The Billionaire's Baby Bargain novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Page Nine

Matthias explains why his child must come from a clinic, wires her sister's $480,000 before she signs, and she signs anyway; his grandmother summons her to dinner.

The folder was forty pages long, and the first thing I did was turn to the end.

"Don't read the end," Matthias said. "Start with page nine."

"Why page nine?"

"Because it's the one everyone gets stuck on."

I flipped to it.

It was titled Conception, and it was one paragraph long.

The child would be conceived at a fertility clinic in Chicago, by insemination, using samples already in storage.

Nothing in this agreement requires, expects or pays for intimacy between the parties.

That was the whole page.

"Why a clinic?" I said. "You're thirty-six. You look healthy. You look like you eat entire deer."

He almost smiled.

It was the first time I had seen his face move, and it did something strange to my stomach.

"When I was twenty-four, I had Hodgkin lymphoma," he said.

He touched the scar above his collar, where the port had been.

"Eleven months of chemotherapy. Before it started, I banked six samples."

"That was smart."

"My doctor insisted. My count was low even before the cancer."

He said it flatly.

"After treatment it got worse. The doctors gave me a number for a natural conception. It was under one in a hundred in a year."

"Under one in a hundred is not none."

"It's close enough to none that I stopped counting."

I looked at the paper so I wouldn't have to look at his face.

"Why a wife, then? Why not hire a surrogate and be done?"

"My grandmother won't give her vote to a bachelor with a freezer in Chicago."

"She wants a wife she can watch and a child she can hold."

"And you're willing to fool her."

"I'm willing to give her the family she wants. It will be a real child, and you'll be a real mother."

I flipped back through the pages.

Marriage until the child's first birthday.

Two million dollars to me at the birth.

Either of us free to leave after that first birthday.

Shared custody, written in careful, boring language.

Then page six.

"What's this?"

"No love," he said. "If either of us claims to be in love, the birth payment is forfeited."

"You wrote a clause against feelings."

"I wrote it for both of us."

"That's the stupidest clause I've ever read."

"It's the one that keeps this honest."

I laughed, because there was nothing else to do.

"Mr. Reinhardt, I haven't had a date in two years."

"I work nights and sleep in the afternoons. I'm not going to fall in love with you."

"Good," he said. "Then it costs nothing."

His voice was steady.

His thumb was pressed so hard into the desk that the nail had gone white.

I put the folder down.

"Here's my side," I said. "Ania's money comes first. Before I sign, before I say yes, before anything."

"Agreed."

"It's hers whether I sign or not. Whether I stay or not. Whether the baby ever happens or not."

"Agreed."

"And nobody buys me. The money in this paper is for a marriage and a child.

It's not for my body, and you don't get to pretend it is."

"That's what page nine says."

"Then I want it said out loud."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Nothing in this contract touches you," he said. "Whatever you do with your own life stays yours."

Heat crawled up my neck.

I didn't like how well I understood him.

He picked up his phone.

"Look," he said, and turned the screen toward me.

It was an email to the finance office.

Wire four hundred eighty thousand dollars to the Halsted Cancer Center for Ania Sobczak, trial deposit. Today. No conditions.

He pressed send.

"It posts when the bank opens at eight," he said. "You'll get the confirmation from Halsted, not from me."

I stared at the screen.

My throat had closed up.

I had spent five weeks calling banks and charities and a man who ran a fundraiser out of a bowling alley.

"You haven't asked me to sign anything yet," I said.

"No."

"You just paid it."

"I paid it before you could say yes. If you walk out now, your sister is still in the trial."

"Why?"

He turned the phone face down.

"Because forty people watched my uncle humiliate me and pretended not to see," he said. "And you were the only one who came upstairs."

I took the pen off his desk.

My hand shook, and I hated that he could see it.

"If I sign," I said, "I want a copy. And I want my sister to meet you before Saturday."

"Tomorrow. She'll hear the same terms you did."

I signed on the line marked Spouse.

Matthias signed under it.

His handwriting was small and neat and furious.

He slid the folder into the drawer and looked at his watch.

"It's five-forty," he said. "Go home and sleep. My lawyer will call at ten."

I walked to the door.

My phone buzzed in my fleece pocket.

It was the hospital: Deposit pending, confirmation to follow.

Behind me, Matthias's phone buzzed too, and he read it twice.

"Sunday dinner, five o'clock, Lake Drive," he said. "Bring whoever you've found. No lies. It's from my grandmother."

"How does she know you found anyone?"

"My uncle called her at four," he said. "She always knows when I'm about to do something stupid."

"Is that what this is?"

He looked at the drawer where the contract lay.

"Yes," he said. "But it's the best stupid thing I've done in years."

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