Billionaire’s Missing Baby Read online

  “Medical leave, right,” Maria laughed sarcastically, rolling her eyes. “You do know where she really is right now, don’t you?”

  “No?”

  “That’s right, you’re too new to know about it,” she said, and Theresa found herself curiously leaning forward despite herself. Maria added in a whisper, “Sarah’s one those surrogate moms.”

  “Surrogate mom?” Theresa gasped. She felt relieved to know the woman wasn’t dying or on drugs or anything, but this was the last thing she’d expected to hear instead.

  “Oh, yeah, she’s done it like, maybe three times already,” Marie shared. “There’s this wealthy couple up in Canada—did you know that you’re not allowed to pay someone to have a baby for you in Canada?—and they can’t have kids of their own. Something wrong with the mother, I guess. Anyway, these two have hired Sarah three times already to have their babies, and now she’s up there negotiating to have a fourth!”

  “She gets paid for that?” Theresa gaped. “But how can anyone do that? Sell their own flesh and blood to somebody? I mean, there’s plenty of orphans and foster kids in need of homes, so why do they need to pay for a baby that way?”

  “Who knows,” Marie shrugged. “They’re wealthy people. Rich folks do all kinds of crazy things.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Theresa had to agree.

  “She makes out pretty good, too,” Marie added. “They pay for everything, including the medical expenses. They make her do all kinds of weird stuff for it, though. They’re vegan, so she can only ever eat a special diet during her pregnancies. They even send her to a special ‘mommy and me’ gym class, and they pay her airfare to take trips up there all the time.”

  Theresa wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. Three times? I mean, who could ever give up their baby three times? I could never give up three of my own.”

  “I don’t know, when I think about my teenagers mooching off of me for my paycheck back home, the offer doesn’t sound half bad,” Marie replied.

  Theresa grabbed up the first chart and called, “Ricky Hanscome?” A twelve year old boy with strawberry hair and red, swollen cheeks preceded his harried-looking mother in her direction.

  “I just don’t understand how this happened,” she insisted. “Ricky is always very careful about his allergies. He knows not to play anywhere that might set him off.”

  Theresa let the monotony of worried motherhood wash over her as she treated Ricky’s allergy outbreak, Tanner’s asthma, and Samantha and Rebecca’s twin cases of ‘there’s-a-test-on-Monday-itis.’

  That last one was handled easily enough. She just told them, "Hey, I can help you without even getting the doctor. It's really easy to cure, we have a shot for it. See, it's right here inside this really big needle…"

  That ended their fevers rather quickly.

  She was midway through pulling a small toy out of the nose of a screaming toddler when her cell phone went off. She glanced at it before tilting her young patient’s head to the side and miming ‘achoo’ so the little one would sneeze on command. The third sneeze had the plastic figurine out.

  The very harassed mother fumed, “I’m going to kill that babysitter.”

  “No harm done,” Theresa responded cheerfully as she wiped the nose of her small patient. He smiled at her shyly. With his mop of curls, nut-brown skin and wide eyes, she was reminded of the photographs she’d kept of her baby brother from before the adoption.

  She smiled at him affectionately. “Good job, little man.”

  After they were gone, Theresa glanced at the number of the missed call with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She returned the call.

  “Iris, is everything okay?” she asked worriedly. “Daniel hasn’t had another fall, has he?”

  “Oh, no, dear,” her elderly neighbor said in a conspiratorial tone. “This isn’t about me this time, it’s about you. That repair man you just had over today left rather early, so I thought I’d go make sure everything was on the up and up. Only, we didn’t find your spare key where it’s supposed to be.”

  “I brought it with me,” she explained. “The sink guy needed my key to get inside.”

  “It’s just that there’s an awful lot of water on the kitchen floor, dear,” she went on. “I don’t know if it’s sprung a leak or whatever, but Daniel couldn’t get inside to find out. I just thought maybe you should know.”

  The beginnings of a migraine forming behind her eyes, Theresa replied, “I guess I’ll have to call the guy back and find out what’s going on. I can’t exactly cut out in the middle of the shift, though. I hope he’s shut the water off at least.”

  “By the looks of your kitchen,” Iris said ruefully, “I just don’t know.”

  Theresa poked her head out to glance at the throng of worried mothers with their kids dripping, sneezing, and poking their sticky fingers everywhere. She thought of Sarah, who was not dying on some mysterious medical leave, but getting knocked-up by a turkey baster in some Canadian fertility clinic while some couple was willing to pay for it.

  What had her life come to if that sounded like a better alternative than this?

  Chapter Three

  The brandy burned Adam's throat on the way down. He mused that the club his brother had brought him to was so full of smoke he almost wouldn’t notice the burn in a few minutes.

  He’d never really liked this place, with its dark, oppressively masculine walls and the scent of smugness and cigar smoke mingling with the admittedly great alcohol. His father often brought him there, too, insisting this old bar had helped him learn how to be a man.

  Adam had always been a bit of a nerd in an athlete's body. At twenty-eight, he was a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with a great curiosity about the world around him. A place like this seemed too intimidating, even downright stifling. He never went there alone.

