Now or Never

‘My baby? This is our baby,’ Oliver told her fiercely.

Their baby. Conceived with Oliver’s sperm and another woman’s—a fertile woman’s—donated egg!

‘Maggie,’ Oliver challenged her insistently when she made no immediate response. ‘This is our baby.’

The look in his eyes made Maggie give herself a small warning mental shake, but before she could give him the response she knew he wanted a door opened and a dark-haired, heavy-set woman burst into the corridor.

‘Don’t lie to me!’ she was screaming at the white-coated man following her. ‘I know what you’ve done. You’ve stolen my babies … You promised me …’

Wildly she turned towards Maggie, who instinctively placed her hand protectively against her still-flat tummy. Just as instinctively the woman’s gaze honed in on Maggie’s betraying gesture, her eyes narrowing, an angry flush of colour staining her pale skin.

‘They’re liars in here. Murderers,’ she hissed, staring at Maggie whilst she demanded,

‘Is it you they’ve given them to? Whoever it is I shall find out.’

Shocked, Maggie stepped back from her.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw that two nurses had quietly entered the foyer and were approaching the woman, taking a careful hold of her. As she was firmly but gently led away, still screaming and sobbing, the man who had been with her, whom Maggie recognised as one of the clinic’s medics, apologised.

‘I’m sorry about that.’

As he turned to follow the nurses the receptionist shook her head and whispered confidingly to Maggie and Oliver.

‘Heavens knows how she got in. The commissioner has got strict instructions not to admit her. She’s a bit of a crank.’

Although Maggie managed a polite smile the incident had upset her. Was this what motherhood was all about? Seeing danger everywhere and feeling fiercely determined to protect one’s child from it? One’s child. Oliver’s child … Her child!

‘Are you all right?’

Maggie could see that Oliver was frowning as he stepped protectively close to her. ‘I’m fine.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘Being pregnant must be making me feel extra sensitive,’ she told him lightly, trying to shrug off the feeling of disquiet the other woman’s behaviour had caused her.

‘I just wish …’ She paused, her expressive eyes shadowing. ‘It’s silly of me, I know, but I wish that hadn’t happened. She looked so … so anguished, Oliver. I know that everyone who comes here for help doesn’t get to be as lucky as we have been. And the only reason we have been so lucky is because of the generosity of the woman who donated her eggs.’

Although naturally it was against the clinic’s protocol for them to have met her, they had been given sufficient information to know that in build and colouring she was very similar to Maggie.

When Oliver had first told her that he wanted them to have a child, she had thought that he was joking.

‘I can’t,’ she had reminded him.

‘You were made to be a mother,’ he had insisted. ‘And there are ways.’

That had been over a year ago but she could still remember the fierce, thrilling jerk of emotional response her heart had given to his words. It had been as though he had uncovered a truth about herself that she had previously kept hidden, a sore place she had refused to acknowledge.

And then she had happened to read an article about the clinic and the controversial pioneering work it was doing, using eggs donated by fertile women to help women who could not possibly conceive naturally to have a child.

Right from their first visit to the clinic she had refused to allow herself to be optimistic, to hope too much.

Oliver had been the one who had been convinced she would conceive, who had carried the hope for both of them.

Watching Oliver as he hailed a taxi to take them back to their hotel, Maggie felt a resurgence of her normal self-confidence. She had booked them into the Langham, one of London’s most prestigious modern designer hotels, mainly for sentimental reasons. The Langham was the hotel where they had spent their first night together. ‘Remember the first time we stayed here?’ she asked Oliver half an hour later as they crossed its foyer.

At six feet one he towered over her. She was only five feet two without the heels she always wore. Dan, her ex, had been even taller at six feet two, his hair so deep, dark brown it was almost black, thick, his olive-tinged skin in direct contrast to her red-gold curls and celtic paleness, where Oliver’s hair was a much softer brown, bleached blond at the ends, a legacy he claimed from his days spent surfing in Australia during the year out he had taken following his degree, to heal himself emotionally from the pain of his mother’s death.

‘Of course.’ He grinned, answering her question. ‘I’d been working for you for more then twelve months, every second of which I’d spent wondering just how I was going to get you into bed, and then we came here and …’

‘And you said to the receptionist behind my back that there’d been a mistake and that we only needed one room. You were lucky I didn’t sack you on the spot when I found out,’ she told him mock severely.

