by K. C. Crowne
I pushed those thoughts out of my head, another idea entirely replacing them.
At first it struck me as a crazy idea, an absolutely insane idea.
What if she could be the surrogate mother I’d been looking for?
The waiter brought back the check and my card. My mind was still focused on the idea of Carly as my surrogate as I absent-mindedly filled in a thirty percent tip and handed the book back over.
At first, the idea seemed far out. I’d only met the woman, after all. And already I was thinking of asking her to be the mother of my child? But it seemed to make more and more sense as it bounced around my mind.
Carly was beautiful, that was impossible to ignore. But more than that, she was brilliant. And she was kind.
Energy filled me as I thought it all over, weighing the pros and cons. The big con, of course, was that she was likely to be freaked out by my proposal and might slap me before marching out.
But Carly seemed the reasonable sort. Worst thing she could do is say no, I figured. And the more I tossed around the idea in my head, the more I thought about having her carry my kid in the old-fashioned way. That would be asking too much, for certain, but thinking about her under the covers with me, that stunning, impossibly beautiful face twisted into an expression of orgasmic delight, her eyes closed, and her mouth formed into a perfect “O” of pleasure…
I shook my head, bringing myself back to reality. No. If I was going to propose this, I’d have to keep it all as professional as possible. That meant no sex with Curvy Carly.
“Alright,” she said, slipping back into the chair and snapping me out of my sexual reverie. She popped a stray cherry into her mouth and smiled as she licked the dab of red juice from her fingertip. It was a quick and innocent moment, but one that turned me on like wild. “What’s next?”
It was then or never. There wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be able to keep the evening going while not sharing what was on my mind. I placed my palms on the table and leaned forward slightly.
“Carly, I’ve a bit of a strange question for you.”
“Well, this night hasn’t exactly been what I’d call normal, so shoot. What’s up?”
“Well, it’s also a bit personal. Feel free to not answer if it makes you uncomfortable.”
She was still interested, but her expression was measured. I could sense she was wondering if I was about to say something weird and out-of-pocket to ruin the evening.
“Have you ever thought of being a mum?”
Her face remained blank for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right. Then her eyebrows arched, her head cocking to the side slightly.
“Have I ever thought about being a mom? As in, getting pregnant and pushing out a baby and raising it? That sort of thing?”
I couldn’t help but laugh at her description. “Well, yeah, that sort of thing.”
The surprise faded from her face, replaced by a humorously sly expression. “Now, Ryan. Don’t get me wrong – I’m having a surprising amount of fun considering you’re someone I’ve only just met. But all the same, I think it’s a little premature to be planning a family together.”
She smiled and took a sip of her wine. The moment represented an opportunity to play it all off as a joke and bring things back to the status quo. But I wasn’t about to let the matter drop. Now that it was out in the open, I was even more enthusiastic.
“No, not like that,” I said. “It’s…something else.”
The seriousness returned to her face, as if she were worried I was about to ask her to join a cult.
“What is it?”
“It’s quite a thing to explain, so I’m just going to throw it out there. I’ve been looking for a surrogate. And I think you’re the woman I’ve been searching for.”
Like I’d expected, she was flabbergasted. Her mouth was a flat line, her eyes wide. Her fingers stayed on the stem of her wine glass.
“A…what?”
“A surrogate – someone to carry a child for me. I know this is all sudden as hell, but the more I talk with you, the more perfect I think you’d be. You’re bright and beautiful and you love children – what more would I be looking for?”
Her mouth stayed in that same flat line, her eyes still wide.
“You alright over there?” I asked. “You look a bit…”
“Shocked,” she said, nodding very slowly. “I am most definitely that.”
“I know it’s a bit mad, but I think it’s something to consider.”
Her eyes flicked down to the table, and I could sense she was taking time to process what I’d just laid on her lap.
“Why don’t we go to the bar? Have one more drink?”
“Sure, sounds great.”
She nodded slowly one more time before rising from her seat and walking toward the bar. I gave her a bit of a head start, fiddling a bit with my mobile before getting up to follow her.
As I did, I couldn’t help but worry if I’d fucked a good thing up before it’d even had a chance to begin.
Chapter 6
CARLY
Once I was at the bar, I gave myself some time to process what the fuck I’d just heard. Thankfully, Ryan knew how to read the room and hadn’t hurried over to sit down next to me. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed that he was still at the table, still on his phone. And that meant I had some time to think.
“Something to drink?” the bartender asked.
“Whiskey. Neat. Thanks.” It was my go-to drink whenever I had something to ponder. The bartender placed a glass of the amber-colored booze in front of me and I took a quick, sharp sip.
Surrogate. Had he really asked me that?
He had. No sense in pretending like I’d misheard him. Ryan, the sexy-as-fuck, funny, doctor I’d only just met had asked me to carry his kid. I did my best to put my shock aside and to focus on the matter at hand.
Surrogate. I repeated the word over and over in my head until I had a handle on it. I’d never known anyone who’d done the thing, but I knew what it entailed. It meant that his sperm would be…injected? I was unsure of the proper terminology. Anyway, his sperm would go into one of my eggs. I’d get pregnant, carry the child to term, and when it was all over and done with, he’d get the baby and we’d part ways.