  James liked it, though. As the resentful ‘spare’ son, he tended to doggedly follow in his father’s footsteps, in both word and deed, while Adam defied the man at every turn and still somehow came out as the favorite.

  He was drinking the brandy more so that his brother wouldn’t snatch it away from him as a top-up than anything else. James always preferred scotch to brandy, but today he stared into his glass with a sad, vacant expression.

  “What’s wrong?” Adam nudged his brother, though he was almost certain he didn’t want to know.

  "What does it feel like?" James asked finally.

  Adam shook his head in confusion. "I don't understand the question.”

  "To be the favorite. The one who isn't going to screw up. Ruin everything for the old man."

  Adam groaned, taking another swig. He was nowhere near drunk enough for the jealousy conversation.

  James scoffed. “Come on. You know you are. I did everything he ever asked of me. I dated the girls he pointed me to, schmoozed with the best of them, even learned all the secrets to running his precious company exactly the way he'd do it, and the whole time, all he saw was you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You're a globe-trotting, bleeding heart, guilty about money, women, and God knows what else liberal,” he growled. “You had no interest in what he did, you mouthed off every chance you got, and the whole time he's talking to me, every time he's talking to me, I know he'd rather be talking to you. How did you do it?”

  Adam resisted the urge to reach forward and give his baby brother's shoulder a squeeze. Past experience taught him it would only cause him to clam up fast, but he leaned forward and leveled an earnest gaze at him instead. He was startled when James looked up with tears on his face.

  “Is it because I look like Mom?”

  Adam shook his head. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of his lungs, and for a moment he couldn't answer. James’ rounder face and tousled hair could easily have been a reminder of their Mom, the woman who had run away from her children when he was only ten years old.

  He clenched a fist as he forced out, “No, I don't think that was
it.” Then he paused and watched his brother’s face, and his mind flashed back to the night his brother had first gone to rehab, pale and drawn and incoherent. “James, dad… he wasn’t right, was he? You’re not… injecting?”

  James jolted backwards so fast it startled Adam. “God, you make one mistake,” he complained.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it, okay?” Adam said, throwing his hands up defensively. “I just asked in case there was anything I could do to help.”

  “You could promise me you’re only going to have one kid,” James laughed bitterly. “No favorites that way.”

  “Are you kidding?” Adam asked, shaking his head and trying to avoid sounding too self-deprecating as he said, “Hell, I’ll probably never reproduce at the rate I’m going.”

  To his surprise, James leaned forward earnestly and clutched at his sleeve like he did when they were little kids. “Don't say that. I mean, I’m the family screw up, and I probably have at least half a dozen bastards I don’t know about somewhere, but none of them are going to matter to the family line, right?”

  “We’re not royalty,” Adam scoffed at him. “And when did you have any kids? This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

  James shrugged. “That’s not the point. What I’m saying is, have you ever stopped to realize cancer is genetic? The old man has it in his brain, and Grandpa had prostate cancer when he was even younger. You’re twenty-eight now, and I’m probably going to be dead by your age.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  James laughed hollowly. “All of this got me thinking, and I decided I should do something about it. I went to the sperm bank and had some of my boys preserved. And if you had any sense, you’d do the same.”

  “You what?” Adam laughed in bemusement.

  “Yeah, you heard me right. They'll do that for you, so if you get cancer or something you can still make sure you can have a kid later on.”

  Adam dropped his head into his hands and scrubbed his face. It was simultaneously wildly out of character for James to think of having a family, and also completely in character for him to pull some crazy scheme to ensure it happened exactly on his terms.

  He nodded. “I see.”

  “So I’m just saying, you’re older, and the heir-apparent,” he added with a roll of his eyes. “You should think about doing it, too.”

  Adam drained his glass and pushed it aside. He studied his brother carefully. James looked at him in a way he seldom ever did: sincere and thoughtful.

  The thing was, Adam would be lying if he said he'd never thought about what his brother was suggesting. The men in his family had a proclivity for heart disease and cancers that could make having a child later in life difficult. They also had a tendency for racism and nepotism, however, yet Adam had never been great at living up to the image that his father so desperately wanted him to have.

  “Yeah, maybe I will think about it,” he agreed.

  James grinned at him. “Oh, no way, that’s not going to work. It didn’t work when we were kids, and it’s not going to work now. You’re doing the dad thing, saying maybe when you actually mean no.”

  “What?” Adam scoffed, laughing at him.

  “Come on, I mean it. I don’t want you wimping out on this one.” James was leaning forward in earnest now, and Adam shook his head.

  “Are you seriously trying to drag me to a sperm bank?” he asked, shaking his head with exasperation. “I think you’ve drank too much.”

  “Chicken!” James began making loud, obnoxious chicken noises that made the three well-dressed men at the bar, none of them under the age of forty-five, stare at him.

  “You think I’m going to a—” he paused and looked around self-consciously, “—sperm bank just because you’re teasing me?”

  “No, but you’ll go because the other option would be that I pass on the ever-so-important Costanza genes,” he said, gesturing to himself with a rueful chuckle. “And come on. Nobody wants that.”

