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Speakman’s eyes reflected the bright light from the windows. They were clear, intelligent eyes. Not a trace of madness or the kind of wild glee that signaled insanity. Griff wondered if Mrs. Speakman was aware of it. Hell, he wondered if there was a Mrs. Speakman. The millionaire might have been completely delusional as well as compulsively tidy.
When Griff failed to reply to the question about his name, Speakman’s smile relaxed into an expression of disappointment. “At least stay long enough for me to finish making my pitch. I would hate for all my rehearsing to be for naught.” He gave a quick smile. “Please.”
Fighting a strong urge to get the hell out of there, but also feeling guilty for the physical rebuff he’d given the man, Griff returned to his chair and sat down. As he settled against the cushions, he noticed that the back of his shirt was damp with nervous perspiration. As soon as he could gracefully make an exit, he would adiós.
Speakman reopened the dialogue by saying, “I can’t father a child. By any method.” He paused as though to emphasize that. “If I had sperm,” he added quietly, “you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Griff would just as soon not be having it. It wasn’t easy to look a man in the eye while he was talking to you about losing his manhood. “Okay. So you need a donor.”
“You mentioned a sperm bank.”
Griff nodded curtly.
“Laura—that’s my wife. She and I didn’t want to go that route.”
“Why not? For the most part, they’re reputable, aren’t they? Reliable? They do testing on the donors. All that.”
Griff knew little about sperm banks and wasn’t really interested in how they operated. He was thinking more about what had happened to Speakman to put him in that chair. Had he always been paraplegic, or was it a recent thing? Had he contracted a debilitating and degenerative disease? Been thrown by a horse? What?
“When the male partner is incapable of fathering children, as I am,” Speakman said, “couples do use donor sperm. Most of the time, successfully.”
Well, apparently he wasn’t embarrassed by or self-conscious about his condition, and Griff had to give him credit for that. If he was in a situation like Speakman’s, needing somebody like Manuelo to “tend” to him, he doubted he could be as accepting of it as Speakman appeared to be. He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk about it so freely, especially with another man. Maybe Speakman was simply resigned.
He was saying, “Laura and I desperately want a child, Griff.”
“Uh-huh,” Griff said, not knowing what else to say.
“And we want our child to have physical characteristics similar to mine.”
“Okay.”
Speakman shook his head as though Griff still wasn’t quite getting it. And he realized he wasn’t when Speakman said, “We want everyone to believe that the child was fathered by me.”
“Right,” Griff said, but there was a hint of a question mark at the end of the word.
“This is extremely important to us. Vital. Mandatory, in fact.” Speakman raised his index finger like a politician about to make the most important statement of his campaign. “No one must doubt that I’m the child’s father.”
Griff shrugged indifferently. “I’m not going to tell anybody.”
Speakman relaxed, smiling. “Excellent. We’re paying for your discretion as well as your…assistance.”
Griff laughed lightly and raised both hands, palms out. “Wait a minute. When I said I wouldn’t tell anybody, I meant I wouldn’t tell anybody about this conversation. In fact, I’m not really interested in hearing any more. Let’s consider this…uh…interview over, okay? You keep your hundred grand, and I’ll keep my sperm, and this meeting will be our little secret.”
He was almost out of his chair when Speakman said, “Half a million. Half a million dollars when Laura conceives.”
Arrested in motion, Griff found it easier to sit back down than to stand up. He landed rather hard and sat staring at Speakman, aghast. “You’re shittin’ me.”
“I assure you I’m not.”
“Half a million?”
“You have blue eyes, light hair. Like mine. It’s hard to tell now, but I’m taller than the average five feet eleven. We have similar genetic makeups, you and I. Similar enough anyway for a child you sire to be passed off as mine.”
Griff’s mind was spinning so fast it was hard to hang on to a thought. He was thinking dollar signs, Speakman was talking genes. “Those sperm banks have books.” He pantomimed leafing through pages. “You go through them and find what you want for your kid. You pick out eye color, hair color, height. All that.”
“I never buy anything sight unseen, Griff. I don’t shop from catalogs. Certainly not for my child and heir. And there’s still the risk of disclosure.”
“
