Alyssa laughed and then proceeded to demonstrate she too was thorough, by running through all the information and instructions she’d already reviewed with Madison while she wheeled them to the main entrance.
“Now, honey, not that we didn’t enjoy having you and Joy hang out with us for a little while, but how are we going to avoid fainting again?”
“Take the iron pills every morning.”
“And?”
“Get more rest,” she added obediently, but that was easier said than done. The baby nursed every three or four hours. She tried to sneak naps when Joy slept, but she also had to shower every once in a while, clean up, do laundry, get to the store… A fog of fatigue had become her most reliable new companion over the last month.
“What else?”
“Eat.”
“Exactly. I know things get hazy when you’re caring for a little one, but keep a meal log if you need to, so you can track whether you had that apple or if you only thought about having one and then got sidetracked with a feeding, or a diaper change, or what have you. Drink plenty of water, too. I don’t want to see you back here next month, all exhausted and dehydrated, with no fuel in your tank.”
Her either. She stole a glance at Hunter to find him giving her an odd look. Part concern and part…pissed off?
Of course he’s pissed. He stopped by as a duty call and got roped into chauffeuring you across town. Before she could apologize for derailing his evening, he excused himself to get his car. After he left, she caught herself scanning the parking lot for a black Ford F-150 with a busted taillight and ordered herself to cut it out. Cody was gone—long gone—and the paranoid habit needed to go, too. Another few moments passed, and then Hunter pulled up in a forest green Chevy Tahoe. Bags went onto the floor in the back seat. He latched Joy into a car seat Madison didn’t recognize and then helped her climb in beside the baby. Finally, he got behind the wheel, started the engine, and looked at her in the rearview mirror.
“I’ve got some bad news.”
Chapter Five
The summer-storm eyes in his rearview mirror widened. “What’s wrong?”
“Your car wasn’t in the lot. The signs posted a two hour maximum, so I suspect they towed you.” He kept his voice matter-of-fact, in hopes her mind wouldn’t race ahead to the other alternative. “Want to call and find out?” He tapped the screen of his phone and handed it to her.
She worried her lip with her teeth while she waited for the call to go through and then navigated an automated system. A few seconds later her closed eyes, and a muted, “Damn,” told him they had her car. She disconnected and handed him back his phone. “It’s there. I have to call back tomorrow during business hours to speak with a human being and make arrangements to pick it up.”
He glanced at the clock on his console. “Sorry you can’t get your wheels today.”
Her utterly defeated look left him with a bad feeling. He had to ask, but he didn’t want to push her in a direction she’d be better off avoiding, like toward the MIA baby daddy. “Is there a family member or”—fuck it—“friend who can give you a ride to the tow yard tomorrow?”
She shook her head. “As far as family, you’re looking at it.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “I’ve only been in Atlanta a few months, and the friend I came here with didn’t turn out to be very reliable.” Although it was obvious she preferred not to go into details, she took a deep breath and added, “He’s the main reason I ended up having a baby by the side of the road.”
Yeah. He figured as much, but for once being right didn’t offer much reward. A part of him wanted to press for details, because Mr. Not Very Reliable had responsibilities and obligations, whether he liked it or not, but now wasn’t the time to tackle that issue.
“Okay. No problem. I’m off tomorrow. I can drive you home tonight and pick you up in the morning.”
Nervous eyes cut left, evading his. “That’s not necessary.”
“What’s your address, Madison?” He asked the question quietly, but he already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. She’d alluded to her messed up life the day they’d met. Now he braced himself to find out what qualified as “messed up” to a woman who’d been in labor in the back seat of a car at the time she’d offered up that assessment.
“I’m kind of”—she chewed the inside of her cheek and stared at the baby—“between addresses at the moment. I live at an extended-stay motel near the convention center.” He remained silent, and after a moment, she recited the address.
Yep. That qualified.
The scenery beyond the windshield devolved from a business district, to industrial, to downright fringy, and the bad feeling he’d had earlier turned into a sinking feeling, right in the pit of his stomach. Eventually he pulled into a small parking lot in front of a dumpy two story motel in a section of the city he knew best for calls involving stabbings, gunshots, and overdoses. Hell, no.
