New Year's Baby (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Jodi O'Donnell

  “I’m afraid it’ll be difficult to get in touch should you need something on the road,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe we shouldn’t go—”

  “Go! Go and don’t worry a minute about me. You won’t get this chance again for a long time once the baby comes,” she said with affection, touched by his concern.

  The man smiled at her with the same fondness—but no more than that. “Well, at least you’ve got Cade’s contact info if somethin’ happens,” he said. “Just explain what you need, and I know he’ll see to it.”

  Regret filled his eyes, even as he said with quiet humbleness, “He’s one of the best, my brother. It isn’t in him to quit a person he loves—even when that person quits him. No, I never saw him give up on anything or anyone, no matter if sure defeat stared him in the eye.”

  The tears dried on her cheeks as she stared at him in hushed silence, each word striking like the chime of a clock, deep and resonant, until all that remained was their memory in her heart.

  The crying, though, went on...and on...and on—

  “Sara. Sara, wake up.”

  Sara came out of her dream like one drugged. With effort, she lifted her head and tried to orient herself in the darkened room. She still heard crying, and with a start, she realized it was her baby, lying next to her in the bed.

  “Oh! Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry!” She’d pushed herself up on one elbow, blindly reaching for the babe, when a large hand on her shoulder urged her back down.

  “Relax,” Cade murmured. “I’ll try to quiet the little mite while you get your bearings.”

  She heard him pick up the infant, who continued to wail at an ear-piercing volume. Now fully awake, Sara tried to sit up, stifling a groan. Where right after the labor she’d been tired, now she ached all over, as if she’d climbed Mount Everest.

  A lock of her hair got caught between her back and the headboard, and she tugged it free, gathering the whole damp mass of it in her hands and twisting it over one shoulder.

  “All right, I can take him now,” she said, holding her arms out toward Cade’s shadowed form, dimly backlit by the pale light filtering in from the hallway. “And you may as well turn on a light. It doesn’t sound like he’s going to settle back down right away.”

  “You sure?” Cade asked, holding the still-fussing infant, insignificant as a peanut against his broad shoulder, and patting his back.

  “Well, n-no,” she said rather tremulously as her dream spontaneously revived itself, bringing back the failure she’d experienced with a vengeance. “I mean, it’s obvious I’ve got a ways to go to being a good mother if the sound of my own baby’s crying doesn’t w-wake me up.”

  To her dismay, tears stung her eyes, and she wondered if the whole dream would come pouring out of her unbidden.

  She didn’t want it to, she realized. Not yet.

  “Sara,” Cade said gently. “I didn’t mean were you sure about what the baby needed. I meant were you sure about turning on the light?”

  “Oh.” Already she missed him calling her darlin’. She blinked away the moisture in her eyes and peered at him.

  “I was nursing Baby Cade when I fell asleep.”

  It occurred to her then why he might be crying. “He may need to be burped,” she suggested just as the baby let out a tiny hiccup of air. He immediately ceased fretting and quieted down.

  “That’s all it was,” Cade soothed, holding the baby one-handedly as he stooped to switch on the bedside lamp. “Just a little burp that had to get out. Ready for him?”

  She answered, “Yes.”

  Cade eased the child into her arms. From the looks of things, he’d apparently been asleep himself. The flannel shirt he’d slid on was not completely buttoned, revealing the defined muscles in his chest.

  She realized she was staring, and that he’d apparently noticed, for he stepped back with an abruptness that wrung her heart.

  Suddenly, Sara felt vulnerable, as if the echoes of her dream still ringing in her head reverberated throughout the room as well.

  Yes, she realized, here in this room there was an answering echo. She wasn’t alone.

  Yet something had changed—in Cade. What or why or how she knew it was so, she couldn’t have said. Maybe it was the way he marked distance between them. Or the wariness in his stance.

  Or perhaps it was the way all hope and promise had left his golden-brown eyes.

  He was here, though. He hadn’t left. He wouldn’t leave.

  Sara noticed Cade looking at her, puzzled. “Your hair’s wet,” he said.

  She fingered back a lock of it. “Y-yes, I couldn’t stand it, so when the baby was sleeping, I took a chance he’d be all right for ten minutes and got in a quick shower.”

  “But...how did you manage?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” she admitted. “I’m still pretty shaky on my pins, but I figured I’d just sit down if I started to feel I couldn’t support myself.”

  Cade thrust his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “You should have called for me to help, Sara.”

  “I did,” she answered rather breathlessly. “You must have been asleep—o-or outside. I heard the door slam.”

  Giving undue attention to her perfectly content child, Sara waited. Perhaps Cade would broach the subject and end this awkwardness between them. And she so wanted it to end! She didn’t like the distance between them, missed the closeness they’d shared intensely. In fact, it made her rather desperate, because even more than it had a few minutes ago, fear rolled over her, engulfing her like a cloud of smoke.

  She shivered suddenly. No, she didn’t want to go there.

  “Are you cold?” Cade asked, taking back the step he’d retreated.

