by White, Jade
“You know I was wrong,” she replied. “There were just…things I thought about, things that occurred to me at the last minute. Thinking about getting on the plane with Daniel and the two of us going off by ourselves…I knew I was wrong. The world is full of single mothers, Brenton. They’re scared because they’re taking on the most important thing in the world and they have to do it by themselves. It’s just them and the baby. But Daniel and I…it’s not just us. It’s me and him and…everything that goes with him. I was wrong.”
Instead of hitting the ignition button, Brenton exhaled heavily and leaned back in the driver’s seat, looking as if the weight of the world were suddenly flying from his shoulders. He did not look at Tara, at least not at first. He only said, “I’m glad you can see that.”
There was a beat of silence. Then Tara, sounding meek and crestfallen, said, “I know how angry you are at me. Angry and hurt. You have a right to be.”
Brenton said, “Angry? Hurt? You think so?”
“I said you have the right to feel that way. I said I was wrong.”
A hard edge came into Brenton’s voice, and a hard look into his eyes. “Tara, do you know what I went through when you got into that cab? I went back to the house and I was fit to tear the place to pieces. I felt like sinking my claws into everything I saw. I felt like tearing everything apart and throwing it all over the place. I wanted to turn everything over and break it. I was ready to go through every room and trash the whole place, wreck my own home, wreck and break everything I saw—because it wasn’t going to be a home, not the home I wanted.
I wanted my cub in my home, where I could take care of him and keep him safe. I wanted his mother with us. And it wasn’t about to happen. You know what I did instead, Tara? I just went in the house, and fell on my knees on the floor, and ripped up the carpet, and sat there roaring.
I roared my lungs out because if I didn’t roar I’d break down and cry. My cub was gone, and you were gone—out there, where I couldn’t look out for you, where I couldn’t protect you. Tara, I know you were scared the hell out of your wits, but even you have no f…ing idea what it’s like to be a father and not be able to take care of your family. I felt like the most f…ing helpless, worthless creature on the face of the Earth. And now, after all that, you call me to come and get you, and you tell me you were wrong.”
A single tear rolled down Tara’s face. “What else do you want me to say, Brenton? I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry too, Tara. You’re sorry for your mistake. And I’m sorry for mine.”
Tara was suddenly puzzled, bewildered. “What mistake?”
“A mistake I made almost a couple of years ago, right here at this airport.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tara, there was that one day, when I brought you here after a whole week we spent alone, naked, doing everything in bed and all over the house. I brought you here and put you on a plane to go back to Chicago—and I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to tell you I didn’t want you to go. It was only a week, but it was a f…ing incredible week and I didn’t want it to be over. I didn’t want you to leave. I wanted you here with me.
And I should have told you then and there, ‘Tara, don’t leave. Stay here. Stay with me.’ If I’d just told you, maybe you would have gotten on the plane anyway. You had your life to go back to and maybe you would have just gone. But at least you would have gone knowing how I feel. And maybe you would have changed your mind.
Maybe you would have come back to me—especially when you knew you were having my cub. This whole thing, this whole nearly two years we weren’t together and I didn’t see Daniel for the first year of his life—it could have all been so different. And this whole couple of days would have never happened. It wouldn’t have been like this—if I’d just asked you to stay with me.
“I want you here, Tara, you and Daniel. Here, where I can take care of the two of you. And love you.”
Tara blinked, disbelieving what she had just heard. “Love…?”
“Yeah. I love our cub. And…I love his mother.”
There it was. He had actually said it. The words hung in the air, in the dark, inside the car. For a moment there was no sound except for a tiny, soft purring from the sling against Tara’s bosom—where her heart was beating in a way quite unlike anything she had ever felt before.
“You love me,” Tara said.
“I love you,” Brenton said back. “Human as you are, scared as you are—I love you. I do. And I want you. Do you think you can find it in yourself to stay with me, and trust me, and not be scared? And maybe even love me?”
He reached over and took her hand. Tara shook her head at him, tears streaming from both eyes now, and said, “Yes. I trust you. And I love you.”
And now she had said it back. And she meant it. A lightness came into Tara’s heart, a lightness that she had not felt since that panic-stricken time at the apartment in Chicago when she found a lion cub in her child’s playpen. All the fear, all the dread, just floated away, carried off by love.
Brenton sighed, expelling the last of his ordeal—and hers—in a long breath. He brushed the tears from Tara’s face, and leaned over and kissed her. Tara returned the kiss.
“Let’s take our little guy back to the house and get him into bed,” said Brenton. And he hit the ignition and peeled the car out of its space, and the newest lion pride in Napa was on its way home.
