Pregnant by Prescription: A Fertility Spa MILF Harem Romance

Chapter 1 The Last Man Up the Mountain

The cable car smelled like wet wool and money.

I had one duffel between my boots and a letter in my jacket I’d read so many times the fold had gone soft.

Nineteen thousand, two hundred twelve euros and forty cents.

I knew the forty cents the way other men know their kids’ birthdays.

It was a number you stopped rounding once it stopped being survivable.

Below me the valley dropped away in white shelves. Above me, somewhere in the cloud, was the only employer in three countries who’d answered my application with a yes instead of a form letter.

The car climbed. The cable hummed. I counted the forty cents.

The valley station, twenty minutes back, had a kiosk the size of a phone booth and a woman behind it who’d sold me a coffee and a chocolate bar and asked, friendly as anything, where I was headed.

“Silberquell,” I said.

Her hands kept counting my change. Her mouth tightened at the corners, careful and small, like a door easing shut.

“Ah,” she said. And that was the end of the conversation.

She didn’t ask what I’d be doing up there.

She didn’t ask anything. She slid the coins across and looked past me to the next customer who wasn’t there.

I’d had that already, twice, on the train. Say the name, watch the shutter come down. People up the mountain paid for silence, and the village had learned to sell it wholesale.

The car settled into its dock with a clunk I felt in my knees.

The front hall of Silberquell was all pale stone and warm light and a hush that costs a fortune to maintain.

Somewhere water was running over rock in a way that had been engineered to sound accidental.

A woman in a robe drifted across the far end of the hall like she had nowhere to be and all day to get there.

Real cashmere. Bare feet. She didn’t look at me, which I understood was the local dialect for hello.

The front desk was a slab of dark wood with a young woman behind it, and the young woman was already talking before I’d finished crossing the floor.

“You’ll be Keller.” Irish, fast, bright as a struck match.

Red hair pinned up with most of it negotiating an escape.

A cardigan buttoned over a blouse that the cardigan was clearly losing an argument with.

“You’re early. Nobody’s ever early. The last handyman was three days late and then he was nine days employed, which is punctuality of a sort. ”

“Adam,” I said.

“I know your name, I just told it to you.” She slid a clipboard across the wood. On top of it, an NDA thick enough to stop a small-caliber round. “Sign before coffee. Sign before everything, actually, that’s basically the house motto. You can read it first if you’re the reading type.”

“I’m the reading type.”

“Course you are.” She watched me do it, chin on her hand, green eyes missing nothing.

I read every clause. There were a lot of clauses.

They came down to one idea expressed forty ways: whatever you see up here, you leave up here, and if you don’t, the lawyers who wrote this will find a part of you to remove. I signed.

She checked the signature like it might be forged, then pointed a pen at a brass line set into the floor a few meters down the corridor.

“That’s the wing line. Past that, no phones.

Not on silent, not in your pocket, not switched off and prayed over.

There’s a basket. You’ll learn to love the basket. ” She held out her hand. “Phone.”

“It’s worth less than the basket.”

“Doesn’t matter what it’s worth, it matters what it sees.

” She wiggled her fingers until I gave it over.

She dropped it into a cubby with my name already on a label, in handwriting, like someone had known I was coming and had opinions about it.

“Right. Frau Doktor will see you. Don’t fix anything between here and there even if it’s broken.

She likes to do the hiring before the labor. ”

“Understood,” I said.

“Oh, he says understood.” She grinned at nobody, savoring it. “Full sentence, even. You’ll fit right in.”

Dr. Marlene Adler did not stand when I came in.

She was behind a desk the size of a small boat, a white coat over a silk blouse, reading glasses low on her nose, and she was reading my transcripts the way a customs officer reads a passport that’s almost right.

Silver threaded through blonde, pinned up so tight it looked load-bearing.

She had the posture of someone who’d spent years leaning over things that mattered and never once slouched on the way back up.

She looked at me over the glasses. Not through them. Over.

“Sit, Herr Keller.”

I sat.

“Physiotherapy,” she said, turning a page. “Two and a half years. Top third of your cohort. And then you stop.” She tapped the line where my history quit, and waited, the question left for me to answer or not.

“Money,” I said. “Not grades.”

“You’re certain it was the money.”