  “No.” Sara shook her head, trying to rid it of that feeling at the same time. “No, it’s just that my hair’s still a little damp. If you’ve got a brush, I’ll get the tangles out and put it back in a braid again and off my shoulders. It’ll be dry by morning.”

  “Let me see what I can find.”

  She used the time while he went in search of a brush to pull herself together. Thankfully, Baby Cade was sleeping soundly, nestled between her blanket-covered thighs, and seemed none the worse for having his mother fall asleep on him in the midst of a feeding. Now that she could think about it rationally, she’d bet she wasn’t the first new mother to do such a thing—as well as to feel completely inadequate at motherhood.

  Unable to resist, she wiggled his chin with her pinkie finger. Immediately, his rosebud mouth screwed into a pucker, making smacking noises. When no nipple presented itself to be suckled, he whimpered briefly before settling back into his dreams.

  And that’s all mine was, Sara thought. A dream. There was no way on earth she couldn’t have wanted this child to be born even for a second.

  “Will a comb do?” Cade asked as he came back into the room. “The last person to live in this house who might’ve used a hairbrush was my grandmother, and that was twenty years ago.”

  He handed the comb to her. “I’m surprised going so long without a female influence hasn’t made you McGivern men wild as savages,” she ventured to tease.

  Cade did another one of his turned-to-stone numbers. “You tell me,” he said, and she realized he meant not himself, but Loren—her husband.

  Yes, they’d both tiptoed around mentioning him, had both avoided the subject of what she remembered of him, or of what Cade might tell her to help her do that.

  And they both knew why.

  Sara lifted her arms to attack her tangled hair with a fervor and immediately regretted the sudden effort. Her stomach muscles protested, and she gave a huff of frustration. “I guess I must have overdone it with the shower.”

  She took another stab at tugging the comb through a knot near the crown of her head and failed.

&
nbsp; “Would you like me to give it a shot?” Cade asked quietly.

  “Not if you don’t want to,” she answered, unable to keep the edge out of her voice.

  “Well, and not if you don’t want me to, either,” was his seemingly mild reply.

  She looked up at him, trying to make out the expression in his eyes and failing. “All right. Go ahead.”

  Shifting the baby onto the bed beside her, she gave Cade the comb, and he placed one knee on the mattress behind her. But he didn’t begin, and Sara waited, her breath caught in her chest.

  “It’ll probably hurt less if I start with the ends and work up,” he muttered. “At least that’s what works best when I’m combin’ Destiny’s tail and mane.”

  She felt him lift a back section of her hair and, taking short, light strokes, begin to unsnarl each tangle with infinite patience.

  Both of them were silent for several minutes. Sara couldn’t have said what Cade was thinking. As for herself, she was once again soothed by the gentleness in this man’s large hands. She experienced not one yank or pull on her scalp. Just the tiny tug now and then of a knot finally combed loose.

  “The phone’s workin’ again,” Cade said abruptly.

  Sara jerked. Her eyes had drifted closed. “That’s good to know. Not that we need it at the moment. Everything seems to be under control.”

  “Yeah, well. Still, I gave Doc Barclay a heads-up to let him know about the baby. Come mornin’, I’ll get him on the line and let you speak to him. He’ll have some questions about your progress, probably some good advice to follow, too, until he can get through on the roads and give you and the baby a thorough going-over.”

  “When will that be, do you think?”

  “Couldn’t say for sure, but I’m bettin’ at least a few days.” He lifted her hair from underneath, and his fingers grazed the back of her neck. “The storm’s past, at least.”

  She hadn’t even noticed the wind had finally quit its relentless whistling. Only now did she realize how truly lucky she was to have made it to Cade. No telling what would have happened to her and the baby had she gotten stuck in the blizzard.

  She must have been terribly desperate to have taken such a chance. Or terribly certain Cade was the only one who could help her.

  “I’m curious—how did you explain who I was to the doctor and Virgil?” Sara asked.

  “I just told Doc that you’d come in from the storm needing help with deliverin’ your baby. There wasn’t exactly time to get into the particulars. I gave Virg a quick rundown ’fore I sent him to the bunkhouse to get some rest. He’s pleased as punch to know you’re family.”

  Another silence fell in the room as Sara tried to grasp the concept that yes, she was family to this man. His sister-in-law, to be specific. And the baby on her lap was his nephew.

  It still didn’t seem right, and she knew that was something she needed to come to terms with—in herself and with Cade.

  “I was having a dream, just before you woke me,” she blurted out. “There were...people I seemed to know, conversations that were familiar.”

  Cade paused in midstroke. “Such as?”

  “A...a man who looked like you but wasn’t you,” she whispered. “He was going away, somewhere he’d be difficult to reach.”

  “Loren?”

  “Y-yes, it must have been Loren.”

  He took a minute to absorb that before saying, his voice hushed, “I tried callin’ him. In Albuquerque, just about an hour ago.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “And?”

  “All I got was an answering machine.”

  “At this time of the night?”

  “Exactly. It’s comin’ up on five here, which would’ve made it 3:00 a.m. then in New Mexico.” He gave another of those mirthless chuckles that sounded so bleak to her ears. “Maybe the next little trip you take to Dreamland, you could make a mental note to ask where he is and how to get ahold of him.”

