“Two days,” Emerson murmured.
“That’s right. Now, we may have to do several before it works, or you could get pregnant this month. I’ve found no reason why you would have any problems, but sometimes nature, and in this case science, can take more time. Or it could take no time at all.”
Emerson huffed a long, shaking breath and clenched the sides of the table to stop her hands from trembling.
Dr. Mallory’s thick red brows furrowed. “Emerson, are you still sure you want to do this?”
Well, she’d been one hundred percent sure before Bash had shared his cheese fries, but now she was about eighty percent sure. “Can I ask you a theoretical question?”
“Sure. Ask me anything.”
“If I had a friend, and this friend met a man who was excited to be a parent, and that theoretical man happened to be a shifter…what would the protocol be for asking him to be a donor?”
Dr. Mallory straightened up as her blue eyes went round. With a quick glance at the door, she rolled closer to Emerson and lowered her voice to a whisper. “There would be no protocol because it’s not legal for me or any other medical professional to collect or administer donor sperm from a shifter. And this question needs to stay in this office.”
Shocked, Emerson asked, “Why?”
“It’s not my place to speak about this.”
“But…you’re my doctor.”
“Emerson, I’m going to tell you this once, and then you need to put this idea out of your mind. Riley of the Ashe Crew gave Diem and Bruiser a surrogate baby years ago, and it attracted the wrong kind of attention.”
“What kind of wrong attention?”
Dr. Mallory dipped her voice to barely audible. “Not everyone is pro-shifter, and Riley, a human surrogate, produced a dragon. A dragon, Emerson. It’s not legal for humans to make those kinds of medical interventions anymore. They have to breed on their own.”
“But—”
“Emerson,” Dr. Mallory gritted out. “If you have further questions about what is going on between the government and shifters, ask Diem and Bruiser. Or ask Cora Keller of the Breck Crew. Ask shifters. The government could shut down my clinic and ruin me for life in an instant if they even knew I was discussing this with you.”
“Okay, okay,” she said soothingly. “I’m sorry I asked. I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
“Great,” Dr. Mallory said, looking flushed and panicked. “Then we’ll do everything as planned on Friday, and you’ll be better off with a normal human baby.”
Normal human baby. But Bash was normal, even if he wasn’t entirely human. He was nice and considerate, and he made her heart beat faster and butterflies flap around her insides. He wanted children…er...cubs.
And now her eighty percent sure was down to sixty-five percent sure she wanted to go through with this. Everything was so confusing, especially with the baffling information dump Dr. Mallory had given her.
Emerson walked out of that clinic like a zombie in slow motion, stumbling over the carpet, completely distracted.
Something was going on behind the scenes that she and the public had no clue about. Maybe the shifters didn’t even know. They have to breed on their own. Shifters were people, too, not just animals. And what if a pair of them had fertility problems? They weren’t allowed medical intervention? That didn’t seem right, or ethical. Sure, she’d seen anti-shifter propaganda on the rise after the discovery of dragon shifters, but that was just people reacting to their fear of the unknown. But with this new information, it was clear it wasn’t just civilians who were fearful.
The government was on the defense from shifters reproducing too fast.
Emerson drove home in a daze, waving distractedly to every car she passed because that’s what everyone did in a small town. She still had a final round of edits to do on Bartleby’s stupid article before Bash’s party tonight, and she definitely needed some time to process her feelings on everything that was happening. Two more days until insemination would’ve been exciting a few weeks ago, but now she felt like she was walking slowly toward a frigid river without the ability to stop her legs from forward movement. She still wanted a baby more than anything, but now having the father be some stranger felt a lot scarier than it did before. If she did this, there would be no chance for her and Bash to have any kind of relationship. But if she didn’t, she was right back where she’d been for the last decade, searching for a partner to build a family with, and hoping it happened soon.
At the duplex she lived in, she pulled into the drive and hefted her purse to the front door. A giant Moosey’s Bait and Barbecue Styrofoam cooler sat on the welcome mat, and with a frown, she lifted the lid. There were dry ice packs around the edges, and in the center was nestled frozen packages of short ribs, burnt ends, brisket, and jalapeno sausage with directions on how to heat up everything. There was even a container of creamed corn and a jar of Moosey’s World Famous BBQ Sauce.