Baby For The Bear

Chapter 8

Samantha awoke, her eyes fluttering open, to the soft touch of Ken’s fingers on her shoulder.

“I still won’t be able to think, knowing you’re right over there in the shower.”

“You don’t want to leave, do you? You just got here.”

“No. Listen, I’ll go to the other bedrooms and think for a while. You just get your shower and go on down to the offices. I need to be by myself.” She let him see the sincere and genuine need on her face for what she was asking. “Please?”

“Sammie,” he argued, not forcefully but firmly, “that last time last night…it was as good as ever. If we just remember how good it is, I know we can work anything out.”

She replied, “I used s*x last night to avoid what we were talking about. Yes, it was good. You are always wonderful, Ken. But it’s wrong to hide behind that. I need to think. Can you just let me think?”

Ken frowned a bit, not so much with anger as with acceptance. “Okay. You go on ahead to another bedroom if you want. I’ll go on to the shower.” He pulled down his portion of the covers, and before he slid to the far side of the bed he put a hand warmly and firmly on her shoulder and said, “When you’re done thinking, I really want to talk some more. We have something here that’s important, Sammie; important to both of us. Can you please not shut me out?” He leaned over and kissed her softly on the cheek. “Please?”

Unable to resist touching that gorgeous unshaven face, Samantha said, “Okay.”

She watched him slide out of bed and walk across the suite, so wondrously and awesomely naked, with the thing that had been giving her such incalculable pleasure swinging between his thighs, and something inside her wept. Samantha wanted so much to call him back to bed, to tell him she was sorry, to do what they both wanted her to do and have him do to her what she’d grown to crave so much. But that would only muddle the issue and delay the inevitable. What was on her mind was not about to go away.

Once Ken was in the bathroom and Samantha heard the shower water running, she climbed out of bed herself, found her robe, and left the master suite for another room in the upper level of the penthouse.

In the shower, enveloped in a wet cascade of water that was a poor substitute for the wetness he most wanted to experience, Ken leaned against the wall with one hand and took in his other hand the throbbing hugeness that was not about to get what it wanted. The sound of the shower drowned his muttering voice. “Sh*t, Sammie. Don’t do this to us…”

*****

He put on a suit and walked down the hall to look for her. He found her in another of the bedrooms, the smaller but still spacious and commodious rooms for visiting family and business associates who sometimes stayed overnight. She was sitting up on the bed with legs folded and arms around her legs, as if to make her folded body a barrier against the world. Nothing, he thought, should ever come between his body and Samantha’s. Not even Samantha herself.

Staying in the doorway, Ken asked, “Are you okay?”

She looked over and nodded to him. Samantha knew that all she had to do was say the word and Ken would make himself late for work. Instead, she replied, “I’m fine. Have a good day.” She could tell her smile looked as forced as it felt.

“If you need me—for anything—call me. Any time, no matter what.”

“I will,” she said.

He lingered in the doorway just long enough to watch her look away from him and retreat into her thoughts. Ken hated the sight, the idea, of her looking away from him. She should be doing everything with him. And letting him do everything with her. But the office was calling his name and he tore himself away.

Not seeing but sensing that he was gone, Samantha buried her face against her knees. Everything was going so well until last night. She was as uncertain now as she’d been when she first acted on the crazy impulse to answer his advertisement. The uncertainty gnawed at her. Why couldn’t Ken Brecker be just a hot guy that she met at a recruitment event for job seekers? It would all be so simple then. He would give her his card. Perhaps she would E-mail him. He would invite her for drinks. They would come back here, or go to her place. He would fu*k Samantha in a normal relationship, without any thought of getting her pregnant. She would protect herself, get a morning-after pill, a diaphragm, a prescription. They would date and sleep together. There would be none of the uncertainty about what it would all mean when she got pregnant and after the cub was born. They would face only the uncertainties that any other couple faced. Instead, there was all of this. Neither of them had given any thought to anything but his need for an heir and her need for a livelihood. And perhaps they should have. Perhaps Ken could have chosen someone else to carry his cub through in vitro and Samantha to be the woman in his bed.