She's Having the Boss's Baby - By Kate Carlisle Page 0,9

Ellie? Or to the male population at large? After all, she was a beautiful woman. Plenty of men would be thrilled to help her out. Had she given any of them a chance? Hell, no.

Even Blake Farrell. She hadn’t given him a chance, not really. After all, they’d only been dating for less than a month. What man in his right mind would agree to accept her obvious baby-daddy ploy so quickly after they’d met?

Aidan scowled. The right man would. But Blake Farrell wasn’t that guy. Aidan had known Blake Farrell for years. The guy was a player. He ran an air-shipping operation over on Nassau and had recently opened an office in the port of Alleria. He’d bought a small house in town so he was part of the island community now.

But if Aidan had thought for one moment that Ellie would start dating Farrell, Aidan never would’ve introduced the two. It still rankled him that she’d accepted even one date from him.

Blake wasn’t right for Ellie and he definitely was not the appropriate choice to be the father of her child. But who was? Not that Aidan had any say in the matter, but if Ellie needed someone to do the job, there had to be a lot of guys better suited for the job than Blake Farrell.

Frankly, although he didn’t want to examine his feelings on the subject too closely, he had been relieved to hear that there was no current man in Ellie’s life.

But now that meant that she was going to have a complete stranger father her child. She would be picking some guy’s description out of a book—and who was to say the guy was telling the truth about his attributes? Anybody could donate sperm and claim to be a six-foot-five Adonis when in reality he was three feet tall and a troglodyte.

Hadn’t she considered that? Scowling to himself, Aidan imagined all kinds of weird possibilities stemming from that damn turkey baster.

“Hell, I should offer to do it myself,” he muttered as he sipped his scotch. Abruptly he jerked himself upright in his chair. Whoa. He did not just say that. He tossed down a serious amount of scotch to drown out the words.

There was no way he would ever knowingly father a child. He’d made that decision years ago after watching his own father struggle as a single parent. Aidan and Logan’s mother had left them when the boys were only seven years old. It had been a defining moment in Aidan’s life and while he thoroughly enjoyed the pleasure that women provided, he wasn’t about to trust one enough to marry her, let alone have a child with her.

He would never risk a child of his experiencing the abandonment he’d gone through himself. And now he realized that this was a big reason why he wasn’t happy that Ellie was planning to go through with the pregnancy on her own. She was walking right into a single parent situation with no idea how difficult her life would become. And she wasn’t the only one to consider. Her child would go through life without a dad. That wasn’t right.

Had Ellie tried hard enough to find a man to father her child?

But then he remembered the look on her face earlier when she’d said, It’s not them, it’s me.

Hell, of course she’d tried to find a partner, but no one had been smart enough to step forward. She’d been so vulnerable while talking about it, Aidan had almost taken her in his arms and kissed away the pain he’d seen in her eyes. But he hadn’t done it, thank God. That would have been a huge mistake.

Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it, he thought as he stood and walked to the water’s edge. That wasn’t the point. The point was, it was never going to happen.

Too bad. Because now that he was thinking about topics like trust and women and Ellie, in particular, it occurred to him that there was one woman in the world he did actually trust. Ellie. When it came to business, she was scrupulously honest. She always spoke her mind. And she always had his back in any negotiation they entered. She was almost as good a partner in wheeling and dealing as his brother, Logan, was.

Logan had agreed with Aidan that Ellie would make a good junior partner. Before Logan left on his honeymoon, the brothers had decided to offer Ellie the position. The plan was to wait