Billionaire Bachelors: Ryan Read online

  “Who fills these out?”

  “There are medical evaluations and personality test, things like that,” she said, “but most of the personal information comes from the…the donors.” She looked past him rather than at him.

  “And does anyone check to see if they’re telling the truth?”

  “I…well…I don’t know.” Her eyebrows rose. “Why would they lie?”

  “Beats me. But to assume that the information these anonymous men volunteer is accurate…isn’t that a pretty big risk? I read a case about a guy who knew he carried a rare genetic heart defect that often resulted in death during the young adult years—and he lied on his application. Later, he had an attack of guilt and told his genetics counselor, but when they contacted the sperm bank, his sperm already had produced successful pregnancies for several women. It was a big bioethical mess.”

  Jessie rubbed her temples with her hands. “That has to be a pretty isolated incident, though, don’t you think?”

  “You’ll be living with the results for the rest of your life,” he said impatiently. “What if the guy just neglected to mention that diabetes runs rampant in his family? Or schizophrenia? Or that he’s got other hereditary diseases or conditions in his genetic makeup that could affect your child?”

  “They screen the donations for genetic problems and diseases,” she said. “All the donors have complete physicals and genetic work-ups. I have some literature on it.”

  “But they couldn’t possibly check for everything,” he pointed out. “And are there background checks to see if these men are telling the truth about themselves?”

  “I…I don’t know. I doubt it.” Jessie looked shell-shocked. “But they’re supposed to fill in everything they know.”

  “And maybe they do.” He made a deliberate effort to soften his censorious tone. “Probably 99 percent of these men are honest and trustworthy. Hell, maybe they all are. But you have to assume that there could be some falsehoods, for your own protection.”

  Jessie sighed deeply. “Darn it, Ryan. I should have known I’d be more confused than I already am after I’d talked with you.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a compliment.” But she smiled. Reaching across the table, she took the folder from him and replaced it in her satchel, then shook her head. Her eyes were troubled. “I was planning to do this the next time I ovulate, but I can see this is going to require a lot more thought than I’d anticipated.”

  He couldn’t dredge up an appropriate response to that, so he merely murmured, “Good.”

  The rest of the meal went quickly. She declined coffee, telling him she had to get back to relieve one of her sales staff, and they parted outside the Ritz. As he bent to kiss her cheek and she tilted her face up to his, the sweet scent of her filled him with an unexpectedly sharp longing, and he nearly closed his arms about her before he could catch himself. Unaware of his mental turmoil, Jessie backed away a step and waggled her fingers at him with an impish grin. “Same time, same place next month, big boy.”

  He managed a wave and stood for a long moment as she turned and walked down Arlington Street. Finally he turned and moved off in the other direction, taking a right on Beacon Street past the Public Garden and the Commons, heading back to his office on State Street in the financial district.

  As he paced off the steps, his mind churned. What had happened back there? It was just that he missed having a woman in his life, he assured himself. Since his wife’s death in a traffic accident, he’d led a lonely life. Being half of a couple had suited him. It had felt comfortable. He hated going home to the costly mansion in Brookline now, hated the silence after the day staff had left in the evening. He hated attending cocktail parties and charity events and having eager mothers thrusting their oh-so-eligible daughters in his path. The bottom line was that he simply hated being single.

  And then there was the thought of children, which he’d put out of his mind years ago. Until Jessie’s bright idea had dredged it up again.

  Children. A stab of longing pierced him. He’d wanted kids with Wendy, always assumed they’d start a family someday…but it hadn’t been quite that simple. And now she was gone.

  So marry Jessie. She wants a baby…you want a family.

  The idea was so shocking that he stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk on Tremont Street, causing a woman walking past to glance at him oddly.

  Marry Jessie. The thought made his heart race alarmingly. Wryly, he acknowledged that some things never changed. Part of him was still that adolescent boy with the crush on his lissome young neighbor.

  Marry Jessie. She was as different from his deceased wife as two women could be. Wendy had been blond and blue-eyed, petite and yet buxom. She’d been quietly charming, almost passive, rarely arguing with him. She’d been content to make a home for them; she’d felt no need to prove herself in a career. She’d been musical and elegant. Each night when he’d come home there’d been drinks in the drawing room.

  Jessie…Jessie wasn’t any of those things. Except elegant. With those long legs and the graceful way she carried herself, she was most definitely that. His mouth curved at the mere notion of Jess sitting home waiting for any man. She was volatile, determined to succeed at her business. If she disagreed with him, she said so in no uncertain terms. She had a tin ear, although she got offended if anyone suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t sing.

  For the first time, the striking differences made him pause. Could he have chosen Wendy, in part, because she was so completely unlike Jess?

  It was an unnerving thought. He’d told himself he was over Jessie, that she’d been an adolescent fantasy. He’d married another woman and forgotten her. But in the back of his mind, he had to admit that it was possible he’d been comparing other women to her for the past ten years or more. And he was over her, he assured himself. Just because he couldn’t stop thinking about her now didn’t mean anything except that he was still as physically attracted to her as he’d always been.

