The Clinic Swapped My Donor, So a Billionaire Alpha Fathered My Baby novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: My Terms

In her Ballard bungalow, with her best friend Wynne watching, Marit lays out five terms; Anselm wants the baby declared at his Hall, she wants her own hearth, and he agrees to all five far too easily until his mother's car pulls up outside.

Wynne was sitting on my porch steps when I got home.

She was still in her scrubs and her pink Crocs, with a bag of lemon cookies on her knee.

"Tell me it's a girl," she said. "Tell me it's a girl and the donor is a twin."

"The donor is the Alpha who owns the cranes at Terminal 5."

She stopped chewing.

"The what?"

I unlocked the blue door of my bungalow and let her follow me in.

It was a small house with a kitchen the size of a closet.

A cedar chest that had been my mother's stood in the front hall, and every inch of the place was mine.

I had a mortgage and my name on the deed.

I had wanted nothing else in the world but a person to put in the second bedroom.

I told her everything standing at the counter.

The vials, the sixteen turned around into sixty-one, the tissues.

The card.

Wynne put down her cookie when I got to the card.

"He slid you a number to call," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"And you tore it up."

"Yes," I said again.

"Marit Falkner, I have loved you for nine years, and that's the best thing you've ever done."

Then the doorbell rang.

We looked at each other.

I opened the door a hand's width.

He was on the porch, alone, with no driver and no car in sight, in the same charcoal suit.

"I'd like to talk," Anselm Strandberg said.

"How did you get my address?"

"The clinic," he said.

"I'm going to sue the clinic," I said.

"I'd advise it," he said. "I'd also like to come in."

Wynne's face appeared beside mine at the gap in the door.

"She has a witness," she told him.

He looked down at her pink shoes.

"She's human," he said.

"She's been human her whole life and she's been a friend of mine for nine years," I said. "She knows what I am. She stays."

He took that in with a small nod.

"Then she stays."

I let him in.

He had to turn a little to get through the kitchen door, and the room seemed to shrink around him.

He did not sit when I pointed at a chair.

He stood in the middle of my kitchen floor.

He looked at my fridge magnets and my mother's blue kettle as if he had never seen a kitchen.

"I owe you an apology for the card," he said.

"You do."

"I'll make it properly, when I..."

"Not tonight," I said. "Tonight I have terms."

Wynne already had a pen.

I did not need one.

"One," I said. "I live here, in my own house. Nobody moves me anywhere."

"Agreed."

He said it too fast.

"Two. You come to every scan and appointment I allow, and you don't come to the ones I don't."

"Agreed."

"Three," I said. "Nothing public until the Gathering. I know what the Moot is, and I know what your people will do with a pup. I decide when they hear."

"Agreed," he said.

"Four. You pay for nothing I haven't asked you to pay for."

His jaw moved.

"Agreed," he said.

"Five," I said. "No touching."

Wynne coughed into her fist.

Anselm looked at me for a long moment.

"No touching," he said. "Agreed."

"You haven't argued with one of them," I said.

"I'm not an unreasonable man."

"You slid a card across a table."

"I was an unreasonable man this afternoon," he said. "I'd like to be a reasonable one now. Let me say what I want."

I crossed my arms.

"Say it."

"The Harvest Gathering is in October," he said. "Under Moot law a pup of an Alpha's blood has to be declared there, in front of every pack. It's declared to its father's Hall, or it's declared to its mother's hearth."

"I know the law," I said.

"I'm standing for Speaker against Gunnar Bjorklund. The Moot trusts a man with a nursery. I intend to declare this child to the Strandberg Hall, with my name on it and a place for you in it."

"A place for me."

"The best the Hall has," he said, quite seriously. "A wing of your own. A doctor. Whatever you want."

"I want my own hearth," I said. "A roof in my name, three pack mothers to witness, and the pup declared to me. That's the other half of your law, and it's the half I'm using."

"That would leave you unprotected."

"That would leave me unclaimed."

We stood there with the table between us.

Wynne looked from one of us to the other, and she very carefully did not say anything.

"We have until October," Anselm said at last. "I'd like to talk again after the first scan."

"Fine."

"Fine."

He turned to the door.

He turned back, and he said something I had not expected from a man who wore a suit like that.

"Thank you for not hanging up on me. I haven't had a lot of practice at being told no."

"I noticed."

He almost smiled.

It was a small lopsided thing that he put away at once, and I disliked how much I noticed that too.

Then I heard tires at the curb.

A silver car had stopped behind the street lamp, with its engine running and its lights off.

Anselm went absolutely still.

"I told no one," he said, low.

The car door opened.

A woman in a navy cashmere coat stepped out and walked up my path with her silver hair perfect and her pearls catching the light.

She stopped on the porch step and looked at me over her son's shoulder.

"Good evening," she said. "I'm Hedda Strandberg. I believe I'm going to be a grandmother."

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