Simple enough. But I didn’t need to know anything about it to understand that it would be far, far less simple than it sounded. For one, I would have to give him the baby that grew inside of me. A baby that would be genetically half me.
OK, pregnancy. That was one thing. But the whole idea behind carrying a kid to term, of going through all the symptoms and watching your belly get bigger and bigger by the day – enduring all of that – was to, at the end of it all, have an adorable, chubby little baby that was all yours.
Not for the surrogate. For her, she might not even get to hold the baby. It would be whisked from her arms, whisked from her life, never to be seen again. The idea was enough to make my stomach turn.
I was getting ahead of myself. Another question was why this guy had picked me out of literally every other woman on the planet to be the one to carry his kid. And not only to carry the kid, but to be half of him. Or her.
It was a hell of a lot to process.
And as I thought the matter over, what was even more fucked up was that I kept imagining what it’d be like to get pregnant by him the, um, old-fashioned way. My mind flashed with fantasies of being in bed with the handsome doctor, of wrapping my legs around him as he pumped into me. No doubt he had a crazy-good body under those expensive clothes, and it would be a total pleasure to watch it work as he brought me to orgasm after orgasm.
Something else strange – thinking about sex with the plan of getting pregnant made the fantasy even hotter. I wasn’t much of a casual sex kind of girl, but whenever I did end up in bed with a guy, I was always gung-ho about protection and making sure that no accidents happened.
But with Ryan, it was different. And I couldn’t quite explain why.
<
br /> Wait, what if that was what he wanted? The idea made my heart go thump-thump-thump in my chest. And to make matters worse, he appeared next to me right in the middle of me thinking about him in bed with me.
I had no idea where to even begin processing it.
“You alright?” he asked in that accent I was getting more and more attracted to with each word he spoke.
“I’m fine.” I tried to plant a smile on my face, but I could only force a weak one. There was too much to think about to be cool and chill. “Totally good.”
“Mind if I join you? I’d…ah, understand if you wanted me to go.”
“No, it’s cool. Sit.” I patted the chair overexuberantly, as if he were a puppy I was hoping to entice to sit next to me. I felt goofy, out of sorts.
He chuckled, sliding that amazing ass into the chair. His eyes flicked down at my drink.
“Whiskey?”
“Whiskey.”
“Sure. I’ll take one too.”
He waved to the bartender, who quickly had a drink placed in front of Ryan. We took sips in silence, as if neither of us was sure where to begin with this new topic of conversation.
“OK, I have to ask you this straight,” I said, the wine and sip of whiskey giving me a bit of courage. “Is this all some lead-up to you asking if I’ll come home with you and we can, um, get this surrogacy thing started tonight?”
I worried I might’ve been dancing around the question too much, but the warm smile on his face let me know he understood what I was asking.
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on taking you home and knocking you up tonight.”
Hearing him say the words was enough to send a surge of heat through me and make my pussy wet.
This was going to be a tricky, tricky topic.
“No,” he said again. “I was thinking of something more clinical. And completely legal. I’d get a contract drawn up, and have my lawyer walk you through every step of the process. Then, once you were ready, you’d sign.”
“And then what?”
“We’d have the rest done in a lab. It’s a very easy procedure, nothing you need to worry about.”
“Oh…OK.”
He grinned, and I could see that I’d betrayed my thinking too clearly.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “There wouldn’t be any, ah, hanky-panky involved.” Another one of his cute turns of phrase managed to dissolve much of the tension.
But still, him mentioning the subject of being in bed with me was enough to send another hot rush of sexual energy through my body. The more time I spent with him, the more I wanted him. And that most definitely didn’t make him getting me pregnant any easier to think about, whether it took place in a lab or under the covers.
Hanky-panky. Damn, did that sound nice. At the very least, a little no-strings-attached fun sounded like a good way to take my mind off all the other stuff going on in my life.
Then again, sex for the purpose of getting pregnant was the total opposite of no-strings-attached.
Thankfully, at that moment, my inner straight-A student kicked in. I quickly took my phone out of my purse and turned it on with a click.
“What’s that?” he asked, his eyebrows arching in curiosity.
“I’m opening up Notes. If we’re going to be talking about this, I want to make sure to get every detail down.”
He nodded, a small smile on his face suggesting he was happy that I was, so far, interested in the plan. I quickly keyed in the info about the lab, about the lawyer, and all the rest.
“OK,” I said. “What else?”
“Oh!” he said. “I can’t believe I forgot the most important part. You’d be paid very well for all you’d be doing.”
Money. Just the mention of it was enough to make me even more interested in the plan.
“How much?”
He reached into his pocket and took out a fancy-looking silver pen. Then he leaned forward to grab a cocktail napkin. Both in hand, he jotted down a figure on the napkin and passed it over.
“And this, of course, wouldn’t include whatever you’d need during the pregnancy. Or hell, anything that you’d want to make the whole process easier. I’m not planning on being stingy when it comes to your comfort or convenience.”
