in reality he was three feet tall and a troglodyte.
Hadn’t she considered that? Scowling to himself, Aidan imagined all kinds of weird possibilities stemming from that damn turkey baster.
“Hell, I should offer to do it myself,” he muttered as he sipped his scotch. Abruptly he jerked himself upright in his chair. Whoa. He did not just say that. He tossed down a serious amount of scotch to drown out the words.
There was no way he would ever knowingly father a child. He’d made that decision years ago after watching his own father struggle as a single parent. Aidan and Logan’s mother had left them when the boys were only seven years old. It had been a defining moment in Aidan’s life and while he thoroughly enjoyed the pleasure that women provided, he wasn’t about to trust one enough to marry her, let alone have a child with her.
He would never risk a child of his experiencing the abandonment he’d gone through himself. And now he realized that this was a big reason why he wasn’t happy that Ellie was planning to go through with the pregnancy on her own. She was walking right into a single parent situation with no idea how difficult her life would become. And she wasn’t the only one to consider. Her child would go through life without a dad. That wasn’t right.
Had Ellie tried hard enough to find a man to father her child?
But then he remembered the look on her face earlier when she’d said, It’s not them, it’s me.
Hell, of course she’d tried to find a partner, but no one had been smart enough to step forward. She’d been so vulnerable while talking about it, Aidan had almost taken her in his arms and kissed away the pain he’d seen in her eyes. But he hadn’t done it, thank God. That would have been a huge mistake.
Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, he thought as he stood and walked to the water’s edge. That wasn’t the point. The point was, it was never going to happen.
Too bad. Because now that he was thinking about topics like trust and women and Ellie, in particular, it occurred to him that there was one woman in the world he did actually trust. Ellie. When it came to business, she was scrupulously honest. She always spoke her mind. And she always had his back in any negotiation they entered. She was almost as good a partner in wheeling and dealing as his brother, Logan, was.
Logan had agreed with Aidan that Ellie would make a good junior partner. Before Logan left on his honeymoon, the brothers had decided to offer Ellie the position. The plan was to wait until Logan got back to the island. They’d never brought in another partner before, but they both agreed that there was nobody better for their organization than Ellie. And if they wanted the company to grow even larger, they needed someone else in the top ranks who had her intelligence, business insight and unwavering principles.
And all that had nothing to do with the fact that she was downright sexy and beautiful. He thought again of those amazing legs of hers, pictured them wrapped around his waist with him buried so far inside her, he could feel it.
The carnal image was so vivid, he almost lost his footing. Damn, his mind was wandering down a perilous path and if he wasn’t careful, he’d find himself facedown in the sand.
He recovered quickly and drank down a good slug of scotch. The smooth, liquid heat soothed his throat and snapped him out of his wayward thoughts. His wildly active imagination meant nothing in reality. He liked Ellie, would love to take her to bed, but it wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t.
How the hell could he risk losing Ellie as a business partner if a romantic thing between them didn’t work out? Or worse yet, what if he initiated something and she was so offended she quit?
“She wouldn’t just quit,” he muttered darkly. “She’d punch you in the nose first and then quit. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
Still, he wanted her to be happy.
But apparently, it was going to take having a baby to accomplish that.
“Hell.” He rubbed his face, annoyed with himself. If he was being honest, he would have to admit that if Ellie had approached him and asked him to be the father of her child, he would have had a hard time pushing her away. But he absolutely would’ve turned her down in the end. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would’ve. There was no way he would say yes to something like that. Even if it was Ellie doing the asking.
“Not that she asked you,” he groused, then scowled at his own idiotic statement. It was official: he had lost his mind. Exasperated, he swallowed the rest of the scotch and headed back to his suite before he found himself howling at the moon like the rest of the lunatics in the world.
Ellie yawned, then finished the last of her tea and shut down her computer. She should’ve gone to bed an hour ago, but since she knew she wouldn’t sleep anyway, she had spent more time sifting through the family photos her sister, Brenna, had sent from Atlanta. A picture of Brenna with her darling husband, Brian. One of Brenna and Brian with their two adorable children. Various shots of the kids on their new backyard jungle gym. And the latest one, a blurry ultrasound photo of Brenna’s unborn baby.
Doctor’s pretty sure it’s going to be a boy, Brenna had written in the email. Lilah’s so excited to have another brother. No annoying little sister to deal with.
Ellie smiled. She could hear Brenna laughing as she wrote those words, since it was Ellie who’d been the annoying little sister Brenna had dealt with all her life. And thank goodness for that, Ellie thought.
Now Brenna had her own wonderful family and Ellie couldn’t wait to see them all again. That was another reason she had chosen the Atlanta clinic. She would get to visit with her sister’s happy, loving family again.
Ellie and Brenna hadn’t always been this happy. Growing up, their mother had been absent most of the time, even when she was sitting in the same room with them. That was what happened when a woman became so obsessed with a man who wanted nothing to do with her. Rather than give any love or attention to her own children, their mother had kept it all inside, saving it up, just in case their father ever returned. Except he never did. He didn’t want anything to do with them. He had moved on, found another woman to marry, a woman who gave birth to children he cared for much more than he had ever cared about his first two daughters.
But Ellie’s mother never gave up on him, never stopped loving him or chasing him, never stopped pretending that he would come back one day. She was always ready, always perfectly dressed and coifed in case he showed up at the door. She insisted that the girls be ready, too. And in her own subtle way, their mother never stopped blaming Ellie and Brenna for causing him to leave. That is, when she managed to remember that she had two children who needed her.
One day, when the girls and their mother were enjoying a rare moment of fun at a local hamburger stand, their mother thought she spied their father walking down the sidewalk. She raced outside to catch him, saw the man cross the street and blindly dashed after him. She was struck and killed by a city bus.
It was one of many lessons that Ellie took with her into adulthood. She would never, ever cling to or chase after a man who didn’t love her. Ellie wouldn’t do to her own child what her mother had done to Ellie and Brenna.
After all, she didn’t want to get hit by a bus.
More than that, she refused to allow her self-esteem to be shattered as her mother’s had been. Her mother had made a fool of herself over and over again. She had deluded herself for years and, slowly but surely, the delusions had replaced reality. Ellie would never allow that to happen
