edge, deep brown hair swept back from his face and a wiry build.
Desmond Pierce was the perfect man to be a father or she wouldn’t have agreed to his proposal. What she hadn’t realized was that he was a perfect man, period. Coupled with the baby in his arms, he might well be the most devastatingly handsome male on the planet.
And then she realized. He wasn’t just a man. They were married. He was her husband. Whom she was never supposed to meet.
“The baby won’t eat,” he said over the yowls. “You need to try to breast-feed him.”
She blinked. Twice. “I need to do what?”
“The nurse said he’s allergic to formula. We’ve tried for an hour.” He moved closer to the bed with a purposeful stride that brooked no nonsense and held out the wailing bundle. “He needs you. This is the one thing I cannot give him.”
She stared at the wrinkled face of her child, refusing to reach out, refusing to let the wash of emotions beating through her chest take hold. The baby needed her and she was the sole person who could help. But how could she? Breast-feeding was far too nurturing of a thing to do with a baby she wasn’t allowed to keep.
How dare Desmond come in here and layer on more impossible emotional turmoil in the middle of her already-chaotic heart?
She’d done her part according to their agreement. The baby was born, healthy and the child was set for life with a billionaire father who wanted him badly enough to seek out an unusual surrogacy agreement and who had the means to take care of him. What more could Desmond Pierce possibly expect from her? Did he want to slice off a piece of her soul when he took her baby away for the second time?
“That’s too much to ask,” she whispered even as her breasts tingled at the suggestion. They’d grown hard and heavy the moment the baby had entered the room crying. It was simple physiology and she’d known she’d have to let her milk dry up. Had been prepared for it.
What she had not been prepared for was the request to use it to feed her son.
Desmond’s brows came together. “You’re concerned about your figure?”
That shouldn’t have been so funny. “Yeah, I’m entering the Miss USA pageant next week and how I’ll look in a bikini is definitely my biggest objection.”
“That’s sarcasm, right?”
The fact that he had to ask struck her oddly, but before she could comment, he stuck the baby right into her arms. Against her will, her muscles shifted, cradling the baby to her bosom, and she was lost. As he must have known. As the nurse had known.
She shouldn’t be holding the baby, but she was, and it was too late to stop the thunder of her pulse as it pumped awe and love and duty and shock straight to her heart.
My son.
He still cried, his face rooting against her breast, and it was clear what he wanted. She just hadn’t realized how deeply her desire to give it to him would ultimately go.
“There’s a clause in the custody agreement about the baby’s medical needs,” Desmond reminded her. “You’re on the hook for eighteen years if he needs you for medical reasons.”
“Yeah, but I thought that would only be invoked if he needed a kidney or something,” she blurted as the baby’s little fingers worked blindly against her chest. “Not breast-feeding.”
She couldn’t. Judging by how badly she wanted to, if she did this, it would be so much harder to walk away. It wasn’t fair of Desmond to ask. She was supposed to go back to Portland, register for school. Become a doctor like she’d dreamed about for over a decade. That’s how she’d help people. This evisceration Desmond Pierce wanted to perform wasn’t part of the plan.
“He might still need a kidney, too.” Desmond shrugged. “Such is the nature of sharing DNA with another human.”
Did he really not get the emotional quandary she was in? All of this must be so easy for him. After all, he was man, and rich besides—all he had to do was snap his fingers to make the world do his bidding. “You know breast-feeding isn’t a one-time thing, right? You have to repeat it.”
In the tight-knit community her parents belonged to, they raised babies as a village. She’d watched mothers commit to being a baby’s sole food source twenty-four hours a day for months. Some women had trouble with breast-feeding. He acted like she could just pop out a breast and everything would be peachy.
“Yes, but once we find an alternative, you can walk away. Until then, our agreement means you have a commitment to his medical needs.” He crossed his arms. “There is literally nothing I would not do to help my child. He needs you. Three months, at least. You can live with me, have your own room. Use a breast pump if you like. You want extra compensation added to the settlement? Name your price.”
As if she could put a price on the maternal instincts that warred with her conviction that whatever decision she made here would have lasting impacts that neither of them could foresee. “I don’t want extra compensation! I want—”
Nothing except what he’d already promised her. A divorce settlement that would pay for medical school and the knowledge that she’d helped him create the family he wanted. It felt so cold all at once. But what was she supposed to do instead? She rarely dated, not after three years with a ho-hum high school boyfriend and a pregnancy scare at nineteen, which was why she refused to go out with one of the men her parents were constantly throwing at her. Dating wasn’t worth the possibility of an accidental pregnancy.
She couldn’t be a mom and a doctor. Both required commitment, an exhaustive number of hours. So she’d chosen long ago which path worked for her. Because she was selfish, according to her mother, throwing away her parents’ teaching about natural remedies as if their beliefs didn’t matter.
So here was her chance to be unselfish for once. She could breast-feed for three months, wean the baby as he grew out of his formula allergy and go back to Portland for the spring semester. It was only a small addition to what had already been a year-long delay.
She’d wanted to experience pregnancy to better empathize with her patients. Why not experience breast-feeding for the same reason? She could use a pump if the baby had trouble latching on, just like any new mother. No one had to know that it was going to kill her to give up the baby a second time after she’d fallen the rest of the way in love with him.
She glanced up at Desmond, who was watching her hold the baby with an expression she couldn’t interpret. “I’ll do it. But you can’t stay in the room.”
His expression didn’t change. “I beg to differ. He’s my son.”
Great, so now he was going to watch. But she could still dictate her own terms. “Can you at least call the nurse back so I can make sure I’m doing it right?”
Instead of forcing her to push the call button, he nodded and disappeared into the hall, giving her a blessed few moments alone. The hospital gown had slits for exactly this purpose so it was easy to maneuver the baby’s face to her aching breast. His cries had quieted to heartbreaking mewls, and his eyes were closed, but his mouth worked the closer she guided him toward her nipple. And then all at once, he popped on like a champ and started sucking.
She was doing it. He was doing it.
Entranced,