  It was on the tip of Adam’s tongue to tell his brother he was being ridiculous, but he caught a spark of something sad and vulnerable in his eyes. They had always been rivals, in James’ mind. No matter how Adam tried to convince him they were on the same side, to James, Adam was always winning in their competition without even bothering to try.

  He clamped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You know this is the weirdest thing you’ve ever asked me to do, right? But alright, if this is something you're really worried about, then fine. Lead the way.”

  “Well, okay,” James said with a laugh. He let out a crow of victory and sprang from his seat.

  Adam was mystified by his exuberance. Still, maybe if he did this for him it would go a long way toward burying the hatchet so that once the old man was gone, the two of them might still be able to get along.

  ***

  The clinic they went to was small, and there were no other donors in sight. The one receptionist seemed to be working at the place all alone, and her professionalism seemed to be somewhat lacking. Why else would she be staring at Adam like he was the next thing on her lunch menu?

  “Well, there are magazines back there, of course,” she mentioned in a flirty tone. “But some men don’t find them nearly as helpful as looking at the real thing. I… I could help you out, if you’d like?”

  “No, thanks, I should be just fine on my own,” Adam replied, nervously avoiding her gaze.

  He was surprised they didn’t want to do a much more thorough screening process than just his name and age, but he figured that was because he was storing the sample for himself rather than donating it. They probably didn’t much care what type of stuff they found since he was paying them, rather than the other way around.

  It was a lot easier for him to get the business concluded than he’d thought, really. He’d never been keen on doing anything sexual in unfamiliar places, but he supposed there was a first time for everything. And besides, it had been a while for him anyway. He figured this one sample should be sizable enough that he wouldn’t have to return to do it again.

  Chapter Four

  “That’s going to run you three thousand dollars, all told, ma’am,” the plumber told her as his eyes trailed down the wet patches on her t-shirt; the result of her trying to sop up some of the mess on her kitchen floor.

  “What?” she gasped incredulously. “But you’re the one who did this in the first place. Your company should totally be responsible for all this!”

  Staring pointedly now, he replied, “No way, ma’am. This here is what you’d call a pre-existing condition. We’re not liable for one dime.”

  Why had she opted to put on such a thin shirt before cleaning up all that water? Theresa asked herself this as she rolled her eyes. “Look, there’s no way I can just hand over three thousand dollars for this mess. It’s bad enough I’m going to be forced to take my laundry elsewhere until we get this fixed, and park my car for a month of Sundays while I ride my bike to work. Do you think you’ll be able to take payments for the amount?”

  “I’ve never known the boss to do an installment plan,” he said, unrepentant, eyes cast downward at her chest. What the hell, was this guy twelve or something?

  She coughed meaningfully. He didn’t get the memo.

  “I mean, you could call the office and ask, right?” she persisted. “I can’t be leaving the water off like this for an extended period of time.”

  “Look, lady, if you don’t like it you could always call somebody else,” he said, briefly looking around the room before his eyes landed on her breasts again.

  “I might just do that,” she snapped, glaring at him. “Don’t worry about the water, I’ll just—” she spread her arms wide, then crossed them. “I’ll figure something out. I’ll use my brain. Which is just below my eyes. Which are up here,” she finished with a flourish, pointing at her face.

  He didn’t even look embarrassed. He grinned, clamped a meaty hand on the back of his neck, and shrugged. “I’ll, uh, leave you a car
d.”

  She shook her head, turning away as he left. The lights in the kitchen were off. The window still had a crack in it, and she’d have to pay for that on Monday when that repair guy came, too.

  Her kitchen, which had looked cute and inviting when she did the tour of her very first real home, was now half-flooded, and the tiles were cracked from the tools the plumber had dropped when he came to fix her blocked sink.

  She groaned, rubbing her brow in thought. Did he really refer to her as ma’am? Did he have to do that? Rubbing at her temples next, she headed into the bathroom to grab the cleaning supplies.

  As she pulled open the closet door her angry reflection sent her into another reverie. Her skin was a light mocha, thanks to her white father and black mother, but it wasn’t as light as her baby brother’s. Still, they did share the same warm, deep brown eyes and angular cheek bones.

  She hadn’t seen Lewis since the baby had been two, and then only briefly. The vague memory of him would just have to do, though, since she had no idea where he might be now.

  Frowning at herself for dwelling on such thoughts again, she hauled the mop bucket out of the tiny closet and grabbed some cleaning solution, intent on giving the floor a more thorough scrubbing than the one she’d attempted before. Since the water was off, she poured a bit of the green liquid on directly. It spread easily.

  At twenty-five, she certainly didn’t look old enough to be a ‘ma’am,’ she thought grumpily. She tugged at a stray hair that she promised herself was absolutely not turning grey, and took a deep breath as she finished dealing with her disaster of a house before settling down for the night.

  As she sat in her cramped home office, she wondered briefly what the best options for Googling home repairs were before remembering that she had found this guy online in the first place. So, sighing loudly, she just rolled up her sleeves and opted to try again.