Daddy By Choice. Paula Detmer Riggs

up off the bed.

      For the first time since quittin’ school at sixteen to join the junior circuit, he’d been reluctant to move on. Especially when she’d cried and clung to him like there was no tomorrow.

      I’ll write every day, she’d promised between frantic kisses. And she had at first, four letters for every one of his, telling him over and over how much she missed him—and how she couldn’t wait for him to come back when the season was over with the engagement ring he’d promised.

      The more she wrote about them getting married, the tenser he’d become. Hell, he’d just gotten old enough to drink legal in a few enlightened states. The last thing he wanted was a noose around his neck. Thing was, though, he’d promised, and like his old man always said, a Jarrod never broke a promise.

      Bent a few, though. And it wasn’t like he’d been real specific about when the season ended.

      What with one thing and another, he’d started looking for reasons to put off goin’ back. Things like not havin’ enough money to support a wife. Or even the prospect of a steady job. Hell, he had no education to speak of. Nothing but a talent for stayin’ glued to the back of a raging tornado in horseflesh for the eight seconds it took to put money in his jeans.

      Since his father had remarried and started another family, he didn’t even have a home to offer her—not a real one, anyway. So he kept puttin’ off that long drive back to Texas. As the months rolled by, there’d been other dusty towns and inevitably, other girls. Soon he’d been impatiently scrawling a few lines on a postcard. And finally he’d stopped writing altogether.

      So had she—eventually—which was why he’d been so surprised to see the letter waiting for him at his daddy’s ranch outside Wickenburg. Damn thing had followed him halfway around the country—Canada, too—forwarded so many times the envelope had been raggedy and smudged.

      All the way from Arizona he’d been picturing her with a big belly. The more he’d thought about it, the more awestruck he’d become. That sweet girl was havin’ his baby. His. It humbled him as much as it scared him.

      Sweat beaded under the band of his dress Stetson hat as he made the left turn that would take him to her place. What was done was done, he told himself as he pulled into the driveway of the ugly brown house. He’d had his fun. Now it was time to pay the piper.

      But as he climbed down from the truck and straightened his shoulders, he realized he was glad she was pregnant. Maybe it wasn’t the best way to start out a lifetime with his lady, but he’d make it work. If it took him a lifetime, he was determined to show her just how much he loved her. His Maddy girl.

      Chapter 1

      Twenty-two years later

      “I don’t mean to frighten you unnecessarily, Maddy Sue, but I wouldn’t be doing my duty as your doctor if I didn’t lay out the worst-case senario.”

      Sixty-seven-year-old Dr. Horace Austin Morrow had been Madelyn Smith Foster’s doctor from the moment she was born. Or, more precisely, from the moment of her conception, as he liked to tease with a twinkle in those still-bright blue eyes whenever she was being mulish.

      Madelyn trusted him implicitly. She also loved him like the father she should have had. She liked to think he cared deeply for her, as well. Certainly he had stood by her when almost everyone else in her life had turned against her.

      After Luke had broken her heart, she’d cried on Doc’s broad shoulder so many times she’d come to associate the smell of his starched lab coat with fathomless sorrow. When Doc had haltingly told her that the odds of her ever becoming pregnant were too minuscule to measure, she’d collapsed in those strong arms, sobbing until she was empty inside.

      Five months ago, when he’d given her the astounding news that she’d beaten those odds and had actually conceived, she’d also cried in his arms. From joy this time. But now…

      “You said I just had a small cyst, that it was nothing to be concerned about.” Her voice was a thread, pushed past the sudden constriction in her throat.

      “Actually it’s more like a benign tumor. Folks generally call these things fibroids, but the correct medical term is myoma.”

      Instinctively her hand went to her tummy where the fragile little soul she already adored was curled into a warm ball under her heart. “You mean I…I could lose this baby?”

      “It’s possible, honey. These here myomas are like West Texas weather—real unpredictable. Sometimes the weatherman forecasts a big old tornado, and all we get is a piddling little blow. On the other hand it only makes sense to duck on down to the cellar when you see the warning signs.”

      Madelyn bit her lip, her gaze fixed on the fuzzy black-and-white image of her child in the ultrasound photo. Along the curve of her uterus was a black smudge, more like a thickening than her idea of a tumor. Certainly it didn’t look menacing, at least not to her untrained eye. However, the dark shadow was bigger in this photo than the one taken a month earlier, which Doc claimed was a big old red flag.

      “Would you mind going over the possible…complications again, please?” she asked when he remained silent, his homely face set in somber lines.

      “I wouldn’t mind at all, honey.” The springs of Doc’s chair protested as he shifted his bulk a little closer to where she was perched rigidly on the edge of her chair. “These are only maybes, you understand,” he said, lifting his shaggy salt-and-pepper brows.

      “Yes, I understand.” And if she didn’t, she soon would—even if she had to steal Wiley Roy’s precious laptop computer and search every database on the Net.

      Doc held up the same gnarled hand that had held hers while she’d screamed in agony during her first delivery. One by one he ticked off potential problems. Each one was worse than the one before. Each one had the potential to precipitate early labor or worse. By the time he finished, she felt light-headed and her throat was dust dry.

      “What do you suggest I do?” she managed to squeak out after swallowing several times.

      “Get yourself to a specialist who handles these kinds of cases on a regular basis, one of those new high-risk docs that are all the rage these days. I’ve been doin’ some callin’ around just in case, and I’ve come up with five names.” He reached for a folder and flipped it open. “Two are at Baylor, one at UC San Diego, one at Mount Sinai and one up in Oregon at Portland General.”

      Madelyn cast a wary glance at the collection of faxes and printouts he was shuffling through, refreshing his memory. “Is there one that’s better than the others?” she asked when he glanced up.

      “They’re all excellent. Some I’ve heard tell of here and there, some I haven’t. I met Candace Marston once at an internists’ conference in Austin three or four years ago. She’s a few years younger than you, but sharp as a tack. The others are all men.”

      “I don’t care about gender. I care about my baby, and I want the best, whoever he or she is.”

      Doc studied her in thoughtful silence through his half glasses for a long tense moment before nodding. “In that case, this is the man you should see. The best of the best.” He lifted a sheet of paper with a brief bio typed at the top of a long list of published articles and honors.

      Her breath dammed up in her chest when she read the name printed in bold letters at the top: LUCAS OLIVER JARROD, M.D.

      “It can’t be,” she said, her voice flat.

      “According to everyone I asked, Jarrod’s considered the premier expert on myomas, among other things. Way I heard it, he’s got women flying in from all over the world, just so’s he can watch over ’em.”

      “I don’t care.” Her heart seemed as if it would pound clear through her chest, and her blood felt hot in her veins. Not once, in all the years since the social worker had taken her child away forever, had she stopped loving her daughter or wondering about