Free Come Home to Me by Brenda Novak

it.”
    “Why would he regret making his brother happy? We’d take excellent care of the child. And he can have other kids if he wants.”
    Presley had made having a secret Aaron baby look easy. She hadn’t even meant to get pregnant, and here she was with Wyatt. No doubt that figured into her sister’s thoughts. “It would be a perfect plan if there was some way we could get Aaron’s sperm without him knowing,” she mused. “Like I did—by accident. But how could we ever do that?”
    “We couldn’t. He’d have to go to a clinic and bank the sperm, and I’d have to go there afterward.”
    “Without telling Dylan?”
    “Yes, without telling Dylan!”
    “Would a clinic do that?”
    “Fortunately, we live in the most liberal state in the country when it comes to things like that. I asked an online doctor at one of those expert advice sites. According to her, there’s no law that a husband has to give his consent. She also said some clinics might demand it, but that I could find one that won’t.”
    “And if you can’t?”
    “Aaron has the same last name as my husband.”
    “You’d have him pose as your partner? ”
    “Why not? I’d just need to go to a clinic or doctor that isn’t affiliated with the hospital where I’ll be giving birth. Otherwise, the fact that I was artificially inseminated would be noted on my chart, and one of the nurses could let it slip.”
    “I can see you’ve put a lot of thought into this. But that brings up another point. What if Dylan found out? If not now, then later? In five or ten years? How would he feel about it?”
    When Cheyenne spoke again, her voice was soft, defeated. “What am I doing? You’re right. That would be terrible. It won’t work.”
    “And yet you can’t help going back to the possibility.”
    “It would solve everything, ” she said. “Using Aaron’s sperm instead of Dylan’s seems like such a...a technicality. It wouldn’t make any difference to me if I had Aaron’s child. Aaron’s so much like my husband. I love them both. And Dylan would adore a child. You’ve seen how he is with Wyatt.”
    “He’d be a good father.” There was no question about that. “But...why not adopt?”
    “That comes with as many risks.”
    “True, but—”
    “Anyway, I’m not opposed to it. I could see us adopting at some point. I just need Dylan to believe he gave me one .”
    “To salvage all that male pride?”
    “It’s the way he is,” she said defensively. “And I wouldn’t change him even if I could. Pride’s one of the things that carried him through the hard times, that gave him the determination he needed to soldier on. It’s—”
    “You want to do this,” Presley broke in, going straight to the bottom line.
    “If it’ll make Dylan feel better, I do. But I’m scared, too.”
    Now that she wasn’t so shocked by the idea, Presley tried to be more open-minded. In a way, it did seem like a technicality that it wouldn’t be Dylan’s sperm. She’d want to save her husband the humiliation and anguish, too, if she had a husband like Dylan and that husband had a brother like Aaron. “I guess you wouldn’t be the first person to use a known donor.”
    “People do it all the time.”
    More knowledge gleaned from the internet? “Without the consent of their spouse? I still think that’s asking for trouble.”
    “It’s not like I intend to sleep with Aaron, Pres. I won’t be cheating. Is it really that terrible to use, with the donor’s permission, some DNA that’s very similar to my husband’s? What Dylan doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”
    Presley sat on the edge of the couch and massaged her forehead. She’d used almost the same logic. Which led to the same conclusion. “Unless he finds out.”
    “He won’t,” Cheyenne argued. “Who’s going to tell him? Me? You? Aaron? None of us! It doesn’t have to be a big deal unless we make it a big deal.”
    “If you do this, we’ll both have children by Aaron.” She