The Child Who Changed Them Read online

She should have introduced them that day.

  And she’d been afraid that Wood would make more of her friendship with Greg than was there, that he’d think she didn’t need or want him anymore, then move out. It was all so convoluted and mattered not at all at the moment.

  How was it going to affect Greg, once he eventually realized that he was going to be a father? That was all she needed to be focused on where he was concerned in terms of her pregnancy. Had he wanted children before he found out he was infertile? The fact that he’d taken fertility tests three times indicated he’d wanted badly to be a father.

  Most men didn’t know they were infertile until they took a test, and that was generally done only when they’d tried and failed to impregnate someone.

  Whom had Greg tried to impregnate?

  And if he’d wanted a child badly enough to go through testing—three times, apparently—would he then be ecstatic to know he was finally going to have one?

  Or would he be disappointed that the child was growing inside her instead of the woman he’d been trying to impregnate?

  Either way, whatever way, her task was to think of him. Keep his needs in mind at all times.

  Hurt feelings on her part were not necessary and not welcome, either. As a doctor, she certainly didn’t fault him for believing the results. He’d done everything right. Tested multiple times, multiple places. She’d believe them, too, if she wasn’t carrying the evidence of his false results inside her.

  She knew it was much more likely that he’d had failed test results than that she’d been injected with sperm when she’d been in for a completely different procedure.

  Firmly resolved, she knocked on his door, tablet in hand, ready to talk about charting issues. Nurse Martha. And Brooklyn George.

  The door opened and the first thing she saw was Greg holding something: a piece of white plastic, a home sperm test, with a C underlined—the control line indicating that he’d done the test correctly. Greg’s fingers, ones that had moved artistically over her body for months, were shaking. Reaching into his pocket with his free hand, he took out another test, also marked very clearly with a C result. Putting both in one hand, he then pulled several sheets of paper, each folded in half lengthwise, out of his back pocket, and handed them to her.

  She took them because they were there; it was an instinctive move. She read them because she wanted to see what kind of testing he’d had, by whom, and compile the results. As another doctor would.

  Her thoughts, though, were not on test results. There was a chart, showing all of the efforts he’d made, followed by test results that showed no change at all. She looked up from the paper and saw a man who’d not only been tested, but done everything he could to change his results.

  Over a period of six years.

  She saw a man with resolution in his gaze.

  Greg was a doctor. He knew what those results meant, and yet he’d kept trying. And trying. He’d wanted a child that badly. And continued to be told he wasn’t capable of fathering one.

  She could only imagine the level of pain that had to have brought him. Tears pricked at her eyes and she bent her head until her own emotions were under control.

  Could he allow himself to be happy that he’d finally succeeded?

  If he’d succeeded.

  The magnitude of that if weighed heavily on her with his results in hand.

  “These two—” he held up the testing devices with which he’d greeted her “—were last night and this morning,” he told her. “I didn’t bring the third one I did in between.”

  He’d ejaculated three times in twelve hours. That knowledge didn’t surprise her. The man was as virile as they came. The sudden heat between her legs, accompanied by a wave of disappointment for not having been there, were completely unexpected.

  And brought a new wave of shame in herself. The man was dealing with what he believed to be incredibly difficult news and she stood there getting turned on by him?

  Because it was all about her, in her world, apparently. Her husband’s death, Wood’s sacrifices, all pointed to it.

  How could she have slid so far into herself? Yeah, the car accident had been rough. She’d lost her husband, nearly lost her own life. She’d been paralyzed for a time, believing she’d never walk again. But she was good as new. And living like some kind of victim, as though she had to have a man in her life having her back at all times. Even when it hurt his own.

  His test results weren’t good. The home sperm count test confirmed what the others had told him.

  “I understand that you have low sperm count,” she finally spoke, trying to choose her words carefully. “But it only takes one good one out of thousands...” And as often as he’d emptied himself in her, those odds weren’t as impossible as they might seem. “And I must have a particularly hospitable environment.”

  Shaking his head, Greg turned his back, leaving his testing apparatuses on his desk before grabbing his tablet and heading to their work space—the round table they’d occupied the day before.

  “I don’t just have extremely low sperm count, Elaina. I have antibodies that kill off my sperm. Probably due to a prostate injury I had during an impromptu high school football game. My sperm are sparse and they don’t make it out of my body.”

  Antisperm antibodies. She was familiar with the condition, even before she’d just read his test results.

  He wasn’t talking in medical terms, she could tell. He wasn’t a doctor in the moment. He was a man with a condition that hurt him deeply. And the chances of overcoming it were slim to rare.

  She hadn’t meant to touch him. Forethought would have prevented her from doing so. But her hand was covering his before she’d had a chance to form a thought. “One did, Greg,” she said softly. Tentatively.

  Could he be glad that he was finally going to be a father? Could they share this child and maybe manage to be friends in the process?

  Real friends?

  Not lovers. She adamantly couldn’t go back there—she was too emotionally dependent to allow that. But with a child between them...they’d...

