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Mission Creek Mother-To-Be
Elizabeth Harbison
Melanie Tourbier desperately wanted a child, but she'd stopped looking for a husband who would love her for more than her money. When she started the sperm-donor process at the hospital, Dr.Jared Cross tried to talk her out of motherhood. The handsome doctor had reasons for wanting to deter Melanie, but the feisty heiress vowed to show him a thing or two! While she volunteered at the hospital, Melanie came in close contact with Jared. Suddenly, harsh words turned to passionate kisses, until the truth became evident. Would these stubborn lovers rise to the stork's ultimate challenge?
CLUB TIMES
For Members’ Eyes Only
Dr. Sweetheart and flying snail shells…
Nothing makes me giddier than a man who appreciates a good joke. And Dr. Jared Cross certainly made my heart go pitter-pat when he listened to me tell the one about the rabbi, the priest, the go-go dancer and the nun. I got a little lost in my story while staring at his wild green eyes and gleaming smile. I kept thinking that Dr. Cross needed a good woman—someone to ruffle up his hair and give him some roses to smell. And then I forgot the punch line.
Harvey Small wanted me to announce that he’s giving etiquette classes on Tuesday nights. I won’t mention that Harv slammed the door in my face last week. Then again, maybe he didn’t enjoy my exposé on country club managers and hair loss. Make sure to bring an extra plastic fork and your escargot equipment for each class. And please leave the kids at home. The class was reprimanded for beaning Ford Carson with empty snail shells.
Time to run! Gotta go catch famous heiress Melanie Tourbier, who’s just arrived and made a beeline for Dr. Cross’s office. Wonder what that could be about!
Make the Lone Star Country Club your private getaway. The Jacuzzi’s waiting….
About the Author
ELIZABETH HARBISON
began her love affair with Texas when her sister moved there in the early 1980s. It’s a place she’s revisited, both in fiction and in life, several times, and she always loves to return. Writing Mission Creek Mother-To-Be was a particular pleasure, since it incorporated some of Elizabeth’s favorite themes: a runaway heiress, babies, a tortured hero who needs love and a happy ending.
Mission Creek Mother-To-Be
Elizabeth Harbison
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Welcome to the
Where Texas society reigns supreme—and appearances are everything.
She didn’t think she wanted a baby the old-fashioned way until she met a doctor who had just the right bedside manner!
Dr. Jared Cross: As a fertility counselor and child psychiatrist, the good doctor makes dreams come true for so many families. But it’s his work with one woman in particular that has him thinking of a future—and a family—of his very own.
Melanie Tourbier: She’s been surrounded by gold-digging men her entire life. Now, with her desire for a baby increasing by the minute, Melanie knows a fertility clinic is her best option. Except there’s a very special doctor in attendance who’s making her rethink her child’s paternity….
Fireworks in Mission Creek: An explosion outside the nursery of Mission Creek Memorial Hospital and the escape of a vengeful criminal lead to a dangerous hostage situation. Whose lives will be spared…and who will suffer to protect others?
To Greg Cunliffe The Godfather
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
One
“…Branson Hines has escaped from authorities while being transferred from Mission Creek to a high-security prison in Lubbock. The thirty-two-year-old Hines is described as five feet ten inches tall, with dark eyes, dirty-blond hair and an unkempt goatee. Police spokesman Darryl Reilly warns that Hines is volatile and may be armed. Anyone who knows anything about his whereabouts is requested to call the Mission Creek Police hot line at—”
Melanie Tourbier reached out and clicked off the radio of her rented convertible. Then she shuddered and tried to take a deep cleansing breath as her yoga teacher in London had instructed. If things were going to work out the way she wanted them to here in Mission Creek, she needed to relax, to think positive thoughts. She did not need to panic about a dangerous escaped criminal who happened to be on the loose in the very small town she was staying in for the next few weeks. She’d be cautious, of course. But then, she was always cautious about strangers.
A lifetime’s worth of paparazzi and gold diggers had taught her that.
