Chapter 2
TWO
Gage
I almost didn't wait.
That's the honest truth of it. I sat in that waiting room for twenty minutes after she disappeared through the door with the nurse, telling myself I was being reasonable, that I'd heard an interesting solution to a real problem and it was worth thinking through, that the fact that she'd made me laugh twice in thirty minutes had nothing to do with anything.
Then I told myself I was being an idiot and I should go home and call my lawyer and find a proper surrogacy agency and handle this the way a grown man with a real problem handles things, which is methodically and without getting distracted by a woman in a marigold mask who did math in her head faster than I did and looked at me like I was simultaneously her best option and her worst idea.
I stayed.
I'm not sure what that says about me. Nothing good probably.
I moved outside when my own consultation wrapped—shorter than expected, longer than I wanted, the kind of clinical conversation that made everything feel small and procedural in a way I hadn't anticipated. The doctor had been kind. That almost made it worse.
The parking lot was half-empty in the June heat. I leaned against the tailgate of my truck and took off the mask and breathed real air for the first time in two hours and tried to think clearly.
The problem was simple. I needed a woman who wanted a baby.
I had twelve months. The woman inside that building wanted a baby and had no way to fund it and had looked at my situation and done the math before I had and said it makes sense, right like she was proposing a business arrangement and not the most insane thing anyone had said to me in thirty-eight years on God’s green earth.
It was insane.
It also made complete sense.
I was still working through the specific geometry of that contradiction when the clinic door opened and she came out and took her mask off.
And she was…well, shit.
I don't know what I'd expected. The eyes I'd seen, the way she talked, the specific quality of her laugh—I'd built some version of her in my head without meaning to and it had been accurate in the way that sketches are accurate, close enough to recognize but missing the detail that makes a thing real.
This was the detail.
She was —
She stopped just outside the door, blinking in the June sun, and I had approximately three seconds to look at her before she found me in the parking lot, and I used all three of them.
Brown skin warm in the sunlight, dark hair pulled back in a way that was coming undone on one side, her face—her face—round and soft and pretty in a way that hit me low in the gut.
Her dark eyes were bright, sparkling, intelligent.
She had a delicate gold hoop in each ear, and a gold cross on a chain on her neck.
And her mouth…her mouth. Full and plush and red.
She was curvy. Really curvy. My brain supplied the word before I could stop it.
Fertile.
I filed that away and looked at the horizon.
But…God help me, I wanted to fuck her. Contract or no contract, I wanted to make this woman come.
I looked at the horizon briefly. Collected myself.
She found me.
Our eyes met and she did the same thing she'd been doing in the waiting room—thought something, decided not to show it, moved.
She walked toward me and I watched her cross the parking lot in the June heat.
As she got closer, I could see the sweat collected in the line between her breasts, a single drop running down…
Eyes. On hers, not on her.
She smiled as she came closer. “You waited,” she said.
“Promised I would.”
“Okay,” she said. “Terms. Should we—”
I was already pulling the tailgate open and patting one side of it. “You wanna take a seat?”
Her eyes widened. I wondered if maybe she’d wanted to talk somewhere else.
“Or—we could—” I started.
She hopped up onto the tailgate. It made her body do unspeakably sexy things.
“No, this is great,” she said, putting her bag down and pulling out her spreadsheet again. “Let’s talk.”
We talked for about forty minutes.
She was good at it—better than me, probably, which I hadn't expected and probably should have.
She had questions ready, a sequence to them, the kind of organized thinking that came from years of managing things that couldn't fall apart.
Parental rights. Financial arrangements.
What happened if it took longer than the twelve months. What happened if it didn't take at all.
I answered everything straight. She wrote things in the margin of the spreadsheet in that small tight handwriting, occasionally stopping to ask a follow-up that cut right to the thing I'd been hoping she wouldn't think to ask, and I answered those straight too.
At some point it stopped feeling like a negotiation.
