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Watching him go, Max knew he’d made the right career decision. Not for him this office life, running a successful company but always being called in to solve this or check that. Working in a hospital was much the same, noisy pagers summoning him from one place to another. Private practice might be okay, but it had changed—less personal in so many ways.
So the lecturing he did, combined with research on the spread of infection in developing countries, plus hands-on work in the same area, was his career choice. It also gave him freedom to head off and climb the odd mountain when he needed to clear his head. He had no strings attached and it worked for him.
Another confirmation this was also the right decision.
Until Pete strode back into the room, obviously flustered, clutching a small metal container not unlike a miniature silver flask and a sheaf of paperwork.
And delivered the blow that had Max stuck in his chair.
‘Max … mate, I don’t know how to tell you this. This is unbelievable. Unbelievable that it’s happened, and that it’s happened to you. Max … I just need to say it. You might already be a father.’
Aware that he was probably doing a very good impression of a stunned mullet, Max could only stare at his friend.
Finally he got it out. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘There’s a mistake with the cross-match,’ Pete croaked.
‘You want to explain?’
Max heard his voice as if it came from someone else. Icy cold. Controlled. Not his.
‘The cross-match … Names matched to codes, verified every step of the way. But your name has the wrong code on it. They’ve checked and there’s a matching mistake. Your code with another name on it. But, hell, Max, yours has been used.’
‘My sperm has been used?’
‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say. It might even be a mistake—it has to be a mistake—though how it happened, I have no idea. But it’s been used. There’s a pregnancy.’
Could a life change so completely so quickly?
He stared at his friend. Pete stared back in consternation, then stood and walked to the window. He barked into his phone, demanding more information.
Max stared at his back, then down to the folder on the desk. He flicked it open.
A name … details …
Pete turned, saw what he was looking at and snatched the file away.
They stared at each other.
Shock eased and words came. Demands. Anger
He rose to his feet, coffee forgotten as he tried to absorb this impossible news. Icy anger.
‘There’s b-been a m-mix-up,’ Pete stammered. ‘Honestly, Max, this never happens—the checks and balances … I’ll find out how and why, but right now—’
‘You’re saying someone’s having my baby! Who?’
‘I can’t tell you that—it’s bad enough it’s happened. I mean, we’ll have to tell the woman when we sort out just what’s happened. God, this could ruin us!’
‘Ruin you? Ruin the clinic? What about me?’
‘And the poor woman who thinks she’s having her dead husband’s baby …’
Anger had him pacing—back and forth in front of the desk. But … Dead husband. The two words that brought Max to a halt, to loom over the desk once again.
‘What do you mean, dead husband?’
Pete looked up at him, his face pale and haggard.
‘Her husband died shortly after he was here, and she finally decided to use the sperm—have his child.’
‘The fact remains she’s having my baby,’ Max growled. He raked his hair. ‘Hell. Do we …?’ He was struggling to get his head around it. ‘Do I need to know? Does she need to know?’
‘There’s no way we can do that,’ said Pete. ‘The DNA … it’s yours, not his. That has so many implications …’
It did. Implications were all he was seeing right now, and he didn’t like any of them.
‘I need to meet her,’ he said at last, trying to think logically. ‘I need to speak to her. How far gone is she? Is the pregnancy viable?’ So many questions …
Pete recovered enough to straighten in his seat, colour returning to his face.
‘Max, you need to leave this to us. We’ll sort it. Somehow. This business is all about confidentiality. I’ll see her, I’ll explain—keep you right out of it.’
‘Keep me right out of it when it’s my baby you’re talking about?’ He couldn’t get his head around the words. My baby.
This didn’t make sense. Why the surge of certainty? Why the instant knowledge that if this was his baby, he wanted to be involved?
Maybe the rational decision he’d walked in here with hadn’t been so rational after all.
And he’d seen the file.
‘It’s Joanne McMillan,’ he said, watching his friend’s face. ‘Dr Joanne McMillan.’
‘You can’t know.’ Pete clutched his file in horror, his colour fading even further. ‘You shouldn’t have seen. Forget it. We need to talk to her—explain. I need to see her, not you.’
‘Oh, no! There is no way some woman is going to have my baby without my at least meeting her—checking her out.’
‘But it won’t be your baby—don’t you see that?’ Pete held out his hands in a plea to his friend. ‘You’ve told me you don’t want children. You’ve made a rational and reasoned decision about it and come in to have your sperm destroyed. The best way to treat it is to consider you made an anonymous donation.’
‘No way!’ He hardly knew what he was saying; he only knew it was a basic, instinctive truth. ‘This is my baby—and while I might not want it, at least I need to see it’s going to a good home. I do have some responsibility. I should have some say in the matter. As she’ll want to know—want to check me out surely.’
Light-bulb moment!
‘You said you’d go and see her to explain. Why don’t you let me go? You can make an appointment for someone from the clinic who needs to see her and I’ll go.’
‘And do what?’ Pete demanded.
‘I’ll work that out when we meet. I imagine she’s going to be so shocked to learn what’s happened she’s not really going to care who the father is, not right away. And if she’s happy to go along with the anonymous donor thing and I decide she’ll do as a mother, then, okay, I won’t tell her.’ ‘Of course she’ll do as a mother—she’s a doctor, a paediatrician, in fact. She’ll make an excellent mother.’
