Page 15 of Owned

Charlotte gave another dry laugh. “A woman after my own heart. I should have tracked you down years ago.” Then she said a number that made my eyes pop out of my head.

It was a staggering amount. Enough to buy my own place. Enough to cover all Mom’s medical bills and get full time care if need be. Enough that I wouldn’t have to work ever again if I didn’t want to.

“Is this a joke?” I asked, just to be sure.

“No,” my grandmother said. “Check your bank account.”

I blinked, then lowered my phone and clicked on the banking app to glance at my account. It was fifty grand richer.

I stared at the zeroes then lifted the phone again, my hand shaking a little. “Oh,” was all I could think of to say.

“Is that serious enough for you?” Charlotte asked. “And to be clear, you can keep that payment whether you agree or not. But if you don’t, you won’t get the rest.”

The rest….

My mouth dried. All my money worries would be solved. I could go to college if I wanted, get my MBA, which was a dream I used to have before Mom got really sick. We would never have to scrape for a living again…

But you’ll have to be pregnant, remember? Then you’ll have to give your baby up.

I hadn’t thought about having kids. It had been a ‘one day in the future’ kind of thing, for when Mom was better and I’d found a man I wanted to share my life with. Certainly not now, at twenty four.

“All your medical bills will be paid for,” Charlotte went on. “And you’ll have the best obstetric care money can buy.”

My head was spinning. I turned around and leaned back against the stove, still trying to get a grip on what she was saying. “So that’s all?” I asked. “I just have to…get pregnant?”

“You’ll also have to get married, which I’m afraid I’ll have to insist on. It’s a trifle old-fashioned, but I can’t have the child being born out of wedlock. Don’t worry, though, it’ll be a purely on-paper marriage.”

This was getting weirder and weirder.

I swallowed. “So presumably the man I’m getting married to will be the father?”

“Correct,” Charlotte said. “You don’t have to have anything to do with him if you don’t want to, though.”

I could barely take in that she was talking marriage as well, not when the baby thing was taking up the entirety of my brain.

Have a baby. For money. It felt wrong somehow. Not the surrogate part, plenty of women were surrogates, but from what I’d heard most did it out of the goodness of their hearts. For relatives or friends who couldn’t have children.

“How do I know you’ll be good to the child?” I asked, the question popping into my mind at random. “You were estranged from Mom after all.”

“A very good question,” Charlotte said. “And I’m sure you have many more. Let’s meet face to face and discuss this. How about next week, at La Chouette?”

La Chouette was new, extremely swanky, and almost impossible to get into. But apparently not if you were a Hamilton.

“Oh…uh…that soon?” I forced out, the shock taking its time to wear off. “But I?—”

“If you have anything on, cancel it,” my grandmother interrupted crisply. “I’ll see you there, Rowan.”

Then the call disconnected, leaving me standing there staring at the wall.

I didn’t move for a long moment, my head still spinning with the implications of Charlotte’s offer.

Get married. Have a baby. Earn a fortune.

I should have said no, that there was no way I was going to do any of those things, because seriously? Have a baby?

That would be a life I’d be bringing into this world. A life that would be part of me, no matter that I was a surrogate, and then I’d be handing over that life to someone else. To Charlotte Hamilton, who must have been an awful mother if my mom was anything to go by.

Then again, she’d wanted to do better, that’s what she’d said, and what did I know about being a mother? Nothing. Nothing at all, which might mean that Charlotte was the better option from the child’s point of view.

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