The Child Who Changed Them (Parent Portal 5)

So much for his sympathy for finding herself unexpectedly pregnant. She wanted to be pregnant.

He’d been having sex with her and he hadn’t known that she wanted to be.

Had he not been sterile, would she have...

“Were you using me to get pregnant?” The words flew up and out of him before he’d thought them through.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even frown. Looking him straight in the eye, she said, “No.” And then followed it up with another kick in the pants. “I’ve been preparing to have myself fertilized with Peter’s sperm. He did his residency at the clinic, and like many of his peers back then, had donated sperm. I’m supposed to be having his baby. Yesterday’s exam was the final check before insemination.”

Tears came to her eyes as the words trailed off and Greg felt sick. Stunned. Hurt. And sad for her all at the same time.

She’d been sleeping with him, and while he was preparing to ask her to take their relationship to another level, she’d been actively pursuing having another man’s baby.

Not just another man. She’d been planning to have a baby by the man who’d been the love of her life.

Not that she’d ever talked to him about Peter. But others had. They’d been the golden couple of Oceanfront.

Either way, Elaina had been happily married to a man who’d died tragically. And was still trying, all these years later, to have his baby.

If that didn’t say “love of your life,” nothing did.

He was nothing to her. Owed her nothing. How she got pregnant wasn’t his concern. He knew it wasn’t by him.

Greg moved to the door of his office, opening it like an automaton. “Is tomorrow afternoon, same time, good for you to go over my results?” he asked as though they’d just stood up from the table and hadn’t already decided the point.

They’d made an unfortunate detour off their professional courses. A mistake he wouldn’t be making again.

“Of course,” she said, heading to the door.

But before it closed behind her, she poked her head back inside. “You’re the only man I’ve slept with in a couple of years, Greg. This baby is yours.”

It wasn’t. But arguing the point with her was useless.

Instead, Greg waited to give Elaina a head start, and then walked out of his office, out of the hospital, and drove out of town. He drove for anonymity. To clear his head. And to stop in the first semilarge town between Marie Cove and LA—Mission Viejo—to pick up a home male fertility test.

He knew the results before he left the drugstore. Before he got back to his apartment. Before he did what he had to do to produce semen for the test.

And when those results came back exactly as he’d known they would, he felt tears prick the backs of his eyes, too.

They didn’t fall. He wouldn’t let them fall.

A guy couldn’t cry for something he’d already lost.

Chapter Five

Elaina wasn’t on call that weekend and spent a good bit of Saturday at her office on the hospital campus, filling out portions of the spreadsheet she and Greg had made the day before. Earlier, she’d called Cassie, telling her that she didn’t want to go to the comedy club they’d planned to attend.

She assured her sister-in-law that she was fine, just that she had a situation at work—something Wood and now Cassie were very used to from her. Her work came first. Always.

Well...until eight months from now. For the first time since Peter died, she’d have a person in her life who would come before work.

When Wood called just as she was heading to Greg’s office on Saturday afternoon, she told him the same thing.

“I’m fine, Wood. You know me.” And maybe he was the only person on earth who really did know her.

“Cassie says you haven’t said a word about Thursday’s appointment.”

“It went fine,” she said, slowing her steps to a standstill in an empty alcove off the mostly deserted Imaging hallway. “I’m definitely a candidate to be a mother. In every way.”