The Accidental Daddy

Praise for Meredith Webber:

‘Medical Romance™ favourite Meredith Webber has penned a spellbinding and moving tale set under the hot desert sun!’

—Cataromance on THE DESERT PRINCE’S CONVENIENT BRIDE

‘Medical Romance™ favourite Meredith Webber has written an outstanding romantic tale that I devoured in a single sitting—moving, engrossing, romantic and absolutely unputdownable! Ms Webber peppers her story with plenty of drama, emotion and passion, and she will keep her readers entranced until the final page.’ —Cataromance on A PREGNANT NURSE’S CHRISTMAS WISH

‘Meredith Webber does a beautiful job as she crafts one of the most unique romances I’ve read in a while. Reading a tale by Meredith Webber is always a pleasure, and THE HEART SURGEON’S BABY SURPRISE is no exception!’

—Book Illuminations

He took her hands, both hands—and even in her panicky state she felt a shiver of reaction. He turned them in his before looking into her eyes.

‘Look …’ he finally said. ‘I haven’t the faintest clue how to tell you this, but the clinic said they would contact you and as far as I can see that would be a disaster. Maybe it’s a disaster anyway, but at least now you’ll see exactly what’s happened. You deserve to know and I need to tell you.’

He wasn’t making any sense but he did seem genuinely concerned—which, together with his talk of the clinic, had the nerves in Joey’s tummy heading straight for riot mode.

‘Perhaps you could just blurt it out?’ she suggested as the tension in the air between them reached seismic proportions.

Just blurt it out? That’s rich! Max thought to himself. Here’s this stunning woman, ready to pop any minute, and a total stranger walks in …

‘The thing is,’ he said, as thoughts of the baby reminded him of his mission. And of the mess they were in!

‘The thing is …?’ she prompted—reasonably gently, considering his eruption into her life and the tension she must be feeling. To make matters worse, she then turned towards him and reached out to rest one hand on his.

‘Oh, the Devil take it all!’ he muttered, turning his hand so he could hold on to hers. ‘The thing is you’re having my baby!’

Dear Reader

In the early stages of writing this book I met a remarkable woman—Alison Ray. Alison isn’t a multi-millionaire philanthropist, or a corporation with money to give away, but on a trip to Africa she saw a need—and from a smallish town in central Queensland, on the edge of the Outback, she set out to do something about it.

When Alison spoke to me of Chainda, a settlement outside Lusaka in Zambia with 26,000 inhabitants, seven thousand of whom are orphans or other vulnerable children, I realised for the first time just how devastating the Aids epidemic was. Seven thousand orphans, or children whose grandparents or other carers are becoming too old or sick or frail to care for them … The number staggered me. So did Alison’s drive and tenacity.

She began small, raising money locally, then found a group of helpers willing to form a committee and from there registered a charity, calling it Our Rainbow House, because eventually what the group hopes to do is provide a safe haven for at least some of these children. Already the group has done a lot with their early programmes, and now has a teacher and a small school for forty-four of the children. But there is so much more left to do. You can read about the organisation, the settlement and the children on www.ourrainbowhouse.org.au and follow them on Facebook. I’m sure you’ll be as inspired as I was by this very special woman.

There is a programme underway to vaccinate healthy young men and women in an attempt to halt the spread of Aids in Africa, but this is happening in Uganda and Kenya, so in this book—right near the end—I sent Max off to Zambia to do it there. Writers are allowed to make things up!

All the best

Meredith

MEREDITH WEBBER says of herself, ‘Once I read an article which suggested that Mills & Boon® were looking for new Medical Romance™ authors. I had one of those “I can do that” moments, and gave it a try. What began as a challenge has become an obsession—though I do temper the “butt on seat” career of writing with dirty but healthy outdoor pursuits, fossicking through the Australian Outback in search of gold or opals. Having had some success in all of these endeavours, I now consider I’ve found the perfect lifestyle.’

The Accidental

Daddy

Meredith Webber

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedication

With many thanks to the incomparable Marion Lennox, without whose advice and encouragement this book would never have been finished.

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for Meredith Webber:

Excerpt

Dear Reader

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

Endpages

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU MIGHT ALREADY be a father!’

Shock held Max Winthrop rooted to his chair, staring at his friend and fellow doctor in total disbelief.

Less than thirty minutes ago he’d stood outside the IVF clinic, trying to work out how he felt.

Uncertain?

Angsty?

Heaven help him, was there even such a word?

Get on with it, he’d told himself. You’ve made the decision, now walk in there and see Pete.

But there he’d stood, his mind flashing back seven years …

Seven years ago, filled with determination to beat a recently diagnosed cancer, he’d left something of himself here—a deposit for the future.

Back then it had been Step One of his ‘positive action’ programme, coming right before Step Two—Begin Aggressive Treatment.