I glanced down at the napkin, my eyes going wide as I took in the figure.
It was a lot.
Like, a lot a lot. Far more than I’d make in a single year of teaching. And it was enough to solve whatever money issues I’d have for the foreseeable future, as well as make a healthy addition to Adam’s college fund.
It was so much money that I almost felt ridiculous not accepting right then and there. But I measured my excitement, not wanting to let him know the amount he was offering had blown me away.
“Is that fine?” he asked, turning the cocktail napkin around and giving it another look, as if he might’ve written the number down wrong.
I cleared my throat and sat up straight. “It’s…it’s fine.”
He smiled, pleased with my response. “Anyway, I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves here. I’m sure this is a hell of a lot to take in, and you’ve no doubt got plenty to process.”
“I do. But you’re making it very easy.”
My eyes lingered on his, Ryan gazing back into my own. It was weird. I did have a ton to think about. I’d gone from getting stood up on Valentine’s Day to sitting across from a man who might change my life forever.
But I felt calm. There was something about Ryan, something about his presence, that put me at ease, and made me feel totally comfortable. The restaurant faded away around me, and for a moment there was only him and me.
Pop! A champagne bottle opened nearby, snapping me out of my daze. I looked over to see a waiter opening a bottle for a couple, the woman standing and showing off an engagement ring so big I could see the stone from across the restaurant. Customers applauded the engagement, giving the couple a brief center of attention.
“Good for them,” Ryan said, his eyes on the same thing as me. “It’s great when people find one another like that.”
“But it didn’t happen for you?”
The words blurted out of my mouth and I was embarrassed immediately.
“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so freaking sorry – that’s none of my business.”
But he wasn’t bothered. “No, it is your business. You’ve got a right to know who I am and why I’m not having a kid the regular way.”
“I mean, I hope I didn’t offend you. It’s just that you’re, well, I won’t mince words, you’re a handsome doctor. As far as I know, those aren’t usually the kind of guys who have trouble getting dates. It’d be like a Victoria’s Secret model who couldn’t find a boyfriend, you know? Just gets you wondering.”
“Believe me, my family’s been giving me the same business. The truth of the matter is…well, I tried that. I met a woman who I thought I’d be having a family with. I built a big house for us and all the kids we’d talked about having. Then, two days before the bloody wedding, I come home to her cheating on me with some graffiti artist she’d met through her work.”
“You’re fucking kidding me?” Who the fuck would have a guy like Ryan and cheat on him?
“I wish I were. And you want to hear the worst part? I was in such denial when I saw it happening that I opened the bloody bedroom door to check. I walked right in on her, ah, in the middle of it, with some guy actually wearing a flat-brimmed baseball cap during sex.”
“Let me guess, she said, ‘it’s not what it looks like’?”
He chuckled. I couldn’t believe he had anything like a sense of humor about it – a good sign about the sort of man Ryan was.
“That’s exactly what she said. She looks me dead in the eye while she’s on top of some bloke, her engagement ring still on her finger, and has the nerve to tell me it’s not what it looks like. People are funny, you know?”
“Funny’s one word to describe it. And then what happened?” Now th
at the subject had been broached, I couldn’t help but go for all the info.
“Very calmly, I tell her to leave her ring, and that she had until the next day at noon to pack her belongings and find some other place to live. Then I turn, and she and the bloke chase after me, both trying to tell me I’m overreacting.”
“Wow. That’s ballsy.”
“I leave, book myself the nicest hotel room in the city I could find for the night, then drove right to my lawyers to make sure the separation could happen without her getting more out of it than she deserved. Dumb move on her part – if she’d have waited until after the wedding, she’d have been able to walk away with a little more in her pocket than what she had, which ended up being nothing.”
“I’m so sorry, Ryan.” Without thinking, I placed my hand on his thigh just above his knee. The muscle there was as solid as stone, which caused another rush of sexual energy to pulse through my body.
But I didn’t move my hand. And he didn’t ask me to.
“It gets even worse, believe it or not.”
“What? How could it get worse?”
“You’d think she’d be remorseful, yeah? That she’d tell me it was one time, that it would never happen again. But when I checked into my room downtown, I take out my mobile to see all these texts from her telling me that it was my fault she cheated.”
“Oh my God,” I said, shaking my head. “How the hell did she figure that?”
“She said it was because I spent all my time at work, and when I wasn’t at work I was at the free clinic. And that meant I wasn’t giving her the attention a woman like her – those were her words, mind you – deserved.”
“Maybe I’m speaking out of pocket here,” I said. “But a woman who cheats on someone isn’t really making a strong case that she’s worth anything.”
He smiled slightly, pleased with my answer.
“Anyway,” I said. “Then what happened?”
“By that point I was so over it that all I could do was laugh. I reminded her of noon the next day and told her she’d better not make a mess on the way out. And then I treated myself that evening; I had a nice steak dinner with some wine, then relaxed in the pool on the roof that overlooked the city. Pretty good day in all. That is, aside from the getting cheated on part.”