Baby For The Bear

All that, of course, was leaving aside the possibility that he was simply gay and wanted to become a father without bothering himself with heterosexual s*x that would turn his stomach. Hiring a woman to be his surrogate would be an eminently practical alternative in that case.

Summing up the whole idea in one sentence in her head actually made her burst into laughter out loud for a moment, sitting there on her bed with her MacBook in her lap. This well-to-do werebear, whoever he may be, was looking for a womb for rent!

The outrageous pun almost made Samantha keel over laughing. She had heard of women selling their eggs to fertility centers. And she had heard of women in conditions of financial distress actually renting their wombs—there was the pun again, threatening her with another peal of laughter—to fertility-challenged people desperate to have children. But she had never, ever imagined being in such a position herself: carrying a child to hand over to the sperm source in exchange for money. Samantha was not one to judge, but it all sounded so…grotesque. Was that the word she wanted? Grotesque?

Samantha tried to put herself in the position of a woman who would agree to such a thing. What would it do to that woman’s life? The first thing that crossed her mind was the other people in her life, and what they might think. That brought her to her parents. Samantha loved her mother and her father. They had been loving parents. They had been kind to her and given her every advantage and every good thing in life that was within their means to give. But they were ordinary, conventional, even provincial people. They were not hard-headed conservatives by any means, but they were thoroughly mainstream, old-school, button-down sorts. A thing like this was just out of bounds to people like them. She could well imagine their reaction, especially her mother’s, to their daughter “renting out her body.” She could hear her mother in particular bringing up that there was a word for women who did such things. It was not at all a pleasant word to say or to hear.

Of course, that would not be what Samantha was really doing. She would not be actually letting the wealthy werebear have s*x with her; she would be going to a professional medical facility where an OB-GYN staff would perform a procedure, or likely a series of them, to make her the expectant mother of the bear man’s cub. She and the bear man would never see each other naked, never even touch except to shake hands. It would be nothing at all like the kind of transaction that would make her parents so aghast.

Never seeing him naked. Never letting him have s*x with her. Samantha pondered that part of the arrangement. While she was certainly not chaste, she had never experienced anyone like a werebear, or any kind of metamorph, in bed. In school, some of the boys who took her to bed were of other races. She’d had a Latino boyfriend for a while, and a lover of mixed races, black and white. But a man who was two species in one—that would be something new. What she knew of sleeping with morphs, she knew only from things she had read, things she had seen on TV and in magazines and online, and things she had heard other women say. Metamorph men, Ursines included, were uniquely gifted. The genetic mutations that enabled them to change into other creatures also somehow seemed to make them unusually handsome and physically beautiful. Samantha had never heard of a male morph who was homely or balding or fat or too thin. Some human males, no doubt envying them or feeling threatened by them (or even desiring them), found them disgustingly gorgeous. Many human females found them the ideal partners, not only because of their inhuman handsomeness and the athletic perfection of their bodies, but because once they were busy in bed, they were relentless. A male metamorph’s ability to achieve, maintain, and use an ere*tion, and to recover and fu*k again and again, was known to be on the average twice that of a human male. If the chance to go to bed with a morph ever came her way, Samantha had thought more than once, she would take it, and him, and see for herself what every human woman who’d ever lain with one had claimed.

That, however, was not the situation in store for whatever woman the wealthy bear man might choose from the ones who answered this ad. This would be an entirely clinical thing, with no s*x, no bonding, no emotional attachments to complicate matters.

It would be a job. Just a job.

Samantha took the MacBook from her lap and set it down beside her on the bed. She scratched her fingers through her hair, shook her head, and groaned loudly, incredulous at herself for the places she had just let her mind go. The very thought of getting pregnant with a wealthy shape-shifter’s baby for money was the single most outlandish, outrageous, just plain “out there” idea that had ever crossed her mind in the twenty-four years of her life. Pregnancy for pay, of all things! It was bizarre. Crazy. Weird. Wacko.

Lucrative. She looked over at her screen again, and there was the figure. $75,000. Three-quarters of a hundred thousand dollars. It might not make a girl set for life, but it could set her up very well for quite a long time. With that kind of money she might even do what she had heard of some of the rich girls she knew in college doing: save and invest the principal. And all she would have to do would be to get pregnant and have his cub. He would even pay her a stipend, so the ad said, on which she could probably live comfortably while waiting for one of the procedures to produce the desired result.

She could keep this apartment that she liked. She could keep her car. She could pay off the credit card, which would no doubt bump up her credit rating. The student loans would cease to be a problem. As outlandish as it was, the idea was not without its practical side.

There was really only the strangeness of it all, and what she would tell her parents and everyone else. Would this crazy, outlandish thing actually be worth pursuing?

It was entirely possible that he wouldn’t even choose her. There could very well be someone else that he would like better, someone that he thought was prettier, smarter, better educated, in better shape. Someone of his own kind who met all of his qualifications, even. There was no reason to assume Mister Grizzly Bucks would even select Samantha Vance to carry his cub.

Samantha frowned at the turn that her thoughts had just taken. Something that her father liked to say came echoing through her mind: Expecting failure is not the way to succeed.

But did she want to succeed? Was this thing something she really wanted? Were the effects of this thing on her life something for which she was really prepared?