Enchanting Baby

Greg noticed Officer Eiden didn’t have to write that down. He waved the pen. “I know who she is. Why are you looking for her?”

“It’s personal.” That answer had seemed sufficient at the clinic. Well, no, it hadn’t. The people at the clinic had called the cops.

And this cop, evidently, didn’t like that answer, either. “I can detain you if you don’t cooperate with me, Mr. Glazier.”

“On what charges?” Greg wondered if he should call his lawyer, who was all the way back in Denver.

“I said detain. I didn’t say arrest. If you’re a deputy you know that I can put you in investigative detention. Now, I think you’d better tell me what business you have with Ashleigh Logan.”

If Lydia Kane’s furtive behavior hadn’t convinced Greg that the woman he was seeking had, indeed, come to Enchantment to hide, this cop’s pressure tactics sure did. Greg had the creeping sensation that he was dealing with something sinister here. That thought sent a chill through him, because if Ashleigh Logan was in some kind of danger, so was the child inside of her—his child.

The cop’s eyes glittered like dark polished stones while he waited for Greg to answer. No one, Greg decided, could look more threatening.

“Look,” Greg said, trying to sound reasonable. “I need to find Ms. Logan for reasons that are mine alone. It’s something between the two of us. Is she in some kind of trouble or something?”

“I asked you why you’re looking for her.”

“I’d rather not say. I need to explain the full situation to her first. She deserves that much. Like I said, it’s personal.”

The cop leaned forward and braced his elbows on the table with his smooth brown hands fisted together over the legal pad. “You her boyfriend or something?”

Greg took a measure of the guy, deciding whether to trust him or not. Miguel Eiden seemed solid and clean cut. Except for a scar on his square jaw that looked as if it’d been earned in a fight. So maybe the guy had a bit of a history. Didn’t everybody?

Eyeing him, Greg bet his top stud horse that the guy knew exactly where Ashleigh Logan was.

And if Ashleigh Logan was in Enchantment, the sooner he talked to her, the better. He had tried not to let himself consider this possibility, but if Ashleigh Logan had already found out about the disastrous mistake…well, she might do something rash if she was devastated enough. He had to make her see that there was more at stake than she knew. He suppressed his fears by reminding himself that she was the star of a show about having babies, and that her own unorthodox pregnancy had already been highly publicized. How would it look to her viewers if cute, bubbly Ashleigh Logan opted for a late-term abortion? And The Birth Place clinic didn’t look like the kind of place where a woman would come for such a procedure, anyway. Still, Greg couldn’t quell a certain sense of urgency. This was his child, the only child he would ever have. He had to ask.

“You know where she is, don’t you?”

Miguel Eiden’s mouth formed a tight line. “I asked you a question, Mr. Glazier. What is your relationship to Ashleigh Logan?”

They had clearly reached a Mexican standoff, and since the cop had the gun on his hip, Greg was bound to lose. He decided he’d have to tell the guy the truth if he was ever going to get out of here.

“I don’t have a relationship with her. We’ve never even met.”

The cop’s frown deepened.

Greg could see he was going to have to tell the guy all of it. “This has to be kept confidential.”

The cop leaned back and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “I’m a police officer, not a gossip columnist.”

Right. As if Greg needed reminding. “Ms. Logan is pregnant.”

The cop gave him a sarcastic frown that said, duh. Ashleigh Logan had chronicled every step of her pregnancy on her nationally syndicated cable TV show for all the world to see. “And?” Eiden pressed.

“The baby is mine.”

The cop’s eyebrows shot up. He dropped his threatening pose and his expression became incredulous as he leaned forward. “I thought you said you’ve never met her.”

“I haven’t.”

“Then you’d better tell me what gives, Mr. Glazier.” He leafed through the papers as if he’d missed something. “’Cause this deal is sounding stranger by the minute.”

Greg sighed, suddenly feeling beaten down by the combined effects of his bizarre situation and the nagging altitude sickness. “Strange isn’t the word for it. Seems like my whole life has been strange, and incredibly unlucky.”

“I wouldn’t call you unlucky, exactly.” The cop continued to study the printout. “I guess you realize we ran an NCIC on you. They had your prints—your being a deputy and all. And Denver had more.”

Greg nodded. The visit to the sister. Why were the cops so interested in him? Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe he should be asking why they were so interested in Ashleigh Logan.

Eiden went on. “In the last two years you’ve made a killing off the property boom around Denver. You’ve been in the news a few times, doing civic stuff. On paper, you look like a real Boy Scout, unless you count a couple of speeding citations that you racked up out on Highway 63. Running back and forth to your ranch out on the Big Sandy, I’d guess.” The corners of Miguel Eiden’s mouth peaked downward grudgingly, as if to say Greg’s profile was no big deal.

“Yeah, that about sums me up.” Greg raked a hand over his face. Except for the fact that the love of his life had died a painful death at the age of twenty-nine, and his father had been shot dead by a pack of rodents, and his druggie mother had skipped off with some hippie when Greg was barely out of diapers, leaving him to be raised by his eccentric grandfather. “Could I please have some water?”

The cop went to the beige wall phone. Soon the flirtatious Crystal showed up with a plastic cup of ice water. Greg drank some, then started in. “When she decided to have a baby, Ms. Logan went to the sperm bank where she had stored her deceased husband’s sperm.”

The cop looked genuinely surprised at that, but he muttered, “To each his own.”

“So, she got artificially inseminated and she thinks she is pregnant with her late husband’s child. But I found out that’s not true. They made a mistake. The child is mine. I came here to tell her that.”

The cop’s face showed that something had finally clicked. “And that’s why you were trying to contact Ms. Logan in Denver?”

Greg nodded and the cop made a note. Greg hated to see this information go on record before he’d had a chance to explain this to Ashleigh Logan, but he supposed there was no help for it.

“You plan to tell her there was a mix-up at the sperm bank?”

“For starters.”

“Is there some way for me to verify your story?”

“I could put you in touch with the sperm bank in California. They would back up my story if I told them to release the information to you.”

“Okay.” Eiden poised his pen. “Give me the number.”

Greg pulled a card from his wallet and handed it over.

After he copied the number, Eiden said, “Okay. We’re done for now. I’ll take you back to your Navigator.” His chair screeched on the linoleum as he stood and reached for his cowboy hat.

“Wait!” Too fast, Greg also jumped to his feet. A wave of dizziness struck as he felt himself break into a cold sweat. A sudden sense of panic mixed with altitude sickness for a moment as he clutched the table and focused on the fact that he wasn’t going to leave here until he found out where Ashleigh Logan was. He had to say something to convince this cop that he needed to know where she was, right now. “There’s something else you should know.” He shook his head to clear it.

One of the cop’s black eyebrows spiked up. “You okay?”

“Altitude sickness.”

“Sit down.”

Greg did so, gratefully. He sipped some more cold water, then said, “This pregnancy—this baby. This is it for me. I won’t get any more chances. The sperm bank…mine’s all gone. They, uh, they accidentally let it…uh, defrost.”

The cop looked as if he was struggling to hide a split second of involuntary disgust, then his dark eyes flitted sideways with something like sympathy. “I get it.” He tugged his cowboy hat down, looking uncomfortable, embarrassed, as if he didn’t like discussing another guy’s sterility problems. Well, Greg didn’t like talking about it, either. But there it was. He was sterile. Though he wasn’t about to explain to this guy how that had come about. The salient fact was, this baby, Ashleigh Logan’s baby, was Greg’s one and only chance to be a father.