Tara sold the travel agency to Felicia, who was overjoyed to know that Tara was doing the right thing by her baby and his father. She sold the apartment where she had lived with George, and Napa became her home. Eventually, she thought, she would start another career. The idea of travel writing, a spinoff of her former business, appealed to her. When she and Brenton were off visiting the places she would write about, they would have the pride to look after Daniel. His grandmother would love that. After a few years he would be old enough to travel with them.
Tara and Brenton raised Daniel together, with the help of the pride, and Tara found that werelions that she was not sleeping with were really not that frightening after all, once she got to know them. They were, in the end, only human.
Message From The Author:
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BEAR MY BABIES
A PARANORMAL PREGNANCY ROMANCE
JADE WHITE
Copyright ©2016 by Jade White
All rights reserved.
About This Book
Billionaire WereBear Thomas McMillian was desperate for a bear baby of his own but so far in his life he had found it impossible to impregnate a female human.
So Thomas sought the expertise of fertility doctor Melissa Rancic who specialized in helping shifters like him reproduce.
However, when Thomas set his eyes on Melissa he realized she was the woman that could help him in more ways than one.
He realized that she was the one who was going to bear his babies and he was going to stop at nothing to make it happen...
CHAPTER ONE
Thomas McMillian tried very hard not to stare at the breasts before him. The fertility doctor leaned back in her chair with a pen in her mouth as he explained his situation. Melissa Rancic was just the right amount of nerdy that made her hot. She had her glasses in a pocket protector sticking out of her white coat.
“Believe it or not, Miss Rancic, there are many women out there who wanted to give me a child. Those who knew the child would be different. I’m not sure all men who come in here have had that option, but I’ve not been able to get any of them pregnant, which is why I think it’s me.”
She nodded and crossed her legs as she leaned
forward. “Your parents, one of them was a human?”
He ignored the hem of her skirt riding up and exposing more of her thigh. “No they are both were-bears. Proud of it, too, there’s just not any of us around. I think we might be close to extinction in North America. I’m not sure, though. What’s the issue, are my boys not swimming?” He truly hated to even say those words. It certainly made him feel like less than a man that he couldn’t get a woman pregnant. If it was because he had an actual medical problem, he would have a hard time dealing with that.
“I think it’s possible that humans and members of the supernatural cannot procreate. The human body is simply not set up to house a supernatural child, so it doesn’t allow the body to become pregnant. It’s basically the same reason animals couldn’t mate with humans for offspring, the genetics are all wrong.” She stood and crossed the room.
He looked her over. She was about his age, maybe a year younger, so twenty-nine. Her body was curved in all the right places and her red hair fell in soft curves over her back. She stopped when she reached a counter and turned around to lean on it.
“So you’re basically telling me,” he said, “I have to find another were-bear, or I won’t be able to have a child?”
“Not necessarily.” She moved back across the room quickly and sat back in the chair. Her eyes sparkled with excitement.
“Explain.”
“I’m working on an experimental process that will help women like me, human, start to produce the means necessary for carrying a paranormal child. It’s in the very early stages, and you’d have to find a woman who was willing to undergo something without knowing the exact affect it would have on her body, but I truly believe it will work. It would be huge if I could pull it off; all the medical journals in the paranormal world would publish me.”
She was no longer with him. Her eyes had glazed over and she stared off into the distance. He cleared his throat. Her eyes focused back on him again.
“So I have to find a lady willing to go through experimental treatments to figure out if her body could potentially carry a paranormal child of mine. She wouldn’t know what it was doing to her body, and she wouldn’t know if it was really going to work.”
“That’s right.” She smiled at him and re-crossed her legs.
He could tell from the way she tapped the pen on her leg she was nervous what his answer would be. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Would you consider doing it? Would you consider going through the process of trying to change the chemistry and make up of your body to carry a paranormal baby?”
Her mouth opened and closed several times without any sound coming out. She didn’t have an answer for him.
Nodding, he started to stand but she reached out and pushed his arm.
“Wait. I’m sorry, you caught me off-guard. I would do it, I would undergo the treatment to give some parents a child to continue their line, sure. If that was their only chance to have a baby, I don’t think I’d hesitate.”
“I’m going to have to think about it.”
Her face fell, but she nodded. “I understand. We can talk in a few days and I’ll see what you’ve decided.”
“You come highly recommended in New York, although I suspect it’s because you’re the only doctor in the city who knows of the paranormal world. How is it that you came to be that one doctor?”
“I suppose if you’re going to trust me, then we should have some sort of open communication between us. I discovered your world by accident.” She’d moved over to the couch that lined up against the far wall of her office.
