The Marriage Contract

How great was it that the man she’d ultimately married appreciated her desire to become a medical doctor instead of a homeopathic healer?

And how terrible to realize that Desmond Pierce had chosen her strictly because he expected she’d easily leave her child without a backward glance.

He was right—she would do it because she’d given her word. But there wasn’t going to be anything easy about it.

Three (#u7e1b2b76-e8fc-59f0-9fe7-62db84f15bcd)

Since the nanny had left him high and dry, Desmond was the one stuck sorting out his son’s 3:00 a.m. meltdown. Conner woke yowling for God knew what reason. Larissa had always taken care of that in the past, leaving Des blessedly ignorant to his son’s needs.

Unfortunately, after twenty minutes of rocking, soothing, toys and terse commands, nothing had worked to stop the crying. If he’d known Conner would pull this kind of stunt, Des would have gone to bed before 1:00 a.m. Two hours of sleep did not make this easier, that was for sure.

Desmond finally conceded that he no longer had the luxury of pretending McKenna didn’t exist just to keep his growing attraction to her under wraps. Larissa’s printed instructions clearly said the baby nursed at night. He’d been hoping for a miracle that would prevent him from having to disturb Conner’s mother. That did not happen.

So that’s how he found himself knocking on her door in the dead of night with a crying baby in his arms. Definitely not the way he’d envisioned seeing McKenna Moore in a bedroom. And he’d had more than a few fantasies about McKenna and a bed.

She answered a minute later, dressed in a conservative white robe that shouldn’t have been the slightest bit alluring. It absolutely was, flashing elegant bits of leg as she leaned into the puddle of light from the hall.

“Woke up hungry, did he?” she said with more humor than Des expected at three in the morning. “Give him here,” she instructed and, when he handed over the baby, cradled him to her bosom, murmuring as she floated to an overstuffed recliner in the corner of her room.

Funny. He hadn’t realized until this moment that she sat in it to feed Conner. He’d envisioned her snuggling deep into the crevices to read a book or to chat on the phone with her legs draped over the sides. McKenna seemed like the type to lounge in a chair instead of sitting in it properly.

The lamp on the small end table cast a circle of warmth over the chair as she settled into it and worked open her robe to feed the baby. Instantly, Conner latched on and grew quiet.

“You can come in if you want,” McKenna called to Desmond as he stood like an idiot at the door, completely extraneous and completely unable to walk away.

“I would...like to come in,” he clarified and cleared his throat because his voice sounded like a hundred frogs had crawled down his windpipe. Gingerly, he sat on the bed because the love seat that matched the recliner was too close to mother and child.

Similar to the other times he’d watched McKenna breast-feed, he couldn’t quite get over the initial shock of the mechanics. It was one thing to have an academic understanding of lactation, but quite another to see it in action.

Especially when he had such a strong reaction, like he was witnessing something divine.

The beauty of it filled him and he couldn’t look away, even as she repositioned the baby and her dark nipple flashed. God, that shouldn’t be so affecting. This woman was feeding his son in the most sacrificial of ways. But neither could he deny the purely physical reaction he had to her naked breast.

He couldn’t stop being unnaturally attracted to her any more than he could stop the sun from rising. Seeing her with Conner only heightened that attraction.

Mother and child together created a package he liked.

He shouldn’t have stayed. But he couldn’t have left.

This quandary he was in had to stop. McKenna would be out of his life in two months and he’d insist that she not contact him again. Hell, he probably wouldn’t have to insist. She was resolute in her goal of becoming a doctor, as they’d discussed at the pool yesterday.

In the meantime he’d drive himself insane if he didn’t get their relationship, such as it was, on better footing. There was absolutely no reason they couldn’t have a working rapport as they took care of the baby together. At least until he hired a new nanny.

“Is it okay that I brought him to you?” he asked gruffly. “I don’t know what you worked out with Larissa.”

He felt like he should be doing more to care for his son. But all he could do was make sure the woman who could feed him was happy.

“Perfectly fine. She’s been trying a bottle at night with different types of formula to see if she can get his stomach to accept it when he’s good and hungry. Hasn’t worked so far.” McKenna shrugged one shoulder, far too chipper for having been woken unceremoniously in the middle of the night. “So I take over when she gets frustrated.”

“She didn’t mention that in her instructions.” Probably distracted with trying to pack and deal with travel arrangements on such short notice. So he reeled back his annoyance that he hadn’t followed the routine his son was probably used to. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.

Clearly he needed to take a more active role in caring for Conner. This was the perfect opportunity to get clued in on whatever Larissa and McKenna had been doing thus far.

“Taking care of a baby is kind of a moving target,” she said.

“Speaking from your years of experience?” He hadn’t meant for that to come out sarcastically.

But she just laughed, which he appreciated far more than he should.

“I come from a very tight-knit community. We raise our babies together. I’ve been taking care of other people’s children for as long as I can remember.”

Mr. Lively had briefed him thoroughly on the cooperative community tucked into the outskirts of the Clatsop Forest where McKenna had grown up. Her unusual upbringing had been one of the reasons she’d stood out among the women he’d considered for his surrogate. “Surprising, then, that you’d be willing to give one up.”

She contemplated him for a moment. “But that’s why I was willing. I’ve seen firsthand what having a child does to a mother’s time and energy. You become its everything and there’s little left over for anything else, like your husband, let alone medical school, a grueling residency and then setting up a practice.”

“It’s not like that for you here, is it?”

“No, of course not.” She flashed him a smile. “For one, we’re not involved.”

He couldn’t resist pulling that thread. “What if we were?”

The concept hung there, writhing between them like a live thing, begging to be explored. And he wasn’t going to take it back. He wanted to know more about her, what made her tick.

“What? Involved?”

The idea intrigued her. He could read it in her expressive eyes. But then she banked it.

“That’s the whole point, Desmond. We never would have had a child together under any other circumstances. You wanted to be a single father for your own reasons, but whatever they are, the reality is that neither of us has room in our lives for getting involved.”

A timely reminder, one he shouldn’t have needed.

Even so, he couldn’t help thinking he was going about this process wrong. Instead of hiding out in his lab until he’d fully analyzed his attraction to McKenna, he should create an environment to explore it. That was the only way he could understand it well enough to make it stop. What better conditions could he ask for than plenty of time together and an impending divorce?

“As long as you’re happy while you’re here,” he said as his mind instantly turned that over. “That’s all that matters to me.”

He was nothing if not imaginative, and when he wanted something, there was little that could stop him from devising a way to get it. One of the many benefits of being a genius.

She glanced up at him after repositioning the baby. “You know what would make me happy? Finding a nanny with an expertise in weaning when the baby has formula allergies.”

“Then, tomorrow, that’s what we’ll do,” he promised her.

And if that endeavor included getting to know his child’s mother in a much more intimate way, then everyone would be happy.

* * *

The next morning, McKenna woke to a beep that signaled an incoming text message.

She sat up and reached for her phone, instantly awake despite having rolled around restlessly for an hour after Desmond had left her room with the baby.