Enchanting Baby. Darlene Graham
Читать онлайн книгу.
sighed, suddenly feeling beaten down by the combined effects of his bizarre situation and the nagging altitude sickness. “Strange isn’t the word for it. Seems like my whole life has been strange, and incredibly unlucky.”
“I wouldn’t call you unlucky, exactly.” The cop continued to study the printout. “I guess you realize we ran an NCIC on you. They had your prints—your being a deputy and all. And Denver had more.”
Greg nodded. The visit to the sister. Why were the cops so interested in him? Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe he should be asking why they were so interested in Ashleigh Logan.
Eiden went on. “In the last two years you’ve made a killing off the property boom around Denver. You’ve been in the news a few times, doing civic stuff. On paper, you look like a real Boy Scout, unless you count a couple of speeding citations that you racked up out on Highway 63. Running back and forth to your ranch out on the Big Sandy, I’d guess.” The corners of Miguel Eiden’s mouth peaked downward grudgingly, as if to say Greg’s profile was no big deal.
“Yeah, that about sums me up.” Greg raked a hand over his face. Except for the fact that the love of his life had died a painful death at the age of twenty-nine, and his father had been shot dead by a pack of rodents, and his druggie mother had skipped off with some hippie when Greg was barely out of diapers, leaving him to be raised by his eccentric grandfather. “Could I please have some water?”
The cop went to the beige wall phone. Soon the flirtatious Crystal showed up with a plastic cup of ice water. Greg drank some, then started in. “When she decided to have a baby, Ms. Logan went to the sperm bank where she had stored her deceased husband’s sperm.”
The cop looked genuinely surprised at that, but he muttered, “To each his own.”
“So, she got artificially inseminated and she thinks she is pregnant with her late husband’s child. But I found out that’s not true. They made a mistake. The child is mine. I came here to tell her that.”
The cop’s face showed that something had finally clicked. “And that’s why you were trying to contact Ms. Logan in Denver?”
Greg nodded and the cop made a note. Greg hated to see this information go on record before he’d had a chance to explain this to Ashleigh Logan, but he supposed there was no help for it.
“You plan to tell her there was a mix-up at the sperm bank?”
“For starters.”
“Is there some way for me to verify your story?”
“I could put you in touch with the sperm bank in California. They would back up my story if I told them to release the information to you.”
“Okay.” Eiden poised his pen. “Give me the number.”
Greg pulled a card from his wallet and handed it over.
After he copied the number, Eiden said, “Okay. We’re done for now. I’ll take you back to your Navigator.” His chair screeched on the linoleum as he stood and reached for his cowboy hat.
“Wait!” Too fast, Greg also jumped to his feet. A wave of dizziness struck as he felt himself break into a cold sweat. A sudden sense of panic mixed with altitude sickness for a moment as he clutched the table and focused on the fact that he wasn’t going to leave here until he found out where Ashleigh Logan was. He had to say something to convince this cop that he needed to know where she was, right now. “There’s something else you should know.” He shook his head to clear it.
One of the cop’s black eyebrows spiked up. “You okay?”
“Altitude sickness.”
“Sit down.”
Greg did so, gratefully. He sipped some more cold water, then said, “This pregnancy—this baby. This is it for me. I won’t get any more chances. The sperm bank…mine’s all gone. They, uh, they accidentally let it…uh, defrost.”
The cop looked as if he was struggling to hide a split second of involuntary disgust, then his dark eyes flitted sideways with something like sympathy. “I get it.” He tugged his cowboy hat down, looking uncomfortable, embarrassed, as if he didn’t like discussing another guy’s sterility problems. Well, Greg didn’t like talking about it, either. But there it was. He was sterile. Though he wasn’t about to explain to this guy how that had come about. The salient fact was, this baby, Ashleigh Logan’s baby, was Greg’s one and only chance to be a father.
“Weird deal, huh?” he prompted when the cop didn’t say anything.
Eiden looked up.
“So maybe you can understand why this is so urgent to me,” Greg pressed. “What if she finds out the truth before I get to her? What if she’s come here to do something…rash?”
Eiden put a hand up. “They don’t do stuff like that at The Birth Place.” He looked at Greg as if he wanted to tell him more, as if he wanted to help. “Are you staying somewhere in town?”
“I was thinking about getting a room at that bed-and-breakfast down the way.”
The cop looked at his watch. “The Morning Light?”
Greg nodded.
“We’d better get you over there, then. Morning Light fills up pretty early during aspen-turning time.” He tugged on the brim of the cowboy hat.
“Aren’t you going to tell me where she is?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Glazier. For tonight, I want you to sit tight, okay? I’ll give you a call as soon as I clear up a few details.”
THE SUN HAD SLID BEHIND the mountains now.
After dropping Greg in the circular drive at the clinic, the cop waited, gunning the engine of his cruiser, with the alley lights blazing on Greg’s back as he walked up to the door of the Navigator. Greg wondered what the guy thought he was going to do. Break into the clinic? Rifle through the file cabinets? Dig out Ashleigh Logan’s records? Not a bad idea, actually. He assumed it was frustration that was making him think like this.
Greg got in his vehicle and fired it up, wondering if this whole odyssey was worth the grief. Maybe he should just head back to the family ranch and forget about this baby—if indeed there still was a baby.
The people at California Fertility Consultants had refused to give Greg the name of the man whose sperm had been confused with his, had refused to confirm that Greg’s sperm had indeed been used to inseminate some unknown woman. It was only the intense publicity surrounding Ashleigh Logan’s pregnancy that had finally tipped him off. When he’d seen the name of the clinic in that article in USA TODAY, he’d figured out the dates—her husband’s sperm would have been stored at about the same time his was. The article said the sperm bank was proud of the fact that they had successfully stored specimens for that long. Well, their storage techniques weren’t the problem. It was what they had done when they put the “specimens” into storage that had caused the damage.
Now two lives were thoroughly messed up. No, make that three lives. At first Greg had wanted to sic his lawyers on the idiots at that sperm bank, but after he’d calmed down, he’d realized that the threat of a lawsuit was his trump card. And he’d used it well.
Why, he asked himself again, was he doggedly pursuing this baby at all? It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to occupy his time between the ranch and his business pursuits in Denver, especially now that Gramps had passed on. But the sad reality was that even though there was plenty of work to do, plenty to distract him out in Last Chance, Colorado, there was not a soul to share it with. There was no one to love.
In the last few years Greg Glazier’s world had narrowed down to two things: horses and money. Neither one seemed like enough of an anchor to hold him for the next forty or fifty years of his life. Hell, if he was anything like Gramps—and he was—his life might go on for another sixty years. Family, Gramps had kept repeating