idea was so shocking that he stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk on Tremont Street, causing a woman walking past to glance at him oddly.
Marry Jessie. The thought made his heart race alarmingly. Wryly, he acknowledged that some things never changed. Part of him was still that adolescent boy with the crush on his lissome young neighbor.
Marry Jessie. She was as different from his deceased wife as two women could be. Wendy had been blond and blue-eyed, petite and yet buxom. She’d been quietly charming, almost passive, rarely arguing with him. She’d been content to make a home for them; she’d felt no need to prove herself in a career. She’d been musical and elegant. Each night when he’d come home there’d been drinks in the drawing room.
Jessie…Jessie wasn’t any of those things. Except elegant. With those long legs and the graceful way she carried herself, she was most definitely that. His mouth curved at the mere notion of Jess sitting home waiting for any man. She was volatile, determined to succeed at her business. If she disagreed with him, she said so in no uncertain terms. She had a tin ear, although she got offended if anyone suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t sing.
For the first time, the striking differences made him pause. Could he have chosen Wendy, in part, because she was so completely unlike Jess?
It was an unnerving thought. He’d told himself he was over Jessie, that she’d been an adolescent fantasy. He’d married another woman and forgotten her. But in the back of his mind, he had to admit that it was possible he’d been comparing other women to her for the past ten years or more. And he was over her, he assured himself. Just because he couldn’t stop thinking about her now didn’t mean anything except that he was still as physically attracted to her as he’d always been.
So where did that leave him? Was it ridiculous to think that he could make a life with her now, a life that included the children he’d always wanted?
He’d reached his building, walking most of the way on automatic pilot while he’d thought of her, and as he stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hall to his office, a new determination hardened within him. The moment he’d hung up his coat and taken his messages from his office assistant, he went into his inner office and closed the door. Then he reached for the phone.
What did he have to lose?
After lunch Jessie was answering a customer’s questions about a line of glazed pottery she carried when the telephone rang. Excusing herself, she moved to the phone. “The Reilly Gallery. May I help you?”
“Jess.”
A small shock of surprise ran through her. “Ryan?” Normally she didn’t see or hear from him from one month to the next unless they crossed paths at some social function. “Did I forget something?”
“No.” There was an odd quality to his voice, as if he were unsure of something. “I wondered if…I’m calling to ask you to have dinner with me.”
Dinner. With Ryan. “Why?”
He chuckled, and abruptly he sounded like the adult she’d come to know, self-confident and calm. “I had some other thoughts about your, um, selection process that I wanted to discuss with you.”
“Oh.” Well, that was good, wasn’t it? After what he’d said at lunch, she’d been in a blue funk thinking about the risks. “When and where?”
“How’s tomorrow night? I’ll pick you up. Seven all right?”
“Tomorrow evening works for me. And seven is fine.” What she really wanted to say was that tomorrow night was soon. But she didn’t have any reason to delay, and she didn’t even know why she instinctively wanted to do so.
When she hung up the phone, her assistant had taken over with the customer she’d been helping, so she headed into her small office. On her desk was a loan application she’d picked up from her bank on the way back to the gallery after lunch. Ryan’s question, “What are you going to do about it?” had occupied her thoughts during the walk, and she’d realized she had little choice. If she wanted to compete, she was going to have to expand. And to expand, she’d either have to get a loan, or use the money she’d set aside for the artificial insemination. And using that fund wasn’t something she was prepared to do.
Thoughtfully she stared at the application. Although she regularly paid on the loan she’d taken out when she started her store, she had a line of credit that was running a little higher than it should right now. It was a temporary thing, based largely on the inventory she’d recently ordered in anticipation of the spring and summer tourist season. But she suspected she’d have to pay it down before she could get a loan. And then there were the sales figures…it would take a few days to pull all that together.
Another loan. Or, if she rolled her current one into it, a larger loan. The mere thought made her nervous. She’d worked hard to get to where she was now. She could pay her bills, live comfortably and save for a leisurely retirement someday. To her, loans meant that someone else would own what she’d worked so hard to build, and with that came the implied threat of loss. Her business was her independence; she couldn’t lose it. Still, she shouldn’t have any trouble meeting her financial obligations even if they increased. It would simply mean cutting her personal spending and watching her pennies at the gallery. But she wasn’t at all sure she was going to look like a good bet to Mr. Brockhiser, the lender at Boston Savings with whom she would be dealing.
The rest of the afternoon was insane, and it wasn’t until Jessie closed the door to her apartment that evening that she thought about Ryan again. Thoughtfully she put away her coat, boots, scarf and gloves. Her home was only four blocks from her shop, and like many Bostonians, she preferred to hoof it as much as possible rather than fight the notoriously clogged roadways.
She was afraid Ryan might be right about the sperm donations. How did she know that what she saw on those profiles was accurate? The screening process had sounded so complete when she first read through it. But the bottom line was that this was, at best, a game of chance.
When she’d first gone to discuss the procedure at the fertility center, they’d asked her if she had a donor lined up or if she planned to select one from a cryobank’s stock. She’d never even considered asking any of her friends to donate sperm, for heaven’s sake! She’d thought it would be far too embarrassing. Not to mention the fact that something within her warned her against using a friend for such a purpose. What if the guy wanted rights to her child at some later date? Probably an irrational fear, but… And what about the fact that most of the decent men she knew were already married, some with children of their own? She couldn’t, and shouldn’t, generalize, but she knew it would bother her if an acquaintance asked the man she loved to donate sperm for another woman’s child. Oh, she’d read about people who’d done it, but it just wasn’t an approach she felt comfortable using.
So that left bachelors. Jessie shuddered. Most of the single men she knew were single for a reason. She’d dated a number of them and hadn’t been impressed by one yet. How could she possibly ask a guy she didn’t even like? Okay, so that meant she could really narrow down the list, she thought as she pulled a bag of premixed tossed salad from her refrigerator and poured some into a bowl. There was a chicken breast left over from the ones she’d baked last night for herself and her assistant manager, Penny, and as she carried the food and a glass of Napa Valley Zinfandel to the small table in her kitchen alcove, she grabbed a pen and paper to start a list.
Let’s see. She swirled the wine and inhaled, appreciating the fruity odors before she took a first, experimental drink. There was Edmund Lloyd. He wasn’t so bad, except for
