Baby for Keeps

Without warning, she felt his warm hands on her shoulders. “Sit down, Mia. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, sniffling and, as usual, without a tissue.

“Here. Take this.” The pristine square of white cotton he pulled from his back pocket was still warm from his body. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, feeling hollow and shaky.

Dylan tugged her down beside him on the sofa, both of them glancing at Cora automatically to make sure she was in no danger. The baby was oblivious. “Don’t worry,” she said, trying to laugh. “I’m not going to have a nervous breakdown.”

He grinned, revealing the slightest hint of a dimple. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got all night.”

The genuine concern in his eyes disarmed her, despite her embarrassment. It couldn’t hurt to have an impartial opinion. She was at a crossroads, and perhaps she was too close to the situation and too sleep-deprived to make a rational decision.

“Okay,” she said. “You asked for it.”

“Start at the beginning.” He stretched a muscular arm along the back of the sofa, making her uncomfortably aware of his masculine scent and closeness. His khaki slacks and navy knit polo shirt with the bar’s name embroidered on the chest fit him in a way that emphasized everything about him that was male.

Her hands shook, so she clasped them in her lap. “After I turned twenty-nine, I realized that I wanted a baby. A cliché, I know, but my biological clock was ticking so loudly, I couldn’t ignore it.”

“Did the man in your life agree?”

“There was no man at that moment. Well, there was one. For about fifteen minutes. But we were a terrible match, and thankfully we both recognized it before we did anything irrevocable.”

“So who did you have in mind for a daddy?”

“Nobody,” she said simply. “I was well educated and financially secure. I decided that I could raise a child on my own.” She couldn’t fault the skepticism she saw on his face. In retrospect, she had been both naive and overly confident in her abilities.

“There’s still the matter of sperm.”

His droll comment made her cheeks heat again. “Well, of course, but I had that all figured out. As part of the scientific community in Raleigh, I possessed a working knowledge of what was going on in most of our experimental labs. And of course, fertility research was and still is a majorly funded arm of study.”

“Still no sperm.”

“I’m getting there. Once I found a doctor and a facility that I trusted, I had all the initial tests to see if I was healthy and ovulating well.”

“And were you?”

“Definitely. So I knew the timing was right. Then all I had to do was visit a sperm bank and select the proper donor.”

“Who, I’m assuming, would be a doctoral student with intellectual capabilities matching your own.”

He was entirely serious.

She shook her head vehemently. “No. Not even close. I would never do that to a child of mine. I wanted a normal baby.”

“Good Lord, Mia. You mean to tell me you deliberately tried to make little Cora less smart than her mother?” The baffled shock on his face gave her a moment’s pause.

“I wouldn’t say that.” She heard the defensiveness in her words and winced inwardly. “But I selected a candidate who was a blue-collar worker with average intelligence.”

“Why?”

“I wanted her to have a happy life.”

* * *

Dylan honestly didn’t know what to say. I wanted her to have a happy life. Those eight words, quietly spoken, told him more about Mia than if he’d had her résumé in front of him. For the first time, he understood that even if his school career had been painful and difficult, Mia’s had also, but in an entirely different way.

The knock on the door saved him from having to respond to that last, heart-wrenching statement. Soon he and Mia were enjoying appetizers and burgers. Based on the drinks she had ordered downstairs, he avoided anything alcoholic and instead opted for Cokes to accompany their meal.

Mia ate like she hadn’t eaten in a week. “This food is amazing,” she said. “Thank you so much. I’ve been living off frozen dinners and frozen pizza for days. My mom helped out for the first week and a half, but the baby exhausted her, so I finally encouraged her to go home.”

He lifted an eyebrow, helping himself to another handful of French fries. “You’ve left me hanging,” he said. “Finish your story, please.”

“I was hoping you’d lost interest. The whole sorry tale doesn’t put me in a very good light.”

When she wiped a dab of ketchup from her lower lip, to his surprise, he felt a little zing that was a lot like sexual interest. Squashing that thought, he leaned back in his chair. “I’m all ears.”

Mia was slender and graceful. Though she wore neither makeup nor jewelry, she carried herself with an inherent femininity. Back in high school, he had kissed her once upon a time, more out of curiosity than anything else. The heat had surprised and alarmed him. He needed Mia’s help with schoolwork. He couldn’t afford to alienate her, just because his teenage libido was revving on all cylinders.

Now, thinking back to how he had perceived the fifteen-year-old Mia, he wondered what had attracted him. She’d been quiet and timid, although she had managed to stand up to him on more than one occasion when he tried to blow off a project or an assignment.

Her looks and figure had been nothing spectacular in the eyes of a teenage boy. Mia had been on the cusp of womanhood, with no breasts to speak of, and a body that was still girlish despite her maturity in other ways. Yet something about her had appealed to him. In all of their interactions, she had never once made fun of his ineptitude, nor had she patronized him.

Now, from the vantage point of adulthood, he marveled that she had put up with his arrogance and antagonism. Though eventually they had become friends, for weeks at the beginning of their relationship he had acted like a total jerk. And an ungrateful jerk at that.

He kept silent, counting on the fact that she would eventually talk to him if he didn’t push.

Mia finished the last swallow of her drink, stacked her dishes neatly and curled her legs beneath her. “The thing is,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if about to confess to a crime, “artificial insemination is expensive. I assumed, quite erroneously, that since I was young and healthy I would get pregnant the first time.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. And every month when I got my period, I cried.”

“Why was it so important to you?”

She blinked, her expression one of shock, as though no one had ever dared ask her that question. “I wanted someone of my own to love. You may not remember, but my folks were older parents. They had me when my mom was forty-three. So though I love them very much, I understood why they wanted to retire and move south. Even when we lived in the same state, we didn’t see that much of each other.”

“Why not?”

She hesitated. “They were proud because I was smart, but they had no idea what to do with me. Once I was out on my own, the gulf widened. I’m sure part of it was my fault. I never quite understood how to talk to them about my work. And besides...”

“Go on.”

“I found out when I was a teenager that my parents had never really wanted children. It was a Pandora’s box kind of thing. I read one of my mom’s journals. Turns out that when I was conceived, my mother was going through menopause and thought she couldn’t get pregnant. So I was an unwelcome surprise in more ways than one. They did the best they could. I’m grateful for that.”

Dylan thought of his big, close-knit, sometimes rowdy family. And of the way his mother cherished and coddled each of her sons though they were now grown men. They all had their moments of discord, of course. What family didn’t? But he couldn’t imagine a life where his brothers and his mom weren’t an integral part of who he was. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “That must have hurt.”