Her cell phone rang on the seat next to her and she punched the “on” button, glad for the distraction. She slipped the hands-free earpiece into her ear. She was nothing if not safety conscious. “Hello?”
“Where are you?”
Melanie smiled at the voice of her friend Jeff. She could picture him in her mind, his wavy brown hair mussed, his thin body draped casually across the Chippendale chair he’d inherited from his wealthy grandfather. “You know where I am,” she said. “I’m in Texas.”
“Melanie Tourbier, you are out of your mind! Come back before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late. I’ve made up my mind and I’m going through with this.” She readjusted her grip on the steering wheel, symbolically reconfirming her resolution. “Face it, pal, you’re going to be an honorary uncle.”
“Much as I’d love that, I think you’re going about this the wrong way.”
“No, I’m not,” she said lightly. She was certain of that.
“But you’re only thirty!” Jeff argued. “You’ve got plenty of time to meet a man the traditional way, not in a test tube.”
“Oh, Jeff, don’t be silly, they don’t keep men in test tubes here,” she teased.
“They keep the essence of them there, and don’t change the subject. You’ve got plenty of time to go about this in the usual way and you know it.”
“I already tried that.”
“One bad husband doesn’t mean that there’s no one good out there.”
Melanie laughed. “Maybe not, but it certainly opened my eyes to some of the bad that’s out there.”
“Your relationship with Michael wasn’t all bad.”
“Bad enough.” Michael Mason had entered her life as a financial advisor and had left it as a financial liability. The divorce had cost her millions, but it was worth it to get rid of a man who had become more domineering and intimidating with every passing month. The only good thing, if you could call it good, that had come from the relationship was she’d learned early on about medical problems that would make it very difficult for her to conceive a child. One doctor had given her a one-in-a-hundred chance, though to her it felt like one in a million.
Which was a main reason she’d decided upon her current course of action.
“Why not just wait a couple of years?” Jeff implored. “Mr. Right might be just around the corner.”
“Even if he was, and I know he’s not, a couple of years won’t do it.” She tapped her foot on the brakes and glanced right and left as she rolled over some railroad tracks. “Think about it. Say, hypothetically, I meet a guy today. We’d have to date for at least a year before I could trust him enough to even consider sleeping with him—”
“A year?”
“At least. Remember what happened with Roberto?”
“Ah, yes, the pool boy.”
“He wasn’t a pool boy and you know it. He was the landscape artist. And a con artist,” she added miserably. Roberto Loren had been a huge mistake. A flirtation gone out of control. Melanie had met him when he’d come to redesign the grounds of her estate in Maui. They’d spent the summer flirting and dating, and eventually took a trip to his home in Majorca together, where she found out, the hard way, two crucial facts: first, that Roberto was not divorced as he’d said but still quite married with three young children; and second, that he’d set the whole thing up so he could have scandalous-looking pictures taken pool-side, with his children present, which he could sell to the tabloids.
His trashy book on the affair was due to hit the stores this week.
“Okay, I can see why you’d want to take some time to get to know and trust a man,” Jeff conceded. “Maybe do a background check. I’ll give you a year for that.”
“Right,” she said. “So I’m thirty-one right there. Then there’s the time spent trying to get pregnant. You know about my problems there. I already tried for two years with Michael, to no avail. And I was younger then. It could take three, four years now, or even more.”
“Or a month.”
Melanie scoffed. “Those odds are a million to one, as you well know. And with every year that passes, conception grows more difficult. The already minuscule window of opportunity gets smaller and smaller, and the risk of birth complications increases dramatically.” She’d memorized these arguments over the past year of repeating them to herself. “Now, where was I?”
“You were almost forty, I think.”
“Right.” There was a blue hospital sign ahead and Melanie slowed the car and stopped at a red light. “And that’s just the first child. What if I want more?” She felt the questioning gaze of the person in the car next to her and lowered her voice. “I’d have to start all over again with—”
“Stop!” Jeff cried into the receiver, just as the stoplight turned green.