“I have an idea.” He turned around in his seat and waited until she raised her head and focused on him. “Why don’t you and Joy spend the night in my guest room? We’ll see about getting your car out of impound tomorrow and then take things from there.”
Beau’s voice echoed in his head. ‘Take things from there’ has no exit strategy.
True, but…to hell with exit strategies. They needed help, and he could provide it. The only person he needed to justify it to was himself. Yes, he had a big challenge lined up on his horizon. He knew exactly how tough med school was, and he didn’t intend to sabotage his second chance with added distractions and responsibilities, but they had plenty of time to work out an exit strategy without endangering any of his goals. He rescued people. That was his job. This rescue was just going to take a little longer and would be off the clock.
Didn’t mean he had a hero complex, goddammit.
“Hunter, you’re very sweet to offer, but no. I can’t do that.” She dropped her gaze to the baby. “Joy and I will be fine at the motel.”
Okay, apparently he needed to justify it to her as well, because she was wrong on all counts. He wasn’t sweet, it wasn’t an offer, and they would not be fine at this motel. But since he’d phrased the solution as a suggestion, she mistakenly believed she had a choice in the matter.
All this takes is a little charm. You routinely coax belligerent, bleeding drunks into your ambulance. You can cajole a scared kid into letting you put an IV in her arm. Sophomore year of high school, you sweet-talked varsity cheerleader Kimberly “Limber Kimber” Colton into the back seat of your Bronco. Surely you can convince an exhausted mama to spend the night in your safe, clean, absolutely free house rather than some fleabag motel in thugtown.
Sure he could. “Sweetheart, this place is a shithole.”
Her head came up so abruptly, he half expected her to get whiplash. “It’s affordable. Fancy’s pretty far down on my list of priorities right now.”
So much for charm. He’d offended her, and there was no backpedaling from it. He forged ahead. “I don’t give a damn about fancy, either, Madison. I realize you didn’t select this place for the view. And while I’m no Sherlock Holmes, I also picked up on enough clues to know you’re not sitting on a pile of money, or options. I’m trying to give you one we can both live with, because I flat out cannot leave you alone with that baby at a down-and-outer motel on the edge of gangland. It’s not right. Don’t ask it of me.”
“We’ve lived here a month, and we’ve been perfectly fine.”
Says the woman who’d been so dehydrated, exhausted, and anemic she’d passed out in a drugstore. “No, you’ve been lucky.” He managed to stop himself from smacking the steering wheel to underscore his frustration. Though he’d sworn an oath to conserve life, he once again felt a decidedly life-threatening impulse toward the nameless, faceless bastard who’d helped put her in this situation.
“Please.” There. He had a little charm in him after all.
She exhaled slowly and looked at the baby again. “All right. We’
ll stay. Just for tonight.
They’d see about that, but for now, he stuck to, “Thank you.”
Another long exhale greeted those words, and then, “No. Thank you. You’re nice to put yourself out like this.”
The gratitude sat uncomfortably on him. His peace of mind benefitted from bringing them to a safe place where he could look after them. He couldn’t live with himself if he dumped them here and walked away.
You can kiss your rec letter goodbye if Ashley ever gets wind of this.
She wouldn’t get wind of it. End of story.
The discomfort stuck as he followed them up to the room and then held Joy while Madison packed. He rested the baby against his shoulder and took in the shabby, smoke-stained hovel some sleazy fuck had the balls to call an extended-stay suite. Extended-stay his ass. Most of the rooms probably rented by the hour. Whatever they charged, it was robbery.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
She stood before him, holding the extendable handle of a medium-sized wheeled duffel bag in one hand and the straps of a shopping bag in the other. Not a lot of stuff. “That’s it?”
“I left anything I didn’t need on a daily basis in the trunk of my car.”
“What about the crib?”
Her attention shifted to the old white portable crib parked beside the old, sunken, about-to-collapse bed. “It’s the motel’s.”
