by Tina Beckett
“I know. I’m willing to risk it. If you are pregnant or not, I still want you in my life. And if both of these babies make it, then I want them in my life too.”
A sliver of sunlight came through one of the windows and hit the floor in front of her, and she allowed herself to hope. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I am.”
She closed her eyes, and thanked whatever gods were looking down at them. When she opened them again, Tucker was still there. Strong and steady. The Tucker she’d fallen in love with.
“Where do you want me?”
His head shifted sideways to look at her. “Excuse me?”
She laughed. “I mean, where do we live? Here in Atlanta? Or do you want to go back to New York? Maybe my grandparents could be talked into relocating, since they’re ready to downsize.”
“So you’re willing to give me a second chance?”
She let go of the balloon and watched as it drifted toward the high ceiling above. “I’ve been willing for a very long time.”
“You’re going to be sorry you did that.” He nodded toward the balloon. “Because now we’re going to have to go after it.”
“I’m sure it’ll come down eventually.”
“I’m sure it will, but since your wedding rings are in there we might want to make sure we’re here when it does.”
“My wedding rings?”
He nodded. “Although if you don’t want any reminders of the past, I’ll understand. We can always buy a new set.”
“I loved those rings.”
“And I love you, Kady. We’ll get the balloon back. Once I do this.” He lowered his head and captured her lips in a kiss that was sweet, gentle and filled with a longing she understood far too well.
She would have told him she loved him too, but her mouth was busy at the moment. And she figured there would be plenty of time for that. And for decisions about where to live. And to catch that runaway balloon.
They had their whole lives ahead of them.
And if they were very, very lucky, they would have the lives of two special babies to celebrate somewhere along the way.
EPILOGUE
THE MOMENT HE held his newborn daughter, he knew it was going to be okay.
And she was his daughter, no matter what any paternity test might say. The rush of love he’d been so afraid he wouldn’t be able to feel came hurtling toward him, stopping right at his feet. Just like his love for her mother.
“She’s gorgeous.” He pressed her tiny form to the skin of his chest, the contact branding him for life. They hadn’t done this with Grace, and he was glad Kady had insisted on him unbuttoning his shirt before he held her. He was also glad she’d so steadfastly said she wanted a baby. With or without him.
He’d chosen with.
It was the right choice. He knew it.
In the end Kady had chosen both sperm and eggs from donors, just so there would be no chances.
He smiled. And both embryos had implanted exactly the way they should have. He held Bethany Michelle, while Kady cradled Nathaniel Eric. These were it for them. Their children. Their little family. They would raise and love them and cherish every moment they had with them. Just as they’d done with Grace.
Tucker hoped they both lived long happy lives. Someday they would talk to them about their older sister, show them pictures, and they would visit her grave together. She would always hold a special place in their hearts. She’d taught him that the important things in life might not last as long as one might like. Any of them could be taken in an instant. Life carried no guarantees.
It had taken him far too long to learn that message. He could have saved both Kady and himself a lot of heartache if he’d been able to understand this truth, that they needed to be grateful for the blessings of life and to take nothing for granted.
Carefully keeping Bethany against his chest, he leaned down and kissed Kady. “The nurse said your grandparents are here. They’ll want to see the babies.”
“They’ll spoil them rotten.” She sighed. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“I wouldn’t either. Do you think your grandfather has finally forgiven me?” Tucker had been accepted back into the fold as if nothing had ever happened. As if he hadn’t been a huge jerk for the last two years.
“He loves you. My whole family loves you. Probably more than they love me.”
“Not true, but thank you. And I love you. Thanks for knocking some sense into me.”
“You came to your senses all by yourself. I’m the one who had to be convinced in the end. No more secrets, okay?”
They’d caught the balloon back at the hospital, and Kady’s original wedding rings were now back on her finger. Watching her thumb rub across those bands again and again was satisfying in a way that nothing else was.
