Читать книгу Mommy Under Cover - Delores Fossen - Страница 9

Assisted Fertility Clinic

Dallas, Texas

“The Baby Maker,” Dr. Barton Fletcher read from the personal memo clipped to the file.

So that’s what people were calling him these days. He chuckled. It made him sound a little like God.

Which in a way, he was.

On occasion he’d created life. And on other occasions, he’d taken life. It all evened out in the end.

He glanced through the Tates’ quarter-inch-thick file that his staff had put together for him. Aston Tate, a reclusive California software guru with an ego purportedly as large as his net worth, and his heiress wife, Isabel. Eccentric tendencies. Situational values and ethics.

In other words, his kind of people.

He’d been lucky finding his kind of people. Or rather, they’d been lucky in finding him—all through word of mouth, of course. He couldn’t advertise certain…aspects of his business. Not that lack of traditional advertisement had hurt. In the three short months the clinic had been open, he’d already assisted eleven couples with his procedure. The Tates would make it an even dozen.

Like the other eleven couples, the Tates were looking for a perfect baby. A baby genetically engineered to their specifications. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Male. Athletic build. Above average intelligence. Well above average. No imperfections of any kind.

In other words, the usual.

The hair and eye color varied from couple to couple, but the rest was a given.

There was something comforting about predictability.

Well, maybe.

Barton Fletcher took another look at the Tates’ file.

The paperwork and requests were indeed predictable and in order, including the attached memo from Isabel Tate that lauded him as the Baby Maker for a couple who desperately wanted the child of their dreams. However, the fact that everything was in order did nothing to rid him of the knot tightening in his gut.

Was something wrong?

The obvious quickly came to mind. Maybe this was some sort of sting operation. The latest attempt by authorities to apprehend him.

That wasn’t going to happen.

Because he was always careful.

Always.

If these clients were indeed working for law enforcement, then he’d just have to deal with the situation as he had before.

Give life…take life. It all evened out in the end.