  Pulling his hand from beneath hers, he shook his head. “You’re a doctor, Elaina. You read the test results. You know as well as I do that I’m not capable of fathering a child.”

  She did know that, medically speaking, he was right. But somehow it had happened.

  “I haven’t slept with anyone else.”

  She needed the seventh week to arrive so she could get the paternity test. She needed him to know. For more than just herself. The man was meant to be a father. She wanted it for him. Even though it messed up her idea of what her future family was going to look like.

  She hadn’t figured on a live father in the picture...

  “And there could have been a mix-up at the clinic. Maybe a PA injected you as opposed to getting cultures when you were in for testing.”

  The thought had occurred to her—because it was the only other possibility for a pregnancy within her. No one else had been near her space. But he was a doctor. He knew the unlikelihood of such an unprofessional and disastrous mistake. Too many checks and balances were in place for a mistake like that to happen. He was really grasping at straws. To the point that she felt sorry for him. And a bit hurt again, too. Was the idea of even considering the possibility that she could be pregnant with his child so abhorrent to him?

  Or had he just been disappointed one too many times?

  “Did you watch the procedure?” he asked, his gaze serious, and completely clear, as he looked at her.

  “No.” She’d done what she always did when being examined—turned her head, stared at the wall and put her mind on something else. On the day he was referencing, five weeks before, that last argument with Peter had sprung to mind and she’d spent the entire time hoping that having Peter’s baby would somehow add a bit of salve to the egregious wound she’d unknowingly helped create. The exam had been somewhat painful, as her uterus had to be manipulated, and...

  Elaina stared at her tablet, at the still blank screen.

  And something occurred to her, causing her heart to jump a beat. She’d had to switch exam rooms that morning. The computer in the room she’d been in hadn’t been working.

  And then the system had gone down for a short time.

  Was it possible that someone had mistaken her for another patient? One who had a painful exam, thinking she was being fertilized, and ended up not pregnant on that try?

  The ramifications blew up in her mind’s eye as she felt herself flush, then shiver.

  Looking at Greg, she didn’t realize that she was silently asking for reassurance until he said, “I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now, but I’m here if you need to talk.”

  What she needed was to stop scaring herself and get him to understand that he was the father of her baby.

  To get away from the misplaced, warm compassion searing her from his gaze, she turned her head, saw the test results on his desk, and took a deep breath.

  Clearly, she had to have a fetal paternity test. But...

  “I know it’s hard to accept, a clinic as renowned as The Parent Portal making a mistake, but they happen, Elaina.”

  She shook her head. Clearing it as best she could. She didn’t want an unknown man’s sperm in her body. She’d made that decision early on: it would have to be Peter’s, or no insemination.

  But she wanted the baby growing inside her. Right then and there, her pregnancy became completely real to her as she was hit with how badly she wanted that child.

  How she’d already wrapped her heart around it.

  She hadn’t wanted the baby to be Greg’s, but she’d been falling in love with it, knowing it was his. So shouldn’t she be equally accepting of an anonymous donor? It wasn’t like she’d been expecting anything from Greg.

  Greg picked up his tablet, turned it on, swiped and poked until the spreadsheet they’d been working on came up. They’d used a yellow highlighter to show charting discrepancies. Meds ordered and meds taken didn’t always gel. There was a handful of such instances, one during the time that Brooklyn should have been getting medication through an IV.

  He motioned toward the chart and said, “This isn’t my first time seeing something like this.”

  His tone had changed, and she looked over at him.

  “I lost a patient in Las Vegas,” he told her. She knew he’d come from a major hospital there. But she knew very little other than that he’d been an internist, had done a rotation in the ER and had liked it so much he’d changed his specialty.

  “Many doctors do, if they stay in the business long enough,” she said softly. One of the reasons she’d chosen nuclear medicine as her specialty was so that she didn’t have her own patients, but rather, was able to help a much larger group of people. While she was fascinated by medicine and the way the human body worked, while she cared deeply about people and helping them, she just didn’t see herself wanting to stand in a room and deliver a difficult diagnosis.

  The world was made up of all kinds of people, with varying strengths and weaknesses, for a reason.

  “This one was due to medical error. She was a young teacher who’d come in for a simple procedure and ended up in a coma.”

  Shocked, she stared at him. Horrified for his patient. For him. For the medical field in general. And back for Greg again. A doctor with something like that in his history...

  That was something he carried with him forever. Like being somewhat responsible for a husband’s death...

  How could she not have known such a monumental thing about him? The question seemed to be becoming a regular in her repertoire where he was concerned. And yet, she knew the answer. He didn’t know about Peter, either.

  How could she have been so hurt by his initial paternity test request, hurt that he was doubting her, when she knew him so little?

  How could she have been missing him these past weeks, when she’d never really known him?

  “As it turned out, the mistake wasn’t mine,” he said. “A nurse hadn’t followed my orders. Medications had been administered wrongly. But that didn’t come to light until I’d almost lost my license. And there was talk of criminal negligence charges being filed.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t care about either of those things so much as you mourned for that woman and her family.” The words flowed naturally out of her. Because there was something she knew about him.

