by Lilian Darcy
He cupped his palm to capture her jaw and coaxed her head back in his direction. Her faltering, “No!” made her lips into a pout, and he branded them with his mouth.
“Say that as if you mean it and I might stop.” His voice snarled in his throat.
“I do mean it. It’s not going to make a difference. I’m still angry.”
“But you’re kissing me back.”
Oh, yes! He felt her fingers come to rest lightly on his hips. Her face had lifted to meet his now, instead of trying to turn away. Her lips had parted. She was very definitely kissing him back.
“I’m kissing you back,” she agreed. She wrapped her arms around his neck, nipped his lower lip with her teeth then salved the nonexistent wound with her tongue. They both had to lean to get beyond the baby. “But it makes no difference. I’m angry.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Kiss you until you apologize.”
“That’s a pretty wild claim. I can hold out longer than you.”
“Good! I’m in no hurry.”
Neither of them were making much sense.
“Then what?” he demanded.
“Then I’m going to call Corinne and arrange to meet.”
“No!”
“You’re not going to preempt me on this, Daniel. You’re not going to stop me from doing what I need to do. Kiss me as much as you want.”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll do that,” he muttered.
“But don’t kid yourself that it changes anything about how we deal with each other.”
A cold shower wouldn’t have worked nearly as fast as Lauren’s last speech. Daniel stepped back.
“Don’t call Corinne!” he said. “For mercy’s sake, don’t do it!”
“Why not?”
“Because you have a baby due in eight days.”
“So I’m a child who isn’t safe fighting her own battles? Stop doing this to me, Daniel!”
“You have other stuff, Lauren! That’s what I’m saying. Don’t give her the satisfaction of finding out exactly how much she got to you. Do you want a catfight with her, like on daytime TV?”
“You think that’s my style?”
“No! Heck, no! But maybe it’s hers. You’re so much better than she is, I can’t stand the thought of you even breathing the same air.”
She looked at him, head tilted slightly to one side, calmer now than she had any right to be. “I wonder if that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.” A smile tickled the corners of her mouth and brightened her eyes. “I think it is.”
“Did you remember you’re booked for a tour of the maternity unit at the hospital tomorrow afternoon?” Daniel said, fighting the strange wobbly sensation in his gut. “And that your dad wanted me there to check out their security?”
“Yes, I remembered that. I have a prenatal appointment just before it, and I want you there, too. In the waiting room,” she added pointedly. “I want your protection, Daniel. But I don’t need you to protect me from betraying friends.”
He shrugged, hiding his panic. Damn it, she did need that!
Or, he suddenly wondered, his stomach caving in even more, was Lauren right? Did the need come purely from him?
Chapter 9
“How’d it go?” Daniel had been prowling the obstetrician’s waiting room, ill at ease with his role.
“Dr. Feldman says everything’s fine,” Lauren answered. She was back to business wear today, a navy dress that he recognized. “The heartbeat is strong and the baby’s still growing. The head is down and well-engaged. That means—”
“I know what it means.”
“Right. So you know what it means when he says I’ve started to dilate, as well?”
“It means you could still be around three weeks from now.”
“Ready to commit murder, probably.”
“Speaking of which, I didn’t ask you yet about whether you—”
She anticipated his question. “Yes, I saw Corinne this afternoon. Yes, she’s still in one piece and has all her hair.”
“That’s a plus,” he agreed cautiously.
“I didn’t lose it, Daniel.” She brushed her fingers up his gray shirtsleeve, as if soothing a child. Could she tell that something was eating at him? He was tempted to ask her for help in working out what it was. “I sat behind my big desk in my big office with my lawyer in the room. I stayed in control, I forced her to look me in the eye—she wasn’t very good at it!—and I got what I wanted.”
“What was that, exactly? You never told me yesterday.”
“You weren’t showing much sign that you’d listen. I wanted to find out more than she intended to tell me about where Ben’s thinking is and I achieved that.” Her chin lifted, chasing away the delicate shadowing on her neck. “I know where I stand with this baby. Ben’s not going to return to the U.S. or he’ll have to face charges. He says I can visit him in Europe if I want him to see the baby. ‘No hard feelings,’ or something. Corinne is planning to join him soon. I never realized that her trip to Europe before Christmas was mainly about cementing their relationship. Well, since she lied to me about the trip, that’s hardly surprising! And he’s ‘sorry’ I’ve been hassled with threats. He’s planning to offer some kind of settlement, but I’m not going to accept it. Not when it’s really other people’s money. I’m not going to take the baby to Europe. I’m on my own.”
It felt like a bucket of hot water cascading down his body. He was more emotional about this than she was. But then, she hadn’t really been through it yet. Her baby was still unborn. She didn’t know what she was getting herself into. Was that why this was unsettling him so bad?
“How does that feel?” he asked, and his voice was husky. “Is it okay?”
“It feels good. Under the circumstances, considering the other options, it feels good.”
She gave a wince which suggested it didn’t feel good at all, and rubbed her lower back. Daniel knew the gesture. He almost said, “Let me rub it for you,” but he was wary today, rethinking a lot of things.
