Baby Business

Lisa folded her arms across her full bosom, Macy’s first indication that she wasn’t going to get the commiseration she anticipated. “His wife died while she was carrying their child, Macy.”

“Says Thad Winters. Some guy puts up a hundred grand and women fall all over themselves to get in line. But has anyone checked his story? What if it’s not true?”

“Did he seem insincere to you?”

Macy pictured Thad Winters’s rugged face, the high cheekbones, the thick brown hair, the square jaw and slightly cleft chin, light blue eyes contrasting sharply with the darkness of his five-o’clock shadow. The way he easily controlled his tall muscular body lent him a confident air. He seemed driven, focused, intense, but he didn’t seem insincere.

“No, but good looks and an expensive office are no reason to trust a man, Lisa.”

Her friend grinned. “He’s good-looking, huh?”

Macy felt herself blush. She knew it had something to do with the way Thad Winters had affected her on a personal level, but she tried to ignore that, hoping Lisa wouldn’t notice. “He’s not bad,” she lied.

“‘Not bad’ coming from you means he looks as good as Brad Pitt. And if he’s that good-looking, he could probably get any number of women pregnant without spending a dime.”

Macy wasn’t sure she wanted to be convinced by Lisa’s rationale. Despite his physical charms, she was angry at Thad, for reasons she didn’t fully understand. He was offering her the one thing she needed. He was also exacting the highest form of payment, making her give him one baby to save another. “Maybe he thinks it’s some sort of interesting game,” she mused. “Maybe it arouses him to hold so much power over a woman’s destiny, to have us all groveling at his feet for the privilege of bearing his child. You should have seen all the gifts—bribes, really—stacked in his office.”

“I don’t think so. Dr. Peters lived next to the Winters family all the years Thad was growing up and says he’s never met a better man, or someone more capable of leading a successful life.”

“What, does Dr. Peters make a percentage for brokering the deal?” Macy grumbled.

Lisa pulled her frizzy light-brown hair out of her eyes and scowled. “My, aren’t we turning into a cynic! Thad Winters wants his own baby, and he no longer has a wife to give him one. So he’s taking an alternate route. So what? He’s an ad exec.”

“Which means…”

“He’s creative. As for the application and stuff, there’s nothing wrong with interviewing, playing it safe.”

“Playing it safe would be waiting until he falls in love and marries again. Playing it safe would be doing it the right way.”

“The right way didn’t work for him. What if he feels certain no woman could ever replace his wife?”

Macy considered this, wondering if she’d grown suspicious of all men because of what had happened with her father and Richard. Her father had left her mother before Macy was born. She didn’t know him, had never known him. And Richard had run off almost as soon as he learned of Haley’s illness, which only confirmed what her mother had taught her as a child: men don’t have what it takes to stick around when the going gets tough. It’s women who hang on through thick and thin. Edna was proving her words by being the one to help Macy pay her bills now that she couldn’t work because of school and the time she spent at the hospital.

“I’m just saying it’s normal for him to have a few questions,” Lisa went on.

“A few questions?” Macy repeated. “Look at this folder. He’s expecting me to write a book! Have I ever taken any drugs? Have I had unprotected sex in the past ten years? Do I drink or smoke? Have I ever sought or obtained psychological counseling? How much caffeine do I drink? I’d have to be the Virgin Mary to pass this test!”

“Well, you’d come closer than anyone else I know. You’ve never smoked or taken drugs. You need counseling for what you’re going through right now, but you’ve never sought or obtained it, so you can feel pretty good about saying no to that. And you haven’t slept with anyone other than your ex-husband.”

After a quick check to make sure Haley was still sleeping, Macy gave her friend a look of incredulity and lowered her voice. “Aren’t you forgetting that guy I went home with from Studio 9 last year? You relieved the baby-sitter I’d gotten to watch Haley that night and picked me up at his house the next morning, remember?”

Lisa grimaced. “You can’t count that. Your husband had just run off with a seventeen-year-old. I think what you did was pretty understandable, considering.”

