The Misconception (2 page)

“Yes.” Harold grabbed Jax’s arm. Since the only address he had for the woman was a post office box, he doubted he could track down her phone number. “A woman will be waiting for me. Can you tell her I’m not coming?”

Jax’s handsome face fell. “You’re standing up a woman? Geez, Mac. You sure you want to do that?”

“I couldn’t be more sure.”

“Okay. I don’t like it, but I’ll break the news to her,” Jax said, sounding resigned. Then something seemed to occur to him. “She won’t get upset, right? I mean, this meeting wasn’t for pleasure, was it?”

“Weeeellll,” Harold drew out the word, biting his lip. It would be easiest to let Jax think the woman was strictly a business contact, but he didn’t want to lie. Not to Jax, who’d always been so nice to him. “Sort of.”

“Geez, Mac.” Jax looked decidedly unhappy. “Just tell me what she looks like before I change my mind about helping you.”

Harold bit his lip. “I don’t know what she looks like.”

Jax let out a short, incredulous bark. “You just said you were meeting her for pleasure. How can you not know what she looks like?”

“We’ve kind of, uh, never met.”

“Never met?” Jax shook his head. “I don’t understand. What was this going to be? Some sort of blind date?”

“Yes, exactly. A blind date.” Harold fastened on the term like a scientist on a microscopic irregularity. Going into specifics would be too embarrassing. “I need you to tell her I’m sorry. That circumstances prevent me from meeting her.” He paused. “Now or at anytime in the future.”

Jax narrowed his eyes. “That’s kind of harsh, Mac.”

“Would you tell her? Her name’s Rhea, and she’ll be holding up a sign with my name on it.”

“I don’t like it.” Jax rubbed a hand over his smoothly shaven jaw. “But, yeah, sure, I’ll tell her. Let’s exchange cell numbers in case we need to be in touch.”

“Thanks,” Harold said. Moments later, the loudspeaker announced it was time for all other passengers taking Flight 707 to board the aircraft.

Harold watched only long enough for Jax Jackson to disappear into the portable tunnel leading to the plane. Then he turned and walked quickly out of the airport.

His hands had stopped shaking, and his sperm, he imagined, were no longer shivering.

Chapter 2

Dr. Marietta Dalrymple took her damp palms and accelerated heartbeat as good signs. As a biology professor, she was much too educated about the a-word to let it get the better of her.

The trick was turning the anxiety to her benefit. If she let herself get too on edge, the task at hand would seem overwhelming, maybe even impossible. The proper degree of anxiety, however, would help her focus on what she hoped to accomplish.

It was perfectly normal to feel a tad apprehensive about heading to the airport to pick up the stranger she hoped would impregnate her.

She inhaled deeply, drawing in an additional five hundred or so cubic centimeters of much-needed supplemental air, and pulled on her long, dark coat before heading for the front door of her townhouse. She pulled it open to a blast of chilly February air and a more vibrant version of herself on the doorstep.

“Hey, Marietta.” Her younger sister Tracy looked up from her open purse and displayed a smile made more charming by the slight gap between her front teeth. “Boy, am I glad you’re home. I think I forgot my key again.”

The low-cut blouse Tracy wore with a short, denim skirt was firecracker red. So were her low boots and faux leather jacket. Her long, ruler-straight hair was tinted red, and she was wearing more makeup than Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow. Even so, she didn’t look much different than every other hairdresser at her salon.

Tracy pointed to the silver-blue Lincoln Continental parked curbside on the narrow street in front of the townhouse. “Did you buy a new car without telling me?”

“I
rented
a new car,” Marietta corrected, walking through the door. She gave her sister a quick hug, because Tracy was the person in the world she cared most about. At Marietta’s urging, Tracy was also pursuing a college degree. “I didn’t think you’d be home for another few hours. Don’t you have anthropology class Friday mornings?”

