The Slow Burn

by Caro Carson

  “Tana.” Caden placed his hand on the side of her face and turned her toward him, a touch that felt entirely personal. Entirely caring. “This is just a precaution. There’s a ninety-nine percent chance that you’re right, but I can’t ignore that tiny one percent chance. You’d pay too high of a price if I let you walk away, and I was wrong. Go to the hospital. Prove me wrong. Please.”

  She didn’t really agree, but he must have thought the way she was blinking back unwanted tears was a yes, because he lifted her to her feet. The uniformed woman pushed levers and lowered the gurney, so Tana turned and sat on it.

  “My clipboard,” she said flatly.

  Caden handed it to her, then buckled a seat belt across her hips, under her baby bump. “Do we have to go out through the women’s locker room?”

  Tana pointed toward the door that led to the offices. “That hallway goes out to the parking lot.”

  Caden looked around. “Who is coming with you?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  He introduced her to the woman. “This is Michelle. She’s got you now. I have to stay on site.”

  Tana didn’t want to be wheeled away from him. Everything in her protested. “But—she could stay. You could take me to the hospital.”

  “She’s with a private ambulance company. I work for the city. We can’t switch places.” He looked around again. “Is there no one here to go with you?”

  Caden was sending her off without him, and she felt scared, maybe sad. Nothing made her angrier than feeling sad and scared. She glared at Caden. “My assistant coaches have to stay because the meet isn’t over, remember?”

  “Are we ready?” Michelle sounded chipper as she raised a bed rail.

  Caden started pushing the gurney. “I can call someone to meet you at the hospital. A friend? Your boyfriend?”

  She was outraged that he’d even ask that. She’d told him at Thanksgiving there was no one. Since Michelle was speed walking with them on the other side of the gurney, Tana just glared at Caden in silence.

  “How about your family?” His voice had changed to pity.

  She hated this.

  “What about your parents? Don’t they come to your meets?”

  Her parents hadn’t come to anything for the past ten years. It was overwhelming, the loss she felt at the sudden memory of her parents’ faces in the spectator seats, supporting her with their presence. Tana wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, not now.

  She hung on to her anger desperately. “Can you stop with the personal questions? My whole world is watching me.”

  The crowd started applauding as if she were an injured player being carried off the field. She waved with her best smile plastered on her face, the one that should have sold soup as she wore a gold medal.

  The gurney stopped. Caden disappeared behind Tana’s head. She couldn’t see where they were going, but Caden must have been getting the doors while Michelle pushed her along with a too-cheerful smile. “Almost there.”

  They rolled outdoors. The asphalt rattled the gurney. She heard what had to be ambulance doors opening behind her.

  “Hi, there.” A man appeared at her other side. His uniform matched Michelle’s, not Caden’s. He pushed more levers, raising the gurney, bumping her into one of the ambulance’s open back doors.

  “There’s no one, Tana?” Caden asked quietly, back by her side. “No one? How is that possible?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, warding off his pity. “I have people. They just aren’t at this swim meet, so you can stop looking at me like that.”

  The gurney and Tana were pushed into the brightly lit ambulance. Michelle sat on a little bench in the back with her. The new man jogged out of Tana’s vision, but she heard him shut the driver’s door and start the engine.

  Tana pretended she wasn’t afraid as Caden stood in the parking lot below her. She had to look past her feet to see him and his strong shoulders, the ones upon which she could never rest her head and give up. She’d been divorced by one man, left alone as an unwed mother by another. She knew better than to jump in with a third, especially with one who looked down on her with pity, even as he stood on the pavement, looking up at her.

  With a smile of reassurance that didn’t fool her and a touch of his fingers to an invisible cowboy hat, Caden shut the ambulance doors on the woman he felt sorry for.

  The baby kicked her, a good, strong, healthy kick. Tana hunched over and wrapped her arms around her belly. She wouldn’t cry.

  The sirens wailed all the way to the hospital.

  * * *

  “Masterson Hospital, how can I direct your call?”

  “ER nurses’ station. This is Lieutenant Sterling from MFD.” Caden was put through directly. When a nurse answered, he gave his name and rank again. “I’m checking on a patient I sent there an hour ago. Montana McKenna, screening for preterm membrane rupture after a fall.”

  “Yes, no rupture. No fetal distress of any kind.”

  Thank God.

  Caden cleared his throat. “Could you give her a couple of messages for me? I wanted to let her know her team won the relay races she missed at the swim meet. Men’s and women’s, both.”

  “She was discharged already, but great. Go, Musketeers.”

  “Discharged? How is she getting home? If she’s waiting on a ride—”

  “Her friend came rushing in here right after she did. She seemed really surprised to see him, but there were lots of happy tears, and they left together maybe ten minutes ago. I wheeled her out to his car myself. What was the second message?”

  Tell her I can come for her. Just got off my shift.

  But the offer wasn’t necessary. Caden said all the polite, expected things as he thanked the nurse and hung up. At least, he assumed he’d said them. He was staring at the phone in his hand, and the call had ended.

  Goodbye, Tana.

  It needed to be for the last time.