‘You have got to be joking!’ Max muttered. His mind was heading off on all sorts of tangents. How could he feel protective of … his sperm? A stranger’s pregnancy? All he knew was that he was.
‘You and I both remember men and women from our university days who would make appalling parents,’ he told Pete. He was sounding a lot less flustered than Pete right now, more in control. ‘Medical training doesn’t include extensive courses on good parenting, and even if it did, it wouldn’t have got through to people like Mike Wills, whose eyes were on the dollar signs right from the start, or that daffy woman who was always forgetting her handbag or her lecture notes and kept losing her car in the car park. Can you imagine how she’d be with kids? “Now, did I have two or three of them when I left home?” she’ll be saying.’
He was talking drivel, but it was helping him back towards a semblance of normality. It was strengthening his determination to meet the woman who would be the mother of the child he hadn’t wanted to have.
‘How far along is the pregnancy?’ he demanded, and then, as Pete didn’t answer, he grabbed the file and flicked it open. And almost reeled. ‘That’s … It’s due in two weeks! Pete …’
‘You’re not supposed to know,’ Pete bleated, but he’d lost control and he knew it.
‘Make an appointment for me to see her today—you can spin some story to get me in there.’
‘Max—’
‘Now!’
‘But it’s all confidential.’ Protest getting weaker.
‘Until your clinic screwed up!’
‘I’ll get to the bottom of it,’ Pete promised, but Max had picked up the phone and handed it to him.
‘Getting to the bottom of it might protect your clinic in the future, but it’s not doing a damn thing for me or this woman. Phone her!’
Pete stared at him for a long, helpless moment—and then made the call.
‘Jess will give you the details,’ he said as he set down the receiver and slumped back down in his chair. ‘And leave Jess your information so I can keep in touch with you. That’s if I can’t find an unsealed window and take a leap from it.’
‘You’re on the second floor—you’d probably only break a leg.’
Slipping her feet back into the sandals she’d discarded under her desk, Joey heaved herself upright so she could walk out through the waiting room with her favourite patient. With her arm around the just-teenager’s shoulders, she opened the door into the waiting room.
‘Now, you behave yourself,’ she said to Jacqui. ‘Go to your own GP if your insulin levels are playing up and phone me if you’re worried about anything at all. You’ve got both my numbers.’
‘Thanks, Joey,’ Jacqui responded, turning to kiss the specialist on the cheek. ‘You take care yourself and have a rest before the baby arrives.’ She grinned, then added, ‘That’s if there is only one!’
Smiling at the girl’s remarks, Joey saw her out and was about to return to her office to check who was next on her patient list when she registered the man sitting in the corner of the waiting room.
A tense man, although, for all his tension, there was something about him.
Something disturbing.
Physically disturbing.
Special …
She continued into her office, hoping she hadn’t been caught in mid-step, gazing at him instead of ignoring his presence.
But she obviously hadn’t ignored his presence for it seemed as if every detail of his physical appearance had registered in her brain.
Even sitting, she’d been able to tell he was tall—a rangy man, with brownish-reddish hair. A swatch of it hung across a high forehead. Dark eyebrows above eyes that had seemed to be studying her, a fine, neat nose and lips—
Surely to God she hadn’t just noticed his lips—hadn’t noticed how well shaped they were …
Pregnancy brain!
She’d put it down to that—as she put all the silly things she was doing lately down to it.
Settling carefully behind her desk, she lifted her phone.
‘There’s a man in the waiting room,’ she muttered to Meryl, her receptionist and the mainstay in her life right now.
‘He’s from the fertility clinic—some kind of rep, I suppose. They phoned and made an appointment for the end of the day.’
‘End of the day? He’s going to sit there while I see another four patients?’
‘Apparently,’ Meryl said, sounding so completely unfazed by the man’s presence that Joey realised she’d have to pull herself together.
Difficult when every time she brought a patient in, or walked a family to the door, she’d see the man.
So?
She was beautiful!
He wasn’t sure why this should surprise him, but it did. Dark hair and pale, creamy skin—hugely pregnant and looking very tired, but still beautiful.
The receptionist had told him he couldn’t get an appointment until the end of the day and suggested he go off and get himself a coffee somewhere, but he’d felt he needed to stay—to see her—to hear the chat in the waiting room. It had all been positive. In fact, from all accounts she was an angel set down on earth, a miracle worker, and so kind, so caring, so …
He’d certainly got the picture her patients and their parents painted of her—seen her kindness as she’d shown the young teenager out, although offering her private phone number when she was about to have a baby?
Surely that was above and beyond the call of duty!
Pete had told him she was a paediatrician, so he wasn’t surprised to see the waiting room with its big cane basket full of brightly coloured toys and the prints from Alice in Wonderland on the walls. A welcoming, non-scary place for kids.
But it was the woman herself who drew his attention, appearing at the door to her rooms to summon in the next small patient, always greeting the child first, then the parent, ushering them in, speaking directly to the child or adolescent all the time.
Her dark hair was pulled ruthlessly back into a knot on the back of her head, but from the tendrils escaping to frame her face, or dangle enticingly down the back of her neck, he could tell it was curly.
He felt a pang of sympathy for her as she followed a little group through the door, for she’d put one hand behind her and was rubbing just above her left hip.
Thirty-eight weeks … Why was she still working?
Money worries?
A string of questions rattled in his head.
Surely he wouldn’t be expected to help out financially—it was all a mistake, and not his mistake.
But this was his child. If she needed financial help, how could he deny it?
