That would be weird.
Skimming his feet over the cool sand of the beach, Aidan tried to figure out where he’d lost the argument with Ellie. Not that he’d been given much chance to argue, he thought. Ellie had presented her plan as a fait accompli. She had no intention of backing down, and Aidan had to admit he appreciated that quality in her. She’d made the decision and she was sticking to it.
So why in the world was Aidan making such a big deal over it? The choice to have a baby was Ellie’s alone to make. It was her life. If she wanted to have a baby, she should go get pregnant and have a baby.
But then she’d be leaving the island. True, it was only for three weeks, but she’d confessed out loud that if the first time didn’t work, she’d be going back again. And again.
Aidan hated to admit it, but things never ran as smoothly when Ellie went away. He would even go so far as to say that things tended to go straight to hell when Ellie was gone. Two years ago, she took five days off and Hurricane Willie struck the island. Last year she was gone for a week and the hotel kitchen staff went on strike.
She was like a barometer for all things Alleria. If Ellie was on the island, life rolled along. When she wasn’t, it was more of a crash-and-burn scenario.
Aidan was tempted to fly in a fertility specialist if it meant Ellie would stay on the island. He considered that for a second or two. It was the perfect solution. One that would make everybody happy, right?
So why was he still brooding about it?
Because, Aidan thought as he sipped his scotch, it still meant that Ellie would be using artificial means to have a baby. And that was the one thing Aidan refused to accept. He wasn’t ready to examine his feelings too closely, but suffice to say it wasn’t fair that his beautiful senior vice president was choosing to get pregnant by means of a turkey baster.
“Fair?” he muttered aloud. Fair to whom? To Ellie? Or to the male population at large? After all, she was a beautiful woman. Plenty of men would be thrilled to help her out. Had she given any of them a chance? Hell, no.
Even Blake Farrell. She hadn’t given him a chance, not really. After all, they’d only been dating for less than a month. What man in his right mind would agree to accept her obvious baby-daddy ploy so quickly after they’d met?
Aidan scowled. The right man would. But Blake Farrell wasn’t that guy. Aidan had known Blake Farrell for years. The guy was a player. He ran an air-shipping operation over on Nassau and had recently opened an office in the port of Alleria. He’d bought a small house in town so he was part of the island community now.
But if Aidan had thought for one moment that Ellie would start dating Farrell, Aidan never would’ve introduced the two. It still rankled him that she’d accepted even one date from him.
Blake wasn’t right for Ellie and he definitely was not the appropriate choice to be the father of her child. But who was? Not that Aidan had any say in the matter, but if Ellie needed someone to do the job, there had to be a lot of guys better suited for the job than Blake Farrell.
Frankly, although he didn’t want to examine his feelings on the subject too closely, he had been relieved to hear that there was no current man in Ellie’s life.
But now that meant that she was going to have a complete stranger father her child. She would be picking some guy’s description out of a book—and who was to say the guy was telling the truth about his attributes? Anybody could donate sperm and claim to be a six-foot-five Adonis when in reality he was three feet tall and a troglodyte.
Hadn’t she considered that? Scowling to himself, Aidan imagined all kinds of weird possibilities stemming from that damn turkey baster.
“Hell, I should offer to do it myself,” he muttered as he sipped his scotch. Abruptly he jerked himself upright in his chair. Whoa. He did not just say that. He tossed down a serious amount of scotch to drown out the words.
There was no way he would ever knowingly father a child. He’d made that decision years ago after watching his own father struggle as a single parent. Aidan and Logan’s mother had left them when the boys were only seven years old. It had been a defining moment in Aidan’s life and while he thoroughly enjoyed the pleasure that women provided, he wasn’t about to trust one enough to marry her, let alone have a child with her.
He would never risk a child of his experiencing the abandonment he’d gone through himself. And now he realized that this was a big reason why he wasn’t happy that Ellie was planning to go through with the pregnancy on her own. She was walking right into a single parent situation with no idea how difficult her life would become. And she wasn’t the only one to consider. Her child would go through life without a dad. That wasn’t right.
Had Ellie tried hard enough to find a man to father her child?
But then he remembered the look on her face earlier when she’d said, It’s not them, it’s me.
Hell, of course she’d tried to find a partner, but no one had been smart enough to step forward. She’d been so vulnerable while talking about it, Aidan had almost taken her in his arms and kissed away the pain he’d seen in her eyes. But he hadn’t done it, thank God. That would have been a huge mistake.
Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, he thought as he stood and walked to the water’s edge. That wasn’t the point. The point was, it was never going to happen.
Too bad. Because now that he was thinking about topics like trust and women and Ellie, in particular, it occurred to him that there was one woman in the world he did actually trust. Ellie. When it came to business, she was scrupulously honest. She always spoke her mind. And she always had his back in any negotiation they entered. She was almost as good a partner in wheeling and dealing as his brother, Logan, was.
Logan had agreed with Aidan that Ellie would make a good junior partner. Before Logan left on his honeymoon, the brothers had decided to offer Ellie the position. The plan was to wait until Logan got back to the island. They’d never brought in another partner before, but they both agreed that there was nobody better for their organization than Ellie. And if they wanted the company to grow even larger, they needed someone else in the top ranks who had her intelligence, business insight and unwavering principles.
And all that had nothing to do with the fact that she was downright sexy and beautiful. He thought again of those amazing legs of hers, pictured them wrapped around his waist with him buried so far inside her, he could feel it.
The carnal image was so vivid, he almost lost his footing. Damn, his mind was wandering down a perilous path and if he wasn’t careful, he’d find himself facedown in the sand.
He recovered quickly and drank down a good slug of scotch. The smooth, liquid heat soothed his throat and snapped him out of his wayward thoughts. His wildly active imagination meant nothing in reality. He liked Ellie, would love to take her to bed, but it wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t.
How the hell could he risk losing Ellie as a business partner if a romantic thing between them didn’t work out? Or worse yet, what if he initiated something and she was so offended she quit?
“She wouldn’t just quit,” he muttered darkly. “She’d punch you in the nose first and then quit. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”
Still, he wanted her to be happy.
But apparently, it was going to take having a baby to accomplish that.
“Hell.” He rubbed his face, annoyed with himself. If he was being honest, he would have to admit that if Ellie had approached him and asked him to be the father of her child, he would have had a hard time pushing her away. But he absolutely would’ve turned her down in the end. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would’ve. There was no way he would say yes to something like that. Even if it was Ellie doing the asking.
“Not