The following week was pretty frantic.
Curt pitched the deal. Acting like he had never met her before, Gabe wrote a report that Alice was healthy, of above average intelligence, and that there was no awful hereditary disease in her family. Mr. Numbnuts bought it, especially after he saw a picture of Alice looking innocent and sweet. Curt drew up papers and had both parties sign them. Alice packed (she had very little in her closet, mainly because she didn't wear very much).
She went to her supervisor and negotiated a year off her job as a senior computer programmer. The company wanted her to come back so much they guaranteed her job. One reason was that they were afraid of morale problems -- half the software division thought they were in love with her. The other reason was that she was their best expert at finding and debugging recursive loops in the deep machine logic of computer programs for missle guidance systems.
Bobili also made arrangements for time off with her supervisor at the hospital. Gabe boned up on obstetrics. He also boned Alice but this time he had to wear a condom because she was going off the pill. Fertility was going to change Alice's whole lifestyle, it seemed.
The "ranch" was really a small estate with a Spanish-style house. It was hidden at the end of a long road and surrounded by a wall. In some places where the wall was low there was a fence on top. One guard was always out front of patrolling the property and a second was in a bunker in the basement, watching the monitors. Everything was monitored by a security system. In case of emergency, they would call Mr. Numbnuts' security organization first, not the local police. They could deal with any problems privately.
This level of security had never been really necessary before at the ranch. Mr. Numbnuts and his family had never actually lived there. He had bought the property figuring that someday it would be the perfect hideaway for a mistress. That had never worked out, mainly because he was too busy making big bucks to get one. Now, with his life hanging in the balance, he would use it for another purpose, to protect his sexual investment.
Gabe took Alice's temperature for several days and figured out from that and her cycle when she would be most fertile. Just after her period, she moved into the ranch and her confinement began.
Alice certainly felt like property under guard when she moved into the place. For a while she thought that maybe she had made a mistake. There was nothing she liked more than sex, and she wanted to feel pregnancy, but she was a little scared. This wasn't spontaneous, happy, swinging sexual abandon the way she usually had sex. This was the first time she was doing it for money, even if she wasn't really doing it. She would sure miss balling with her friends and occasional lovers if she had to stay under guard all the time.