New Year's Baby (Harlequin Heartwarming)

by Jodi O'Donnell

  “Yes, don’t worry, Sara,” Loren agreed fervently. “No matter what happened, you’re safe and sound now, right?” He slowly wagged his head back and forth in amazement, his eyes, as expectant as ever, on his brother. “What a stroke of luck that even with your amnesia you were able to find Cade.”

  For once, Sara herself couldn’t look at him, would do anything not to, as the most awful fear yet sprouted in her. But just as Loren spoke, the tall, mahogany grandfather clock in the corner sounded another kind of stroke. No one said a word as it struck twelve chimes in all, the last echoing in the room—and in her head, it seemed, for she couldn’t help remembering the moment she had first heard its peal.

  “A stroke of luck, too, that Cade was here for you,” Sarah Ann murmured, almost in echo of her thoughts.

  “And I’ll never forget that,” Sara felt compelled to vow as, tugged inexorably by that magnetic force, she lifted her gaze to meet Cade’s. She knew immediately his thoughts had gone to that same moment when they’d raced against time to see her child safely into the world. How far into the past it seemed now! And getting farther away every second that went by. The connection was waning even now, much as the clock’s last chime—and would continue to, to nothing, if she let it.

  That, she understood, was the real choice she had to make.

  But she simply couldn’t go back to before! Sara begged Cade with her gaze. She couldn’t! Something else would die inside her.

  Yet there was no moving forward with any part of her life, until she had. She couldn’t cheat herself out of the past, for she’d be cheating those she loved out of a real future. She’d known it last night. Until she remembered the past they hadn’t shared—the past she’d forgotten—it would forever keep them from forging ahead. Even with this news about her husband, that fact hadn’t changed.

  “It was...nothing,” Cade quietly said.

  And Sara knew then that the clock had started ticking on a different kind of race, though no less one of life—and death.

  * * *

  BONG...BONG...BONG...BONG...BONG...

  Wearily, Sara leaned her head back in the rocking chair. She was beginning to hate that stupid clock. It pointedly marked off the passing hours of her life, telling her now that, though she’d finished nursing Baby Cade at three, she was still up and wide-awake a uselessly spent two hours later.

  Holding her breath, Sara tried for the tenth time that hour to mentally delve through the miasma of fog and try and see through it and into the deepest recesses of her mind.

  You’re Sara Jane Childress, she called into that dusky, murky hollow. Your husband is Greg Childress. Remember?

  No! The denial rose in the back of her throat.

  No, he was...

  Her breath came out in a wheeze. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go there, not this way, alone and desperate.

  And she was now so very, very alone.

  “Sara Jane.”

  Sara’s gasp came out as a sob of sheer terror. Her eyes flew open, her fear escalating three-fold as she wondered what they’d encounter.

  A shadow moved, and she saw it was her cousin who stood in the doorway, a white nightgown flowing around her.

  Life-giving air rushed back into her lungs. “Sarah! It’s you. I didn’t know...”

  Sarah Ann came swiftly into the room to kneel beside the rocking chair, her hand on Sara’s arm. “Sara, forgive me for startling you! When I saw you sitting in this chair, I thought you were awake. I had no idea you didn’t hear me come downstairs.”

  “I—I was awake.” She slid a shaking hand across her forehead, slick with cold perspiration. Her head had begun to throb again. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Neither could I,” her cousin confessed softly.

  Baby Cade started to fuss, and on reflex, Sara started to rise to go to him.

  Sarah Ann pressed her back. “Here, let me.” She bent over the cradle and lifted the infant against her shoulder, hushing and shushing him in tender tones.

  “He might need to nurse again,” Sara said when Baby Cade continued to whimper. She felt for the switch to the lamp on the table beside her, and turned it on, its soft glow warming the room and chasing away the rest of her fear. Or at least keeping it at bay—for now. “He didn’t seem as interested in it as usual the last feeding. Let me try again.”

  Her cousin made a sound of regret at having to hand the baby over. Sara tucked him into the crook of her arm, her other hand automatically reaching for the buttons on her nightie. She stopped short in midgesture, though, in a sudden bout of shyness.

  “Would you like me to leave?” Sarah Ann asked gently.

  “N-no.” Sara felt herself color. “I don’t use a nursing blanket if Cade or Virgil aren’t around, is all.”

  “Whatever you feel comfortable with. I know I’m still practically a stranger to you.”

  “Stay—please,” Sara found herself saying impulsively. “I’d like you to.”

  “I’d like to.” She perched on the edge of the narrow bed, hands on either side of her and elbows locked.

  Sara found her shyness had left her once she started Baby Cade nursing. She simply hadn’t the same reaction to her cousin as she had to Cade being in the room. In fact, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for Sarah Ann to share this experience with her.

  It was nice, she decided. Nice to have another woman around. Another woman to confide in, as much as she felt able to.

  “I named him after Cade,” she confessed into the quiet of the room.

  “I wondered what you’d decided to call him—if anything yet.” Sarah Ann traced the worn pattern in the rug with her toe. “You didn’t mention it, and I didn’t want to pry by asking.”

