I stayed.
I'm not sure what that says about me. Nothing good probably.
I moved outside when my own consultation wrapped—shorter than expected, longer than I wanted, the kind of clinical conversation that made everything feel small and proceduralin a way I hadn't anticipated. The doctor had been kind. That almost made it worse.
The parking lot was half-empty in the June heat. I leaned against the tailgate of my truck and took off the mask and breathed real air for the first time in two hours and tried to think clearly.
The problem was simple. I needed a woman who wanted a baby. I had twelve months. The woman inside that building wanted a baby and had no way to fund it and had looked at my situation and done the math before I had and said it makes sense, right like she was proposing a business arrangement and not the most insane thing anyone had said to me in thirty-eight years on God’s green earth.
It was insane.
It also made complete sense.
I was still working through the specific geometry of that contradiction when the clinic door opened and she came out and took her mask off.
And she was…well, shit.
I don't know what I'd expected. The eyes I'd seen, the way she talked, the specific quality of her laugh—I'd built some version of her in my head without meaning to and it had been accurate in the way that sketches are accurate, close enough to recognize but missing the detail that makes a thing real.
This was the detail.
She was —
She stopped just outside the door, blinking in the June sun, and I had approximately three seconds to look at her before she found me in the parking lot, and I used all three of them.
Brown skin warm in the sunlight, dark hair pulled back in a way that was coming undone on one side, her face—her face—round and soft and pretty in a way that hit me low in the gut. Herdark eyes were bright, sparkling, intelligent. She had a delicate gold hoop in each ear, and a gold cross on a chain on her neck.
And her mouth…her mouth. Full and plush and red.
She was curvy. Really curvy. My brain supplied the word before I could stop it.
Fertile.
I filed that away and looked at the horizon.
But…God help me, I wanted to fuck her. Contract or no contract, I wanted to make this woman come.
I looked at the horizon briefly. Collected myself.
She found me.
Our eyes met and she did the same thing she'd been doing in the waiting room—thought something, decided not to show it, moved. She walked toward me and I watched her cross the parking lot in the June heat. As she got closer, I could see the sweat collected in the line between her breasts, a single drop running down…
Eyes. Onhers, not onher.
She smiled as she came closer. “You waited,” she said.
“Promised I would.”
“Okay,” she said. “Terms. Should we?—”
I was already pulling the tailgate open and patting one side of it. “You wanna take a seat?”
Her eyes widened. I wondered if maybe she’d wanted to talk somewhere else.
“Or—we could—” I started.
She hopped up onto the tailgate. It made her body do unspeakably sexy things.