Good. His back ached just looking at the damn thing, with its high sides and mattress an inch above the ground. He took the handle for the duffel bag from her and hefted it onto his shoulder. Then he handed Joy over and lifted the shopping bag weighted down by a quart of OJ, a box of maple and brown sugar instant oatmeal, a jar of peanut butter, and a half-loaf of bread. He banked an urge to hurl the meager contents into the nearest trashcan and go get her some real food. No wonder she’d passed out. Turning in her key took no time—apparently she’d been paying by the day, which probably qualified as an extended stay compared to their other guests.
Silence reigned in the car while he backed out of the parking space. What was she thinking?
“This is a nice car seat,” she said once he’d merged into the rush hour traffic. “How much do I owe you?”
Mystery solved. She was still thinking about being in his debt. Shit. “What, for that old thing? Nada.”
“Hunter, I’m not an idiot. It’s brand new.”
“It just so happens I needed a rear-facing infant car seat.”
Now her conceal-nothing face turned cautious, and he wanted to kick himself.
“You have a baby?”
He heard all the unspoken questions that went hand-in-hand with the one she’d voiced. A wife? Girlfriend? Baby-mama? What am I doing in this car with a guy I barely know? “Nope.” One near miss his disastrous first year of college was as close as he’d come to fatherhood—and as close as he intended to come until the time was right and he had his shit together. Life had taught him a few valuable lessons that year. “Beau’s got a baby on the way. He and his fiancée Savannah are expecting their first this summer.” There. That ought to put her voiced and unvoiced questions to rest.
“Oh. Please tell him congratulations for me.”
“Will do.” He took the freeway and drove past the very spot where he’d first met Madison and Joy. Barely a month ago, but it seemed like eons. “How’s Joy liking the ride?”
“She’s out.”
He heard the smile in Madison’s voice. And the fatigue. “Sounds like you’re not far behind.”
“Hmm? No, I’m okay. Just a little dazed.” The hum of the engine nearly drowned out her tired laugh. “I feel like I haven’t been outside in forever.”
“Hospital time moves slower than regular time.” Hell, just wheeling a crashing patient into the ER could seem to take a thousand years. “On one hand, it’s boring being stuck in a room for hours. On the other, it’s hard to get any rest with doctors and nurses coming in all the time, checking up on you.”
“Sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals.”
“I’ve been an EMT for seven years, so I’ve seen my fair share.”
“Seven years?” Surprise laced her voice. “You must have started young.”
He shrugged. “I started at twenty as an EMT-Basic and kept moving. A few years later I earned my Paramedic cert. The rest, as they say, is history.” He’d perfected the short career summary. People rarely asked for the long version, and that suited him fine. The long version involved some pathetic missteps early on, and as a general rule he preferred not to talk about them.
“Wow. At twenty I was working at Subway, taking a class here and there at community college, and trying to plan out what I wanted to do with my life.” She gave a self-conscious laugh and looked out the window. “I’m still trying to figure it out. Did you always know you wanted to be an EMT?”
Madison would, of course, be the exception to the rule, and he considered giving her an easy answer, but her humorless laugh still echoed in his ears and told him it might be good for her to know she wasn’t the only person who’d ever found herself in less-than-ideal circumstances as a result of less-than-perfect judgment.
“Hell, no. EMT was a default choice. One I’m still trying to live down. I come from a long line of doctors. My daddy’s a cardiologist. My older sister’s a pediatric surgeon, and by God, I was supposed to be a doctor, too.”
“You weren’t on board?”
“I was fully on board. Kept my GPA up in high school, aced my college entrance exams, and got accepted to a six-year med program at Tulane.” He paused to let the bitter taste in his mouth subside.
“What happened?” She asked the question softly, and he could feel her dread and sympathy all the way from the back seat.
