Sitting on the bow of his boat, her little feet in ridiculously small-looking tennis shoes, the woman made him nuts and peaceful at the same time. Helping Mallory was the right thing to do. Tucker would have expected it of him.
Hauling her downstairs to bed was not even in the realm of possibility.
Nor did he want it to be, anymore. Sex with Mallory came with a whole knotted ball of strings attached.
“That’s the beauty of it, Mal,” he said, glancing over as his fishing line grew taut. There’d be no fish there. He hadn’t baited the damned thing.
He could just imagine being in the middle of presenting his case and having to stop to reel in a slippery, smelly, great-tasting piece of fish.
“We’re in complete control here, Mal, and we’ve got the perfect vehicle. We’ve spent three years building a friendship that would allow the peace of mind you need for this venture. It couldn’t be better if we’d planned it all along.”
“We live on the surface,” she said. “A baby won’t stay there. Nor will all of the emotions attached to having one. I’m fully prepared for that. Are you?”
She wasn’t getting it. “That’s just it! I won’t be emotionally involved. I’ll be going on with my life, as planned, while providing you the means to go as safely as possible on with yours.”
Frowning at him, her eyes only partially hidden by her sunglasses, she said, “You honestly think you can father a child without feeling anything?”
Sure, there’d be some feelings attached, at first probably, until he fully adjusted to the changes in their lives. “No more so than any other sperm donor.”
“They don’t ever know if their sperm is even used, let alone have a relationship with the recipient.”
“Some do.” He’d researched that one. “Men donate to gay women friends. Women are surrogates for gay men friends. I read about a man who donated to his best friend, who was celibate, so he and his wife could have a baby. And a mother who carried for her barren daughter and son-in-law—”
“We were married, Bray. We had a son together. Lost a child together. And you think you can father my second child and just walk away?”
“I do.” He really did. “When I’m ready to have a family of my own, I know full well I can do so. I’ll meet a woman, the desire will be there and I’ll have my family. I’m not there yet. But you’re ready to have your family, and I can help ensure that you have the best chance at doing so happily.” He didn’t waver as he met her eye to eye. The plan made perfect sense.
“I need your support during the pregnancy more than I need the sperm,” she said. “Sperm I can buy. But you’re right, it’s going to be hard. I’ve done all the reading, too, and giving birth after SIDS is hard. Your head plays with you, makes you afraid what happened before can happen again. I blame myself, like my body is broken somehow because it produced a child with a faulty breath regulator. What I was hoping to have from you was the common sense reminders that calm my fears.”
“And you’ll have them.”
“It would be much easier for you to give them with more detachment,” she said, the steady look in her eye and the calm tone of her voice making him listen to her. “Having no intimate involvement will better ensure you getting through this with the least amount of discomfort. You know, if the child isn’t yours...”
“He won’t be mine in an emotional or legal sense,” he said immediately.
She was making a point. He got it. When the kid was born, wouldn’t Braden need a second chance, too?
He shook his head, adjusted his baitless pole. “I’m giving away my sperm, Mal, not becoming a father.” The designation was key. “It’s all in how you process it.”
But if she truly didn’t want his biological component in her child...if, in spite of the testing he’d had done, she still thought his genes were partially to blame for what had happened, then he wouldn’t force her. Couldn’t force her. And he didn’t even want to try. He just wanted this to work out for her. Most of the process was completely out of his control, except for this one small area where he could possibly positively affect her chances.
“Can I think about it?”
Her question came right when he was giving up.
“Of course.”
“On the deck? In the sun?” She was already crawling her way off the bow, giving him too good a view of her ass as she did so.
Way too good.
Hard in the wrong place, he set about baiting his line. It was time to do some real fishing. And not for the things he couldn’t have. Or things that no longer existed.
* * *
Weak in the knees, Mallory made it back to her lounger without incident. Sinking into the woven chair, she kept on her sunglasses just in case Braden was looking. And she refrained from wiping the tears from her cheeks for the same reason.
She’d just been given a second chance. From the minute she’d met her ex-husband she’d known that she’d wanted him to be the father of her biological family. To someone who’d grown up an orphaned foster kid, whose own mother hadn’t even known who’d fathered her, biology was important.
So important.
As important as Braden Harris was to her.
She couldn’t let him do this. Couldn’t use him this way. It was his guilt playing with him. She knew that.
Just as she knew that keeping your baby in your room was a key SIDS preventative. She’d studied them all, from the Mayo Clinic to the American Academy of Pediatrics and every blog or message board she could find in between:
Place baby on back, not side or stomach.
Remove all fluffy bedding.
Keep crib as bare as possible.
No prenatal smoking.
Good prenatal care.
Pacifier at night after four weeks of age.
Breastfeeding.
And baby in your own room for a minimum of six months, better if it was twelve.
