The Misconception

by Gardner, Darlene

  “Another meeting? You mean, another sexual encounter.” Tracy fanned herself with one of her hands. “I think I’m going to faint.”

  “We’ve been over this before, Tracy.” Marietta held up her sister’s limp body, wishing she could make her understand. “Without sex, there can’t be reproduction. And reproduction is essential for the preservation of the species. For a woman, the desire to become a mother is the strongest of all the biological urges. I have no intention of denying mine.”

  “I’m not proposing you deny it.” Tracy still clung to her. Her green eyes were pleading. “I’m suggesting that placing an ad in a magazine for eggheads might not have been the best way to go about getting a baby.”

  “The magazine is for people of superior intelligence,” Marietta corrected, peeling her sister’s clutching fingers off her clothes as she talked. “The male’s genetic material accounts for half the baby’s makeup. By choosing someone with desirable qualities, I’m merely looking out for my baby’s welfare. Surely you’ve heard of the terms natural selection and survival of the fittest.”

  “There’s nothing natural about what you’re doing! The natural process would be to fall in love with a man and have his baby.”

  Marietta sniffed, moved to her car and yanked open the door. “You know how I feel about love.”

  “I know you have a warped view of love.”

  Marietta swallowed her retort. Bringing up her theory about the myth of the monogamous man would only hurt her sister. Tracy had been separated from her cheating husband for seven months, and she still wasn’t over the snake.

  “That’s your opinion,” Marietta said.

  “Here’s another one,” Tracy said. “Try artificial insemination instead.”

  “An unnatural option. Did you know that freshly collected semen have a much higher success rate than frozen spermatozoa during the artificial insemination process? That alone proves the natural way is better.” Marietta forced herself to shrug. What good would it do to confide in Tracy that she was tempted, even at this late date, to take the easier route. “Besides, why do I need artificial insemination when I already have everything I want in a sperm supplier?”

  Marietta punctuated her statement by getting into the car. Before she could reach for the door handle, Tracy positioned her body inside the open door and leaned down, banging her forehead on the door frame in the process. She held her head with one hand and grabbed Marietta’s wrist with the other.

  “Wait. Think about this logically and consider what could go wrong. How can you be sure this Harold doesn’t have a communicable disease?”

  “I have copies of his medical records.”

  Tracy bit her lip, a long-held character trait that meant she was thinking. “Okay. Then here’s another. What if you do get pregnant, and he wants to play a part in the baby’s life?”

  “He can’t. You know that, Tracy. I neither want nor need a man to help me raise my child. He’s already signed a contract relinquishing all rights to any baby we might conceive.”

  “What if he changes his mind?”

  “It won’t matter. I’ve taken precautionary steps to assure he won’t be able to locate me if he does.”

  “What kind of steps?”

  “I’m going by the alias Rhea. In Greek mythology, she was the mother of the Olympian gods. Don’t you think that’s clever?”

  Tracy didn’t even crack a smile. “What else?”

  “The only address he has for me is a post-office box, I made the hotel reservation under my alias and I’m not sharing any personal information. Why do you think I’m driving a rental car?”

  Tracy didn’t answer. Instead she looked hard at her sister, and uncannily zeroed in on the aspect of the plan that disconcerted Marietta most. “You do realize you have to have sex with him.”

  Marietta tried not to shudder. In her opinion, sex was a sweaty, undignified, unpleasant experience. Some women, Tracy for instance, claimed to enjoy it, but Marietta had found the deed was mainly about male gratification. In the animal kingdom, for example, the act often took less than ten seconds, and females seemed spectacularly unmoved by it.

  The only real benefit Marietta detected for most females, whether human or animal, was procreation. Which was what she needed to remember. For most of her life, she’d wanted to be a mother. As a child, she’d dressed her stuffed animals in diapers and pushed a toy baby carriage around the neighborhood. As an adult, her arms ached every time she saw a mother cuddling a sweet-smelling, cooing baby. If sex was the price she had to pay to get a child of her own, so be it.