Step Three had been Finish Treatment, followed closely by Step Four, Climb Mount Everest.

It hadn’t been a bad plan for a bloke in his mid-twenties who’d suddenly discovered he had an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and although his then fiancée had muttered a few doubts about Step Four on the plan, she’d agreed that he needed something special in the way of a goal.

He suspected Get Married had been her choice for ‘something special,’ although it had never been put into words.

Now, two fiancées and some serious life changes later, he’d decided the time had come to have his frozen sperm destroyed.

‘Why now?’ his friend Pete had asked when Max had finally made it in through the door.

Seven years ago Max had decided to use this particular facility because his friend Pete was working in the clinic.

Pete was now one of the co-owners, and a good part of the reason the clinic had become extremely successful in the competitive world of assisted pregnancies.

‘Why now?’ Pete asked again.

‘You should know that,’ Max finally answered. ‘You’re the one who told me it loses its motility the longer it’s kept frozen.’

‘So you’ve had a test and your little swimmers are okay?’ Pete probed.

‘Not exactly,’ he replied, ‘but if I do happen to find a woman who’ll have me, then I’ll tell her the risks and we’ll take our chances.’

‘Get tested first. I can do it here and now. Or get it done.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ Max said firmly. It made no difference now. Regardless, he wouldn’t be taking changes with long-frozen sperm. Besides, he’d spent the last few months debating this in his head, weighing up the pros and cons of future marriage, accepting, finally, that the women in his life were probably right. He wasn’t good marriage material.

Or family material.

Father material …

This last bit of the argument was the strongest, coming as it did from his own memories—the memory of the child he’d been when his adored father had left the family. It had been the final weight added to the ‘con’ side—the catalyst for this final decision. At times he still felt the pain of that time—and to inflict that on another child?

His child?

Maybe he wasn’t sure. Maybe that was why he’d rushed into preserving sperm before treatment all those years ago, but the years had made him even less certain he could cope with fatherhood. This final act was simply admitting it.

‘I’ve made the decision, Pete,’ Max added. ‘I want it destroyed.’

Pete shrugged, woken the laptop on his desk from its sleep and begun typing, sending a message to a printer somewhere in the bowels of the building.

He then used his phone to summon a lackey—a very attractive female lackey.

‘Jess, would you make sure someone in the cryo room gets the details on that printout I just sent through; then rustle up some coffee? Preferences, Max?’

Max gave his coffee order, then watched the delectable Jess leave the room.

‘Eyes off, old man,’ Pete said to him. ‘She’s engaged to one of our new staff members—a genius who’s going to make this company famous worldwide. Although …’

He paused, studying Max as if he were a newly inseminated egg.

‘Again, I have to ask, are you sure about this decision?’

Max had to laugh.

‘Just because I’ve decided marriage and children aren’t for me, it doesn’t mean I’ve become a monk. You’re a happily married man so you’ve no idea how many intelligent, attractive women there are out there who feel just as I do. They’ve decided, carefully and rationally, that marriage isn’t for them, but they’re happy to have no-strings relationships with men who feel the same.’

Pete nodded.

‘Not surprised at all,’ he said. ‘We’ve a couple of them working here. Women who love their work, enjoy their leisure time in all manner of ways and just don’t see marriage or kids as an imperative in their lives.’

Jess returned with the two coffees and a plate of wafer-thin almond biscotti. She put the tray on table by the window, assured Pete someone was working on his request and departed once again.

Max picked up his coffee, while Pete studied a message that had obviously come through on his mobile.

‘Drink your coffee, I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, as he headed out the door.

Watching him go, Max knew he’d made the right career decision. Not for him this office life, running a successful company but always being called in to solve this or check that. Working in a hospital was much the same, noisy pagers summoning him from one place to another. Private practice might be okay, but it had changed—less personal in so many ways.

So the lecturing he did, combined with research on the spread of infection in developing countries, plus hands-on work in the same area, was his career choice. It also gave him freedom to head off and climb the odd mountain when he needed to clear his head. He had no strings attached and it worked for him.

Another confirmation this was also the right decision.

Until Pete strode back into the room, obviously flustered, clutching a small metal container not unlike a miniature silver flask and a sheaf of paperwork.

And delivered the blow that had Max stuck in his chair.

‘Max … mate, I don’t know how to tell you this. This is unbelievable. Unbelievable that it’s happened, and that it’s happened to you. Max … I just need to say it. You might already be a father.’

Aware that he was probably doing a very good impression of a stunned mullet, Max could only stare at his friend.

Finally he got it out. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘There’s a mistake with the cross-match,’ Pete croaked.

‘You want to explain?’

Max heard his voice as if it came from someone else. Icy cold. Controlled. Not his.

