by Lisa Jackson
“But you’re a businesswoman now.”
She smiled coyly. “Then I’ll just have to move my business wherever you want. I’ll have your children and tend your house. But, believe me, I will be my own woman.”
“And my wife?” he asked skeptically.
“I think I can be both.”
“You’d better be,” he said, his mouth coming down to claim hers possessively, as if he already were her husband. She nearly dropped the keys to the boat into the water, but he didn’t care. He had everything he needed in his arms.
Lifting his head, he asked, “Where do you want to go for a honeymoon?”
She grinned slowly. “Anywhere you take me.” One of her eyebrows lifted saucily. “You know, we could start right now.”
“Now?”
“Well, you do have a cabin downstairs and…if we want to, we can just sail away together.”
“You’re sure?”
“More sure than I’ve ever been in my life.”
“Miss Montgomery, you’ve got yourself the deal of a lifetime.” One arm around her waist, he plucked the keys from her palm with his free hand, started the engine, rammed the boat into gear, and set on a course that would hold them steady for the rest of their lives.
* * * * *
MILLION DOLLAR BABY
CHAPTER ONE
THE DOG STUCK his wet nose in Chandra’s face. He whined and nuzzled her jaw.
“Go ’way,” Chandra grumbled, squeezing her eyes shut. She burrowed deeper into the pillows, hoping Sam would get the message, but Sam didn’t give up. The persistent retriever clawed at her covers and barked loudly enough to wake the neighbors ten miles down the road. “Knock it off, Sam!” Irritated, she yanked a pillow over her head and rolled over. But she was awake now and couldn’t ignore Sam’s whining and pacing along the rail of the loft; the metal licenses hanging from his collar rattled noisily.
When she didn’t respond, he snorted loudly and padded quickly down the stairs, whereupon he barked again.
So he had to go out. “You should’ve thought of this earlier.” Reluctantly, Chandra pulled herself into a sitting position and shoved a handful of hair from her eyes. She shivered a little and, yawning, rubbed her arms.
Sam barked excitedly, and she considered letting him out and leaving him on the porch. As Indian summer faded into autumn, the nighttime temperature in the Rocky Mountain foothills had begun to dip toward freezing. “It would serve you right,” she said ungraciously as she glanced at the clock on the table near the bed. One forty-three. Still plenty of time to fall asleep again before the alarm clock was set to go off.
Grumbling under her breath, she had leaned over and was reaching under the bed, feeling around for her boots, when she heard it: the sound that had filtered through her dreams and pierced her subconscious over Sam’s insistent barking. The noise, a distant wail, reminded Chandra of the hungry cry of a baby or the noise a Siamese cat would make if it were in pain. Chandra’s skin crawled.
You’re imagining things! she told herself. She was miles from civilization….
The cry, distant and muffled, broke the silence again. Chandra sat bolt upright in bed. Her heart knocked crazily. Clutching the quilt around her shoulders, she swung her feet to the floor and crossed the worn wood planks to the railing, where she could look down and survey the first floor of the cabin.
Moonlight streamed through the windows, and a few embers glowed behind the glass doors of the wood stove. Otherwise the cabin was cloaked in the darkness that night brought to this isolated stretch of woods.
She could barely see Sam. His whiskey-colored coat blended into the shadows as he paced beside the door, alternately whining and growling as he scratched on the threshold.
“So now you’re Lassie, is that it?” she asked. “Telling me that there’s something out there.”
He yelped back.
“This is nuts. Hush, Sam,” Chandra commanded, her skin prickling as her eyes adjusted to the shadows. Straining to listen, she reached for the pair of old jeans she’d tossed carelessly across the foot of the bed hours earlier. The familiar noises in this little cabin in the foothills hadn’t changed. From the ticking of the grandfather clock to the murmur of the wind rushing through the boughs of the pine and aspen that surrounded the cabin, the sounds of the Colorado night were as comforting as they had always been. The wind chimes on her porch tinkled softly, and the leaky faucet in the bathroom dripped a steady tattoo.