I'm not sure when exactly. Somewhere between the financial discussion and the part where she asked about the property—practical questions, where the cottage sat relative to the main house, what the access road was like, whether she'd need a truck with clearance—and I found myself describing Holt Creek the way I almost never did, which was honestly.
The creek in summer. The way the cedar breaks the heat in the afternoon.
The limestone, the way it holds the warmth at night and the cool in the mornings.
She listened with her chin slightly tilted up and her eyes somewhere in the middle distance, seeing it before she'd seen it, and I stopped talking and just watched her do that for a second before I remembered myself.
"You'll want to know about the living situation," I said.
She looked back at me. "The goat situation, you mean."
"That too." I leaned back on my hands. "My brothers live on the property. Wyatt—he's a vet, has a place near the barn, close enough to get to the horses in an emergency. Dakota's in the main house still, when he's not on the circuit."
She frowned. “The circuit?”
“Rodeo,” I said. “He’s travelin’ now, but he’ll be home over the winter.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Yeah…that’s really cool, actually.”
I smiled. "And my cousin Sawyer. He's in the bunkhouse most of the time."
She absorbed this. "So it's not just you."
"It's never just me." I said. “Somebody’s always comin’ and goin’. Guess that’s why it never felt lonely enough to settle down.”
There was this interesting look on her face…almost a smile, bashful.
“I don’t know what that’s like,” she admitted. “I’m an only child. It’s always been kinda lonely.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
She looked at the spreadsheet. Then back at me. "Are they—your family—do they know about this?"
"They know I have a problem to solve." I met her eyes. "They don't know the specifics yet."
"But they will."
"Yes."
She nodded slowly, working through something. "And your parents?"
"Retired. They live in town now." A beat. "My mother will know within forty-eight hours of you arriving. That's just how she is."
She looked just a little alarmed. "Is she—"
"She'll like you," I said. I didn't know why I said it. I was reasonably sure it was true.
She laughed. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know you well enough to want to knock you up,” I said.
She blushed bright red. My heart hammered and I covered my face, rubbing my eyes. “Jesus—I’m sorry. My mother would be ashamed to hear me—”
But Millie was laughing, loud and unrestrained. “No, that’s okay. This is…weird. And to be quite honest, I want you to knock me up, so…”
An image of me knocking her up right here in my truck sprung to mind—but there were contracts to negotiate and sign, lawyers to talk to. This was inheritance, after all.
Not just her. Not just her laugh and her blush and her breasts and her hips.
I cleared my throat.
"Two weeks," I said. "You said you needed two weeks for the lease."
"Yeah." She was still smiling, a little flushed. She tucked a piece of hair back that had come loose and looked down at the spreadsheet. "I'll break it, get my stuff out of storage—I don't have much. Most of it's my mom's anyway."
"You need a truck?"
She looked up. "For moving?"
I gestured at my pickup. “Just that I’ve got one, if you need it.” I paused. "And a trailer. If you've got furniture."
She tilted her head. "You'd send a truck and trailer to San Antonio for a woman you met three hours ago."
“Not just any woman,” I said. “The mother of my child.”
That made her go quiet.
“I’d also like to cover your rent and any expenses from breaking the lease,” I said. “Plus…prenatal vitamins. Appointments. Testing. You name it.”
She opened her mouth to argue.
I preempted it. “I can afford it,” I said. “And I figure you’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting. It’s the least I can do.”
She closed her mouth.
Opened it again. "Gage."
"Millie."
"I'm not—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. I could see her working through something, the specific internal negotiation of a woman who had been handling her own logistics for long enough that someone else offering to handle them felt like a trap. "I have savings."
"I know. I saw the spreadsheet."
"Then you know I can manage—"
"You can," I said. "That's not the point."
She looked at me.
I looked back.
"The point," I said, "is that you're doing something significant for me and my family. The least I can do is make sure it doesn't cost you anything to do it."
