, but she wouldn’t want him interfering. A woman with a child deserved stability and certainty in her life. She was a widow. She was beautiful, desirable, ripe to meet someone who could make her happy again. And if he was on the scene …

He was way ahead of himself. Thinking, stupidly, of relationships? He didn’t need to go there. A man who’d already let down two women he’d loved, and who’d loved him, couldn’t be trusted not to hurt a third. And to hurt a woman with a child was unthinkable.