  Caden flipped through the contacts until he found Sarah’s name. He should take her out tonight. That would be the best thing he could possibly do.

  Sarah really was very nice.

  He stared at the phone until the screen went dark.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tana’s phone vibrated against the nightstand as its screen lit up. The combination was enough to drag her awake.

  She opened one eye. The phone screen was obnoxiously bright, because her bedroom was pitch-black. It hadn’t been when she’d lain down for a quick cat nap, exhausted from her cross-country car trip.

  The vibrating stopped as the call went to her voice mail. Tana didn’t raise her head off the pillow as she groped for the phone to check the time.

  “Crap.” She’d been asleep for five hours. Beneath the time, her phone screen listed one identical alert after another: Missed Call: Coach Nicholls.

  Bob Nicholls was going to kill her. She’d promised to let him know the minute she arrived home, but she’d gotten to her apartment, walked straight to her bathroom—at thirty-seven weeks pregnant, she felt like she had to pee every thirty-seven minutes—and then she’d flopped onto her bed for just a quick minute, five hours ago.

  She needed to call him, pronto. Driving home from the NCAA Championships in Indianapolis hadn’t been as easy as she’d assured everyone it would be. One thousand miles in a rental car had been uncomfortable at best, even broken up over two days, but she’d done it.

  She’d had no choice.

  The airlines that flew where she’d needed to go were the ones that wouldn’t let pregnant passengers fly after thirty-six weeks. Missing the men’s NCAA championships wasn’t optional for a coach who needed her one-year contract to be renewed. She’d flown to Indiana on Monday at thirty-six weeks. She’d had to rent a car to drive back to Texas on Sunday, at week thirty-seven.

  She called her former coach. “I am so sor
ry.”

  “The last time I talked to you, you were in Arkansas. I was seriously going to call the highway patrol to put out an APB on you. What happened?”

  “I got home and fell asleep. I’m fine. Just tired.”

  Actually, her ankles were swollen, for the first time in her entire pregnancy, from so many hours of sitting immobile. She hadn’t been able to work out for the two weeks before all this travel, either. Tana had flown to Georgia for the women’s championships the week before the men’s. Tomorrow, she’d get back in the pool and swim some laps. That would put everything to rights.

  Not really. Getting back in the pool and then getting a renewed coaching contract—that would put everything to rights. She hadn’t heard anything from the athletics director yet. Her baby was coming, but her paychecks were ending.

  “Well, you probably need the sleep,” Bob said. “Congratulations again on your showing at the NCAAs.”

  “We didn’t bring home the trophy.” The trophy wasn’t everything, but it sure would have helped impress her boss. He was big on trophies. Football trophies, especially.

  “Appelan set a new record. Masterson swimmers were up on that winners’ podium again and again. Don’t underestimate the impact of all those second-and third-place finishes. Your school colors are in practically every podium photo. You’ll have your pick of recruits next year.”

  Tana could practically hear her parents: Silver and bronze don’t get soup commercials.

  But Bob Nicholls wasn’t her parent. He was her mentor and, this year, her guardian angel. He’d been in the spectator’s gallery the day she’d fainted on the pool deck, unbeknownst to her. He maintained he’d come to see Shippers and Appelan compete, but Tana knew he’d come to watch her coach her team and run a three-college meet. As her parents had emphasized, he’d put his reputation on the line for her.

  When she’d fainted, he’d apparently been frantic to get from the gallery to the deck level, but she’d been taken to the hospital within minutes. He’d followed, not as her former coach, but as the man who’d basically raised her from age sixteen to twenty. When he’d walked into the emergency room, she’d been so relieved to see a familiar face, she’d burst into tears.

  In the months since the fainting incident, she and Coach Nicholls—Bob, now—had talked plenty. Tana had been right: he wanted her to coach future Olympians, not be one.

  Unless you’re driven to compete again, Tana. If you are, I’ll bring you back to Colorado. You wouldn’t be the first Olympian to win a medal after having a baby. I know you’re tired of your parents comparing you to her, but Dara Torres—

  I know, I know. DT had a baby between Olympics. Honestly, I’d rather coach.

  Then Bob had said the one thing she’d most wanted to hear: That’s because you’re a great coach. You’ve always thrown yourself wholeheartedly into what you’re great at. I’m so proud of you. We’re peers now, fellow swim coaches. It’s time you started calling me Bob.

  Redemption.

  No one at the international level bore her a grudge, although they did toward her ex-husband, according to Bob, for fraternizing with her. Her parents would realize she wasn’t the black sheep of the swimming world that they thought she was. Someday.

  In the meantime, Bob was doubling as her mother hen. “You’re going on maternity leave now, I hope?”

  “I only have office work this coming week. It won’t be demanding.” Her entire future rested on how well she wrote up her reports on the team’s performance and her plans for next year. “I don’t have a maternity leave. My contract ends on graduation day, May fifteenth, and I’m due April twenty-third, so unless they renew me...”

  She’d be jobless with a three-week-old newborn. Homeless, too. She lived in the junior-faculty apartments on campus. She needed her job to be eligible to continue living there.

  “They’d be crazy not to keep you. I’d hire you.”

