Elizabeth Bevarly - The Perfect Father

“I, uh,” she began quietly. She inhaled deeply, and Chase waited to hear the rest. “I sort of have something I’d like to ask you.”

“Another question?” he said, smiling when she continued to avoid looking at him. “You’ve had quite a few of those tonight.”

She nodded. “I, uh...” She paused, inhaled deeply, released her breath slowly and tried again. “I, uh, I have an older sister,” she began, finally glancing up, her gaze settling on his.

Good God, her eyes were blue, he thought again before the significance of her words struck him. Then he began to understand where all this was going. Oh, no. He’d heard that “I-have-a-sister/niece/cousin/dog groomer/hairdresser/whatever” speech before. Too many times. If Sylvie thought she was going to fix him up with her sister, she had another think coming. He’d had his fill of blind dates. Not only did they always backfire, he didn’t have the time.

“A sister,” he repeated blandly.

She nodded again. “She had a baby last year—that would be my nephew whose picture I showed you earlier this evening, and—”

“A baby?” Chase asked incredulously. Sylvie wanted to saddle him with a wife and a kid? What was she trying to do, wreck his life completely? What had he ever done to her? Hadn’t he just told her a short time ago that a family was the last thing he needed messing up his happiness?

He held up a hand to halt any other big plans she might be hatching. “Hold it right there, kid,” he instructed her, ignoring her frown at his use of the word kid. She probably wasn’t that much younger than him, but Chase was suddenly feeling like an antique beside her. “I’m not interested in being fixed up with your sister. Or her baby.”

Sylvie looked confused for a moment, but quickly recovered. She began to giggle, then the giggle became a chuckle, and the chuckle became full-fledged laughter. Chase couldn’t help but smile, too. Clearly he had misunderstood what she was going to say. She had no intention of getting him involved with her sister. He felt much better knowing that.

“Livy’s already happily married—I’m not trying to fix you up with her and her baby,” she said, confirming his suspicions and allowing him to breathe much more easily and laugh a little himself. “I’m trying to fix you up with me and my baby.”

Chase stopped laughing immediately. “What?”

Sylvie suddenly stopped laughing, too. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. Somehow the words had just jumped from her mouth. But now that they’d been spoken, she had nowhere to go but forward.

“I didn’t know you had a baby,” Mr. Buchanan said.

“I don’t,” she told him. “But ever since Livy had Simon, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to have a baby, too.”

“Just like that?”

She shook her head. “Simon’s nine months old now. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought ever since he was born. And according to my doctor, despite the fact that I’m only thirty, I don’t have a lot of time left to have a baby. If I’m going to become a mother—and I do want very much to become a mother—I don’t have time to sit around waiting for some potential husband who might not ever show up.”

“So why are you telling me this?”

Sylvie looked up to find her companion staring at her with frank curiosity. He hadn’t figured it out yet, she realized. She supposed what she was planning was rather unusual—asking a man to make love to her specifically so that she could become pregnant, and then get out of her life for good. There were probably a number of men who would say yes in an instant. The irony was, men like that were generally jerks. She wouldn’t want a jerk for her baby’s father, would she? Of course not. In an ideal world, she wouldn’t have to worry about all this. But this wasn’t an ideal world, was it?

“Because,” she said, feeling the words getting stuck in her throat, “because you’re nice looking, intelligent and talented, and...” She stared down at her hands, spread open on the table, then licked her lips nervously before concluding, “And I’d like my baby’s father to pass all those qualities along to him or her.”

His expression never changed, and she wasn’t sure whether or not she’d made herself clear.

“Meaning?” he asked.

His eyes were speculative, and the corner of his mouth twitched only the slightest bit. Oh, he knew what she meant, Sylvie thought. He just wanted her to spell it out for him.

“Meaning,” she tried to explain again, “that I’d like for you to be the father of my baby. I mean...if you’d consider it.”

For a long time Chase said nothing, only continued to stare at Sylvie as if she were speaking a foreign language. Finally he began again, “Are you actually saying you want me to donate my...” He glanced quickly around, cleared his throat and tried once more, his voice noticeably lower when he continued. “You want me to donate my sperm so you can be artificially inseminated with it?”

“Oh, heavens, no,” she assured him.

The fire that had flared to life in his midsection subsided some. Obviously he was misunderstanding whatever it was Sylvie was trying to say. Clearly she meant something else entirely. He only wished he could figure out what it was.

“I want you to make love to me,” she said.

“You what? ”

“In two weeks. That’s when I’ll be ovulating again.”

The words didn’t register immediately with Chase. He knew what he thought he’d heard her say, of course, but he couldn’t quite believe she was saying what he thought she was saying. This time he was the one to stare down into his coffee without speaking. But his silence only seemed to inspire Sylvie, because she continued to prattle on nervously.

“Um, look, I know what you’re probably thinking about me right now. I know you must be...you know, wondering what kind of woman would ask a virtual stranger to make love to her just to get her pregnant, but—”

“Oh, we’re not really strangers,” Chase interrupted her, looking up. He fixed his gaze with hers. “Are we, Sylvie?”

She lifted one shoulder in an odd kind of shrug, but said nothing. He had never noticed how small she was, he thought. How delicate looking. She’d always seemed so strong to him, so straightforward, so unwilling to back down. He wondered how long she’d been considering him for the task at hand. And he wondered why what she was suggesting, something that should be no more than an indecent proposal, was in fact so utterly appealing.

“After all the conversations we’ve had over the last two years,” he continued, “how can you think of us as strangers? You talked me through that hostile takeover bid last summer, remember? I would have gone nuts if I hadn’t had you to confide in. And I think your advice helped me ward the bastards off better than any other I received.”

She smiled nervously. “Really?”

He nodded. “You were there for me when my dad died, too.”

“And you helped get me through the loss of my mom,” she added. “But you know what’s weird? I don’t even know your first name.”

“And I don’t know your last.”

“Venner,” she said immediately. “Sylvie Venner.”

“Chase,” he replied, extending his hand toward her. “Chase Buchanan.”

Sylvie placed her hand gingerly in his and smiled. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the two of them might just be making a deal.

* * *

It was after 2:00 a.m. when the closing bartender finally routed them from Cosmo’s. Chase walked Sylvie to her car, both of them moving slowly in spite of the below-freezing temperature, as if they had nowhere in particular to go. Downtown Philly was deserted this time of night, its chrome-and-glass high rises dark and vacant. She inhaled deeply, the scent of winter mingling with a hint of lingering bus fumes. The city seemed quieter than she knew it really was.