“The professor cut it short today,” Tracy said, but her attention was on the shiny car. It looked incongruous in front of the brick-front townhouses that reflected the historic ambiance of Old Town Alexandria. “Something wrong with your Volvo?”

“No. I left it at the rental car agency.”

“I don’t get it. If your car’s not in the shop, why do you need a rental car?”

Marietta let out a sigh, which hit the cold air and turned it into a misty cloud. She’d wanted to avoid this conversation, but now that was impossible. “I’m on my way to the airport to pick up somebody, and I thought it would be better not to do it in my own car.”

“Oh, no!”Tracy held her hand over her heart in the same dramatic fashion she’d perfected in high school when cast as Macbeth due to a shortage of male thespians. “Please tell me today isn’t the day you’re meeting that. . . that
sperm whore
.”

“I prefer to call him a sperm supplier,” Marietta said.

“But it can’t be the day!”

“According to my basal body temperature, which I’ve been taking religiously every morning for months, it’s the perfect day. I’m ovulating, Tracy. That means I’m fertile.”

“I know what it means.” Obvious frustration punctuated Tracy’s syllables. “But I thought you weren’t going through with this crazy Conception Connection until next week.”

Marietta patted Tracy on her rouged cheek and smiled. “That’s what I wanted you to think. I calculated the intensity of your arguments would increase in direct proportion to the proximity of the meeting. So I didn’t tell you when I rescheduled the date.”

She took advantage of Tracy’s momentary speechlessness to slip past her. Grabbing the wrought-iron railing, Marietta hurried down a half-dozen steps onto the redbrick sidewalk. She tried telling herself she shouldn’t feel guilty for not sharing her plans with Tracy. It didn’t work. Her anxiety hiked up a notch, and she wiped her damp palms on the nubby fabric of her coat.

Focus
, she told herself, which was difficult with her sister’s boot heels click-clacking behind her. Resigned to apologizing, Marietta turned at the same time the pointed toe of Tracy’s boot caught in a crack. Her sister pitched forward, arms akimbo, and Marietta was just quick enough to catch her as she fell.

“You can’t do this, Mari.” Tracy clawed her way up her sister’s body until she was standing upright again. “You just can’t.”

Marietta paused, affected by the dismay on her sister’s expressive face. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was meeting Harold today, honey, but my clock is tick-tick-ticking. It’s so loud that most of the time it sounds like a boom-boom-boom.”

“Then get a silencer!”

Marietta pursed her lips. “The next time I decide to do something like this, remind me not to confide in you.”

“The next time! I couldn’t survive a next time. Once is bad enough.”

“It was a figure of speech. I just told you. I’m primed for pregnancy. There’s no guarantee I’ll achieve my objective on the first attempt, but hopefully I won’t have to set up another meeting.”

“Another meeting? You mean, another sexual encounter.” Tracy fanned herself with one of her hands. “I think I’m going to faint.”

“We’ve been over this before, Tracy.” Marietta held up her sister’s limp body, wishing she could make her understand. “Without sex, there can’t be reproduction. And reproduction is essential for the preservation of the species. For a woman, the desire to become a mother is the strongest of all the biological urges. I have no intention of denying mine.”

“I’m not proposing you deny it.” Tracy still clung to her. Her green eyes were pleading. “I’m suggesting that placing an ad in a magazine for eggheads might not have been the best way to go about getting a baby.”

“The magazine is for people of superior intelligence,” Marietta corrected, peeling her sister’s clutching fingers off her clothes as she talked. “The male’s genetic material accounts for half the baby’s makeup. By choosing someone with desirable qualities, I’m merely looking out for my baby’s welfare. Surely you’ve heard of the terms natural selection and survival of the fittest.”

“There’s nothing natural about what you’re doing! The natural process would be to fall in love with a man and have his baby.”

Marietta sniffed, moved to her car and yanked open the door. “You know how I feel about love.”

“I know you have a warped view of love.”