“Nothing devastating. Nobody got ill. Nobody died. Just a bunch of bullshit, really, but that’s all it took to derail my big plans. About a month into my first semester, a girl I’d dated over the summer called out of the blue and informed me she was pregnant, and I was the father. Her Catholic university evicted her from student housing and revoked her scholarship as soon as they discovered her condition. Her parents weren’t exactly welcoming her back home, and she didn’t know what to do.”
“And you did?”
He laughed. “Sure. At eighteen, I had all the answers. I married her without telling my parents, because I knew they’d freak, and moved her into the off-campus, one-bedroom apartment they were paying for. I tried to juggle the most challenging academic load I’d ever carried with doctors’ appointments, childbirth classes, and a bored, unhappy new wife who hated our cramped apartment, hated that I refused to come clean to my parents, and resented the time I dedicated to school.”
“I’m sorry. The whole situation sounds like a nightmare.”
A waking nightmare, kind of like now, because he hadn’t meant to dump every miserable detail on her. But the words just kept tumbling out. “We argued constantly. As you do when you’re in way over your heads, and ready to turn on each other over every perceived injustice life throws at you. One night, Natalie got mad or jealous or…something, because I stayed late at school for a study group, so she called my parents, introduced herself as their pregnant daughter-in-law, and told them I was missing. I walked into my apartment at midnight to discover my crying mama, livid daddy, and hysterical wife arguing about why Nat hadn’t filed a missing person report—which of course she hadn’t done because she knew damn well I wasn’t missing. Needless to say, that was the last time I ever left my house without my cell phone.”
“Your poor parents—”
“I thought they were going to disown me, which I definitely deserved.”
Her hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed. “You were trying to do the right thing. Surely they were proud of that?”
“Proud is not the word I’d use. Shocked? Angry? Betrayed? Absolutely. All of the above. To that we can add disappointed, because the story only gets more pathetic from here.”
The hand on his s
houlder tightened. “Something happened to the baby…?”
He shook his head. “A couple weeks before finals, Natalie gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Seven pounds, ten ounces of clearly not mine.”
“Oh. My. God.”
“Yeah. That was my reaction, too. I’m not proud to admit relief factored in as well. I was done. Game over. But it took a little while to completely unwind the whole cluster-fuck, during which time I failed all my finals and flunked out of school. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday as a divorced college washout, with a mama who couldn’t look at him without tearing up and a daddy who barely spoke to him. I’d screwed up on every front. It was not my finest milestone.”
“But somehow you pulled your life together.” She rubbed his shoulder then withdrew her hand. “I admire that.”
She worried she wouldn’t be able to do the same. He heard the uncertainty behind her words and wished he knew her well enough to offer convincing reassurances rather than generic platitudes. Instead, he focused on what had worked for him. “I found an alternate path. My sister actually suggested it to me. She knew I wanted a career that offered me the opportunity to deliver babies by the roadside, but I didn’t have the heart, drive, or the funds for another run at med school. She took me in and lent me the money to give the EMT thing a shot, and”—he shrugged—“so far, so good.”
Her self-conscious smile filled his rearview. “I guess I owe your sister a thank-you…oh goodness.” She yawned and then rested her head against the seat and smiled again. “Excuse me.”
Another five minutes, he estimated, and Joy wouldn’t be the only one snoozing.
The smile faded. “Did your parents come ’round, eventually?”
“My mom, yes. I think she respects the choices I’ve made. My dad?” Familiar regret dropped anchor in his stomach. “He’s never really gotten over the disappointment of me flunking out of med school. I fell short. I let him down.”
More importantly than his dad’s feelings on the matter, though, Hunter wasn’t sure he’d ever gotten over the disappointment, and that, rather than anything he saw in his father’s face, had compelled him to complete his pre-med studies and earn his bachelor’s degree in his spare time. It had compelled him to take the MCAT again, after almost ten years, and submit applications to medical schools. And if any of the secondary applications he’d received turned into an acceptance letter, he’d start medical school in the fall—to prove to himself he could, and to satisfy his own career goals. This time around he wouldn’t allow any complications. He wouldn’t lose his focus. He wouldn’t set himself up to fail.
Emergency Delivery (Love Emergency) Page 5