The cry came again. A chill raced up Chandra’s spine. Was it a baby? No way. Not up here in these steep hills. Her mind was playing tricks on her. Most likely some small beast had been wounded and was in pain—a cat who had strayed or a wounded raccoon…maybe even a bear cub separated from its mother….
Snarling, Sam started back up the stairs toward her.
“Hold on, hold on.” Chandra yanked on her jeans and stuffed the end of her flannel nightshirt into the waistband. She slid her feet into wool socks and, after another quick search under the bed, crammed her feet into her boots.
Her father’s old .22 was tucked into a corner of the closet. She hesitated, grabbed her down jacket, then curled her fingers over the barrel of the Winchester. Better safe than sorry. Maybe the beast was too far gone and she’d have to put it out of its misery. Maybe it was rabid.
And maybe it’s not a beast at all.
By the time she and the retriever crept back downstairs, Sam was nearly out of his mind, barking and growling, ready to take on the world. “Slow down,” Chandra ordered, reaching into the pocket of her jacket, feeling the smooth shells for her .22. She slipped two cartridges into the rifle’s cold chamber.
“Okay, now don’t do anything stupid,” she said to the dog. She considered leaving Sam in the house, for fear that he might be hurt by the wounded, desperate beast, but then again, she felt better with the old dog by her side. If she did stumble upon a lost bear cub, the mother might not be far away or in the best of moods.
As she opened the door, a blast of cool mountain air rushed into the room, billowing curtains and causing the fire to glow brightly. The night wind seemed to have forgotten the warm breath of summer that still lingered during the days.
Clouds drifted across the moon like solitary ghosts, casting shadows on the darkened landscape. The crying hadn’t let up. Punctuated by gasps or hiccups, it grew louder as Chandra marched across the gravel and ignored the fear that stiffened her spine. She headed straight for the barn, to the source of the noise.
The wailing sounded human. But that was insane. She hadn’t heard a baby cry in years…and there were no children for miles. Her dreams must have confused her…and yet…
She opened the latch, slid the barn door open and followed an anxious Sam inside. A horse whinnied, and the smells of dust and saddle soap and dry hay filled her nostrils. Snapping on the lights with one hand, she clutched the barrel of the gun with the other.
The horses were nervous. They rustled the straw on the floor of their boxes, snorting and pawing, tossing their dark heads and rolling their eyes as if they, too, were spooked. “It’s all right,” Chandra told them, though she knew that something in the barn was very, very wrong. The crying became louder and fiercer.
Her throat dry, her rifle held ready, Chandra walked carefully to the end stall, the only empty box. “What the devil…?” Chandra whispered as she spied a shock of black fur—no, hair—a baby’s downy cap of hair! Chandra’s heart nearly stopped, but she flew into action, laying down the gun, unlatching the stall and kneeling beside the small, swaddled bundle of newborn infant.
The tiny child was bound in a ratty yellow blanket and covered by a tattered army jacket. “Oh, God,” Chandra whispered, picking up the small bundle only to have the piercing screams resume at a higher pitch. Blue-black eyes blinked at the harsh overhead lights, and the infant’s little face was contorted and red from crying. One little fist had been freed from the blankets and now waved in agitation near its cheek. “Oh, God, oh, God.” T
he baby, all lungs from the sound of it, squealed loudly.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t cry,” Chandra murmured, plucking pieces of straw from the child’s hair and holding him close to her breast, trying to be soothing. She scanned the rest of the barn, searching for the mother. “Hey—is anyone here?” Her sweat seemed to freeze on her skin as she listened for a response. “Hey? Anyone? Please, answer me!”
The only noises in the barn were the horses snorting, the baby hiccupping and crying, Sam’s intermittent growls and Chandra’s own thudding heart. “Shh…shh…” she said, as if the tiny infant could understand her. “We’ll fix you up.”
A mouse scurried across the floor, slipping into a crack in the barn wall, and Chandra, already nervous, had to bite back her own scream. “Come on,” she whispered to the baby, as she realized the child had probably been abandoned. But who would leave this precious baby all alone? The infant howled more loudly as Chandra tucked it close to her. “Oh, baby, baby,” Chandra murmured. Maternal emotions spurred her to kiss the downy little head while she secretly cursed the woman who had left this beautiful child alone and forsaken. “Who are you?” she whispered against the baby’s dark crown. “And where’s your mama?”