“I’m certain about the money. There’s a number. I can tell you the number.”

The corner of her mouth moved a millimeter.

“I imagine you can.” She set the transcript down and laced her fingers on top of it.

Then she looked at my hands, not at my face while she talked but down at my hands resting on my knees, the nicked knuckles and the burn scar on the right forearm that a boiler gave me when I was twenty-three.

“You finished a massage certification you could afford,” she said, “after abandoning a degree you couldn’t. And you list boiler maintenance, plumbing, and small generators under additional skills as if they’re a hobby.”

“They paid the rent more reliably than the rubbing did.”

“Did they.” Her eyes came back up. Cool grey, and very still. The stillness was the interview. Some people fill silence to seem competent. She used it like a scalpel, and waited to see what I’d bleed.

I didn’t bleed anything. I’ve sat across from worse than a beautiful woman in a white coat. I’ve sat across from men deciding whether to pay me. I waited too.

She liked that. I watched her decide she liked it, the way you watch a pilot light catch and steady.

“You’ll train under my head masseuse, Bianca.

She is better than you. Do not argue with her about technique, you will lose and it will be educational.

” She uncapped a pen. “Maintenance you’ll handle alone.

We have not had reliable hot water in the east radiators for a week, which my last handyman addressed by leaving. ”

“I read about the last handyman. The desk gave me a full briefing.”

“The desk gives everyone a full briefing.” She signed something.

“Probationary. Room and board included, which I understand is the part that interests you.” A pause, and then, level: “We value discretion here above competence, Herr Keller. We are fortunate when we get both. Are we going to be fortunate?”

“You’re going to be warm,” I said. “Where’s the boiler?”

That was when the lights flickered, and somewhere below us a pump gave the wet, dying cough of a machine asking for help.

The boiler house sat downhill behind the main building, a low stone shed with a steel door and the good smell of oil and rust I’d grown up inside.

My father had been a heating engineer. The work gave him a bad lung and took him when I was nineteen, and he left me two things, the trade in my hands and the ability to walk into a room like this and know what was wrong before I’d taken my coat off.

What was wrong was the heat exchanger. Scaled solid. The mountain water up here was hard as church doctrine, and nobody had descaled the unit since, by the look of the deposits, the last ice age.

“It’s the exchanger,” I said. “Plates are choked. No heat transfer, so the system’s running flat out and getting nowhere, which is why your pumps are screaming.”

Behind me, in the doorway, Marlene had followed. So had the receptionist, Poppy, who’d materialized with a toolbox she clearly had no business carrying.

“Can you fix it,” Marlene said. Not really a question.

“I can fix it today if your storeroom isn’t a tragedy. I’ll want the isolation valves, a descaling solution if you’ve got one, vinegar if you don’t, and someone to hand me things and not drop them.”

“That’s me,” Poppy said, dropping the toolbox. It clanged. “I’m extremely good at not dropping things.”

I knelt at the unit and got to work.

It’s honest work, the only kind I fully trust. You isolate the section.

You bleed the pressure. You crack the plate stack and you find, as I found, six years of limescale fused into a brick where clean water was supposed to flow.

I flushed it. I worked the solution through twice while Poppy called out everything she handed me as if reading an inventory to a court.

Marlene stood in the doorway the entire while and said nothing and watched my hands move.

The wealthy women of Silberquell were upstairs in robes, getting their feet warmed. Down here I was up to my elbows in scale and good cold work, and it was the most at home I’d felt in three years.

I bled the system back up. The pumps caught, steadied, dropped into a low contented hum. I put my palm flat against the outflow pipe and waited, and the heat came up under my hand, slow and then certain, exactly as it’s supposed to.

“East radiators will be warm before Ruhe ends,” I said, wiping my hands.

Ruhe, I’d gathered on the walk up, was the sacred afternoon quiet hour the mountain observed, when nobody disturbed anyone and the spa held its breath.

Poppy’s pen stopped halfway to the page and she gave me a fresh, recalculating look, and I knew I’d said the right thing by accident.

Marlene stepped down into the boiler room. She looked at the open unit, the flushed lines, the gauge climbing back into the green. Then she looked at me, and the set of her jaw eased a single degree, the over-glasses look losing a fraction of its edge.

“Nine days,” she said.

“Sorry?”