“Campbell is wonderful. He doesn’t pretend the kids aren’t sick, and he’s careful to keep an eye out for any problems they might have.”
Campbell was a recovering alcoholic who hadn’t been able to find a job anywhere in the county to support his wife and six kids. No one trusted him, including Zach, because he had fallen off the wagon so many times. Rebecca hadn’t been able to resist his request for a job.
“He’s sober now, Zach,” she had argued. “And when I think of all those hungry children…”
Zach had known he wasn’t going to win the debate, but he resisted giving in right away because he liked the methods Rebecca used to cajole him. It had been a pleasure at last to cave in to her entreaties for this latest lost soul.
“All right,” he conceded. “Campbell gets one chance. I see him drunk and he’s gone.”
So far, Campbell had stayed as sober as a Baptist preacher in a dry county.
“At least that’s working out,” Zach said.
“Yes.” Even if their marriage wasn’t.
Zach had kept his promise to work with the children, but he hadn’t let any of them get close again, not like Pete. He was courteous and helpful, a regular Boy Scout. But he dealt with the possibility of pain by closing himself off from feeling anything. It wasn’t the result she had hoped for when she had blackmailed him into working with her the rest of the summer. One more week, and Camp LittleHawk would be done for the season. She didn’t hold out much hope that Zach was going to change in the next seven days.
To make matters worse, she had failed to become pregnant. In most marriages, it would be ludicrous to worry that she wasn’t pregnant six months after the wedding. With the one-year deadline Zach had set, she was conscious that time was running out.
“I think I have to see a doctor, Zach. At least to give us both some peace of mind.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Rebecca shook her head. “We know the problem isn’t with you. After all, Cynthia was… You can certainly father a child,” she finished quickly. “There might be something wrong with me. Something that never showed up during my regular checkups.”
Zach closed his eyes. How could he admit to Rebecca that the problem might very well be with him? How could he explain that the child Cynthia carried might not have been his? There was no sense putting her through a bunch of tests if he was the one at fault. But maybe the problem was hers. Maybe it was better to let her be tested first, to make sure of her fertility before he questioned his own.
“All right,” he said at last.
He watched Rebecca’s shoulders sag as she conceded the necessity for tests. His stomach rolled. He couldn’t make her go through that sort of thing by herself. Not when the problem might be his.
“We’ll both go,” he said.
“What?”
“I said we’ll both go.”
“But you—”
“Cynthia said the child was mine. There’s some question whether it actually was.”
She stared at him, her eyes filled with shocked disbelief. “How…”
“The day she died, I caught her in bed with another man.”
“But…”
“So we’ll both go see the doctor.”
Rebecca didn’t dare ask the thousand and one questions buzzing around inside her head. The look on Zach’s face precluded questions.
“Maybe we’ll have a chance to talk to a doctor while we’re at the hospital waiting for Callen to deliver,” Zach said.
“All right.”
Rebecca couldn’t quit staring at Zach during the drive to the hospital. He had fooled everybody! His parents, Cynthia’s parents, his siblings, even she had believed he had been mourning Cynthia’s death all these years. But would a man mourn the death of a woman who had been unfaithful to him? Would he mourn the death of a woman carrying a child he wasn’t even sure was his?
If he hadn’t loved Cynthia, what was it that had alienated him from love all these years?
Rebecca worried her lower lip with her teeth as she reasoned it out. He must have been hurt, humiliated even, by his fiancée’s infidelity. No man would be likely to confess the truth.
So why had he kept Cynthia’s picture where he could see it every day?
To remind him…of her betrayal.
Rebecca leaned back against the pickup seat and closed her eyes. She felt like a fool. All this time she had thought Zach was still in love with Cynthia, when he had actually been nursing his hate. Cynthia had torn out his heart and left a deep, vacant hole behind. Zach would never love again, because he had been burned too badly the first time. He would shut her out forever, the way he had shut Pete out when the boy got too close, because he couldn’t take the chance that he would be hurt again.
Zach saw the tear slip down Rebecca’s cheek and reached out to catch it. As his fingertips brushed her cheek, she leaned into his palm. “I know it must be hard on you to see Callen at a time like this. Especially when you haven’t been able…when we… But she expects us to be there. She wouldn’t understand why it’s painful for us…”
“Oh, Zach, you wonderful, foolish man…”
“I suppose we don’t have to go, but—”
She scooted across the seat and wrapped her arm around his waist. His arm slid naturally around her shoulders.
“It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll go.”
“Are you sure, kid?”
“I’m sure.”
Rebecca tried not to breathe too deeply when they entered the hospital, but it was impossible to ignore the smell of disinfectant that permeated the place. In all the time she had worked at Children’s Hospital she had never gotten used to it. The astringent smell evoked memories of children she had worked with who had gone home whole and healthy. And children who had not.
She followed a uniformed nurse with her eyes as the woman moved briskly down the narrow green—why were hospitals always beige or green?—corridor.
“Bring back memories?” Zach asked.
She smiled at his perceptiveness. “A few.”