Marietta swallowed her retort. Bringing up her theory about the myth of the monogamous man would only hurt her sister. Tracy had been separated from her cheating husband for seven months, and she still wasn’t over the snake.

“That’s your opinion,” Marietta said.

“Here’s another one,” Tracy said. “Try artificial insemination instead.”

“An unnatural option. Did you know that freshly collected semen have a much higher success rate than frozen spermatozoa during the artificial insemination process? That alone proves the natural way is better.” Marietta forced herself to shrug. What good would it do to confide in Tracy that she was tempted, even at this late date, to take the easier route. “Besides, why do I need artificial insemination when I already have everything I want in a sperm supplier?”

Marietta punctuated her statement by getting into the car. Before she could reach for the door handle, Tracy positioned her body inside the open door and leaned down, banging her forehead on the door frame in the process. She held her head with one hand and grabbed Marietta’s wrist with the other.

“Wait. Think about this logically and consider what could go wrong. How can you be sure this Harold doesn’t have a communicable disease?”

“I have copies of his medical records.”

Tracy bit her lip, a long-held character trait that meant she was thinking. “Okay. Then here’s another. What if you do get pregnant, and he wants to play a part in the baby’s life?”

“He can’t. You know that, Tracy. I neither want nor need a man to help me raise my child. He’s already signed a contract relinquishing all rights to any baby we might conceive.”

“What if he changes his mind?”

“It won’t matter. I’ve taken precautionary steps to assure he won’t be able to locate me if he does.”

“What kind of steps?”

“I’m going by the alias Rhea. In Greek mythology, she was the mother of the Olympian gods. Don’t you think that’s clever?”

Tracy didn’t even crack a smile. “What else?”

“The only address he has for me is a post-office box, I made the hotel reservation under my alias and I’m not sharing any personal information. Why do you think I’m driving a rental car?”

Tracy didn’t answer. Instead she looked hard at her sister, and uncannily zeroed in on the aspect of the plan that disconcerted Marietta most. “You do realize you have to have sex with him.”

Marietta tried not to shudder. In her opinion, sex was a sweaty, undignified,
unpleasant
experience. Some women, Tracy for instance, claimed to enjoy it, but Marietta had found the deed was mainly about male gratification. In the animal kingdom, for example, the act often took less than ten seconds, and females seemed spectacularly unmoved by it.

The only real benefit Marietta detected for most females, whether human or animal, was procreation. Which was what she needed to remember. For most of her life, she’d wanted to be a mother. As a child, she’d dressed her stuffed animals in diapers and pushed a toy baby carriage around the neighborhood. As an adult, her arms ached every time she saw a mother cuddling a sweet-smelling, cooing baby. If sex was the price she had to pay to get a child of her own, so be it.

“Of course I know I have to have sex with him. I’m a biology professor, remember?” The wind blew through the open car door, and she shivered. “Would you let me go? It’s too cold to stay out here arguing with you.”

Tracy’s head dropped. Reluctantly, she released Marietta’s wrist and backed away from the car. “You won’t let me talk you out of this, will you, Mari? You won’t even consider that something could go wrong.”

“I’ve planned everything to the most minute detail.” Marietta slammed the door shut, turned on the ignition and listened to the rental car roar to life. She maneuvered out of the parking spot, rolling down the window to make her parting point. “The plane’s en route. The man who agreed to give me a child and disappear forever is on it. What could possibly go wrong?”

AS THE PLANE did a bumpy landing dance down the runway, Jax theorized he’d gotten the wrong stomach when God handed out body parts.

Anyone looking at him would see a very large, exceptionally strong man who appeared able to weather any hardship. Yet his stomach had soared and dropped with every air pocket the plane hit.

Sweat broke out on his forehead. Geez, he hated to fly. Takeoffs and landings were such torture he had to call on all his willpower not to squeeze the hell out of the armrests. He’d done that once, and the plastic had cracked like an eggshell.