Wrapping the infant in her own jacket, she glanced around the dusty corners of the barn again, eyeing the hayloft, kicking open the door to the tack room, scanning the corners behind the feed barrels, searching for any signs of the mother. Sam, yelping and jumping at the baby, was no help in locating the woman’s trail. “Hello? Are you here?” she called to anyone listening, but her own voice echoed back from the rafters.
“Look, if you’re here, come on into the house. Don’t be afraid. Just come in and we’ll talk, okay?”
No answer.
“Please, if you can hear me, please come inside!”
Again, nothing. Just the sigh of the wind outside.
Great. Well, she’d tried. Whoever had brought the child here was on his or her own. Right now, the most pressing problem was taking proper care of the baby; anything else would have to wait. “Come on, you,” she whispered to the infant again, tightening her hold on the squirming bundle. Ignoring the fretting horses, she slapped off the lights and closed the barn door behind her.
Once she was back in the cabin, Chandra cradled the child against her while she tossed fresh logs into the wood stove. “We’ll get you warm,” she promised, reaching for the phone and holding the receiver to her ear with her shoulder. She dialed 911, praying that the call would be answered quickly.
“Emergency,” a dispatcher answered.
“Yes, this is Chandra Hill, I live on Flaming Moss Road,” she said quickly, then rattled off her address over the baby’s cries. “I discovered an infant in my barn. Newborn, dehydrated possibly, certainly hungry, with a chance of exposure. I—I don’t know who it belongs to…or why it’s here.”
“We can send an ambulance.”
“I live twenty miles from town. It’ll be quicker if I meet the ambulance at Alder’s Corner, where the highway intersects Flaming Moss.”
“Just a minute.” The dispatcher mumbled something to someone else and then was back on the line. “That’s fine. The ambulance will meet you there.”
“Good. Now, please contact the emergency room of the hospital….” Mechanically, she began to move and think in a way she hadn’t done in years. Placing the child on the couch next to her, she carefully unwrapped the howling infant. Furious and hungry, the baby cried more loudly, his skinny little legs kicking. “It’s a boy…probably two or three days old,” she said, noticing the stump of the umbilical cord. How many infants so like this one had she examined during her short career as a physician? Hundreds. Refusing to let her mind wander into that forbidden territory, she concentrated on the wriggling child and carefully ran her fingers over his thin body. “He’s Caucasian, very hungry, with no visible marks….” Her hands moved expertly over the smooth skin of the newborn, checking muscles and bones, small fingers and toes, legs, neck, spine, buttocks, head…. “Wait a minute…” She flipped the switch of a brighter light and noticed the yellow pallor of the whites of the baby’s eyes. “He appears jaundiced and—” she touched the downy hair again, carefully prodding “—there’s some swelling on the back of his head. Maybe caput succedaneum or cephalhematoma…yes, there’s a slight bleeding from the scalp, and it appears only on the right side of his head. I don’t think it’s serious. The swelling isn’t too large, but you’d better have a pediatrician look him over the minute he gets there.” She continued to examine the infant as if he were her patient, her gaze practiced and sure. “I can’t find anything else, at least not here without medical equipment. Did you get everything?”
“Every word,” the dispatcher replied. “You’re being recorded.”
“Good.” Chandra shone her flashlight in the baby’s eyes, and he blinked and twisted his head away from the light. “Notify the sheriff’s office that apparently the child’s been abandoned.”
“You don’t know the mother?” the dispatcher questioned.
Chandra shook her head, though the woman on the other end of the line couldn’t see her. “No. I have no idea whom this guy belongs to. So someone from the sheriff’s office should come out here and look through my barn again and check the woods. I called out and looked around for the mother, but I didn’t have much time. I was more concerned with the child.” She glanced to the windows and the cold night beyond. “My guess is she isn’t far off. You’ve got the address.”