  She chose to ignore his sarcasm. “Are there friends of his...ours there that you might call and see if they know how to reach him?”

  “Not likely. I didn’t even know what part of the country he was livin’ in till a few days ago.”

  “Oh, I forgot.” He’d told her he hadn’t heard from his brother in seven years. “What happened between you two, Cade?” she asked. “Or should I wait and see what I dream up?”

  The short laugh that came from him this time was more wry.

  “Trust Loren to pick a live one,” he commented. He hesitated, then went on, “We had a fallin’ out, as brothers are bound to. Except Loren lit a shuck, left the ranch ’fore we could square things. Being as how we’ve both got stubborn streaks a mile wide and more pride than the law allows, neither of us was willin’ to make the first move, and the time for doin’ so stretched longer and longer till it got embarrassing. I don’t think either one of us ever intended to go on for so long.”

  His hands rested on her shoulders in pause, then he admitted, “For myself, if I’d’ve known that argument meant I wouldn’t see my own brother for nearly seven years, I would never’ve let him step one foot off the ranch without settlin’ the matter one way or the other.”

  Even without seeing his expression, Sara got the distinct impression Cade had made less of what happened than what actually had—and that he was taking on more of the blame for the estrangement from his brother than was his to own.

  That impression, it occurred to her, came from her dream.

  Placing her hand over Cade’s, she turned her head, lifting her eyes to his. “There’s something Loren said in my dream I didn’t tell you, Cade.”

  His features froze. “And that’d be?”

  “He told me if I needed anything, anything at all, I could count on you. And that you were the kind of man who never quit someone you loved—even after that person quit you.”

  Cade’s gaze delved into hers, mining deeply as if to unearth her every secret thought or memory or desire, even those which she herself had no conscious knowledge of.

  And what would he discover about her, should she give him entrance to her mind? Sara wondered. What would she?

  With a shudder, she glanced away. I must be very careful here, she realized. Careful to keep her thoughts close. Careful to keep her heart close.

  Because what she’d felt for the man in her dream who was supposed to be her husband had been anything but wifely, and paled drastically to what she felt for the man whose touch and very nearness roused in her the deepest of those kinds of feelings.

  Were their strength for Cade truly because all she knew of any man was what she’d experienced in the last several hours with him? Somehow, she couldn’t accept that possibility.

  Yet she knew it didn’t make those emotions any more right.

  Especially when he took up his task again, placing the comb against the back of her head to take the first full stroke through her hair, from her crown to the ends. The next stroke was as long and full, tugging at her scalp and making it tingle deliciously. Tugging her back, for one moment, against him.

  If ever a man had brushed her hair in that murky, unclear past of hers, Sara knew such an experience could not compare to the vivid here and now of this one at the hands of Cade McGivern.

  Sara reached back, fingers closing over his and nearly wrenching the comb from his hand. “I can finish the rest. It won’t take but a minute to b-braid up my hair, and I really should get a few minutes’ sleep while I can before Baby C-Cade wakes up for his next feeding.”

  “Of course.” Cade stepped away.

  “Th-thank you, though,” she belatedly remembered to say. Her hands shook, her voice shook, and when she caught the stricken expression on Cade’s face as he headed for the door, she thought she would cry. Or worse, as the panic of before set itself to clawing at her
once more.

  She couldn’t let him go this way. For some reason, somehow, she had to make it right before he left.

  “Cade.”

  He turned at the doorway, and it took her breath away to realize how familiar his stance, his every move, were to her already.

  “I just wanted to tell you again,” she said, her voice barely audible to her own ears, “how grateful I am to you for being here for me and for my baby. For giving me, with your promise, the ability to go on. It was an act of purest selflessness, of pure faith. Truly, no matter what happens, I will never, ever forget it, because I know there’s no way on earth I could ever forget that moment when my baby was born. And if you’re needing something to believe in, you can believe that. Because I do, with all my heart.”

  He said nothing for a good minute, and it almost seemed he was marking the same realization about her that she’d just done of him. Or perhaps that was, again, more about her own hopes and wishes than anything else.

  “I thank you for that,” he finally said, “but it was nothin’ really.”

  His voice was as cynical as ever.

  She watched him walk out the door, her fear not allayed in the least. Yes, she must be very careful. Careful not to lose what this man had given her in that special moment.

  Because she couldn’t go back to before.

  Chapter Four

  FUNNY HOW A simple change in perspective could turn the blizzard that had been a bane into a boon, Cade reflected a few days later as he and Destiny worked to locate cattle and bring them close to the mineral tubs and stock tanks. He’d spent yesterday and today riding out as far as he could to check the herd, leaving it to Virgil to stay close to home blading out the drifted-over ranch yard and lane so he could look in on Sara and the baby now and again.

  Out on the range the snow had had little to drift against, with just a few wisps in spots that made the entire landscape look topped in an endless vista of meringue. The sun shone bright in the cloudless sky, but the air remained so clean and sharp and crisp it instantly froze any moisture in mouth or nostril.