  “Of course I know I have to have sex with him. I’m a biology professor, remember?” The wind blew through the open car door, and she shivered. “Would you let me go? It’s too cold to stay out here arguing with you.”

  Tracy’s head dropped. Reluctantly, she released Marietta’s wrist and backed away from the car. “You won’t let me talk you out of this, will you, Mari? You won’t even consider that something could go wrong.”

  “I’ve planned everything to the most minute detail.” Marietta slammed the door shut, turned on the ignition and listened to the rental car roar to life. She maneuvered out of the parking spot, rolling down the window to make her parting point. “The plane’s en route. The man who agreed to give me a child and disappear forever is on it. What could possibly go wrong?”

  AS THE PLANE did a bumpy landing dance down the runway, Jax theorized he’d gotten the wrong stomach when God handed out body parts.

  Anyone looking at him would see a very large, exceptionally strong man who appeared able to weather any hardship. Yet his stomach had soared and dropped with every air pocket the plane hit.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead. Geez, he hated to fly. Takeoffs and landings were such torture he had to call on all his willpower not to squeeze the hell out of the armrests. He’d done that once, and the plastic had cracked like an eggshell.

  He much preferred driving, but, unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. Not only would it take too long, but it would look bad. Very bad. And one thing Jax Jackson hated to look was bad.

  The plane finally skidded to a stop, causing everything he had drunk that day to slosh against the wall of his stomach before settling into an uneasy peace.

  When he was certain the nausea-inducing flying machine was motionless, he got unsteadily to his feet. He made sure nobody was watching before he pinched his cheeks to restore his color. Then he smoothed down his suit pants with hands he wouldn’t allow to shake and got into the stream of passengers deboarding Flight 707.

  “I hope your flight was enjoyable.” A pretty blond flight attendant caught and held his eyes when he reached the cockpit. He summoned a grin. She had legs like a dancer, and she’d found reasons to bend over in front of him often enough during the flight to make sure he noticed.

  “It about made me want to sprout wings and take off myself,” Jax said, automatically reaching for her hand when she held it out. She pressed something into his palm.

  “That’s not necessary.” Her eye contact never wavered. “We’re the ones who can make you soar.”

  Somebody toting an overstuffed carry-on bag bumped into him, propelling Jax out the door and down the loading tunnel leading to the terminal. He breathed deeply, grateful he didn’t have to take another lungful of the recirculated stuff that passed for oxygen on the plane. He felt immediately better, but still wished he could stick his head outside a window for some fresh air.

  A girl in her late teens wearing a fur jacket and a tight skirt her mama should have outlawed gave him a come-hither look over her shoulder. Not wanting to be rude, he inclined his head in a brief nod.

  The piece of paper the blonde flight attendant slipped him was still in his hand. He unfolded it, revealing her name and telephone number. He stuffed it into his pocket along with the number the brunette working the flight had given him. Their names were Bunny and Loralei, which would work just fine had they been porno stars.

 
Considering the possibilities the names brought up, he figured he just might call one of them later. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. Jax tried to separate business from pleasure, and this was a business trip.

  He didn’t have to work until much later tonight, but he hadn’t gotten where he was by goofing off. He’d check into his hotel, load up on carbs during a quick lunch and hit the weight machines for a couple of hours.

  By the time he had his itinerary planned, he was inside the terminal. He bypassed the airline employee dispensing information on connecting flights and was heading for baggage claim when a name on a sign stopped him.

  Harold McGinty.

  He’d forgotten all about breaking the news to Mac’s mystery woman that Mac was standing her up. Why had he said he’d do it anyway? It wasn’t possible to be thought of as one of the good guys while delivering bad news.

  He took a few steps toward the sign, figuring he might as well get it over with. The woman holding it shifted positions, giving him a clear view of her.