He assumed the story would be long since she was getting comfortable.
“I was a younger doctor then working emergencies. It had been one of those days where I worked back-to-back twelve hour shifts and the morning had finally come. Driving home, I went through the back side of town and came upon a wreck. There was a lady half hanging out of a van. Someone had hit her and ran, her husband was in the street and waved me down. I told them to calm down, I was a doctor and I could help. He asked if I had worked with shifters before and I had no idea what that meant. At that moment, she screamed in pain so I let it go and rushed to her. Her bottom half was shifted only. The pain she was in had caused her to lose her ability to control it. I was shocked, but she was hurt badly and I had to stop the bleeding.”
“I don’t understand. Was the van hit only on the driver’s side?”
“No, she was in deer form when she was hit. He had moved her from the road and into his van having missed her being home at the right time. He’d had to move her out of the road, but it was hard to help her because the wounds were pretty severe. I had to force her to turn all the way human which was difficult for her, but she did it. Of course after that, I couldn’t practice regular medicine. I quit my job at the hospital and opened a fertility clinic.” She smiled and fiddled with the end of her skirt.
“You didn’t freak out? Your whole life you’d believed one thing and then something else happened and you didn’t freak out?”
“Well, I left out the part about the month long drinking and pill stupor I went on. Of course I freaked out, and I ended up in a facility.” She whispered the word facility. He watched her eyes lower to the floor. It wasn’t that he blamed her for freaking out. Had he not been born a were-bear, he doubted he would have believed it either.
“You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t affect you at all.” He was starting to like Melissa. He’d called her Miss Rancic because that was how she introduced herself, but in his mind he was thinking of her first name. It was more innocent. He noted it was strange for him to like someone right away. He usually took a while to warm up to anyone female or male. She was just easy to talk to.
“Okay, so we need to do some general questions and figure out the science of it all.”
“How many women have you tried to impregnate?”
The question took him off guard, he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her. She’d asked so casually, and sat with her pen poised above her notebook to simply log the number as part of a statistic. Finally, he cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter as he counted in his head.
“Seventeen,” he finally said, not sure if he was a number or two off.
“Okay.” She wrote without a word, but her eyes had widened. He knew that was a large number for most people, but it was over a bit of time. He had a feeling she was shocked by the number. He wondered how innocent Melissa was, and what her sheets looked like. Shaking his head, he cleared all those thoughts away and waited for her next question.
“These are women you’ve tried more than once with?”
“Most of them, yes.” He smiled, remembering some of the more adventurous ladies he’d bedded.
She stopped and looked at him. “Women you’ve had one night stands with agreed to get pregnant?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t sleep with someone without telling them what they were in for. What kind of person do you think I am?” He’d had one night stands in the way that the women just were with him for one night, but he’d never tried to make a baby with someone he didn’t know. The good thing was he didn’t have to tell her how many people he’d slept with that he hadn’t tried to make a baby with, and he was happy about that.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”
“All but three of them I tried several times with.”
“This was over the course of weeks, or months?”
“I had two serious girlfriends. One when I was twenty-one and one when I was twenty-seven. The first and I tried for two years, with the second a year and a half.”
“These women aren’t in the picture anymore. Would either be willing to try the treatment to help you now that we might be able to help you along?”
“No, they aren’t in the picture,” he said loudly and felt himself flush with heat.
“Moving on, tell me about the positions you mostly tried in.”
“Is that necessary?” he a
sked, suddenly not wanting to reveal every bit of his sex life to a stranger.
“Yes, I need to know everything.”
“I’m not telling you details, I’m sorry.”
“Fine, I’ll use my imagination.”
He watched her and caught the red that flooded her cheeks. Smirking he sat up in the chair.
“Oh you will, will you?”
“Please Mr. McMillian, give me more credit than that.”
“Isn’t there a way you can just type up a questionnaire of all the things you want to know, and just let me fill it out at my leisure?” he asked.
“I suppose that I could do that.”
“All right then, you do that while I think about whether or not this seems like something I can do. Tell me Miss Rancic, do you make a lot of money working here?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m just curious.”
“I love my work, Mr. McMillian, that’s all that matters to me.” She crossed her arms and stomped a foot.
“Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
He smiled to himself as he walked out of her office. A plan was forming in his mind, but he needed to know more about the redhead before he put it into place. She was pretty, smart, and willing to do the treatment. There wasn’t really anything else he needed in a good candidate.
Walking downstairs, he got into his car and told the driver to take him to his P.I., Blair. If anyone could help him find out some information, it was Blair Schmitt.
