Jacqueline Diamond - Excuse Me? Whose Baby? - Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby!

She shook her head. Why on earth was she thinking of a man she wanted nothing to do with?

The main section of De Lune University was laid out in an old-fashioned rectangle, its symmetry marred only by the jutting addition of the glass-and-steel faculty center. Dex was passing that facility, which was probably why her mind had gone skittering across memories from a crisp evening four months ago.

The holiday faculty party had featured mistletoe and dance music, tipsy flirtations and a general letting-down of inhibitions. In an eggnog-induced blur, she’d felt a man’s dark eyes catch hers with unexpected intensity.

He’d asked her to dance and laughed at everything she said. She didn’t resist when he whirled her onto the patio.

He’d smoothed her unruly curls with both hands, then kissed her senseless. It was all so blurry, so sensational and so…insane. Dex pedaled faster, trying to put the scene, and the memory of what had followed, behind her.

Half a quadrangle farther, at a rear entrance to the administration building, she banged on the door. This was the squirrely abode of Fitz Langley, the maintenance and communications supervisor.

“Hey, Fitz!” she yelled. “Got any stuff for me to deliver?”

The door rattled and shook as the rusty lock stuck. Finally, it wrenched open and out poked a head worthy of mounting on a hunter’s wall. A shaggy chestnut mane framed a broad leonine forehead, a flattened nose and a mouth that could roar but rarely did.

The door opened wider under pressure from Fitz’s short, stubby frame, and he handed her two padded envelopes and a box. “Most of the stuff’s already been delivered, but these just came in. By the way, some lawyer called you.”

Dex got that sinking feeling again. Apparently an attorney really was looking for her. And looking hard.

Could someone be suing her? If so, he’d be sorely disappointed. Her two jobs barely paid enough to scrape by, and she owed a pile of student loans that would become due the moment she finished her doctoral dissertation. Whenever that might be.

“What lawyer?” she asked. “Has he got a name?”

“I e-mailed you.”

“I only check my mail when I enter grades in the computer.” Dex was annoyed by e-mail, phones, answering machines and anything else that interrupted her thinking. Not that her thinking was terribly profound, but how was it ever going to get that way if things kept jangling and blipping at her? “Can’t you just tell me?”

“Once I input data, I erase it from my personal memory banks.” With a shrug, Fitz vanished into his lair.

Dex strapped the deliveries onto the back of her bike. As she pedaled off, she wondered if someone could have died. She hoped not. And left her money. She still hoped not.

Her parents in Florida were both in excellent health, as far as she knew. She called them infrequently, since they listened only when she had some accomplishment to dazzle them with. Still, she would have heard if they were ill.

Her only other close relative was her younger sister, Brianna, a precocious twenty-four-year-old magazine editor. If anything happened to her, it would be her husband calling, not a lawyer. Dex was certain they had no Midas-touched great-aunt who might have popped off. In fact, no rich person had ever crossed her path except once, and she would just as soon never see or hear from him again.

As if to remind her of that one lapse, she found herself again passing the faculty center, going in the other direction. Dex gritted her teeth and sped up.

She didn’t know what had gotten into her that night. He was the wrong sort of man for her entirely. Too bold. Too confident.

She needed someone gentle and understanding, someone who could offer the warmth she’d missed while growing up. Even at the holiday party, she’d known she was making a big mistake. Yet in the arms of Mr. Hot Stuff, she’d been transformed into a hormone-charged Jezebel.

The only fortunate aspect to the whole night was that no one had noticed the man entering and leaving Dex’s apartment. In Clair De Lune, the walls might not have ears but everyone else did, and took notes, too.

She rounded a corner and jerked the handlebars to avoid colliding with two lovesick students standing on the sidewalk, their jean-clad legs entwined, their lips locked and their hands earnestly groping each other. Spring was, of course, the mating season among primates enrolled at De Lune University.

At the art department, Dex raced up the steps and, with a brisk greeting, set the box on the secretary’s desk. Some days she stuck around to chat, but today she was sure she could hear those essays grumbling in her saddlebags. And then there was the annoying question of why that lawyer might be calling her.

She left one of the envelopes at the music department and headed to the science complex, which was located in a separate quadrangle. Her last delivery was for the fertility research center.

As soon as she entered, she noticed something odd. Usually the place had a sterile look, with the receptionist sitting alone at her desk. Today, however, professors, graduate students and technicians formed solemn clumps in the pale peach entryway.

Dex spotted a doctoral student she knew. “Hey, LaShawna, what’s going on?”

The tall African-American woman swung toward her. Instead of giving an upbeat greeting, LaShawna Gregory hugged her clipboard as if it were a life preserver. “It’s Dr. Saldivar. She’s had an accident.”

“An accident?” Dex had never heard of an explosion occurring in an infertility lab. Except maybe a population explosion. “Here?”

“No, in India.” Unshed tears glimmered in the young woman’s eyes. “She was due back yesterday from a medical conference but…” She bit her lip. “We keep hearing rumors. Something about an elephant.”

Helene Saldivar was a brilliant researcher who helped couples have kids. Tall and rawboned, the woman strode through life, her manner brisk but kindly. “Her patients must be upset.”

“Her patients?” said LaShawna. “She doesn’t actually treat any…”

The receptionist marched over and plucked the envelope from Dex’s hands. “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s still work to be done around here.”

Dex nodded guiltily. “I hope the accident isn’t serious,” she told the graduate student, and hurried out. Eager to start grading papers, she sped along the three blocks from campus to the apartment she rented from the retired dean of comparative literature.

Amid a block of pastel-painted bungalows and pineapple-shaped palm trees on Forest Lane, Dean Marie Pipp’s dark-shingled home lurked like an escapee from a Grimm’s fairy tale. An overarching eucalyptus blocked most of the sunlight from the yard, where spindly herbs dominated the flower beds.

Across the street, little old Mrs. Zimpelman stopped trimming her roses and waved to Dex. Then she dialed her cell phone and made a call to one of her gossipy friends. Mrs. Zimpelman reported all the comings and goings on Forest Lane as if it were Avenue of the Stars.

Dean Pipp, by contrast, minded her own business. Today, however, she must have been watching through the window. When she saw Dex, she came onto the porch, her fringed shawl quivering in the light breeze.

“Yoo-hoo, my dear!” she called. “You have a telephone message!”

Dex already had a good idea whom it was from.

THE LAW FIRM of Page, Bittner and Steele occupied the seventh floor of Clair De Lune’s tallest professional building. It was served by four elevators, two of them out of service and the third dedicated to floors eight through twelve.

Dex waited in the lobby for a ridiculous length of time. She wished she’d stopped to eat lunch, but Dean Pipp, whose farsighted eyes could scarcely decipher her own spidery handwriting, said the attorney needed to see her either at one or at once, which in this case amounted to the same thing.