For a short time after Richard left, Macy had frequented the bar scene as a way to help soften the emotional blow, but two things had slapped her awake to the realization that she was heading down the wrong path. One was the night she’d slept with a total stranger and woke up wondering where the heck she was. The other was Haley’s quickly deteriorating health.

“Judging from this list of questions, I doubt Thad Winters will find it understandable,” Macy said.

“Then don’t reveal it.” Lisa’s words were spoken in her matter-of-fact way, but they were far from the brutal honesty with which she normally dealt with the world.

Macy gaped at her friend. “You’re kidding, right? What’s the purpose of an application if I only put down what he wants to hear?” She chewed on the end of a pen she’d picked up from the nightstand. “Besides, I agreed to let him do a background check.”

“What are the odds of anyone finding out about that night? If you tell the truth, you might not get the job.”

“I’m not sure I want the job,” Macy said softly.

Lisa’s attention turned to Haley’s sleeping form, and her expression grew inexpressibly sad. “You don’t have a choice, kiddo. Your insurance is paying for the hospital stay, but the transplant is going to cost over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it’s not covered. As hard as we’ve tried, we’ve only been able to raise…what?”

“Fifty thousand and change.”

“Fifty thousand dollars. And no hospital is going to perform the operation unless you give them full payment, in advance. We’ve already been through that.”

Reaching across the sterile, white sheets, Macy curled her fingers around Haley’s small hand. Her head was beginning to ache, but it bothered her only slightly more than the burning in her eyes and far less than the ache in her heart.

“What did he say when you told him why you needed the money?” Lisa asked.

“I haven’t told him about Haley yet. I didn’t see any reason to bare my soul when I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do this.”

Lisa studied her. “And now? You’re going to go for it if he chooses you, right?”

Macy sighed. Somehow, somewhere, all the lines had blurred. There was no more black or white, right or wrong, only her daughter, who needed a bone marrow transplant and Macy’s determination that she get it.

“I’m still thinking about it,” she said at last.

THE DIM INTERIOR of the steak house where Thad had told Macy to meet him was a cool respite from the bright April sun, making it seem later than it actually was. Macy removed her sunglasses and slid them into her purse, waiting for her eyes to adjust.

The smells of the restaurant—grilled onions, broiled meat, blue cheese dressing—greeted her more quickly than the hostess’s smile, but did little to chase away the chill that ran through her blood. She was going to do it. Despite all her misgivings, she was actually going to try to convince Thad Winters, a total stranger, that she should be the one to bear his child. And her only consolation was that she’d spoken to Dr. Peters, another fellow who’d known Thad at college, and a couple of his firm’s clients, and they all said the same thing: he was an honest, intelligent man who deserved to be a father. It was a shame that fate had robbed him.

Just as fate was trying to rob her now of Haley, Macy thought. But she wasn’t about to let that happen—at least not without a fight.

“One for dinner?” the hostess asked.

“No, I’m meeting someone.” Surreptitiously studying the tables she could see from her vantage point at the entrance, Macy hoped Thad Winters hadn’t arrived yet. She needed a few minutes to calm down after her most recent conversation with Haley’s oncologist. The stark realities he softly intoned always shook her to the core, where a fundamental part of her refused to believe her daughter’s chances could really be so slim.

But Thad Winters was already waiting for her. He looked up from the drink he was nursing at a table nearby and spotted her at almost the same instant she noticed him. Standing, he waved to make sure he had her attention, then folded his tall form back into the booth.

“You’re early,” he said conversationally as she put down her bag and slid into the seat opposite him. “I take it you didn’t have any trouble finding the restaurant.”

“No.” She felt his gaze run over her hair, knit top and blue jeans and wished she’d had time to freshen up since her afternoon classes at the University of Utah’s College of Medicine. She’d returned to the hospital, instead, where Haley had been watching Robin Hood.

“Can I order you a glass of wine or something?” he asked.

It looked as though he was having a mixed drink, but Macy wasn’t here to enjoy herself. She asked for a club soda, then pulled the application from her purse and slid it across the table. “I’ve answered all the questions.”