She had been suffering from a bad bout of uncharacteristic vulnerability prior to the fateful first night she had spent here with Oliver; going through a period when she had been questioning her own satisfaction with her life and secretly comparing it with the lives of her friends; envying them their secure relationships with their male partners; the closeness and intimacy they shared; the children they had together, things that she had believed were permanently going to be denied to her.

‘I was lucky, full stop, the day I met you,’ Oliver corrected her softly. ‘You are so special, Maggie,’ he told her emotionally, raising her hand to his mouth and tenderly kissing her fingers. ‘So special, so perfect; so irreplaceable. So very, very much the woman I want to be the mother of my baby.’

Maggie shivered a little. It scared her sometimes when he spoke like this. No one was perfect, least of all her.

She could remember when she had first introduced him to Nicki, her best friend.

‘He worships you,’ Nicki had told her wryly. ‘You’ll have to be careful never to disillusion him, Maggie,’ she had added warningly.

Thinking of Nicki reminded Maggie of the fact that she was going to have a considerable amount of grovelling and apologising to do when she broke the news of her pregnancy to her close circle of lifelong friends. They would want to know why they had not been let into her plans, allowed to share the trauma of what she had been going through with her, no question. Especially since …

‘Come back.’

Ruefully she smiled at Oliver as he ushered her into the lift.

The first time they had stayed here together, they had barely left the suite, making full use of its luxurious, opulent fittings, including the private Jacuzzi. Oliver had poured champagne over her naked body, licking it ardently from her skin, touching her until they had both been high on the pleasure of the intensity of their desire for one another.

But tonight there would be no marathon sex session, and nor would there be any champagne or long soak in the Jacuzzi. But then sex wasn’t high on her list of priorities right now, Maggie acknowledged as they walked into their suite.

‘You do realise that we’re going to have to buy a proper house now, don’t you?’ she challenged Oliver. ‘A house with room for a nursery, and with a garden and …’

‘I know,’ Oliver agreed. ‘The apartment will definitely have to go.’

Maggie watched him indulgently. Oliver had fallen in love with the apartment the first time they had viewed it. On the top floor of the building, it was a modern conversion designed to imitate the loft apartments so popular in New York. Privately Maggie would have preferred something a little bit more traditional, and rather more comfortable, but Oliver, with his designer’s eye, had laughed at her and so she had kept to herself her no doubt old-fashioned fears about the practicality of keeping the immaculate stainless steel kitchen in its gleaming clutter-free state, and her concerns about just how the contents of her extensive designer wardrobe were going to fit into and remain crease-free in four artistically stacked woven storage trunks. In the end the conversation of the apartment’s third bedroom into a dressing room with fitted wardrobes had solved the clothes storage problem, but the kitchen was not and never would be her own ideal of what a kitchen should be.

She had been living in the small cottage she had bought after the breakup of her marriage to Dan. They had sold the family home, and she had used the money she had received from her share of it to finance her expansion of the small business she and Dan had originally started together.

‘Oh, Maggie … Maggie …’

As he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her Maggie could feel the emotion emanating from Oliver. Whilst not perhaps strictly good-looking in the movie-star sense, he possessed a special something that was all his own, a sweetness of nature that shone from his steady-gazed warm brown eyes, an attraction that went way, way beyond mere good looks.

A woman, any woman could look at Oliver and know immediately that he was a man who liked women, genuinely and wholeheartedly liked them. And in addition to that …!

He was gorgeous. He was sexy! He was tender and loving and good-humoured. He possessed an almost telepathic ability to guess how she was feeling and the love he gave her flowed from him with a generosity she sometimes had to pinch herself to believe was real.

There had been a special rapport between them from the moment he had first walked into her office, even though initially Maggie had fought hard to both deny and deride it. She hadn’t been in the market for a relationship. The breakup of her marriage had left her too wary, too self-protective to want one.

Oliver had told her that he had read about her company and that he hoped to persuade her to commission him to do some conceptual design work for them. Her company planned and designed office interiors, providing a highly personal and tailored environment for those fortunate enough to be able to afford their services.

The business did not make a vast profit, but it did make a very comfortable one and, more importantly so far as Maggie was concerned, she considered running it to be both challenging and satisfying.