“Sorry you quit?”
She shook her head. “I like what I’m doing now a lot better.”
“I suppose it beats seeing them sick in bed.” Zach precluded her retort by grasping her hand and dragging her onto a crowded elevator. She glared at him, but forbore to argue in front of other people.
Zach held on to Rebecca’s hand as a way of allaying his own nervousness. He wanted a child so bad he could taste it. He wanted to see the new baby…and he didn’t. He wanted to be happy for his sister and brother-in-law, and yet he was so sick with jealousy that he felt a burning in the pit of his stomach.
It was every bit as painful as he had expected it would be to see the joy in Callen’s and Sam’s eyes at the birth of their son and know he had no child of his own on the way. It was every bit as difficult as he had known it would be to have the baby thrust into his arms and to feel the softness of its skin, to examine its minute fingernails and lush baby lashes and know the child belonged to someone else.
Worst of all was seeing the look of wonder on Rebecca’s face as she held the baby close, to see her flush of embarrassment when the newborn rooted instinctively for her breast as she touched its cheek with her fingertip, and to see the longing in her eyes as she watched Callen nursing her son.
Rebecca looked up suddenly, and their eyes locked. A wealth of words was spoken, though none were said aloud.
I hope this will be us someday soon.
Oh, Zach, how I would love to have your child.
It’ll happen. We just have to keep trying.
What if there’s something wrong with me?
There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll see.
What if it doesn’t happen right away?
We have six months. That’s plenty of time.
I love you, Zach. I’ve always loved you.
Zach felt the constriction in his chest, a sort of breathlessness caused by what he saw in Rebecc
a’s eyes. She had never spoken of love, not once in all the months they had been married, except to deny it. She had not even said she cared, except for that one lapse when she had called him “darling” and “sweetheart.” Only, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined the words, because he had needed to hear them so badly at the time.
Could he be mistaken about what he saw in her eyes now? Did he want her to love him? Is that why he had projected an emotion where it did not exist?
Of course, she was always touching him. But he figured that was just a habit of hers. She also touched the children often, and the horses and the dog and the barnyard cats. He was no different. Rebecca was a sensual person. If wasn’t her fault he reacted the way he did to her friendly pats and affable strokes and inadvertent brushing against him.
He reached out for Rebecca’s hand again and, when he had it firmly in his own, said, “We have to be going now.”
“Stay a little longer,” his sister urged.
“We’ve got another group of kids, the last campers of the summer, coming tomorrow,” Rebecca said by way of explanation for their early departure.
“I should be home in a couple of days. Promise you’ll come visit then,” Callen urged.
“We will,” Zach promised.
“Promise?”
“Promise,” Zach said, crossing his heart and holding up three Boy Scout fingers.
He had a death grip on Rebecca’s hand and practically dragged her from the room. He wasn’t even sure where he was going until he found himself in front of a doctor’s door on the first floor in the administration wing of the hospital.
Dr. Elmo Bently. Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Zach stopped and turned to stare at Rebecca.
“We don’t have to do this now, Zach.”
“I think we do.”
He knocked and when the doctor called out, he opened the door and pulled her inside.
“What brings you two here?” Dr. Bently asked.
“We want to be tested.”
The doctor raised a brow. “Something wrong? One of you sick?”
“For fertility.” Zach felt the heat stealing up his throat, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He pulled Rebecca closer to his side.
The doctor frowned. “Either of you have any reason to suspect you’re infertile?”
“Only that my wife hasn’t gotten pregnant. And it isn’t for want of trying,” Zach managed to say.
The doctor chuckled. “Both of you sit down and get comfortable. I think we need to have a little talk.”
The doctor asked a series of questions and listened as they answered.
“I’ll do some preliminary tests if you insist,” he said. “But it seems a bit early to suggest there’s a problem with conception. The only possible problem I see is that you may be having intercourse too frequently. The body needs time to recoup, so there may be fewer sperm during subsequent ejaculations. You could try having sex every other day, instead of every day, and see if that helps.”
Rebecca wriggled in her seat at such plain speaking. But it was the first encouraging thing she had heard the doctor say. She looked sideways at Zach to see what he thought of this advice.
“All right, Doc, we’ll cut back on frequency. But I still want us to be tested. When can we arrange to do that?”
“You can leave a sperm sample now, and I can see your wife in a couple of days.”
Zach plainly hadn’t anticipated anything happening quite so soon, but he quickly recovered. “The sooner, the better.”
Rebecca waited in the hall while a nurse took Zach to another area of the hospital. When it took longer than she expected for Zach to return, she wandered down the hall toward a modern computer information center that listed the location of all the wards. One stood out among the others.
Pediatrics.
She took the elevator to the second floor and, when she stepped off, turned away from the nurse’s station as though she knew where she was going. In fact, Rebecca knew exactly what she was looking for. Several doors down the hall, she found it.
It wasn’t a large room, probably because it wasn’t a large hospital. There were eight beds, and each one held a sick child. She hesitated only a moment before stepping inside.