She cringed as he picked up the document and began thumbing through it, partly because many of the questions were uncomfortably personal, but mostly because, in the end, she had lied about having slept with the stranger from Studio 9. Haley needed the money too badly for her to risk the truth. And she justified her falsehood by repeating over and over to herself that it was the only time in her life she’d done something so irresponsible.

When he paused about halfway through, Macy squirmed in her seat. What was he reading? Her answer to the question about having regular menstrual cycles? The one that asked about her marital history? She wished he’d take the darn thing home to go over it, but he thought of their arrangement as business. And if it was business, then this was a business dinner and a perfectly acceptable place to study the “prospectus” in which he was considering investing so much.

God, when had she become a commodity?

The moment I walked through the door of his office a week ago.

Fortunately the waitress arrived with Macy’s drink, interrupting him. He set the package aside in favor of the thick, tasseled menu the young woman handed them both.

“Are you finding anything you like?” he asked after several minutes.

Macy peeked over the menu she was using to block his close regard and offered what she hoped was an at-ease smile. “I think I’ll have the chicken salad.”

When the waitress returned, Thad ordered her salad and a steak, medium-rare, for himself, then retrieved something from his briefcase. He glanced through it, apparently comparing it to what Macy had written on the application, and she suddenly felt as though the word liar hovered in the air over her head.

A frown creased his forehead. “Your grandmother died of heart disease?”

“Yes, but she was eighty-eight, hardly cut down in her prime.”

He nodded. “There’s no information here about your father.”

“Because I don’t know anything about him.”

A raised eyebrow told her he expected to hear more.

“He ran out on my mother after she got pregnant with me. It seems he didn’t share her desire to raise a family.”

“I see.” He went back to his questionnaire, and Macy suddenly wished she’d ordered something much stiffer than soda water.

“You’ve had a miscarriage?”

“Just after my husband and I were married, I became pregnant, but it only lasted three months.”

“What happened?”

“My doctor had no idea why I lost the baby. He said it happens all the time. He gave me a D & C and sent me home.” She took a gulp of her drink, feeling the tasteless fizz roll down her throat and wishing their food would arrive to divert Thad Winters’s attention from her before he reached the infamous Have you had unprotected sex with anyone in the past ten years? question.

“It says here you’ve never taken any drugs.”

“Right.” At least her conscience was clear there.

“You’ve never even experimented? No pot? No acid?”

Macy thought back on all the college parties where she’d been offered such things. She’d been tempted occasionally, but she’d heard of too many bad things that had happened while people weren’t themselves. Except for that short window after Richard left, when she’d drunk more than she should have, she’d always decided to protect her judgment. “No.”

He nodded and kept reading. Finally, he stopped and glanced up, and Macy knew he’d arrived at the question she most wanted to avoid.

“You claim here that you’ve never had unprotected sex, except with your husband.”

Macy let her gaze slide away, unable to face the ocean-blue intensity of his eyes while she lied. Instead of voicing her answer, she nodded, hoping he’d let her get away with that and move on. But he didn’t. He frowned and waited until she started fidgeting with a lock of her hair.

“Do you want to change your answer?” he asked at last.

Forcing her hands away from her hair and beneath the table, where she clenched them, Macy shook her head. “No…ah…no. Why would I?”

“You gave me permission to do a background check, remember?”

“So?” She cleared her throat when the word squeaked out, wishing she could lie as easily and effectively as Richard had always lied to her.

“There’s a woman by the name of Julia Templeton who claims you slept with her boyfriend once. She’s a bartender at Studio 9.”

Macy’s jaw dropped. “You must have turned over every rock in my past to have come up with that information,” she accused.

“That’s what a background check does. Did you think I wouldn’t bother, Macy?”

Being forced into the awkward position she was in and having embarrassed herself by trying to lie made Macy angry. “I’m sure you were most thorough, Mr. Winters. Tell me, what else did you find? That I was the slut of Hillcrest High?”

