"And a bar. Feed store. Hardware store." His eyes crinkled slightly. "It's not San Antonio."
"I grew up near San Antonio," I said faintly. "I know what Hill Country towns are like."
"Then you know what you'd be getting into."
I looked at this man. This enormous, still, silver-templed stranger in a fertility clinic waiting room who had just offered me a cottage on his ranch in exchange for having his baby, as casually as you'd offer someone a ride.
"We'd need a contract," I said.
"Obviously."
"A real one. Parental rights, financial arrangements, what happens if—" I stopped. "There are a lot of variables."
"I have a lawyer."
"I'd want my own lawyer to review it."
"That's reasonable."
I looked back down at the spreadsheet. At the numbers that had been sayingnofor forty minutes.
The numbers were saying something different now.
"I don't even know your name," I said.
"Gage," he said. "Gage Holt."
He held out his hand. Big and weathered and very steady.
I looked at it for one second. Then I took it.
"Millie Calloway," I said.
His hand was warm and completely certain around mine and my body had many feelings about this that I was filing away to deal with never.
"So," Gage Holt said, in that unhurried Texas voice. "You want to talk terms?"
From across the waiting room, a nurse appeared in the doorway with a clipboard.
"Calloway?" she called. "We're ready for you."
I looked at Gage. He looked at me.
"After," I said.
He nodded once. Settled back in his chair.
"I'll be here," he said.
TWO
Gage
I almost didn't wait.
That's the honest truth of it. I sat in that waiting room for twenty minutes after she disappeared through the door with the nurse, telling myself I was being reasonable, that I'd heard an interesting solution to a real problem and it was worth thinking through, that the fact that she'd made me laugh twice in thirty minutes had nothing to do with anything.
Then I told myself I was being an idiot and I should go home and call my lawyer and find a proper surrogacy agency and handle this the way a grown man with a real problem handles things, which is methodically and without getting distracted by a woman in a marigold mask who did math in her head faster than I did and looked at me like I was simultaneously her best option and her worst idea.