  The first thing he noticed was her dress, if you could call it that. It hung off her like a muted-plaid sack, stretching nearly to the floor and covering all but her ankles. Her hair, which was some shade between blond and brown, was secured in a loose bun at the back of her head, as though she couldn’t be bothered with it.

  Her face was in profile, revealing a longish nose, a small chin and full, unpainted lips that told him she didn’t have much use for makeup. She turned to look at him with eyes of an indeterminate color — Were they hazel? Gray? Brown? — and her jaw dropped. Then those kaleidoscopic eyes rolled.

  She wasn’t what you’d call pretty. Despite that fabulous mouth, her face was too stern, and perhaps a little too narrow. She was also too pale, as though she didn’t spend any time in the sun, and she was neither model tall nor pixie short. He couldn’t really tell because of the dress, but her curves seemed neither particularly lacking nor especially rounded.

  “You must be Rhea.” He walked toward her, surprised at the direction his mind was taking. He wondered what her body looked like under that sack, how her hair would appear if she let it down, what color her eyes turned when she was turned on.

  A long moment passed before she nodded, and it seemed as though she had to force her head into the motion. Surprise, tinged by dejection, gripped Jax. It had been a long time since a woman looked at him as though she didn’t like what she saw.

  “Don’t tell me you’re Harold McGinty.”Her voice wasn’t throaty. She didn’t purr or linger sexily over the words. If anything, she sounded disappointed. And more than a little nervous.

  “Actually, people call me Jax.” He gave a half bow, hoping to put her at ease, hoping to make her like him. “At your service.”

  She muttered something that sounded like, “You got that part right,” but he couldn’t be sure because her heavy sigh distracted him. She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head, making him think he’d misread her and she wasn’t nervous at all.

  “Oh, well.” She heaved another sigh. “I suppose you’ll have to suffice, Harold.”

  “Jax,” he corrected automatically. “And, what do you mean, I’ll have to suffice? What’s wrong with me?”

  Her eyes dropped to his size-fourteen feet, lifted to somewhere in the vicinity of his trouser front and widened. She closed her eyes briefly before bringing them back to his face. “You’re substantially, uh, bigger than I imagined you’d be, Harold.”

  “Jax,” he corrected again. He had the fleeting impression she was sizing up his penis, but surely that wasn’t correct. She must be referring to his considerable height, making it clear that she preferred short men. Like the real Harold McGinty. “I’ve never found how big I am to be a problem.”

  “Here’s hoping it’s not this time, either,” she said, and again he got the fleeting impression that she was nervous. Then she squared her shoulders and gave the sign an authoritative toss into a garbage can before picking up a long, dark coat from a nearby chair. She barely glanced in his direction. “Shall we go?”

  He stared at her, puzzled by her attitude. She thought they were going on a blind date, for cripe’s sake. She should at least want to impress him just a little. But, so far, all she’d done is make it clear that he didn’t impress her.

  It was downright insulting, is what it was.

  “Harold? Are you coming?”

  Harold. She thought she was going on a blind date with Harold McGinty, not with Jax Jackson. If Harold had showed up instead of him, would her delectable mouth have curved into the smile of welcome she hadn’t bothered to give Jax?

  “Harold?”

  He should tell her he wasn’t Harold McGinty right now. He had a hotel to check into, weights to lift, a schedule to keep. He should forget the way his libido had hummed when he’d seen her standing there in her sack cloth. It had probably been a fluke, anyway.

  His gaze snagged on her pouty, unpainted mouth. She had the kind of full, wide lips that didn’t need lipstick to look rosy. They got a man to thinking of running his tongue over them before kissing her senseless. Of pressing her down into a mattress and begging her to use that mouth to do erotic things to him.

  “Well?” She tapped her foot, drawing his attention to her ankle. Her very nicely shaped ankle.