  His gaze joined hers, held on gently. As he nodded, her heart leaped toward him.

  And it felt like their messed-up situation got a little messier.

  Chapter Six

  Sunday’s scans on Brooklyn showed significant enough change to convince Greg that the child hadn’t received her medication the previous Monday in the emergency department.

  “You saw my notes?” Elaina asked the second he showed up on her mostly deserted floor late that afternoon, looking for her.

  Alone in her lab, she’d been on the computer, and had spun on her stool to face him as he approached.

  He liked having her watch him.

  Even though she was pregnant with another man’s child, starting a new life completely separate and different from his, he liked having her watch him.

  She turned him on.

  She had turned him on since the day he’d seen her come into the boardroom for the first meeting of the charting committee more than a year before. He’d shoved the feelings aside then. Immediately. Greg didn’t manage the feat as quickly today, but he did succeed, after a while. He needed her to have the paternity test run so that she didn’t keep looking at him with that sense of deep connection that he’d been imagining the last few times he’d seen her. He needed her to know that he wasn’t the father of her child.

  “I saw your notes.” He repeated her words as his mind gained control over his body, focusing on his purpose for seeing her. Grabbing a stool from another countertop station, he pulled it over. “I’ve gone over Brooklyn’s chart from the first time she was in and I’m thinking that, while that mishap on Monday is a critical hospital mistake that must be dealt with, it also pointed out something crucial.”

  Elaina’s nod didn’t surprise him. “She’s not getting the prescribed medication at home,” Elaina said. These words didn’t surprise him, either. “I was really beginning to suspect the child’s problems were purely psychological. But what we see this week is similar to weeks on home meds, and then there’s the change when we know for sure she got the meds here in the hospital... You were right to suspect there’s something going on with her parent.”

  Her praise pleased him. In a personal way. He got over it. “Since we don’t have enough proof to do anything but convince the two of us, we need to determine how we proceed from here. With Brooklyn and her mother. And we also need to bring the other issue—Martha’s misconduct—to Bradshaw. Let’s go at that as a charting error for now, from our standpoint. If administration takes it further, they do.”

  With him being the head of the committee, the call was his. Martha might lose her job. Probably should, though from what he could tell, the woman had been called on a triage emergency and had passed the meds to another nurse, who must’ve failed to administer them to Brooklyn. He’d been thankful to find they hadn’t been given to another patient, by mistake, but this kind of transferring the responsibility to another employee just couldn’t be allowed. Such activity alone, without proper chain of command charting, couldn’t happen.

  “We should report it to administration immediately,” Elaina added as she nodded, squirming a bit in her seat and turning slightly away from him.

  “I’ll do it as soon as we’re done here.”

  She seemed uncomfortable in his presence—a problem recently new to them—and he wanted it gone. Just as he wanted to step in and offer his support.

  She had a challenging road ahead of her.

  And he had the time. The energy.

  But he had no desire to go that route again. He desired her body. But he wasn’t going to settle for being the stand-in.

  Been there, done that, too. Giving up his first semester’s tuition to help Heather. Putting off his own education for half a year.

  “As far as Brooklyn goes, I’d like to have a consult with her pediatrician, with you there, as well. It will be up to him to order periodic scans and blood work to prove our theory. Althea will be told that we’re monitoring progress. Nothing more. I can think of no other way to go about this in a timely fashion. It should only take about a month, testing once a week...”

  “I read in the chart that the mother’s into holistic medicine.”

  He’d seen that, too. Though he didn’t on the whole disagree with the approach, Brooklyn needed more help than she was getting.

  “I’d like to set up the meet for tomorrow, if that works for you, so we can get going on the weekly scans straight off this latest ER visit. And also...” he debated adding the next part and being there alone with her, looking into those deep dark eyes “...this will give me the chance to see this through to the end, to leave the hospital, knowing that Brooklyn’s going to be okay.”

  He watched her face for a reaction, not sure what he’d expected—or hoped—to see. She blinked. Swallowed. And said, “I didn’t know you were leaving,” as though he’d mentioned he liked ranch dressing on his salad.

  “Yep,” he stood. “I accepted the position in LA and have given up the lease on my apartment.” Pulling the bandage off quickly was still the best option, even with all of the medical marvels brought on by modern technology. Him leaving before her pregnancy was even showing—that was getting that Band-Aid off quickly.

  Lest he become a permanent Band-Aid in her life. Or try to be.

  Heather had taught him a hard lesson on that score. He’d known she was still half in love with the guy who dumped her. But he’d believed she’d had genuine feelings for him, too. When she’d told him she was pregnant, he’d believed her. Had said he’d stand by her even if the baby wasn’t his. After he put off going to college, using part of his first semester’s tuition to put a down payment on an apartment, she’d been honest with him. Told him there was no baby. She’d been trying to get her ex back, and had tearfully admitted she’d been wrong to do what she’d done. But she’d needed Greg. He’d loved her. And loved her needing him...