Silence.
The June heat pressed down on us both. Somewhere across the lot a car alarm went off briefly and stopped.
She looked down at the spreadsheet in her lap. At the numbers that had been saying no all morning.
"Everything," she said quietly. Not a question exactly.
"Everything," I said.
She was quiet for another moment. Then she folded the spreadsheet one final time and put it in her bag and didn't take it back out.
"Okay," she said.
Just that. Okay. No further negotiation, no follow-up conditions, which told me that she'd needed someone to just say it plainly and mean it, and that not many people had done that for her recently.
I filed that away.
“I’ll come with the truck two weeks from Saturday to move you out to Briar Hill,” I said. “Probably have my cousin in tow. He’ll want to meet you.”
She laughed despite herself, short and helpless. "This is insane."
"Yeah."
"I just want to be clear that I'm aware it's insane."
"I know."
"Okay." She slid off the tailgate and landed lightly and straightened up and looked at me with those dark eyes in the June sun and she was so pretty it was genuinely inconvenient. "Two weeks from Saturday."
She picked up her bag. Then stopped, the way she kept stopping, like she kept thinking of one more thing. She turned back with a slightly different expression—less certain than usual, working something out in real time.
"Hey," she said. "This is going to sound weird."
"Weirder than the rest of today?"
"Maybe." She shifted her bag on her shoulder.
"My parents—my mom especially—she's going to ask questions when I tell her I'm moving to a ranch an hour away with a man I just met.
A lot of questions. In Spanish, probably, which means she's serious.
" A beat. "I was thinking I'd just tell her we're dating.
That it started fast, that you swept me off my feet, whatever.
Just—something that makes sense to a Catholic mother. "
I looked at her.
She looked back, chin slightly up, the way she had all day when she was saying something she'd decided on and wasn't going to apologize for.
"It would make things easier," she said. "For me. You don't have to do anything differently. I just…I'd rather she think we're a normal couple moving fast than know the actual situation."
"What's the actual situation?"
"That I propositioned a stranger in a fertility clinic and negotiated a baby contract on a tailgate." She paused. "She'd light every candle in San Antonio."
I thought about that.
"She going to want to meet me?" I asked.
"Probably within forty-eight hours of me telling her." She said it with the flat certainty of someone who knew their mother extremely well.
"And your dad?"
"Him too." She said that with the same certainty. "He'll pretend it's casual. It won't be."
I nodded slowly. This was not what I'd been expecting when I got out of bed this morning and drove south to a fertility clinic in a surgical mask. But then none of today had been what I'd expected.
"Okay," I said.
She blinked. "Okay?"
"We're dating." I held her gaze. "Started fast. I swept you off your feet." I said the last part without inflection.
Something moved across her face. "You don't have to say it like that."
"Like what?"
"Like it's a livestock report."
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
And then she laughed—that full unrestrained laugh—before walking away.
She got to her car and stopped with her hand on the door and looked back one more time. The sun was getting lower and it was on her face and I stood at the tailgate of my truck and looked back.
"Gage," she said.
"Yeah."
"Thank you." She said it simply, without the deflection she'd been using all afternoon. "For—all of it. The truck. The expenses. The…" She gestured vaguely at the situation.
"Don't thank me yet," I said. "You haven't met Sawyer.”
She smiled. Got in her car.
I watched the silver Honda pull out of the lot, signal at the exit, and turn south.
I pulled out my phone and texted Sawyer.
GAGE
Moving job two weeks from Saturday. San Antonio. Be there by eight.
SAWYER
who is she
It was a joke. I didn’t date and he knew it.
So I stared at that for a moment and thought of the best possible way to respond.
GAGE
The mother of my child.
Behave.
The three dots appeared immediately. Disappeared. Appeared again.
SAWYER
EXCUSE ME
I put my phone in my pocket.
Got in the truck.
Then I drove north…home to Briar Hill.