If he’d had his way, she wouldn’t have seen Corinne this morning, but it had worked out the way she wanted. She’d said yesterday that it was about closure. Was it a sense of closure that made her look different today?
Calm, a little introspective, happy.
Yes, she looked happy, and it seemed to come from deep inside her. It wasn’t like the stubborn and deliberate I’m-going-to-enjoy-this-if-it-kills-me aura she’d worn two weeks ago on the night of the corporate New Year’s party. It wasn’t even like yesterday’s fuzzy glow of pleasure over the baby’s gifts.
“What’s changed, Lauren?” he asked suddenly, as they crossed a high, glassed-in corridor to the main hospital, from the building where her obstetrician had his office.
She stopped and looked at him. “Does it show?”
“Yes, it shows. It looks great. You look great. You don’t look so…driven, or something.”
“Hormones?”
“More than that.”
“Well, then—you’re right, I do feel different—it has to be because I know where I am, now, and who my friends are. Not Ben. Not Corinne. Eileen, Bridget, Stephanie, Catrina and the others. They’re my friends. And you.” She repeated the word a few seconds later, and this time it was a question. “You?”
“Yes, of course I’m your friend,” he growled.
I’d never betray you, he almost added, but then he held the words back. Was her definition of betrayal the same as his?
“There’s still the guy,” he said instead.
“The guy has never bothered me, Daniel. The violation of having someone go through my things bothered me. That was always what got to me, far more than the tires or the letters.”
They were standing beside a set of windows that ran the length of this connecting walkway, and much of Philadelphia’s downtown business district was visible in the distance.
“Look,” she said, pointing. “You can actually see the top of the bui
lding where Ben’s company had its office space. I noticed it a few weeks ago. The sign is still in place. They had six floors of the building, and I don’t think it’s been rented out again. Someone must be hurting over that.”
“I guess so, yes,” he agreed, not really thinking about it.
Or not at first, anyway.
“The tour of the unit is due to start in a few minutes,” she reminded him. “We’d better get to where we’re supposed to be.”
They walked on, in the direction of the bank of elevators.
“They’re going to think I’m the father.”
“I know. We can put them straight if you like.”
“It’s not important. Let them think what they want.”
Lauren nodded. “If that’s okay with you. Who needs questions, or strange looks?”
She was beginning to wish she hadn’t arranged her day quite so efficiently, with the prenatal appointment and the maternity unit tour back-to-back, at five-fifteen and five-thirty. She would have liked to sit down. Dr. Feldman’s internal exam had been uncomfortable—he said the baby was facing frontways—and she still had a dull, heavy ache low in her abdomen, and a feeling of pressure between her thighs.
It was good to have Daniel here. Why pretend to herself? It was good.
She had gotten too accustomed to him, that was the problem. Accustomed to the way he opened doors for her, asked her if she was warm enough or if she was thirsty. Accustomed to the way his frequent watchful silences created a sense of safety all around her. Accustomed to the way he’d break one of those silences with an anecdote about his boys, told in such a way that she always laughed, always accused him of exaggerating and never really believed him when he said he wasn’t.
Ouch.
The ache low in her belly suddenly coalesced into actual pain, different in quality to anything she’d ever felt before. Since when did she have a freight train inside her, pushing a twenty-ton coal truck into her back, no warning at all? She sweated it out and it ebbed in about thirty seconds.
It wasn’t labor.
Couldn’t be labor.
This baby hadn’t checked its appointment diary. Labor and delivery were down, in black and white, for next week. She was fine.
Fine, and now she was completely unable to focus on the tour. Daniel’s fixed, polite expression of interest looked more genuine, although she knew it wasn’t. He was preoccupied with something else, as well.
“You okay?” he asked a little while later, as the group of expectant mothers and nervous dads trooped along the corridor to look at one of the operating rooms available for cesarean deliveries.
“I’m fine,” she chirped. “I’m glad they don’t move patients to a different room for delivery when everything is going as it should.”
“Yeah, it’s a nice hospital. Uh, I’m going to make a phone call, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Can’t use my cell phone inside a hospital, so I’ll catch up to the tour. Don’t worry.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated. Seconds later, as she peered into the silent, high-tech space of Obstetric O.R.1, the freight train shunted into her back again.
It wasn’t labor. Couldn’t be labor. But it sure didn’t feel good. A clock high on the wall of the O.R. gave her a piece of information she really wasn’t at all interested in. It was a quarter till six. Fifteen minutes since the first pain.
Daniel came back from making his phone call, and his eyes were narrowed so far that they looked like slits.
“Is there a problem?” she asked.
“Not so far. The opposite. I’ll keep you posted.”
She would have asked him what he meant, only they’d just reached the nursery.
“Wow! Babies!” he said, and he grinned as he looked through the glass. “Haven’t seen them as small as this for a while.”
Most of them were asleep, but a couple were crying. One tiny red thing with a shock of black hair was having its first bath, and was not happy about it. The other couples on the tour were holding hands and exchanging private smiles.
Lauren started to turn in Daniel’s direction with a smile for him, then remembered why he was here. She made herself say instead, “How is this unit from your angle, Daniel? Is it safe?”