‘The cross-match … Names matched to codes, verified every step of the way. But your name has the wrong code on it. They’ve checked and there’s a matching mistake. Your code with another name on it. But, hell, Max, yours has been used.’

‘My sperm has been used?’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say. It might even be a mistake—it has to be a mistake—though how it happened, I have no idea. But it’s been used. There’s a pregnancy.’

Could a life change so completely so quickly?

He stared at his friend. Pete stared back in consternation, then stood and walked to the window. He barked into his phone, demanding more information.

Max stared at his back, then down to the folder on the desk. He flicked it open.

A name … details …

Pete turned, saw what he was looking at and snatched the file away.

They stared at each other.

Shock eased and words came. Demands. Anger

He rose to his feet, coffee forgotten as he tried to absorb this impossible news. Icy anger.

‘There’s b-been a m-mix-up,’ Pete stammered. ‘Honestly, Max, this never happens—the checks and balances … I’ll find out how and why, but right now—’

‘You’re saying someone’s having my baby! Who?’

‘I can’t tell you that—it’s bad enough it’s happened. I mean, we’ll have to tell the woman when we sort out just what’s happened. God, this could ruin us!’

‘Ruin you? Ruin the clinic? What about me?’

‘And the poor woman who thinks she’s having her dead husband’s baby …’

Anger had him pacing—back and forth in front of the desk. But … Dead husband. The two words that brought Max to a halt, to loom over the desk once again.

‘What do you mean, dead husband?’

Pete looked up at him, his face pale and haggard.

‘Her husband died shortly after he was here, and she finally decided to use the sperm—have his child.’

‘The fact remains she’s having my baby,’ Max growled. He raked his hair. ‘Hell. Do we …?’ He was struggling to get his head around it. ‘Do I need to know? Does she need to know?’

‘There’s no way we can do that,’ said Pete. ‘The DNA … it’s yours, not his. That has so many implications …’

It did. Implications were all he was seeing right now, and he didn’t like any of them.

‘I need to meet her,’ he said at last, trying to think logically. ‘I need to speak to her. How far gone is she? Is the pregnancy viable?’ So many questions …

Pete recovered enough to straighten in his seat, colour returning to his face.

‘Max, you need to leave this to us. We’ll sort it. Somehow. This business is all about confidentiality. I’ll see her, I’ll explain—keep you right out of it.’

‘Keep me right out of it when it’s my baby you’re talking about?’ He couldn’t get his head around the words. My baby.

This didn’t make sense. Why the surge of certainty? Why the instant knowledge that if this was his baby, he wanted to be involved?

Maybe the rational decision he’d walked in here with hadn’t been so rational after all.

And he’d seen the file.

‘It’s Joanne McMillan,’ he said, watching his friend’s face. ‘Dr Joanne McMillan.’

‘You can’t know.’ Pete clutched his file in horror, his colour fading even further. ‘You shouldn’t have seen. Forget it. We need to talk to her—explain. I need to see her, not you.’

‘Oh, no! There is no way some woman is going to have my baby without my at least meeting her—checking her out.’

‘But it won’t be your baby—don’t you see that?’ Pete held out his hands in a plea to his friend. ‘You’ve told me you don’t want children. You’ve made a rational and reasoned decision about it and come in to have your sperm destroyed. The best way to treat it is to consider you made an anonymous donation.’

‘No way!’ He hardly knew what he was saying; he only knew it was a basic, instinctive truth. ‘This is my baby—and while I might not want it, at least I need to see it’s going to a good home. I do have some responsibility. I should have some say in the matter. As she’ll want to know—want to check me out surely.’

Light-bulb moment!

‘You said you’d go and see her to explain. Why don’t you let me go? You can make an appointment for someone from the clinic who needs to see her and I’ll go.’

‘And do what?’ Pete demanded.

‘I’ll work that out when we meet. I imagine she’s going to be so shocked to learn what’s happened she’s not really going to care who the father is, not right away. And if she’s happy to go along with the anonymous donor thing and I decide she’ll do as a mother, then, okay, I won’t tell her.’ ‘Of course she’ll do as a mother—she’s a doctor, a paediatrician, in fact. She’ll make an excellent mother.’

‘You have got to be joking!’ Max muttered. His mind was heading off on all sorts of tangents. How could he feel protective of … his sperm? A stranger’s pregnancy? All he knew was that he was.

‘You and I both remember men and women from our university days who would make appalling parents,’ he told Pete. He was sounding a lot less flustered than Pete right now, more in control. ‘Medical training doesn’t include extensive courses on good parenting, and even if it did, it wouldn’t have got through to people like Mike Wills, whose eyes were on the dollar signs right from the start, or that daffy woman who was always forgetting her handbag or her lecture notes and kept losing her car in the car park. Can you imagine how she’d be with kids? “Now, did I have two or three of them when I left home?” she’ll be saying.’