  “I’m coming,” he said, making the snap decision. By the end of the blind date, he bet he could have her looking at him with something more than disappointment. Guilt over his deception bloomed within him, but he squashed it. What possible harm could it do? He deliberately gave Rhea the slow smile he’d been told could charm the habit off a nun. The corners of her mouth didn’t even lift. “But only if you promise to call me Jax.”

  “I’ll call you whatever you want,” she muttered, “as long as you deliver.”

  Before Jax could figure out what she meant by that, she strode away. His eyes dropped to her rear, but she didn’t call attention to it with the exaggerated hip roll that he was so used to from women.

  Wondering why he found that sexy, he picked up his bags and followed her.

  Chapter 3

  The man named Harold who wanted to be called Jax had been talking non-stop since they’d gotten into her rental car, gaining high marks for verbal acuity and making Marietta wonder when she’d ever met a more talkative man. He launched into a joke about a skeleton who came into a bar and asked for a beer and a mop, and she had her answer: Never.

  “You didn’t laugh,” he said, making it sound like an accusation.

  “Maybe I didn’t think it was funny,” she replied, which he took as an invitation to tell another joke, this time about a dyslexic devil worshiper who sold his soul to Santa.

  “You’re still not laughing,” he said.

  Marietta managed to make her lips curve marginally upward. She’d been only half-listening, partly because she was concentrating on navigating the streets of Washington D.C. but mostly to avoid questioning whether she had the nerve to go through with her plan. She had to go through with it, because he was the perfect candidate.

  He had an IQ of 145, which put him in the top one percent of the population. He came from such excellent stock that nobody on his family tree had ever been felled by cancer, heart disease or diabetes. He had 20-15 vision in both eyes, not to mention a professional job as a biochemist.

  Any mother-to-be would be lucky to have access to his genetic material.

  But who would have thought Harold McGinty would be so hot? Especially because, in rebellion to a beauty-obsessed society, she’d stated in her ad that looks didn’t matter? She’d been expecting somebody with a less-than-stellar appearance, not the living reproduction of the Statue of David.

  She thought about what Michelangelo’s statue wasn’t wearing, and what Jax wouldn’t be wearing when she got him to the hotel room, and fought off an attack of anxiety. The bad kind.

  “. . . and the bartender said,” Jax continued, as though she’d been paying close attention to the first part of his jok
e, “‘We don’t get many fire-breathing dragons around these parts.’ ‘At these prices,’ the dragon replied, ‘It’s no wonder.’”

  Jax laughed at the punch line, telling Marietta she’d missed something. Then again, as bad as his jokes were, maybe she hadn’t. Taking her mind off his naked skin, she pulled her rental car under the impressive awning of what was arguably the fanciest hotel in D.C.

  “Geez, you’re like a laugh miser,” Jax said when he stopped chuckling. “Don’t you ever just let loose?”

  She turned off the engine and removed the valet key from the ring. “I’m not prone to laughter.”

  “This should be interesting,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “because I’m not prone to being serious.”

  “Nice place,” he commented, his gaze drinking in the elaborate Tudor facade of the Hotel Grande. “I take it this hotel has a grand restaurant?”

  She turned to look at him, and her heart gave an extra ba-boom. Dismaying, but not surprising. From her position as a biology professor at prestigious Kennedy College in Washington D.C., she had carved out a reputation as a national authority on the evolution of sex. She knew, from her vast warehouse of biological facts, that the reason she found his face attractive was because of its outstanding symmetry.

  His heavily lashed chocolate-colored eyes, shaded by matching brows that arched at exactly the right degree, were mirror images of each other. The halves of his strong nose and sensuously slanted mouth couldn’t have been more alike. His right cheekbone was at the same, lofty height as his left. The tip of his nose was lined up in the dead center of his square jaw.

  Her subconscious, Marietta realized, had concluded those perfectly matched features meant he was a man better able to weather environmental hazards than his asymmetric brothers. That kind of subliminal thinking was a relic from the days man had spent in a hunter/gatherer society, but still packed a powerful punch.