  “Yes, well, at the time, it seemed the right thing to do.” She ventured a look at her cousin. “It still does.”

  “Of course it does.” Her eyes glowed as they lingered on the babe in Sara’s arms. “I’m just so grateful you’re both safe. We do have Cade to thank for that, don’t we?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “He seems just as Loren described him—loyal, reliable. A little reserved, but is that just until you get to know him?”

  She ducked her head. Oh, yes. “He’s been wonderful—with the baby, I mean.”

  “Well, and who could resist such a darling? He’s utterly sweet, you know,” Sarah Ann said.

  “That he is, isn’t he? Sweet Baby Cade.” She couldn’t resist stroking the back of one finger down his satiny cheek as she rocked, the song Cade had so tenderly sung to him rising spontaneously to her lips.

  She’d hummed only a few bars when her cousin asked abruptly, “How do you know that song?”

  Sara glanced up to find the other woman studying her intently. “It’s a favorite of

  Cade’s. He introduced Baby Cade to it just last night.”

  Her features relaxed. “Oh, of course. That makes sense.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s one of Loren’s favorites, too.” Sarah Ann gave a little laugh, shaking her head. “It’s just that, when you and Greg told us you were pregnant, we sent you the CD as a gift. I thought for a second you might have remembered that. My wishful thinking, wasn’t it?”

  Sara didn’t answer. “I understand you’re to be congratulated, too,” she said in a deft change of subject.

  “Yes. My due date is May 29.” In her loose gown, Sarah Ann barely looked pregnant, but when she pressed her palm to her abdomen, Sara could see the rounded mound of her tummy. “So far everything’s proceeding normally, but it’s been such a comfort to me knowing Loren’s a paramedic. He’d know what to do if there were any trouble.”

  Her other hand joined the first, cradling her precious burden in a gesture so familiar to Sara. “But even then, who’s to know what’ll happen wh
en my time comes? I can’t imagine anything more gut-wrenchingly frightening than needing someone to be there for you and something keeping them away.”

  She turned her head as if to peruse the paltry selection of books in the bookcase, but Sara could tell she was trying to hide her tears. She knew why she was crying, too.

  “Sarah.” The other woman turned back to her with a furtive brush of her fingers across her cheek. “You mustn’t think that anything’s going to happen to either you or Loren, or to your baby. Please. I’d hate for you to worry another minute about it on account of whatever has befallen me.”

  Sarah Ann smiled tremulously. “Even if you don’t remember it, you’re still the strong, courageous, compassionate Sara Jane I’ve always known,” she said with fierce conviction. “That hasn’t changed a bit.”

  Tears started in her own eyes. “You don’t know the good it does me to hear you say that,” Sara murmured, extending one hand, palm down, which her cousin reached out to clasp warmly. “To know that I might have been that kind of person. To have a history, and family.”

  Yes, she had had a good life. And she had been the kind of woman who met the bad life doled out with courage. Suddenly, Sara was anxious to know these things again deep in her heart.

  “So do we have other family?” she asked.

  “I’m sad to say, no, not to speak of.”

  “Oh.” She was disappointed.

  “You and I are actually third cousins, the closest family each of us has. Our great-grandmother was a Sarah, too,” Sarah Ann explained. “And from what I know of Greg, he was in the same boat as you.”

  “We were?” Sara asked, startled at her cousin’s use of the familiar phrase, one she’d used so recently about her and Cade.

  Sarah Ann, however, interpreted her stunned tone for a different reason. “I’m sorry, Sara. I didn’t mean to bring up—”

  The other woman ducked her chin, lips compressed, then went on in a muted voice. “It’s just that...you told me once that you believed destiny must have brought you and Greg together, because you both knew what it was like to be alone in the world.”

  She took a deep breath, trying to find within herself that brave woman Sarah Ann had spoken of. “Tell me about him, Sarah.”

  Her cousin nodded. “I’m sorry to say I didn’t get much of a chance to know him very well, what with you living in Oklahoma and me in Albuquerque,” she said, curling one leg under her. “In fact, you and I have only had the opportunity to see each other a few times a year, at the most, in the past ten since graduating from high school. And even less lately. I’ve been working as a licensed practical nurse at one of Albuquerque’s hospitals and going to school for my R.N. in the evenings, and you and Greg were pretty involved in getting your graphic design business up and running.”

  “We had a—a graphic design business?” She didn’t want to embarrass herself by admitting she hadn’t a clue what graphic design was. Although...as if by spontaneous suggestion, she did have a sense of the kind of person it might take to do such work: part writer, to take an idea and give it a voice, part marketer to make the message count, part artist to make it catch the public’s eye...

  “Yes, and a pretty successful one, too,” Sarah Ann continued. “Oh, it was just the two of you still, and you worked from a home office, but from what I understand, you were able to make a pretty good living at it.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “As I recall, that’s how you met. You and Greg were both working for a communications firm in Oklahoma City. Once you got married, though, you decided to pursue your dream of building your own business. You were quite good, too, both of you. You sent me some samples of brochures and even some catalogs you’d done on the computer. I’m no expert, of course, but I thought they were very well done,” she finished warmly.