  So where did that leave him? Was it ridiculous to think that he could make a life with her now, a life that included the children he’d always wanted?

  He’d reached his building, walking most of the way on automatic pilot while he’d thought of her, and as he stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hall to his office, a new determination hardened within him. The moment he’d hung up his coat and taken his messages from his office assistant, he went into his inner office and closed the door. Then he reached for the phone.

  What did he have to lose?

  After lunch Jessie was answering a customer’s questions about a line of glazed pottery she carried when the telephone rang. Excusing herself, she moved to the phone. “The Reilly Gallery. May I help you?”

  “Jess.”

  A small shock of surprise ran through her. “Ryan?” Normally she didn’t see or hear from him from one month to the next unless they crossed paths at some social function. “Did I forget something?”

  “No.” There was an odd quality to his voice, as if he were unsure of something. “I wondered if…I’m calling to ask you to have dinner with me.”

  Dinner. With Ryan. “Why?”

  He chuckled, and abruptly he sounded like the adult she’d come to know, self-confident and calm. “I had some other thoughts about your, um, selection process that I wanted to discuss with you.”

  “Oh.” Well, that was good, wasn’t it? After what he’d said at lunch, she’d been in a blue funk thinking about the risks. “When and where?”

  “How’s tomorrow night? I’ll pick you up. Seven all right?”

  “Tomorrow evening works for me. And seven is fine.” What she really wanted to say was that tomorrow night was soon. But she didn’t have any reason to delay, and she didn’t even know why she instinctively wanted to do so.

  When she hung up the phone, her assistant had taken over with the customer she’d been helping, so she headed into her small office. On her desk was a loan ap
plication she’d picked up from her bank on the way back to the gallery after lunch. Ryan’s question, “What are you going to do about it?” had occupied her thoughts during the walk, and she’d realized she had little choice. If she wanted to compete, she was going to have to expand. And to expand, she’d either have to get a loan, or use the money she’d set aside for the artificial insemination. And using that fund wasn’t something she was prepared to do.

  Thoughtfully she stared at the application. Although she regularly paid on the loan she’d taken out when she started her store, she had a line of credit that was running a little higher than it should right now. It was a temporary thing, based largely on the inventory she’d recently ordered in anticipation of the spring and summer tourist season. But she suspected she’d have to pay it down before she could get a loan. And then there were the sales figures…it would take a few days to pull all that together.

  Another loan. Or, if she rolled her current one into it, a larger loan. The mere thought made her nervous. She’d worked hard to get to where she was now. She could pay her bills, live comfortably and save for a leisurely retirement someday. To her, loans meant that someone else would own what she’d worked so hard to build, and with that came the implied threat of loss. Her business was her independence; she couldn’t lose it. Still, she shouldn’t have any trouble meeting her financial obligations even if they increased. It would simply mean cutting her personal spending and watching her pennies at the gallery. But she wasn’t at all sure she was going to look like a good bet to Mr. Brockhiser, the lender at Boston Savings with whom she would be dealing.

  The rest of the afternoon was insane, and it wasn’t until Jessie closed the door to her apartment that evening that she thought about Ryan again. Thoughtfully she put away her coat, boots, scarf and gloves. Her home was only four blocks from her shop, and like many Bostonians, she preferred to hoof it as much as possible rather than fight the notoriously clogged roadways.

  She was afraid Ryan might be right about the sperm donations. How did she know that what she saw on those profiles was accurate? The screening process had sounded so complete when she first read through it. But the bottom line was that this was, at best, a game of chance.

  When she’d first gone to discuss the procedure at the fertility center, they’d asked her if she had a donor lined up or if she planned to select one from a cryobank’s stock. She’d never even considered asking any of her friends to donate sperm, for heaven’s sake! She’d thought it would be far too embarrassing. Not to mention the fact that something within her warned her against using a friend for such a purpose. What if the guy wanted rights to her child at some later date? Probably an irrational fear, but… And what about the fact that most of the decent men she knew were already married, some with children of their own? She couldn’t, and shouldn’t, generalize, but she knew it would bother her if an acquaintance asked the man she loved to donate sperm for another woman’s child. Oh, she’d read about people who’d done it, but it just wasn’t an approach she felt comfortable using.

  So that left bachelors. Jessie shuddered. Most of the single men she knew were single for a reason. She’d dated a number of them and hadn’t been impressed by one yet. How could she possibly ask a guy she didn’t even like? Okay, so that meant she could really narrow down the list, she thought as she pulled a bag of premixed tossed salad from her refrigerator and poured some into a bowl. There was a chicken breast left over from the ones she’d baked last night for herself and her assistant manager, Penny, and as she carried the food and a glass of Napa Valley Zinfandel to the small table in her kitchen alcove, she grabbed a pen and paper to start a list.

  Let’s see. She swirled the wine and inhaled, appreciating the fruity odors before she took a first, experimental drink. There was Edmund Lloyd. He wasn’t so bad, except for that little stutter he sometimes couldn’t get past. Was that a hereditary trait? She put a little question mark by Edmund’s name. She’d have to see what she could find out about stuttering on the Internet.