A muscle ticked in his cheek, but his voice was still civil when he said, “Were you?”

Grabbing her purse, Macy dug through it and tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Then she stood up. “Enjoy my salad, Mr. Winters. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

THAD SAT in the booth at the steak house long after Macy had left, staring at the report Rychert had compiled on Macy McKinney. It was certainly thorough. She’d been raised an only child by a single mother who’d worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles for thirty years and was now retired and living in Las Vegas. She’d attended college on academic scholarship, had dated a lot, despite her pressing studies, and had married a popular football player for the University of Utah. They’d had one daughter, who would be five years old now, and had divorced a year ago when her husband took off with a teenager who’d worked at the local McDonald’s. Since her husband left, she’d enrolled in school again, for the first time since having the baby, and she was now living on student loans, plus some help from her mother, and what she could earn at home transcribing, formatting and proofreading dictated medical reports for various physicians.

Not an easy life for a bright young woman like Ms. McKinney, but one with promise. Her history pointed to an inner strength, dedication and resilience that Thad admired. Rychert had found no evidence of drug use, no alcohol abuse, though she did drink heavily for a short period after her marriage broke up, no particularly worrisome diseases or mental instability lurking in her family genes. And no sexual indiscretions beyond the claims of that one bartender at Studio 9.

Few women had a résumé so clean. Thad had thought he’d found the one. Until she’d lied to him. Then he’d known it would never work. He refused to involve himself with someone he couldn’t trust, not when it came to his child.

Sighing, he finished his drink and pushed the baked potato around some more on his plate. Sex was an uncomfortable subject for most people. With her goal of becoming a pediatrician hanging in the balance, he understood how strong the temptation to lie must have been. But understanding did little to alleviate his disappointment that, regardless of her initial candor, Macy McKinney had turned out to be no better than anyone else.

His cellular phone chirped, interrupting his thoughts. Pushing his plate away, he punched the Talk button. “Thad Winters.”

“It’s Rychert. Did I catch you at a good time?”

Thad looked across at the empty booth, then thought of going home to his empty house. Once he left work, he had nothing but time. He used to spend the evenings with Valerie, painting the nursery, landscaping their yard, cleaning their garage or cars. Since her death, he didn’t know how to fill the evening hours. Her parents and younger sibling had moved out of state when her father retired the year after he and Valerie were married, and they rarely called. His own parents spent their winters in Arizona and wouldn’t be back for a few weeks yet, which left him with a sister and a brother who lived close but had families and busy lives of their own. Sometimes he still tinkered around the house, but there didn’t seem to be much point anymore. At least at the restaurant he could hear the quiet buzz of other people’s conversations, the tinkle of a woman’s laugh.

“Now is good,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Did you get the report on Macy McKinney I sent by courier?”

Thad frowned at the papers that still rested on the table, almost wishing he’d never seen them. “Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I was hopeful until she walked out on me a few minutes ago.”

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Then, “Well, if she’s no longer a possibility, this might not matter, but I was just clearing off my desk to go home and ran across a page of the report I inadvertently left out.”

“I don’t think you left anything out. I’ve got pages one through four and nothing seems missing.”

“This was the last page, page five. Somehow, it didn’t get clipped to the rest.”

Thad shook his glass and listened to the ice clank against the sides. “No problem. It can’t possibly say anything that’s going to make a difference now, anyway.”

“I don’t know. It goes a long way toward explaining why she contacted you in the first place.”

“The money isn’t reason enough?”

“Not for a babe like her. She’s a class act. Single mother, med student, high achiever.”

Putting his glass down, Thad threw his credit card on the table as the waitress came to collect the plates. “Greed can strike anyone, Rychert. She’s a starving student. She has to pay for her schooling somehow. Besides, the part of your report I did receive says she drives an old Pinto. Sounds like she could use a new car.”

“She could use a lot of things, but it’s not school or cars or anything like that she’s concerned about. She has something much bigger on her mind.”

Now Rychert had his full attention. “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

“Her daughter needs a bone marrow transplant. Without it, she’ll die.”

