No hesitation. Not even a blink. “Okay. But, excuse me for saying, it’s…”
“Unorthodox?”
“I was going to say it’s freaking nuts. A guy asking another guy, paying another guy, to sleep with his wife.”
“Not sleep with, Mr. Burkett. Not in the context that implies. Impregnate. As for the freakiness of it, it’s not unprecedented. In fact, it’s scriptural. Genesis. Remember?”
In the household where Griff had grown up, there’d been no Bible. When he went to school and learned the Pledge of Allegiance, he was shocked to hear that it had the cussword God in it. He soon realized that God wasn’t always used in combination with damn.
In any case, it came as shocking news to him that anything like this was in the Bible.
“We want a baby very badly, Mr. Burkett,” she said.
“There are other ways to get pregnant.”
“There are, yes. Our reasons for doing it this way are personal and shouldn’t concern you.”
“They do.”
“They shouldn’t,” she repeated.
“We, uh, do our thing, I go home and sleep with a clear conscience. Is that it?”
“That’s what it amounts to, yes.”
He looked at her, wondering how she could speak so calmly about the two of them getting it on, when her husband was sitting right there holding her hand. Griff looked from her to Speakman, and the man seemed to read his mind.
“Before you joined us, Laura, Griff suggested that…well, that I would be observing the two of you while you perform.”
She’d been looking at her husband as he explained. Several seconds passed before she turned her gaze back to Griff, and he took exception to her affronted frown. “Hey, don’t look at me like I’m the pervert here.”
“You think this is perverted?”
“What do you call it?”
“Would you think it was perverted if we were asking you to donate a kidney? Or give blood?”
He laughed. “There’s a big difference. To donate a kidney you don’t have to…touch,” he said, quickly substituting the word he’d been about to say. “You never even have to meet.”
“Unfortunately, the reproductive physiology is such that touching is necessary.”
The hell it was. He didn’t have to plant the seed personally to yield the crop. But he’d already argued that point with her husband. Speakman was determined for her to conceive naturally. She didn’t seem to have an ethical or moral problem with it, so why was he making an issue of it? Mentally shrugging, he reached a decision: They wanted him to fuck her, he could fuck her. It wasn’t like she had three eyes or something.
He addressed Speakman. “A handshake and I get a hundred grand?”
Speakman rolled his chair over to a desk and opened the lap drawer. He took a manila envelope from it, and when he came back and extended it, Griff was reminded of having to accept a cash loan from his lawyer like a kid getting an allowance. The sooner he was no longer obligated to anyone, the better.
He took the envelope.
Speakman said, “Inside is a key to a safe-deposit box and a signature card. You sign it. I’ll see that the card gets returned to the bank tomorrow, where it will remain on file. While I’m there, I’ll deposit your cash in the box. You can pick it up, um, say anytime after two o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Laura and I have a meeting in the morning with representatives of the flight attendants’ union to discuss their new contract.”
Hiring a stud was just another entry on their busy agenda.
Fine with him, so long as the money made it into that box.
Griff removed the signature card and glanced at it. “What about the physical? What if I flunk?”
The couple glanced at each other, but Foster spoke for both of them. “We’ll take it on faith that you won’t.”