He was talking drivel, but it was helping him back towards a semblance of normality. It was strengthening his determination to meet the woman who would be the mother of the child he hadn’t wanted to have.

‘How far along is the pregnancy?’ he demanded, and then, as Pete didn’t answer, he grabbed the file and flicked it open. And almost reeled. ‘That’s … It’s due in two weeks! Pete …’

‘You’re not supposed to know,’ Pete bleated, but he’d lost control and he knew it.

‘Make an appointment for me to see her today—you can spin some story to get me in there.’

‘Max—’

‘Now!’

‘But it’s all confidential.’ Protest getting weaker.

‘Until your clinic screwed up!’

‘I’ll get to the bottom of it,’ Pete promised, but Max had picked up the phone and handed it to him.

‘Getting to the bottom of it might protect your clinic in the future, but it’s not doing a damn thing for me or this woman. Phone her!’

Pete stared at him for a long, helpless moment—and then made the call.

‘Jess will give you the details,’ he said as he set down the receiver and slumped back down in his chair. ‘And leave Jess your information so I can keep in touch with you. That’s if I can’t find an unsealed window and take a leap from it.’

‘You’re on the second floor—you’d probably only break a leg.’

Slipping her feet back into the sandals she’d discarded under her desk, Joey heaved herself upright so she could walk out through the waiting room with her favourite patient. With her arm around the just-teenager’s shoulders, she opened the door into the waiting room.

‘Now, you behave yourself,’ she said to Jacqui. ‘Go to your own GP if your insulin levels are playing up and phone me if you’re worried about anything at all. You’ve got both my numbers.’

‘Thanks, Joey,’ Jacqui responded, turning to kiss the specialist on the cheek. ‘You take care yourself and have a rest before the baby arrives.’ She grinned, then added, ‘That’s if there is only one!’

Smiling at the girl’s remarks, Joey saw her out and was about to return to her office to check who was next on her patient list when she registered the man sitting in the corner of the waiting room.

A tense man, although, for all his tension, there was something about him.

Something disturbing.

Physically disturbing.

Special …

She continued into her office, hoping she hadn’t been caught in mid-step, gazing at him instead of ignoring his presence.

But she obviously hadn’t ignored his presence for it seemed as if every detail of his physical appearance had registered in her brain.

Even sitting, she’d been able to tell he was tall—a rangy man, with brownish-reddish hair. A swatch of it hung across a high forehead. Dark eyebrows above eyes that had seemed to be studying her, a fine, neat nose and lips—

Surely to God she hadn’t just noticed his lips—hadn’t noticed how well shaped they were …

Pregnancy brain!

She’d put it down to that—as she put all the silly things she was doing lately down to it.

Settling carefully behind her desk, she lifted her phone.

‘There’s a man in the waiting room,’ she muttered to Meryl, her receptionist and the mainstay in her life right now.

‘He’s from the fertility clinic—some kind of rep, I suppose. They phoned and made an appointment for the end of the day.’

‘End of the day? He’s going to sit there while I see another four patients?’

‘Apparently,’ Meryl said, sounding so completely unfazed by the man’s presence that Joey realised she’d have to pull herself together.

Difficult when every time she brought a patient in, or walked a family to the door, she’d see the man.

So?

She was beautiful!

He wasn’t sure why this should surprise him, but it did. Dark hair and pale, creamy skin—hugely pregnant and looking very tired, but still beautiful.

The receptionist had told him he couldn’t get an appointment until the end of the day and suggested he go off and get himself a coffee somewhere, but he’d felt he needed to stay—to see her—to hear the chat in the waiting room. It had all been positive. In fact, from all accounts she was an angel set down on earth, a miracle worker, and so kind, so caring, so …

He’d certainly got the picture her patients and their parents painted of her—seen her kindness as she’d shown the young teenager out, although offering her private phone number when she was about to have a baby?

Surely that was above and beyond the call of duty!

Pete had told him she was a paediatrician, so he wasn’t surprised to see the waiting room with its big cane basket full of brightly coloured toys and the prints from Alice in Wonderland on the walls. A welcoming, non-scary place for kids.

But it was the woman herself who drew his attention, appearing at the door to her rooms to summon in the next small patient, always greeting the child first, then the parent, ushering them in, speaking directly to the child or adolescent all the time.

Her dark hair was pulled ruthlessly back into a knot on the back of her head, but from the tendrils escaping to frame her face, or dangle enticingly down the back of her neck, he could tell it was curly.

He felt a pang of sympathy for her as she followed a little group through the door, for she’d put one hand behind her and was rubbing just above her left hip.

Thirty-eight weeks … Why was she still working?