The Boss's Pregnancy Proposal. Raye Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ temptation and quietly left the room. She sighed, knowing she’d given the game away. But there had been nothing else she could have done, except maybe to run screaming from the room herself.

      It wasn’t really him, she told herself a bit hysterically. It was just…well, she was a woman, after all. And he was the most gorgeous man she’d been this close to in a long, long time. Still, she wished she hadn’t revealed herself that way.

      She finished washing his shirt and when she came out into the office, she found him pulling on a T-shirt he’d found somewhere. It hugged his bulges and emphasized his assets, but it was better than his being naked.

      “I hung your shirt on a hook in the bathroom to dry,” she told him without meeting his gaze.

      He turned to look at her, reminded immediately of what he liked about her. She was efficient and to the point. Her smile didn’t drip with saccharin and she didn’t bat her eyes. He’d been surprised at the way she’d reacted a few minutes before. Usually she was almost as careful and controlled as he was.

      And that was why he’d thought she might be interested in a business proposition he’d put to her a few months before. She’d responded as though he’d asked her to sign over her soul to him and he thought she’d overreacted. Still, he hadn’t been able to get the possibility out of his mind ever since.

      “Am I allowed this close to you?” he teased.

      “As long as you’re dressed,” she said calmly, flashing a sharp look his way. “Naked men make me nervous.”

      “Me, too,” he said. “Naked women, on the other hand…”

      “Should obviously be kept out of your reach.”

      He laughed. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m just a tame family man.” Reality flashed into his mind and his smile faded. He had no family anymore.

      “Or at least I used to be,” he murmured softly, staring into space.

      Funny. It had been almost two years since Jan had died. There were now times when he could go a few days without the wave of nausea, the sharp pain in his heart and the cramping of his stomach muscles at the thought of her and what he’d lost. And then it would come again, slapping him in the face when he least expected it. Like now.

      She was the only woman he’d ever loved or ever could love. And because of that, he almost welcomed the pain. Anything that would bring her closer for a moment. He would never get over it. He didn’t want to get over it. Jan was still his wife, now and forever.

      On the other hand, he ached for a child. His little Lisa had been as beloved as a baby could be and he missed her almost as much as he missed Jan. But over the last year or so, the need for another child had been growing in him. He wanted a son. A baby to fill up the hole in his heart. A child to give him a future.

      “Are you thinking this way because of Granddad?” his sister, Gena, had asked him just the other day when he’d hinted at his longing. “I know he’s on all the time about wanting you to marry again so you can have a son to carry on the name.”

      “‘Grant Carver, the name of Texas heroes’,” he quoted his grandfather in a voice very like his, and they both laughed. “No, this has nothing to do with getting married.”

      “Children usually come with mothers attached,” she’d warned him.

      She meant a wife, of course. She thought he ought to look for someone to marry.

      “I’ll find a way around that,” he’d told his sister artlessly.

      “You can’t have a baby without getting married,” she’d insisted.

      “Oh, yeah? Watch me.”

      But he wasn’t as confident as he pretended. He’d looked into the various options open to him and had found it wasn’t as easy as you might think. You couldn’t just order up a new kid the way he’d bought his new Lamborghini. Not if you wanted the child to actually carry your genes.

      And that was what he wanted—deeply, passionately, with all his heart. He just wasn’t sure how he was going to be able to make it happen.

      “Do you have any family around you?” he asked Callie curiously. He knew she was a widow, but he didn’t know much else about her circumstances. “Any parents or aunts and uncles?”

      She had the look of someone who was thinking of edging toward the door.

      “Family?” she repeated. “Uh…no, not really. I’m pretty much alone.”

      Leaning against his desk, he dabbed at the blood on his lip again. “Everybody needs some sort of family,” he advised her. “I just spent the last few days at a friend’s family reunion in San Antonio. Watching all those people enjoy each other and care about each other and depend on each other really brought it home to me. We all need other people in our lives.”

      And I need a son.

      He didn’t say it aloud, but somehow he almost felt she heard his thoughts. Watching her eyes change, he knew she was thinking of the same thing he was—of that rainy fall day about six months before when he’d nipped into his cousin’s medical clinic and found Callie Stevens sitting in the waiting room.

      Babies—that was his cousin’s business. Ted ran an infertility clinic that specialized in in vitro fertilization. Tortured by his longing for a child to love, Grant had stopped in to see if he could get some information from his cousin about surrogate mothering—without actually planning to come clean on why he was asking about it.

      And there was Callie, flipping nervously through a food magazine. He’d nodded in recognition. She’d turned beet-red and nodded back, then pretended fascination in tofu recipes. And he’d left without the information he’d come for, but with a new curiosity in just what a woman like Callie had been doing in his cousin’s waiting room.

      As a widow, could it be that she, like him, longed for a baby but didn’t want the complications of another relationship? The thought was tantalizing and he’d spun a whole scenario around it, getting more and more enthusiastic. His cousin’s office wasn’t the first place he’d gone to find out about surrogates. He’d gone as far as to interview candidates at two other clinics. And he hadn’t been impressed. But if he could interest a woman like Callie Stevens…

      He knew instinctively she would never have a baby for mere money. So what could he do to provide an incentive? He’d mulled it over for days and thought he’d come up with a plan that would be mutually advantageous. She obviously wanted a baby. He could provide the support for her if she had a child for him—and then stayed on to basically be the child’s nanny. That way they both could get what they wanted.

      It sounded good to him.

      The next day he called her into his office and ran it past her. She’d acted like he was setting up a baby smuggling ring and wanted her to provide the baby. She couldn’t get out of his office fast enough. He was actually afraid she might quit her job or file some kind of harassment suit.

      She hadn’t done that, but she had acted very wary around him for a while. He hadn’t brought it up again. But the possibilities were provocative, and he’d done his share of wondering—what if?

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