Read Online The Misconception by Darlene Gardner - Free Book Online Page B

all his blood had drained to his feet and seeped onto the floor.
“Cash.” His mother was suddenly at his side, although he hadn’t noticed her come into the family room. “Is everything all right?”
Jax shook his head mutely. After what he had just learned, he wasn’t sure anything would ever be all right again.
“Cash, you’re scaring me. Tell me what I can do to help you.”
    He cleared his throat, and looked down at his mother’s concerned face. “You don’t, by any chance, happen to know the name of a good private detective, do you?”
    “Why would you need a private detective?”
    “You don’t want to know. Let’s just say there’s somebody out there I need to find.” He stopped, raised his eyes to the ceiling and blew out a breath. “Correction. Make that two somebodies.”
     

Chapter 6
     
    Marietta Dalrymple leaned weakly against the restroom stall while the lyrics of a golden oldie reverberated in her head. Except, instead of “turn, turn, turn,” she bastardized the words to “churn, churn, churn.” Which was precisely what her now-empty stomach was doing.
    In the past few weeks, she’d become intimately acquainted with the inside of stall number one in the first-floor restroom of the Camelot Building. That’s because it was closest to her office.
    If she continued this way much longer, she’d anoint herself Kennedy College’s Porcelain Princess.
    She walked to the nearest sink on unsteady legs, reached into her purse and extracted the toothbrush she kept precisely for incidents like this. The minty smell of toothpaste hit her nostrils, and she reeled. Her olfactory nerve must be way out of whack if even the scent of toothpaste made her nauseated.
    She collected herself, held her breath and brushed her teeth as quickly as possible. When she was through rinsing her mouth, she splashed water on her face and raised her eyes to the mirror.
    She looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost’s scary older sister.
    Her normally fair skin was milky-white except for the dark half-moons under eyes that looked even more washed out than usual. Even her lips, which she’d always thought were too large for her face, were colorless.
    Pregnancy was definitely not agreeing with her.
    She placed a hand over her still-queasy stomach, a gesture that never failed to get her through her bouts with morning sickness. She already loved the baby growing inside her and thanked providence daily that she was one of the lucky women who had no trouble conceiving. The only hitch in her plan was that it had taken so long to find a suitable sperm supplier that she hadn’t been able to time the birth for the summer months.
    The baby was due in mid-October, which meant she’d have to take the fall semester off from teaching. But that was a minor inconvenience considering the tremendous payoff. No price on earth was too steep to pay for the wonder of motherhood. Not even the thousands she’d mailed to the baby’s sexy sperm supplier.
    At the thought of Jax, warmth spread through her stomach, directly over the place her baby nestled. Memories of Jax in her bed, making procreation seem much more like recreation, assaulted her with hot fingers. She could probably come to orgasm just thinking about him.
    Which was why she had to banish the warm thoughts and think about him as a talented stud-for-hire. He wasn’t her baby’s father any more than a donor who leaves a deposit at a sperm bank.
    Her baby didn’t need a father, anyway. She, or he, only needed Marietta.
    She rummaged through her purse for the little-used lipstick and blush her sister Tracy had thrust at her during her latest unsuccessful let’s-make-over-Marietta kick. After painting on the color, she surveyed the result.
    Great. Now she looked like a ghostly apparition with Adobe-Sands cheeks and Very-Berry lips.
    The restroom door swung open. Through it walked a college coed no more than five feet tall and so brimming with health and vitality that Marietta felt