Chandra didn’t wait for a response, but hung up. She pulled a blanket from her closet and rewrapped the tiny newborn. He was beautiful, she thought, with a shock of downy black hair that stood straight off his scalp and a voice that would wake the dead. But why had he been abandoned? Had the mother, perhaps homeless, left him in the relative comfort of the barn as she searched for food? But why not stop at the cabin? Why leave him in the barn where there was a chance he would go unnoticed, maybe even die? Chandra shuddered at the thought. No, any responsible mother would have knocked on the door and would never, never have abandoned her child. “Come on, you,” she said to the baby, “we’ve got work to do. You can’t just lie there and scream.”
But scream he did until she swaddled him more tightly and held him in her arms again. Only then did his cries become pitiful little mews. Chandra clutched him even tighter; the sooner she got him to the hospital the better.
Sam was sitting at attention near the couch. She looked in his direction, and the big dog swept the floor with his tail. “You,” she said, motioning to the retriever, “stick around. In case the mother wanders back or the police show up.”
As if the dog could do anything, she thought with a wry smile.
She found more blankets and tucked the child into a wicker laundry basket which, along with several bungee cords and the baby, she carried to her suburban. After securing the basket by the safety belt in the back seat, she crisscrossed the bungee cords over the baby, hoping to hold him as tightly and safely as possible.
“Hang on,” she said to the infant as she hauled herself into the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut and switched on the ignition. She rammed the monstrous rig into gear. The beams of the headlights washed across the side of the barn, and Chandra half expected a woman to come running from the shadows. But no one appeared, and Chandra tromped on the accelerator, spewing gravel.
* * *
“DR. O’ROURKE. Dr. Dallas O’Rourke. Please call E.R.”
Dallas O’Rourke was writing out instructions for a third-floor patient named William Aimes when the page sounded. He scowled menacingly, then strode to the nearest house phone and punched out the number for the main desk of Riverbend Hospital. Checking the clock at the nurse’s station, he realized he’d been on duty for the past twenty-two hours. His back ached and his shoulders were stiff, and he felt gritty from lack of sleep. He probably looked worse than he felt, he thought grimly as the receiver of the phone rubbed against the stubble of beard on his
chin.
A voice answered, and he cut in. “This is Dr. O’Rourke. I was just paged.”
“That’s right. I’ll connect you to E.R.”
The telephone clicked and a familiar voice answered quickly. “Emergency. Nurse Pratt.”
“O’Rourke.” Leaning a stiff shoulder against the wall, he scribbled his signature across Aimes’s chart, then rubbed his burning eyes. How long had it been since he’d eaten? Six hours? Seven?
“You’d better hustle your bones down here,” Shannon Pratt advised. “We’re swamped, and we’ve got a live one coming in. The switchboard just took the call. Something about an abandoned baby, a newborn with possible exposure, dehydration, jaundice and cephalhematoma.”
Dallas scowled to himself. What was the old saying? Something about no rest for the wicked? The adage seemed to apply. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.” God, what he wouldn’t do for a hot shower, hotter cup of coffee, and about ten hours in the rack.
He only took the time to leave the chart in the patient’s room and give the third-floor nurses’ station some instructions about Bill Aimes’s medication. “And make sure he takes it,” Dallas warned. “It seems Mr. Aimes thinks he can self-diagnose.”
“He won’t fool us,” Lenore Newell replied, and Dallas was satisfied. Lenore had twenty years of nursing experience under her belt, and she’d seen it all. If anyone could get Bill Aimes to swallow his medication, Dallas decided, Nurse Newell could.
Unwilling to wait for the elevator, he took the stairs to the first floor and shoved open the door. The bright lights and frenetic activity of the emergency room greeted him. Several doctors were treating patients, and there was a crowd in the waiting room.
Shannon Pratt, a slim, dark-haired woman and, in Dallas’s opinion, the most efficient nurse on staff, gave the doctor a quick smile. “They’re on their way. Mike just called. They’ll be here in about five minutes.”
Mike Rodgers was one of the regular paramedics who drove ambulance for Riverbend Hospital.