  “I’d work for you.” But she’d have to leave Texas. Leave Masterson. Turn her young swimmers over to some unknown replacement. Say goodbye to the friends she’d spent a year getting to know, friends like Ruby. Friends like... Caden.

  If she left Masterson, she would never run into a blue-eyed fireman again. She looked for him every time she went to the grocery store, every time she went out to eat with friends. She wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, like she had when she’d been dressed as a witch. Their last two emotional encounters were not the impression she wanted him to have of her, but she never saw him.

  If Caden Sterling had wanted to see her, he could have volunteered to work another swim meet. He had not. Their friendship had been too new to take so much stress, perhaps. She might as well move to Colorado.

  “I may have to take you up on that,” she said.

  “My budget wouldn’t let me pay you for more than a measly part-time.”

  “Part-time pays more than no time.” She put just the right note of humor into her voice.

  “Don’t worry. Masterson will renew you.”

  “Sure. I’m fine.”

  She’d survived the dreaded month of March. That was something. Tomorrow would be April first. Twenty-three days and counting until she had this baby. Twenty-three days to convince the university to extend her contract.

  Tana hung up, then lay in the dark and worried about her future, until exhaustion pulled her under, and she dreamed about floating without a care in a tropical blue sea.

  * * *

  There it was, parked outside the diner: the swim-mobile.

  The swim coach was here.

  Caden put his pickup truck in reverse with a tired sigh. He’d just wanted to order a cup of coffee and a sandwich to go. He needed to get to the station a little early, because he was still in his civilian clothes. He kept a spare uniform in his locker for days like today. A meeting at his brother’s ranch with a rescue group had run long, so he didn’t have time to go to his house, get into uniform and make himself a dinner. The Streamliner Diner was on the way into Masterson from the Sterling ranch. Its food was almost as quick as a hamburger drive-thru, and less greasy.

  But Tana was here, so he shouldn’t be.

  Distance. A little distance was all he’d needed this spring to keep a healthy perspective on his relationship with Tana McKenna—or the lack of it. He thought he’d been doing well, too, but a couple of days ago, an April Fools’ Day prank had forced him to stop kidding himself.

  Javier’s wife was expecting, for real. Javier had thought it would be a great prank to bring in a fake sonogram and announce it was triplets. Since triplets were usually born around thirty-five weeks, Javier had set a new due date that just so happened to be the exact date three of their coworkers were leaving for their annual hunting trip. Department policy gave paternity leave priority over vacations, so one of the guys would have to cancel his trip to fill in for Javier. The joke had been watching the three as each one hemmed and hawed and stalled, hoping one of the other two would step up and volunteer to take one for the team.

  By the time Javier had said April Fools’, the coworkers had resorted to rock, paper, scissors, and Caden had calculated the due date for the director of aquatics at Masterson University. If she’d been twenty-six weeks at the swim meet in January, then she was due the last week of April, which meant she was probably around thirty-six weeks now, so if she’d been pregnant with triplets, they would have been born already, but she would have told him as he’d treated her on the pool deck if she was pregnant with multiples, plus she would have looked much bigger than she had, instead of having that cute little soccer-ball bump, and if Caden thought avoiding her all spring had made him forget about her, he was the fool on April first.

  He threw his truck into Park again and shut off the engine. It was April third, distance was a failed tactic and he was on a tight schedule. He just needed a sandwich to go. If Tana was in a booth with her b
ack to the door, she’d never see him standing at the counter. He wouldn’t have to smile and wave and pretend he wasn’t dying to see how she was doing.

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and crushed gravel under his boots with each step toward the stainless-steel doors. Tana fainted too easily. Some people just did, and it worried him. One glance, and he’d know if she looked healthy. He didn’t have to talk to her.

  He saw her right away. She was in a booth, facing the door. She could have seen him if she’d looked up, but she was absorbed in a conversation with the two people sitting across from her. She was all smiles, animated as she spoke. She looked good. Radiant. Beautiful.

  He sighed at himself. “Just healthy.”

  The cashier tapped her pen on the counter. “I didn’t catch that, honey. You want the health plate? That’s a tomato stuffed with cottage cheese and dry toast. I’m an expert on what a growing boy like yourself needs. That ain’t it.” She winked at him suggestively. She was old enough to be his grandmother.

  Who was he to judge what was inappropriate? He was practically drooling over someone else’s pregnant girlfriend. Tana’s hair was in a ponytail that bobbed a little with every enthusiastic gesture she made with her hands. She had a sporty kind of femininity, even pregnant.

  He shouldn’t be noticing things like that. “Turkey and provolone to go, hot peppers, no onion, and the largest cup of coffee you can sell me.” He paid and stepped aside for the next person.

  From this angle, he could see the two men she was talking to. They looked related, a father and son, but the son didn’t look old enough to be at Masterson yet. The father was talking, so Tana’s ponytail was still.

  Her hand suddenly went to her side, a motion that he’d report as guarding in medical lingo, the human instinct to put a hand on some part that hurt.

  He watched her face. She was still smiling as she listened, but it was taking her some effort. After a moment, she relaxed.

  “How many creams do you want, sugar?” the cashier asked.