Delores Fossen - Reining in Justice

Even if what she’d done was wrong.

“My doctor told me I couldn’t have any more eggs harvested for at least a year. Maybe not ever because I’d had a bad reaction to the fertility drugs.” A reaction that’d almost killed her. “I figured one fertilized embryo was a long shot, but it was the only shot I had. So I hired a surrogate, Cissy Blanco, to carry Emily for me.”

Reed cursed, groaned again. He opened his mouth, closed it and with his back against the wall, sank down onto the floor.

“I didn’t tell you, because I knew how you felt about becoming a father,” Addison added.

“You knew it, and yet you went through with this.” His voice was raw and clipped, each one of his words punching into her like fists.

“I never expected you to be a father to the baby,” she went on.

“But I fathered her!” he practically shouted. It was so loud that it startled Emily, and she started to whimper.

Addison pulled the baby closer to her and rocked her, hoping it would help, but it was possible that Emily was picking up on the tension in the room. There was certainly plenty enough of it to pick up on.

The door flew open again, and just like that, Reed was back in lawman mode. He pulled his gun and got to his feet. But it was just the nurse again. This time there was plenty of concern in her eyes.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. “I heard someone shouting.”

“Everything’s fine,” Addison lied.

A burst of air left Reed’s mouth. A laugh, but definitely not from humor. “My ex-wife and I were just having a little talk,” he grumbled.

The nurse gave Addison a long look, no doubt silently asking if it was okay for her to leave, and Addison finally nodded. There was no need for an audience for the argument that Reed and she were about to continue having.

Once the nurse had left, Reed walked closer, staring down at Emily. Every muscle in his body was tight, the pulse in his throat throbbing.

“Are you going to ask if she’s really yours?” Addison tossed out there.

The staring went on for several more long moments. “No.”

Maybe he could see the resemblance. Emily had his dark brown hair, and even though Emily’s eyes were closed now, they were the same shade of deep blue as Reed’s. There were times, like now, when Emily had that same intensity in her expression as Reed.

“I went to the storage facility with the nurse to pick up our embryo, and I was with the surrogate when it was implanted. If I’d thought I could harvest more eggs,” Addison continued, “I wouldn’t have used our embryo.”

She would have used donor sperm with newly harvested eggs so that Reed wouldn’t have been included in this process. Of course, her intentions meant nothing to him now. He’d just learned he was something he’d never truly wanted to be.

A father.

Nothing she could say to him would soothe that. Still, she tried.

“I didn’t intend to tell you,” she went on. “I knew all along this was my baby, not yours. I don’t expect or want anything from you.”

That sent a flash of anger through his eyes, but that anger faded when he looked at Emily. He reached down, brushed his finger over Emily’s cheek and turned away. “She looks like my mother.”

Addison wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Reed hadn’t talked much about his folks, and she’d never met them. However, from what Addison had gathered, Reed had been physically abused by his alcoholic father and left alone after cancer finished off his mother. He would have ended up in foster care if it hadn’t been for Roy McKinnon. Roy had taken him in when Reed was fourteen and raised him as his own, but by then the damage had been done, and Reed had wanted nothing to do with parenthood.

Damage that Addison had always thought she could undo and convince him that he would indeed make a wonderful father.

She’d failed big-time.

“Go ahead,” Addison insisted. “Yell at me. Tell me how wrong I was to do this to you.”

She braced herself for him to carry through on her offer, and maybe he strongly considered doing just that, but he glanced down at his badge. The thing that’d always anchored him.

“You hired a surrogate,” Reed said. The emotion was still in his voice, but at least he wasn’t yelling. “From this Dearborn Agency. I don’t remember them coming up in the baby farm investigations, but it’s possible they did.”

That sent another chill through her even though it was something Addison had to consider. Those kidnappers had come after her for a reason, and the reason might have something to do with Dearborn or even the surrogate herself.

“I need to contact Cissy Blanco, the surrogate,” Addison said. “To see if she knows anything about this.”

“I’ll contact her.” Reed didn’t leave any room for argument, either. He was taking charge of getting to the bottom of this. “Is it possible the surrogate developed a strong attachment to the baby and she didn’t want to give Emily up?”

Addison was about to jump to say no, but then she remembered something. “I don’t think she developed an attachment, but about midway through the pregnancy, something about Cissy changed. She was moody. Maybe even scared.”

“Scared? About what?”

“There was a question about some mix-up with embryos, and the doctor at Dearborn gave Cissy an amnio test to make sure the baby she was carrying was ours. It was. But I think having the test was the start of her being upset.”

“The start? There was more?” Reed snapped.

Addison nodded. “She’d mentioned being worried about her sister, who was also a surrogate at Dearborn, but when I brought it up again at our next visit, Cissy said everything was okay, that I should forget she even said anything about it. I blew it off, thinking she was just going through pregnancy hormones.”

But Addison couldn’t be sure of that now.

“Maybe not all of Dearborn’s surrogates were legal,” Reed said. “Maybe some of them were involved with the baby farms.”

That put Addison’s heart in her throat. Was that true? If so, it would perhaps explain why the attack had happened.

“We should do a DNA swab on Emily just in case the question of her paternity comes up,” Reed suggested.

It wasn’t even something she wanted to consider, and Addison had been there with Cissy for the in vitro procedure. She was positive Emily was Reed’s and her baby. Still, Reed was right. They needed to have proof in case there were arrests made at Dearborn.

“When’s the last time you had contact with Cissy?” he asked.

“Not since Emily was born seven weeks ago. I was in the delivery room with her, and a few hours afterward I went in to thank her again, but Cissy was already gone. She checked herself out of the hospital.”

That got Reed’s attention. “And you didn’t think anything was wrong with that?”

Sadly, Addison had to shake her head again. “I wasn’t thinking of anything but the baby. I sent the last of Cissy’s payments to Dearborn and figured that was the end of it.”

Of course, Addison hadn’t even attempted to get in touch with the woman. In a way, she’d wanted to put the whole surrogacy behind her and get on with her new life. That could have turned out to be a mistake.

“What do I do now?” she asked, kissing Emily’s forehead.

That got his muscles working hard again. “The baby and you will need protective custody until I can find out why those men came after you, and...” But his explanation ground to a halt. “I need a minute,” he said, and reached for the door.

Addison figured it’d take a lot more than a minute for Reed to come to terms with what he’d just learned. Heck, maybe a lifetime wouldn’t be enough. However, he hadn’t even made it out of the room before his phone rang.