Her eyes were drawn to a girl about five years old. She wore a cast on her right arm and another on her right leg, which was attached to a pulley that kept it elevated. Her face was crisscrossed with tiny scabs that suggested she had probably gone through a car windshield. She was awake, but merely stared at the ceiling.
“Hello,” Rebecca said.
The little girl turned big, curious brown eyes on her, but she didn’t speak.
“My name is Rebecca. What’s yours?”
“Jewel.”
“May I sit down, Jewel?”
The little girl nodded.
“How are you feeling?”
“Are you a doctor?”
Rebecca smiled and shook her head. “No, just a visitor.”
The girl sighed in relief. “Good. Because I’m tired of doctors.”
“Seen too many of them?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you could go anywhere in the world this afternoon, where would you go?” Rebecca asked.
“Home.”
Rebecca felt the sting in her nose that preceded tears and blinked quickly to keep them back. She had expected an answer like “Disneyland.” How long had this child been here, anyway?
“How long have you been in the hospital, Jewel?”
“A long time.”
“I’ll bet your mommy and daddy come and visit you a lot.”
“My mommy and daddy are dead.”
Rebecca brushed a stray curl of plain, Mississippi-mud-brown hair from the girl’s forehead while she tried to swallow back the huge lump in her throat. “That’s too bad, Jewel.”
“I had a brother, but he got killed, too. I just got hurt real bad.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. When she blinked, one slid down her too-thin cheek.
“I’m sure someone out there will be glad to have a little girl like you come to live with them. Your grandma and grandpa? Or your aunt and uncle?”
She shook her head sadly. “There’s no place for me to go. When I’m well, I have to go to a father home, I think it’s called.”
“A foster home,” Rebecca corrected.
Rebecca saw the girl’s eyes shift upward over her shoulder and turned to see who was there.
It was Zach.
“I wondered where you had gone. I took a wild guess, and lo and behold, here you are.”
“I just wanted to visit,” Rebecca said.
“Who’s your friend?” Zach asked.
“Jewel, this is Zach. Zach, this is Jewel. She’s been explaining that she’ll be going to a foster home when she’s well.”
The little girl and the tall man solemnly shook hands.
“Hello, Jewel. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Hello. Are you a doctor?”
Zach smiled wryly. “No. I’m a rancher.”
“Do you have horses on your ranch?”
“Lot of them. Ponies, too.”
“I used to have a pony. My daddy and I…my daddy…” The child turned her face away and stared at the wall, clearly overwrought.
Rebecca touched the girl gently on the shoulder and said, “I hope you get well soon, Jewel.”
If Zach hadn’t taken her hand and pulled her away, she wouldn’t have left at all.
Once they were far enough beyond the door that they couldn’t be heard, Rebecca turned to Zach, her heart in her eyes. “Zach?”
“I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is no.”
“She doesn’t have anywhere to go. In a week Camp LittleHawk will be done for the season, and it won’t be starting again for months. It doesn’t have to be forever. A foster home is just an interim step, until someone comes along who wants to adopt her.”
“No.”
“It isn’t as though she
’s sick. She was injured in an accident. She’s obviously well, or nearly well. She will be well.”
“No.”
“She’s all alone in the word, no relatives, nobody. We can’t turn our backs on her.”
Zach huffed out a breath of air. “There would probably be a ton of paperwork to qualify as a foster home.”
Rebecca’s grin was blinding. “Oh, thank you, Zach. Thank you. You won’t be sorry, I promise you.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
“But you stopped saying no.”
Zach chuckled. “You’re impossible.”
“And you love me for it,” Rebecca said with a flirtatious look from beneath long lashes. She realized suddenly what she had said and quickly asked, “How did the test go?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. “First time I’ve done that since I was a teenager,” he muttered.
She couldn’t help the giggle that escaped.
Zach picked her up and hugged her tight. “Don’t laugh. Your turn is coming.”
Both of them sobered at the reminder that they had been unsuccessful in conceiving a child of their own. Zach set her down. “You can pursue the possibility of providing a foster home for Jewel. But be sure you understand we’re talking about a temporary situation. If I’d wanted to adopt a kid, I could have done it a long time ago. Don’t let yourself get attached to her.”
He tipped her chin up to force her to meet his gaze. “Understand?”
“I can care for Jewel without getting emotionally involved. I proved that as a nurse. You don’t have to worry about me.”
He slid an arm around her waist and headed down the hall toward the elevator.
“Do you think they’ll let us have her?” Rebecca asked.
“I think there’s a pretty good chance of it.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I know the head of social service in town. She owes me a favor for something I did for her in high school.”
Rebecca arched a suspicious, inquiring brow. “What, exactly, was it you did for her?”
Zach grinned. “I think that’s better left unsaid. Suffice it to say, if you want to foster Jewel, I’ll do what I can to grease the wheels.”
It was the least he could do. After all, for a welcome change she had consulted him before making a decision about helping somebody. Besides, he was willing to accept the homeless waif on a temporary basis for entirely selfish reasons.
Hawk's Way: Callen & Zach Page 20