The Accidental Daddy

‘You have got to be joking!’ Max muttered. His mind was heading off on all sorts of tangents. How could he feel protective of … his sperm? A stranger’s pregnancy? All he knew was that he was.

‘You and I both remember men and women from our university days who would make appalling parents,’ he told Pete. He was sounding a lot less flustered than Pete right now, more in control. ‘Medical training doesn’t include extensive courses on good parenting, and even if it did, it wouldn’t have got through to people like Mike Wills, whose eyes were on the dollar signs right from the start, or that daffy woman who was always forgetting her handbag or her lecture notes and kept losing her car in the car park. Can you imagine how she’d be with kids? “Now, did I have two or three of them when I left home?” she’ll be saying.’

He was talking drivel, but it was helping him back towards a semblance of normality. It was strengthening his determination to meet the woman who would be the mother of the child he hadn’t wanted to have.

‘How far along is the pregnancy?’ he demanded, and then, as Pete didn’t answer, he grabbed the file and flicked it open. And almost reeled. ‘That’s … It’s due in two weeks! Pete …’

‘You’re not supposed to know,’ Pete bleated, but he’d lost control and he knew it.

‘Make an appointment for me to see her today—you can spin some story to get me in there.’

‘Max—’

‘Now!’

‘But it’s all confidential.’ Protest getting weaker.

‘Until your clinic screwed up!’

‘I’ll get to the bottom of it,’ Pete promised, but Max had picked up the phone and handed it to him.

‘Getting to the bottom of it might protect your clinic in the future, but it’s not doing a damn thing for me or this woman. Phone her!’

Pete stared at him for a long, helpless moment—and then made the call.

‘Jess will give you the details,’ he said as he set down the receiver and slumped back down in his chair. ‘And leave Jess your information so I can keep in touch with you. That’s if I can’t find an unsealed window and take a leap from it.’

‘You’re on the second floor—you’d probably only break a leg.’

Slipping her feet back into the sandals she’d discarded under her desk, Joey heaved herself upright so she could walk out through the waiting room with her favourite patient. With her arm around the just-teenager’s shoulders, she opened the door into the waiting room.

‘Now, you behave yourself,’ she said to Jacqui. ‘Go to your own GP if your insulin levels are playing up and phone me if you’re worried about anything at all. You’ve got both my numbers.’

‘Thanks, Joey,’ Jacqui responded, turning to kiss the specialist on the cheek. ‘You take care yourself and have a rest before the baby arrives.’ She grinned, then added, ‘That’s if there is only one!’

Smiling at the girl’s remarks, Joey saw her out and was about to return to her office to check who was next on her patient list when she registered the man sitting in the corner of the waiting room.

A tense man, although, for all his tension, there was something about him.

Something disturbing.

Physically disturbing.

Special …

She continued into her office, hoping she hadn’t been caught in mid-step, gazing at him instead of ignoring his presence.

But she obviously hadn’t ignored his presence for it seemed as if every detail of his physical appearance had registered in her brain.

Even sitting, she’d been able to tell he was tall—a rangy man, with brownish-reddish hair. A swatch of it hung across a high forehead. Dark eyebrows above eyes that had seemed to be studying her, a fine, neat nose and lips—

Surely to God she hadn’t just noticed his lips—hadn’t noticed how well shaped they were …

Pregnancy brain!

She’d put it down to that—as she put all the silly things she was doing lately down to it.

Settling carefully behind her desk, she lifted her phone.

‘There’s a man in the waiting room,’ she muttered to Meryl, her receptionist and the mainstay in her life right now.

‘He’s from the fertility clinic—some kind of rep, I suppose. They phoned and made an appointment for the end of the day.’

‘End of the day? He’s going to sit there while I see another four patients?’

‘Apparently,’ Meryl said, sounding so completely unfazed by the man’s presence that Joey realised she’d have to pull herself together.

Difficult when every time she brought a patient in, or walked a family to the door, she’d see the man.

So?

She was beautiful!

He wasn’t sure why this should surprise him, but it did. Dark hair and pale, creamy skin—hugely pregnant and looking very tired, but still beautiful.

The receptionist had told him he couldn’t get an appointment until the end of the day and suggested he go off and get himself a coffee somewhere, but he’d felt he needed to stay—to see her—to hear the chat in the waiting room. It had all been positive. In fact, from all accounts she was an angel set down on earth, a miracle worker, and so kind, so caring, so …

He’d certainly got the picture her patients and their parents painted of her—seen her kindness as she’d shown the young teenager out, although offering her private phone number when she was about to have a baby?

Surely that was above and beyond the call of duty!

Pete had told him she was a paediatrician, so he wasn’t surprised to see the waiting room with its big cane basket full of brightly coloured toys and the prints from Alice in Wonderland on the walls. A welcoming, non-scary place for kids.

But it was the woman herself who drew his attention, appearing at the door to her rooms to summon in the next small patient, always greeting the child first, then the parent, ushering them in, speaking directly to the child or adolescent all the time.

Her dark hair was pulled ruthlessly back into a knot on the back of her head, but from the tendrils escaping to frame her face, or dangle enticingly down the back of her neck, he could tell it was curly.

He felt a pang of sympathy for her as she followed a little group through the door, for she’d put one hand behind her and was rubbing just above her left hip.

Thirty-eight weeks … Why was she still working?

Money worries?

A string of questions rattled in his head.

Surely he wouldn’t be expected to help out financially—it was all a mistake, and not his mistake.

But this was his child. If she needed financial help, how could he deny it?