CHAPTER THREE

PRIMARY CARE HOSPITAL was a creamy-white building located on Medical Drive next to the university hospital. It hummed with the fans and belts that ran the air-conditioning, specialized medical equipment and various office machines. The chilled air carried a hint of antiseptic, and the cloying smell of serious illness pervaded the place, but Thad tried not to notice. Instead, he focused on the petite, gray-haired nurse sitting at the receptionist’s desk just inside the main entrance.

“I’m looking for Haley McKinney’s room,” he said when he reached her.

The nurse glanced at the clock, then eyed the huge stuffed teddy bear propped under Thad’s arm. “Visiting hours are over.”

“I know I’m a little late, but I won’t stay long.”

She looked at the bear again. “Well, her mother’s with her. If you make it quick, I don’t see how it can hurt anything, as long as you scrub up before you go in. Her immune system is so low, we have to be careful what germs she comes in contact with. Wait a minute. They moved her a day or two ago. Let me check her room number.” She swiveled away to consult her computer. “Take this hallway to the elevators and go up to the fourth floor. When you get off, you’ll see a set of doors leading to the oncology department. Right inside is a small anteroom where you’ll scrub your hands and arms and face. Just make sure the outer door is closed before you open the inside one. You don’t have a cold or anything, do you?”

“No.”

“Fine. Haley’s in room 3.”

Thad thanked her and pushed away from the counter, growing increasingly uneasy with the memories this sterile environment evoked. He hadn’t expected it to be quite so bad, but now that he was standing in the middle of the hospital lobby, he couldn’t avoid the memories of Valerie’s last days. He had spent many hours in a similar place, waiting while the doctors operated, hoping, praying, staring dumbly into space—and eventually losing everything that mattered to him.

Shooting a look at the sliding doors that led to the parking lot where he’d left his car, Thad hesitated. It wasn’t too late to turn away instead of plunging right into the middle of someone else’s misery. He didn’t owe Macy anything. They were still virtual strangers. She hadn’t even leveled with him and told him why she needed the money. She didn’t want him in her personal life. There had to be someone else who could help her.

Then why did she contact me? Surely I was a last resort?

Thad winced under the responsibility that thought landed squarely on his shoulders. Dammit, he hadn’t asked for this! All he wanted was a child of his own, and he was willing to sacrifice every penny of the life insurance money he’d collected on Valerie’s death to avoid any further entanglements.

Still, it wasn’t responsibility that drew him down the hall and away from the exit, he realized. It was the thought of Macy’s gaunt cheeks, the lack of sparkle in her eyes. The mystery of what had caused those things had been solved, and as much as he didn’t want to, he could feel her pain. He understood—as few could—and that understanding wouldn’t allow him to walk away.

The nurses’ station outside the oncology department was deserted. Thad scrubbed up as he’d been told and closed the outer door, then stepped into the sterile ward, expecting someone to question his presence or acknowledge him in some way. But other than a hushed murmuring a few doors down, there was no one to stop him from walking down the hall and poking his head into room 3.

No one except himself. He hovered just outside until a small sweet voice caught him as effectively as a net.

“Mommy? Is that you?”

Not wanting to frighten the child by leaving his shadow falling across her door, Thad moved inside, where she could see him and he could see her. Small for her age and almost as white as the sheets she lay between, she stared at him with round eyes that were far too big for her face. Her hair had been reduced to a few wispy strands. Her bones were prominent through her flesh. And the circles beneath her eyes were so dark it looked as though they’d been painted there deliberately. No less than twenty-five IVs surrounded her bed.

The sight clenched Thad’s stomach like a vise, and even though he didn’t know this child, had no emotional connection to her, he ached for her suffering.

“My name is Thad, Haley,” he said, smiling to reassure her. “I’m a friend of your mommy’s.”

“I’ve never seen you before,” she replied doubtfully.

His smile grew. “No, your mother and I haven’t known each other very long. Did she go home to get some rest?”

“Lisa made her go to the lunchroom.”