  She thought some more. What about Charles Bakler? He was a dear. But…not the brightest crayon in the box. And she wanted her baby to be intelligent. She put a frowning face beside Charles’s name.

  Okay. Surely she could come up with more desirable single men that that! What about Ryan? No. She dismissed the idea almost as quickly as it popped into her head. She could never ask Ryan. Not an option. But still…to be fair, she should list him. So she did. She didn’t write anything at all beside his name.

  Geoff Vertler. A possibility, except he was a pretty hearty partier, and she wouldn’t want to inadvertently give her baby a predisposition to alcoholism.

  Laying down the pencil, Jessie exhaled a frustrated sigh. This was stupid! She didn’t even know as much about these men as she did about the candidates she’d chosen from the sperm bank. If what they’d written was true.

  You know almost everything about Ryan, said that sneaky little voice in her head. Oh, Lord. She took a big slug of her wine. He really would be the logical choice. The one man she’d known nearly her entire life. He was smart, he was kind, he didn’t have any horrible health secrets hidden in his family history. He was well coordinated, she knew, since he’d played soccer in high school and college, and he could even sing. Physically, he was…perfect. If she had a son who looked exactly like Ryan, she’d be thrilled.

  But how could she ask him? Shaking her head, she pushed away from the table and rose. No way. She just couldn’t.

  But as she rinsed her dishes and put them in the dishwasher, a thought struck her. She was having dinner with him tomorrow night. And he’d said he had some other ideas to share with her. What if he was planning to offer to be the donor for her baby? She put a hand to her mouth—that had to be it! Why else would he want to have dinner? They normally had their monthly luncheon and went their separate ways.

  Jessie danced down the hallway to her bedroom. It was perfect! She’d never have been able to approach him about it, but if he offered…just perfect. And she didn’t have to worry about offending his wife since he didn’t have one.

  The thought doused her good humor, and she slowly tugged off her clothes and donned the oversize T-shirt in which she slept. It was purely an accident that Ryan didn’t have a wife anymore. An awful, unexpected accident.

  Climbing into bed, she set her alarm and snapped off the bedside lamp. But sleep eluded her.

  She’d been at the University of Alabama getting her degree when Ryan had met Wendy, and she hadn’t come home for the wedding. And by the time she’d come back to Boston, they had married, and Ryan already had begun to make history and money with the invention that had founded his fortune.

  Wendy. She could still remember the ridiculous stab of jealousy she’d felt the first time Ryan had introduced them. Wendy had been petite and curvy, with big, arresting blue eyes and pretty cornsilk hair. She’d clung shyly to Ryan’s hand, and Jessie had been jolted by the fierce feeling of possessiveness that had shot through her. Ryan had been her friend; for years and years the first person to whom she ran when things went wrong was the boy next door. Two years older, quiet and intelligent, he’d helped her survive what she now realized was an emotionally abusive childhood. They’d had a special bond. And though it had dimmed when she’d begun going steady with the captain of the high school football team and nearly died when she’d followed Chip south to Alabama, Ryan still had been hers in some indefinable way.

  Jessie had chided herself for being childish and resolved to be pleasant to Wendy Shaughnessy, and to her surprise it hadn’t been a chore. If there was a sweeter person alive, someone would have to prove it to Jessie. Wendy had become a dear friend. In fact, it was she who had suggested the monthly luncheon tradition.

  Who would have thought they’d be carrying on without her after only six short years?

  And who, she asked herself wryly just before she finally fell asleep, ever would have imagined that Ryan would father Jessie’s child? But she was sure
that’s what he was going to suggest. She could hardly wait for tomorrow evening!

  Two

  He took her to L’Espalier, a converted town house that had become one of Back Bay’s premiere restaurants. It was only a few blocks from her home, but Jessie had never been there before. Partly because it was quite pricey, but also because L’Espalier was one of those places people went to celebrate life’s milestones.

  Over a truly superb vegetarian meal, though, Ryan showed no signs of getting around to the reason he’d asked her there. Much as they had yesterday, he kept the conversation impersonal, telling her about various causes for which he’d recently been solicited, asking her opinion on which ones would be the best to support. Maybe he’d changed his mind. Her heart sank. Could she force herself to ask him?

  When she declined dessert, he asked for the check, and before she knew it, they were back on Marlborough Street, heading for her apartment. They both were silent as they walked along the sidewalk. Each of them had their gloved hands in their pockets, and walked carefully through the darkened streets; there were icy patches in unexpected places left over from a storm the week before.

  Twice she opened her mouth and closed it without speaking. How to bring up the topic? Maybe he felt as embarrassed as she did. Maybe she should just go ahead and ask him. But she couldn’t. Her vocal cords simply froze at the thought of asking Ryan to donate sperm. At the same time she was all too aware of his tall, broad-shouldered figure. She’d never looked at him as anything but a dear friend in the most platonic sense, but the whole notion of creating a child raised the specter of sexual intimacy, and try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of a new fascination with him. She would not, she reminded herself for at least the fiftieth time, engage in prurient thoughts about this man who’d been such a dear friend.

  Right.