Melanie pressed the accelerator, turned the car left onto Mission Creek Drive and kept her eyes open for Mission Creek Memorial Hospital. “I’ve made myself clear, then?”
“Crystal.” He sounded defeated, but she knew Jeff well enough to know he’d resurrect the subject countless times before it was truly too late. “So how is Texas?”
“Hot,” Melanie answered, tipping her face gratefully toward the summer sun. “Wonderfully hot and sunny. I may never leave.”
“That’s exactly what I was afraid of when you left London. You may have lived here for the past fifteen years or so, but you’re still an American at heart.”
“And on my passport,” Melanie added. She’d grown up in the United States, living first in San Francisco and then in Dallas from ages five to fourteen. After her parents’ death when she was just fifteen, she had lived primarily in London, first attending an exclusive girls boarding school on the orders of her parents’ executor, then, after a brief stint at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, returning to the University of London where she studied art history.
She’d married Michael Turner directly after graduating. They had divorced just under three years later. In the ensuing five years, Melanie had focused her energies on the many charitable organizations her parents had established and patronized, but her life still felt empty. Despite everything she had, all she truly wanted was a family. Her optimism about that was fading fast. It didn’t help that the only men she’d met since her divorce were either party boys or opportunists, after her money and fame.
So Melanie decided she was through with men, through with romance. She did, however, still want a family of her own. So she’d done some research and learned that the fertility clinic at Mission Creek Memorial Hospital was one of the best in the world, as well as one of the most discreet. She’d come in part because of the clinic’s reputation and in part because, after all these years, she was finally ready to come home. Texas still felt like home.
“So what are you doing right now?” Jeff wanted to know.
“Right now I’m in the car. I’m on my way to meet with a family planning counselor,” she said. “A Dr. Cross. Doesn’t he sound nice? As I understand it, I have a quick chat with him, assure him that I know what I’m doing, and then bingo, I’m off for the procedure. Or at least the first one.” She smiled at the thought, although she was well aware she might need multiple tries. Still she felt it was best to be optimistic. “Who knows? Next time you hear from me, I might be pregnant!” She hung up the phone and returned her full attention to the road before her, literally and metaphorically.
When she arrived at the hospital, she strode straight to the elevator, pressing the button with a flourish. “One step closer,” she said excitedly under her breath.
“I beg your pardon?”
Startled, she whirled to see a man standing there. He was tall and dark, with the most striking pale-green eyes she’d ever seen. “I—I was just talking to myself.”
“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
She smiled. “I guess someone who’s talking to herself has to accept eavesdroppers as part of the deal and hope none of them is a psychiatrist.”
He gave her a strange smile, and she immediately thought her joke was idiotic. Now he probably thought she was, too.
“Just kidding,” she added, in case there was any doubt.
“That’s what I figured.”
His eyes were mesmerizing, like a hypnotist’s watch. She couldn’t look away.
He was looking at her, too, and he frowned slightly, as if trying to place her. “I’m sorry, but do we know each other?”
“No, no. I don’t think so. But you do look…familiar,” she finished lamely. He didn’t look familiar at all. This was not a face she would have forgotten.
The bell dinged behind her, and she heard the elevator doors shoosh open. She turned and walked into the mirrored elevator, conscious not so much of the thirty Melanies that seemed to step on with her, but the thirty tall, dark-haired, green-eyed strangers.
She reached out to press the eighth-floor button at the same time he did on the opposite side of the door. She glanced at him and said with a nervous little laugh, “Popular floor.”
He smiled. “Most of the offices are there. Patient rooms are on the other floors.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “I’m not familiar with the building. This is my first time here.”
“Where are you headed?”
“To see Dr.—” She stopped, reflexively protecting her privacy. “A specialist.” She gave a dismissive smile and watched the numbers as the elevator climbed.
The man nodded politely and didn’t ask questions.
It occurred to her then that she wasn’t entirely sure which suite she was headed for. Glad for the chance to do something other than say inane things to a stranger, she opened her purse and began rooting for the appointment card they’d sent to her in England.