“Yeah, it’s good,” he answered. “No real problems.”
He went through some details on security arrangements, but Lauren wasn’t listening. That freight train was attempting another shunting maneuver in her belly. Longer this time. Felt that way. Maybe only because it hurt more. The nursery clock showed seven minutes to six.
Daniel had caught sight of something in her face.
Sheer terror, possibly.
He said something to her, and she didn’t hear a word of it, just clutched blindly at his arm. Decided that his arm wasn’t going anywhere without her ever again. Couldn’t think about the rest of him, right now, but the arm, definitely, was staying in her life.
She must have answered his question without even realizing it, because the next thing she knew, he was…not yelling at her, but it felt that way. “You’re not fine! What’s wrong? You’re cutting off the circulation in my arm. You looked like you were—”
“It’s not labor.” One of the other couples looked at her and she lowered her voice, to repeat, “It’s not labor.”
“No?”
“It just hurts. Then it goes. Then it comes again.”
“And that’s not labor?”
“No. It’s those Braxton Hicks contractions. The books say they can get quite painful.” She got a curious look from the nurse conducting the tour and gave a big, reassuring smile in reply.
Four minutes later, the next contraction began, and they pretty much stuck to the four-minute pattern after that. Three minutes till six. One minute after. Five after. Nine after. The tour finished.
“Are you ready to go home?” Daniel asked.
He seemed to accept that she had taken total possession of his arm, which was a plus. It was the best arm in the world. About every four minutes, she knew she’d die without it.
“No, I’m not,” she told him. Was it supposed to get this intense, this soon? Wasn’t it supposed to build gradually?
“Yeah, I was starting to wonder. It actually is labor, right?”
“I think so.”
“And you want to check in for the night?”
“Yes.”
And I don’t want you to leave.
But she didn’t have to say it because he didn’t even ask. He just told her, “Let’s get you settled, and then I need to call my mom, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m staying, Lauren. I’m not leaving you.”
“I know. Thank you.” She held tightly to his warm arm the way she’d held her teddy bear after a nightmare when she was six.
They walked the corridor of the unit until Lauren knew every detail of the route by heart. She sucked on ice chips. She leaned her forehead against the wall of the room assigned to her while Daniel pressed his fists into her lower back.
With every contraction, she considered an epidural. But the nurse warned her that it could slow things down, especially with a first baby, and it looked as if things were going pretty slow already. Better to wait until later, when the pain got real bad. With at least five freight trains shunting around inside her now, Lauren wondered what “real bad” could possibly feel like.
Daniel tried to distract her with a running commentary on the wrestling show on the TV in her room, but she was beyond that now. The hands on the clock crawled around some more but meant nothing. The contractions had stabilized at around three minutes apart, but she wasn’t dilating fast.
“You’ve still got a long way to go,” the nurse told her.
“I think I will have that epidural now,” she decided aloud.
“Okay, honey, but the anesthesiologist is in the middle of a C-section with another one coming up, so he’s going to be a while.”
She left the room, and Lauren told
Daniel calmly, “I hate her.”
“Let’s go for another walk.”
“No!”
For some reason, the crawling clock now claimed it was seven in the morning. Daniel’s mother must have stayed all night with his boys. Lauren tried to mind about that, but couldn’t. She didn’t actually believe that the rest of the world existed anymore. A new shift of nurses came on. From somewhere, she smelled breakfast. Her new nurse told her that the anesthesiologist would be here soon, after one small, tiny, teeny, little emergency that had just cropped up. Lauren didn’t believe her for a second. The anesthesiologist didn’t exist.
Daniel persuaded her to go for walk number nine around the corridors. She agreed, but hated him.
“Doesn’t this help?”
“No! It hurts! I went to the classes. I’m breathing. It wasn’t supposed to hurt this bad.”
Sobs came, dry ones without tears. They shook her whole body. She clung to Daniel and he held her. Kissed her. Told her, “It’s okay. I love you, Lauren. It’s okay.”
She didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe the nurses, so why should she believe him? The world was ending, only no one had told her. She wanted the world to end, because then this wouldn’t hurt anymore. She wanted to get back to her room, except that the contractions were coming so fast she could only take a few steps between each one, and walking during their iron grip was impossible.
When she at last crawled back onto her bed, Daniel excused himself and left the room. Bathroom. She hated him for needing the bathroom. He was away for three contractions, and they seemed to hurt far worse than any of the others. How was that possible?
“It’s okay,” he said when he got back.
“It’s not okay. I want you here. All the time. I’m not going to be a well-behaved patient. It feels better when I behave badly. I’m not happy, and I hate you!”
“It’s okay.”
“I said I hate you.”
“And I love you, okay? I’m here for you. Forever, if you’ll let me.”
“Go away! No. No, don’t go away. Hold on to me. Oh, dear Lord, when will this be over?”
The nurse had once again strapped her onto the monitor, where the printout of the contractions showed like impossibly jagged mountain ranges, climbing to the very top of the graph. “Pretty intense,” she murmured. “The baby’s still facing frontways, that often makes it extra bad. Your waters haven’t broken yet, have they, honey?” she added.