Baby For The Bear

Chapter 3

Ken conducted the rest of his interviews that day, thanking each of the remaining women for her time, and cleared off his desk and turned off his computer. When Pamela called him on the intercom to tell him she was ready to go home and ask him if he needed anything else before she left, he told her no, thank you, and sent her home with a thanks and a “Good evening.” And with his outer offices as empty as his inner suite, Ken sat in the big leather chair behind his desk, with his elbow on the arm of the chair and his stubbly chin in his hand, and pondered the thing for which he had cleared out all of his other business today. He had delegated every other bit of work to subordinates just to concentrate on his conversations with the women who sought to be the mother of his cub. The screening process to cull out the unsuitable ones and bring in only the best had yielded a number of eminently desirable women for the job, women that he would have wanted to take to bed if his aim were not to take them to a fertility center. Any of them would have served admirably.

And he kept coming back to that one.

That blonde. Samantha Vance. The one who’d sat in front of him and, in her tactful job-interview way, raked his bear hide over her coals for the state of her life for which he was directly responsible. The one who had been personally affected by his business decisions.

Samantha Vance had a fire about her. Perhaps it was a fire ignited by the indignation of being laid off from a job that she was good at, from which she expected to advance and build a career; but she was fiery, of that Ken had no doubt. She was proud. And he permitted himself just a faint trace of a smile at her being startled when he said he understood her position. She was beautiful when she was startled. She was beautiful when she was angry.

Hell, she was beautiful.

But that should not be the deal maker here. He should weigh all the factors—the practical, pragmatic factors—in favor of each of these females. And the practical considerations, then, should be his basis for deciding which one of them he chose.

Huffing a bit, sounding almost like the bear that he was inside, Ken turned his computer on just long enough to forward all the candidates’ files to his private, non-business E-mail, to look at them on his home computer later in the evening. Then he picked himself up from behind his desk and exited the office, his destination the elevator upstairs to the penthouse.

*****

After dinner Ken took a shower.

His shower was like a great cave with granite walls and glass doors at the entrance. If those granite walls and glass doors could talk, they would tell of the women he’d had in here. They’d speak of the things he’d done to them.

In the next twenty-four hours and no longer, I have to make up my mind.