Not in your bed but in your room. It had to do with waking more easily, among other things. Logic then followed that if she’d been home that night Tucker would have been in his smaller crib in their room, where he’d been every night since his birth. She’d have been there, too. Which could have prevented SIDS.
Braden had done his own reading. He had to know this, too. And he was offering to give her what she wanted in order to appease his guilt.
Maybe it would be kindest to give him a way to atone and move on.
How could she put him through fathering a child he didn’t want? How could she ask him to experience the pregnancy with her, knowing what it would probably cost him? How could she hurt him any more than he’d already been hurt, loving him like she did?
Unless...if atoning set him free...
She tried to doze, to let the sun take her to the peaceful place outside of pain, and ended up thinking about Tucker instead. The sound of him laughing. The first time he’d laughed Braden had been at work. She’d been alone with the baby, coming at him again and again with funny noises, stopping just short of reaching him to pull back and start again, reveling in the way his eyes had followed her every movement.
Braden had missed the whole thing. Tucker had been asleep when he’d arrived home that evening and though Braden had gone to wake him, she’d told him not to. It would have been too hard to get the baby back down. Feeling as sleep deprived as she had been, the admonition hadn’t been completely without warrant, but what would it have hurt in the long run? Yeah, she’d been exhausted, but it wasn’t like she’d had to get up to go to work. She’d still had another month of leave ahead of her. Even if the baby hadn’t laughed again that night, Braden would have racked up more minutes of memories to feed him in the years that followed.
Someone like Braden probably wouldn’t access those memories like she did. And when they came to him, calling up a wealth of emotion, they might be more a hindranc
e than anything else.
So maybe someone like Braden, someone who was happier shutting out emotion than letting it in, would be the perfect sperm donor—if he really didn’t want another child of his own.
But what if he only thought he didn’t? What if, once they got into it, once she heard a heartbeat and then started to show, once the baby started to kick, he found out he really wanted it all again, too?
She tried to find the idea abhorrent but couldn’t.
Because if Braden could be the man she’d thought he was, there’d be no more perfect scenario than having his baby.
Which was the true problem, she acknowledged, lying there with her eyes closed, the sun beating down on her, the gentle sway of the boat rocking her.
The real problem was her. What if she got pregnant, heard the heartbeat, started to show, felt the baby kicking her...and wanted Braden to get excited about all of those things because it was his baby, too? What if she fell in love with him all over again?
What if she started to fall back into who she’d been? A woman who’d been ashamed to cry because her husband didn’t like emotional outbursts. One who’d curtailed her most exciting moments when he was around for the same reason.
One who’d grown to relish her time alone with her baby so she could gush and be all intensely moved by the miracle of him and just feel complete.
No, she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t have Braden’s baby.
That settled, she concentrated on the slow rhythm of the boat’s movement and tried to drift off with it.
But she lay there, wide awake as a thought struck her.
She had to put the baby first.
Always.
In the end, she didn’t matter at all. What mattered was her baby’s health. His or her best chance at a long and happy life. Braden was right. With a sperm donor there were many unknowns.
She herself was an unknown, too. Yes, she’d had her own genetic testing and didn’t carry any alarming signs, but her family might. She had no way of knowing if there was a history of cancer. Or liver or kidney disease. Or slowly developing areas of the brain that regulated breathing.
Not only could her baby develop something, but she could, too. What if kidney failure ran in her family? Or car accidents?
Sitting up, Mallory opened her eyes, taking a minute to bring herself back mentally to where she was. The ocean. The boat. Fresh sea air and sunshine.
Car accidents weren’t genetic.
But they did take people unexpectedly, leaving loved ones behind to fend for themselves.
In her case, it would leave her little one with no known family at all. He or she would be just like Mallory, a foster.
Rising, she made her way back to the front of the boat. Braden was sitting with his forearms resting on raised knees, looking in her direction. His line lay limp before him. There wasn’t a single fish in the basket close by.
With a raised brow, he seemed to ask if she’d reached her decision.
“I have a question.”
“Okay. If I don’t have the answer, I’ll see what I can do about finding it.”
The reply was so Braden she almost teared up again. And smiled, too. He tried. He really, really tried hard.
“If something were to happen to me, would you be willing to take the child, to raise him or her?”
“Of course.”
It wasn’t so much his answer—which she’d have expected if she’d given herself enough time to think about it—as it was his lack of hesitation that set her suddenly frightened heart at ease.
“Then I accept your offer.”
“Good.”
He was looking at her. She looked back at him.
They’d just agreed she was going to have his baby.
And it felt as though they’d never been further apart.
Chapter Five
Feeling not the least bit relaxed, Braden gave up any pretense of enjoying a Sunday morning fishing jaunt. Mallory seemed to share his eagerness to get off the boat, based on how quickly she’d agreed with his suggestion that they head back to shore.