  Sara barely heard her. “So that’s what I did for a living,” she murmured, gladness causing her throat to tighten with the threat of more tears. Yes, it was a relief to discover she had talents and enthusiasms and goals in life. Yet they’d also been goals she’d shared with her husband. Dreams they had dreamed together. Precious hopes they had whispered to each other in the deepest, most secret part of the night.

  “Why do you think I must have forgotten Greg, Sarah?” she asked with sudden urgency.

  Her cousin sighed. “I don’t know, dear. But you were pretty devastated by his death. When he died in that auto accident...you were frantic with grief, Sara. I wondered if it’d kill you, too.”

  Sara shook her head, making it start to hurt again. “You said that before, but that was months ago! Why would I lose my memory when I did? What happened?”

  Sarah Ann leaned forward, taking her hand again, and Sara was glad for the contact while still on the verge of rejecting it. “I don’t mention it to upset you, dear, just to provide background that might help you understand, even if you don’t remember yet, what your state of mind might have been.”

  Her eyes shone with tears of empathy. “You were...inconsolable when I talked to you on the phone right after the accident. It happened less than a mile from your home. And you kept saying something about how you’d had an argument—a silly argument, you said, and how Greg had left the house that evening before you had a chance to make up with each other.”

  Sara withdrew her hand. “I said that? A...silly argument?”

  “Yes. Why, are you remembering something?”

  She was, but not from her forgotten past. Really, Cade, this is such a silly argument.

  Really. It’s not silly to me.

  Sara rose abruptly, the baby still nursing as she paced aimlessly to the door. What was going on with her? Things were getting jumbled in her mind, the past mixing with the present, the bad with the good, as it had before in those flip-side emotions she’d experienced.

  Maybe that’s what she needed to do—concentrate on the good memories, ground herself in them first before moving to the bad.

  Her cousin spoke. “I didn’t want to bring this out when we first got here, but...” She got up and left the room, only to return a second later with her handbag. Sitting back down on the bed, she searched through it, coming up with a billfold. She opened it and handed it to Sara. “It was taken on your wedding day.”

  Sara studied the photo as she sank down on the bed next to her cousin, Baby Cade still at her breast.

  Two people stood in front of a church altar, a woman in a white veil and dress, next to a tall man in a black tuxedo.

  She brought the photo closer. The man had medium-brown hair and a mustache, and deep-set eyes she couldn’t tell the color of. But she could make out the expression in them, easily: wildly joyous, deliriously happy. And lucky beyond belief.

  Still, she got no sense of this man—who he’d been or what she’d felt for him. But the biggest shock to Sara was seeing the same happiness shining in the eyes of the woman next to him.

  The woman was her.

  Rather than grounding her, the sight of the photo made the whole situation seem even more unreal to her. It simply didn’t seem possible that she could have felt such powerful feelings for this man. Contentedness, yes. Partnership, sure. But how could she have felt the sort of deep, committed love that fairly radiated from the couple in the picture?

  Yet she must have! So why couldn’t she remember him?

  With anxious eyes, she scrutinized her son. His eyes were squeezed shut in fierce concentration, tiny mouth working like a suction pump, as she tried to find something of the man in the photo in her child and failed. In fact, the baby seemed suddenly unreal to her, too—that he had been hoped for and conceived and anticipated with this man, her husband, whom she had no recollection of.

  But this was her son! He was as much a part of her as Greg Childress. And she had wanted this baby, so much she’d have done anything to see him safely born.

/>   Then again, there had been that dream just after his birth, and those aching feelings of confusion of wanting him, while still not wanting him to be born....

  Her head felt as if it would pound off her shoulders at any moment.

  “Loren didn’t mention this, Sara,” her cousin spoke up, “but your movers had also left a message on our machine that your belongings were set to be delivered to our house at the end of the week. I’m thinking you’ll find a lot of clues there...a lot of reminders of your life with Greg.”

  She turned her head. Sarah Ann barely appeared at the end of that tunneled vision of hers, and that’s how she knew that she was withdrawing into that frightening limbo again. She seemed helpless to stop herself. It was simply too painful, too confusing, otherwise. Especially without the life force of Cade McGivern to pull her back, without the promise he’d made to her in that most desperate of moments...the moment of truth...

  Yes. Sara closed her eyes as calm surrounded her through the pain. Yes, there it was, its strains coming from far away at first, then becoming louder as the words resonated in her body: Wherever both of you came from, you and your baby, you’re here now—in my house, right where you need to be. For now, you belong here, with me. And I won’t let you down.

  No, she may not have Cade to pull her back, but she did have the gift he’d given her when Baby Cade was born, that of trusting in a force—call it whatever—in which she’d somehow lost faith in that slumbering memory of hers.

  Its promise rose up in her, surrounded her. How could she have forgotten it, even for a second?

  Baby Cade grunted, breaking his mouth’s suction on her nipple. He gave a squeak of dismay, the forerunner to an all-out wail, that drew Sara’s attention.

  Of course, here was the other force in her life with whom she shared a powerful connection. The one for whom she’d have done anything not to lose. And she hadn’t lost him. Somehow, she’d pulled him through, pulled them both through, to safety. She had not failed. She must remember that, too.