Excuse Me? Whose Baby?: Excuse Me? Whose Baby? / Follow That Baby!. Jacqueline Diamond

her coffee cup.

      “You promise to stay in college for the rest of the semester,” Dex said. “In exchange, I’ll critique your papers in advance for your other classes. I can’t in fairness help you prepare for Professor Bemling’s class, since I’ll be grading you, but what you learn should apply to everything.”

      “I—I can’t afford to pay you much,” the freshman said.

      “No charge,” said Dex.

      “I can’t accept such generosity.” Cora pressed her lips together before continuing. “Besides, I’m sure there are more deserving students.”

      I’m going to rescue you whether you want me to or not. “First of all, you deserve my help as much as anybody. Second, I’m not being generous. Consider this a loan,” Dex said. “Next year, you can tutor a freshman who’s having problems, and she can pass the favor on to someone else the following year, and so forth. How’s that?”

      Reluctantly, the woman nodded. She must be eighteen or nineteen, and yet she seemed very young. At twenty-six, Dex had considered herself still a kid. Until today.

      Now she was a mother. And a tutor. Next to Cora, she felt practically ancient.

      Then she remembered that she was going to be staying at Jim’s. “Let me give you another address. I’ll be helping out a friend with some baby-sitting for a week. You can contact me there.”

      She hated to hedge, but people gossiped like crazy around campus. The discovery that James Bonderoff had a daughter by Helene Saldivar, and that the biological mother was a mere teaching assistant, would fan the flames to wildfire proportions.

      Cora accepted the slip of paper gratefully. “I can’t believe you’d do this for me.”

      “That’s why I’m in the teaching field,” Dex said.

      After the freshman left, she mulled over the conversation. Was she in education because she enjoyed helping people? That hadn’t been mentioned anywhere in her parents’ expectations.

      She did enjoy her time in the classroom on those occasions when Hugh was ill or at a conference. The problem was that college-level instruction required researching and writing professional papers, which she did not enjoy. Also, the lectures were often delivered to large groups of students with little or no personal contact and the grading left to an assistant.

      Well, it didn’t matter. She didn’t belong in any other world, so she had better make the best of this one.

      After tucking a few changes of clothes and her personal care items into a backpack, Dex opened her desk drawers and flipped through the notes she’d accumulated for her dissertation. She really ought to finish it this coming summer, which was only a few months away.

      She’d chosen to write about how the structure of Shakespeare’s plays prefigured movies and television. While watching Kenneth Branagh’s movie version of Henry V, Dex had been struck by how visual it was and how well the scenes, with little adaptation, worked on the screen.

      Her parents had agreed that it was an interesting subject. Her mother had sent a long letter with suggestions for how to approach the matter, and her father had urged her to publish the thesis as soon as possible to gain critical attention.

      That had been a year ago. Since then, Dex hadn’t been able to muster any interest in working on the dissertation. It seemed to belong more to her parents than to her.

      Oh, grow up, she told herself. As soon as she returned from Jim’s, she would buckle down and get to work.

      A short time later, she locked the door and set off with her backpack. En route, she stopped at a baby store and bought a bicycle seat for Annie. It was quite an extravagance, since she’d only be able to use it for a week, but perhaps she could give it to the adoptive parents.

      Maybe Annie would stay in Clair De Lune. Maybe Dex would see her from time to time, riding in this very bicycle seat, whizzing around town behind some bearded man or long-haired woman.

      Unexpectedly, tears pricked her eyes. It must have been the wind.

      5

      AFTER HIS LUNCH with Dex on Friday, Jim Bonderoff returned to his office for two hours. In that time, he made one hundred million dollars.

      That was how much his stock went up when news was announced of a faster, smaller computer chip developed by researchers at Bonderoff Visionary Technologies. The company’s other investors became similarly enriched, and he declared a bonus for employees.

      Word traveled fast. De Lune University President Wilson Martin was one of the first to call with congratulations and a hint about future donations.

      Of course, he didn’t ask Jim for money directly. What he said was, “I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your past generosity to our school.”

      “And I want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed being an honorary Ph.D.” Jim, who’d never completed college, had been thrilled to receive the degree at graduation ceremonies last June. It honored his achievements in the fields of business and technology.

      “You earned it, buddy!” Wilson Martin spoke with a gung-ho attitude more reminiscent of a car salesman than of a university president. Right now, he would be sitting at his desk, brushing back the thick hair that he dyed silver to disguise the fact that he was only forty-two years old. “By the way, did you hear the tragic news about Dr. Saldivar?”

      “Something about an elephant, I gather.” Jim propped up his foot and retied one of his jogging shoes. He dressed comfortably whenever he didn’t have an important meeting.

      “Tragic loss,” Wilson said. “It was her dream to someday see us establish a medical school on campus.”

      It hadn’t taken the man long to work his way around to his longtime dream. Jim doubted it had also been Helene’s, but obviously she provided a convenient way of bringing up the subject.

      Well, Jim was a hundred million dollars richer, minus taxes. Why not make a sizable donation? He was on the verge of proposing it when something occurred to him.

      He had a daughter. This money was hers, too.

      Not that he intended to spoil her. He considered it foolish to give young people huge amounts of money. Still, he felt for the first time as if he were the custodian of his wealth instead of its outright owner.

      “I’d be happy to look at some cost projections,” he said.

      “We’ll get right on them,” the president responded. “In any case, we’re always glad to see BVT prospering. It’s good for the community.”

      Jim was glad when the man rang off. Not that he disliked Wilson Martin, but Jim had other things on his mind. One in particular, and she was waiting in his outer office.

      He strode across the variegated carpet and went into the adjacent room. Between the fax machines, copiers and computers sat a portable playpen.

      Five women stood, leaned and knelt around the playpen, making cooing noises. Jim assumed they had wandered over to enjoy the unexpected visitor. He couldn’t even spot the tiny figure inside until he got close enough to see over the women’s shoulders.

      Ignoring a pile of stuffed animals and toys, Annie sat regarding the women around her with mingled interest and uncertainty. Someone had fixed tiny yellow ribbons in her hair, one of which had fallen out.

      As he approached, the little girl plopped onto her knees and crawled toward the fallen ribbon. Her audience responded with encouraging cries of, “Go for it!” and “You can do it, honey!”

      Jim cleared his throat. The response was electric. The five women swiveled, straightened, or—depending on their starting position—leaped to their feet. They weren’t afraid of him, but they did seem embarrassed to be caught making goo-goo eyes at a baby.

      “Congratulations,