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

Instead of answering, the lawyer said, “And you, Miss Fenton? You knew her as well, I believe?”

“Sort of.” Dex squirmed. The kind of contact she’d had with Helene Saldivar wasn’t something she cared to discuss in front of James Bonderoff. “I heard she had some kind of problem with an elephant.”

“I’m afraid so.” The lawyer shuffled a sheaf of papers on his desk. “It seems that, while she was in India, she suffered a coronary.”

Jim frowned. “She had a heart attack?”

“It was an unfortunate coincidence,” said the attorney. “Although it’s not uncommon for a motorist to suffer an attack and crash the car, it’s the first time I’ve heard of anyone being stricken and falling off an elephant.”

“Is she going to be all right?” Jim leaned forward, his hands clenched. What kind of tests had she run for him, anyway? Dex wondered.

The lawyer stopped rattling the papers. “I’m afraid the accident was terminal.”

Dust motes swirled against the white wall behind him as silence reigned. After a moment, Dex said, “You mean she’s dead?”

Page nodded. “I have her will here. You’re both named.”

“But why?” She couldn’t imagine that Dr. Saldivar would leave her so much as a test tube. Dex had simply become, at the doctor’s request, an egg donor to help out some of her desperate patients.

Then she remembered with a jolt that, according to LaShawna, Dr. Saldivar didn’t treat patients.

“I don’t understand, either.” Jim’s voice had a hoarse quality. “What’s going on?”

“It has to do with the disposition of Ayoka,” said the lawyer.

“The elephant?” Dex peeled off a loose bit of fingernail polish. The rose-colored flake dropped onto the black-and-white carpet, where it stood out like a neon sign.

“No, no.” Burt Page cleared his throat. He stared at his desktop, then at the ceiling, then out the window. “Ayoka isn’t an elephant. She’s the, er, baby.”

NORMALLY, Jim’s brain worked on multiple tracks like the quantum computer—which so far was only theoretical. He could solve so many problems simultaneously that his brain must be operating in various universes. In none of those universes, however, did Burt Page’s comments make any sense.

“What baby?” he asked. “If she went to India to adopt a child, what could that possibly have to do with either of us?”

“Ayoka isn’t adopted.” The lawyer’s Adam’s apple made a noteworthy trip up his throat. “She’s yours. Uh…both of yours.”

Dex’s face went white. She swayed in her chair.

Jim caught her arm to steady her. As he did, a strand of her scouring-pad mane brushed his cheek. It smelled like herbal shampoo, he noted in a daze.

The woman bore only a faint evolutionary resemblance to the type of ladies he usually dated, yet she aroused a powerful male response. Four months ago, she’d sent him spiraling out of control. Jim Bonderoff was a man who never lost control.

He’d luxuriated in her spontaneity and her ample curves. She didn’t fit the image of a wife and mother that he’d formed in his mind, yet he’d begun to think, for the first time in years, that perhaps he should stop trying to control every aspect of his life and simply trust his instincts.

Then she’d announced that she was leaving town and had declined to give any forwarding address. He’d been bitterly disappointed and had contemplated pursuing her to the ends of the earth.

A few days later, his common sense had reasserted itself. She was obviously the wrong woman for him, and both of them knew it. So he’d taken steps to make sure he would never lose control that way again.

Now, however, her warm presence penetrated all the layers of his consciousness. He ached to cup that pointed little chin and to touch her wiry hair, which straggled in all directions as if spread across a pillow. Not to mention what he’d like to do to those rosebud lips.

“Are you all right, Miss Fenton?” Burt leaned across his desk. “Perhaps I should summon a doctor.”

“I’m all right.” Dex wiggled out of Jim’s grasp. “And there’s no need to prop me up, either.”

“You were sagging,” he said.

“Wrong.”

“Swaying, then.”

“Catching my breath,” she snapped.

Jim wondered what had gotten into him. Hair spread across a pillow? Rosebud lips? Barbed wire and fangs were more like it.

“You were saying?” he prompted the lawyer.

“Dr. Saldivar gave birth to a daughter nine months ago,” Burt said. “She’s called Ayoka, which I understand is a Yoruban name meaning ‘one who causes joy all around.’ Annie for short.”

This was interesting, but pointless. “I still don’t see how she could be my child,” Jim said. “Dr. Saldivar and I never—” how was he going to phrase this diplomatically? “—strayed from the vertical.”

“But she did conduct some tests of a personal nature, isn’t that right?” Burt leveled him a man-to-man gaze. Having served in the Marines, Jim knew what it meant. This has to do with your manhood. It’s a guy thing. Don’t make me spell it out in front of the lady.

Jim made the connection. He hadn’t wanted to accept that this baby might actually be his but, when confronted, he could hardly deny it.

All of his adult life, he had considered fatherhood an impossible dream. After suffering a double attack of the mumps in adolescence, he’d feared he might be sterile.

Out of sympathy for others with similar problems, he’d begun donating money to fertility research.

About a year and a half ago, he’d mentioned the subject to Dr. Saldivar at the dedication of a new wing of the university’s fertility research center, which he’d funded. She’d offered to test his sperm discreetly.

A short time later, Jim had learned that he was potent enough to father a whole brood. His sperm, Helene had told him, practically leaped out of the test tube like little dolphins.

Apparently she’d kept a few of those dolphins for her own use. The realization hit him hard. He made an uncharacteristic choking sound. “I’m the father?”

Burt folded his hands on the desk. Instead of answering directly, he said, “As a young woman, Dr. Saldivar didn’t want children, so she had her tubes tied. As the years went by, however, she changed her mind, but the operation couldn’t be reversed. I suppose you might say that her biological alarm clock went off.”

“Okay, she needed a father for her baby and she chose me, without my consent,” Jim acknowledged. “But you said she had her tubes tied. If she couldn’t produce an egg, then who…”

He stopped. Inside the room, the silence coagulated. Outside, a car horn ayoogaed the Lone Ranger theme.

Even a man with a brain like a very old computer, or possibly a set of Tinkertoys, could get the picture. Jim looked at Dex. She picked at her fingernails, her gaze averted.

“That’s right,” Burt said. “Miss Fenton is the mother. Biologically speaking.”

Dex stopped shredding her manicure and addressed the lawyer. “I never authorized such a thing. We’ll put her up for adoption, of course. That was why I donated my eggs, to give some loving parents a much-wanted baby.”

Give her up? Until this moment, Jim had been oblivious to the fact that he had a daughter, but he knew immediately that he wasn’t going to let strangers raise her.

He’d wanted a child for years. Not, admittedly, out of wedlock, and certainly not with Dex Fenton. But fate, in the form of Helene Saldivar, had taken matters out of his hands.

“Don’t you even want to meet her?” Burt was saying.

“No,” said Dex.

Jim felt a sneaking sense of regret that this fireball didn’t care about her own baby, but perhaps it was for the best. “I’ll take her. Sight unseen. If I have a daughter, I’ll accept full responsibility.”