It was as though once they’d made their decision to give her another child, they couldn’t stand to be around each other.
The idea was ludicrous, and yet, it held a strong ring of truth, as well. Strong enough that he couldn’t just let things go as they were. If he and Mallory couldn’t be friends, if he didn’t have the access to help her out when she needed him, the entire point of his involvement was moot.
Luckily he knew exactly how to fix that problem.
“I never did tell you why I called Friday night’s meeting,” he said, planning to finally tell her of his pending move. He’d lowered the throttle and headed a little more slowly toward the private marina where his dock was located. In the seat next to him, she’d been silently watching their progress.
Now she glanced at him, waiting for him to continue. He wanted to know what she was thinking—a husband’s desire, not a divorced friend’s one. Cutting the throttle completely, he let them bob on the water.
“What’s her name?” she asked. And then, before he could answer, she added, “And are you sure she’ll be okay with this? Because if you need to reconsider, I fully understand.”
Staring at her, he wasn’t sure whether to grin or be pissed. About to embark on a huge and potentially frightening life change, considering the demons that would be on the trip with her, Mallory was sitting there thinking about him. Letting him off the hook.
Just as she’d always done.
Why the thought pissed him off, he wasn’t sure.
Or maybe it wasn’t her at all.
“There is no ‘her,’” he said. But he didn’t like how available that made him sound, so he added, “At least not at the moment. And when there is, in order to qualify, she’ll need to be okay with the fact that my ex-wife has a child that is biologically mine and that I am her friend.”
Yes. That was it in a nutshell. All clean, wrapped up and completely doable.
“She’ll have to be one special woman.” Her grin made him think of how special she was.
Right.
And, of course, any future relationship he might have would be with someone else who was special to him. That was the nature of hooking up. It would be that way whether he donated sperm or not.
“I can put off my appointment,” she said, making him aware that he hadn’t responded to her earlier comment.
The ocean’s vastness called to him. And yet, there he sat in the harbor. The story of his life. At sea, but missing out on a world of possibility.
No. What was that nonsense? His life was a damned good story. He got up every morning, eager to get going. His work didn’t just earn him loads of money; it energized him.
“I think you need time to seriously reconsider,” Mallory said, turning that warm, concerned gaze on him. How well he recalled that look. He’d almost been jealous of his own son once, when he’d been trying to talk to Mallory about a particularly testy client and a lucrative deal that had almost gone sour, and instead of hearing him, she’d heard Tucker sneeze and had immediately turned that same look on the baby.
Hard to believe he even remembered that.
“It will just be too messy.”
Whoa. She wasn’t changing her mind, was she?
“Only if we make it so,” he said, jumping in before the deal went south on him. “It will be what we make it,” he continued, looking her straight in the eye. “We’re friends. Your child will be your child, just as though you had an anonymous donor. I will be there for both of you, as a friend of the family, in the same way as I would be if you purchased the sperm.” He’d spent much of the previous day getting straight with it all. “The only difference will be the biology—a scientific component that no one will ever need to know about—that will make you and the ch
ild safer than if you did it anonymously.”
She still looked as though she needed reassurance.
“It’s not like we just divorced,” he said, putting every ounce of confidence he had into his words. “We’re three years in, Mal. We’ve got this down.”
She nodded.
“If anyone can do it, we can.”
She watched him, saying nothing.
“It’s perfect for us, really,” he said, continuing to fill the silence. “You said multiple times that I’m detached. So here’s where my detachment works for us.”
He hadn’t been detached when they’d been married. But he was now. Somehow he’d become what she’d thought she’d seen.
“I still think I should cancel my appointment to give you more time.”
“I don’t need any more time. If you do, if you want to think about this some more, then by all means, postpone things. But you don’t need to do it on my account.”
Her response was quick. “I’m not worried about me. My mind is fully made up.”
“I meant about using me as a donor. If that’s going to be a problem for you.”
“I think it’s fraught with potentially difficult situations, most I fear that we can’t even see right now, but, honestly, I’d take on any of them to have the peace of mind of knowing that if something happened to me, my child would have biological family willing to welcome him.”
“But he would only know about that biology if such an occasion arose.” They needed that clear. They were proceeding as if this was an anonymous sperm donor. For her sake, more than anything. It was what she needed.
“Correct.” She nodded but then glanced out to sea.
“Maybe you do need to take a little time,” he told her, not wanting to rush her. Mallory had never been one to jump into anything. Because she gave her all when she got there.
She looked at him. “I told you, my mind is firmly made up.”
He nodded, believing her.
“So, do you need me tomorrow, then?” He’d never been to a fertility clinic, but he’d heard his share of do-it-in-the-cup jokes. Seen sitcom episodes on TV. It wasn’t his style, but what the hell.
The Baby Arrangement Page 4