“No more secrets.” He’d been afraid that Kady’s pregnancy might affect him physically, but it hadn’t. They’d talked through his reservations, and she’d told him even if they never had sex again, she was okay. She loved him. Wanted to be with him.
They’d had sex, though. Lots of it.
He’d gone through genetic counseling with her, insisting even when she said it was no longer necessary. He’d done it anyway, the way he should have all those years ago. He never wanted her to feel that alone ever again.
He’d even asked if she wanted him to have his vasectomy reversed, saying for future babies they could use their own sperm and eggs and have the embryos tested before they were implanted. Kady said she was happy with the two babies they were going to have. They were enough.
Yes, they were.
And so was she.
He was back in Atlanta. Back in the house where they’d spent time with Grace. It had taken some careful planning as the New York hospital hadn’t wanted to let him out of his contract, but in the end they’d capitulated when he’d worked out a compromise. He had to promise to come up for a month once a year when the new crop of medical students was doing its shadowing. Once the babies were old enough, Kady would join him.
Bethany squirmed against him and gave a thin cry. Tucker immediately tensed, only to find Kady’s hand on his arm. “Hey, it’s okay. She’s okay.”
He took a careful breath and blew it out. “You may have to talk me down from the ledge from time to time.”
“We’ll probably take turns standing on it. When that happens we’ll just hold hands and get through it together.”
“Together. That’s one of my favorite words.” He lowered himself into a chair beside the bed. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? I can either hold the babies or call the nurse to come and take them.”
“You’re actually willing to let them out of your sight?”
“What? No. I’d go down with them and wait until you’re awake again.”
Kady couldn’t contain her laugh. “I want them to stay up here. There’ll be plenty of time to sleep later.” She tilted her head so it leaned against his arm. “Besides, I’m afraid I’ll wake up and find this is all a dream.”
“It is a dream. But it’s very, very real. I’ll be here when you wake up. So will Bethany and Nathaniel.” He grinned. “Well, the babies and I might be in the nursery, depending on how strict they are about time schedules.” The hospital did offer rooming in, but since Kady had needed a C-section they might be a little less accommodating to their request, even though Kady worked in this very unit. Doctors supposedly made the worst patients. Who knew?
“You look good holding her,” Kady said. “I never believed this was possible.”
“You look good holding him.”
Settling a little deeper in the recliner, he did his best to soak in this moment, to imprint it on his memory—where he could retrieve it when times got tough.
One thing he knew for sure—he would never walk away from this woman ever a
gain. Or his children.
He was right where he belonged. And this was where he would stay. For as long as they both should live.
* * * * *
If you enjoyed this story, check out these other great reads from Tina Beckett
THE DOCTOR’S FORBIDDEN TEMPTATION
FROM PASSION TO PREGNANCY
RAFAEL’S ONE NIGHT BOMBSHELL
THE NURSE’S CHRISTMAS GIFT
All available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt fom RESISTING HER COMMANDER HERO by Lucy Ryder.
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Resisting Her Commander Hero
by Lucy Ryder
CHAPTER ONE
“LOWER THE BASKET!” yelled paramedic Francis Abigail Bryce into her headset over the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter hovering a hundred feet overhead. Wind and rain lashed at the ledge on which she was crouched, shielding the fallen climber.
If she slipped it was a long way down and probably wouldn’t end well. It wasn’t exactly how she’d envisioned spending her Friday evening but when word had come through from the rangers’ station earlier that a climber had fallen, Frankie had been dispatched to the scene.
Further up the coast from the large seaside town of Port St. John’s on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state, heavy rains had caused a huge landslide and rescue teams were busy digging out survivors. With the storm wreaking havoc on the Juan de Fuca Strait, rescue personnel were stretched to the limit.
Frankie had returned with a few of the injured and then been the lucky candidate in the wrong place at the wrong darn time. Now, instead of providing emergency medical care at the site of the slide, she was clinging to a slick ledge only a few feet wide and a couple hundred feet from certain death because a group had thought it smart to go climbing in torrential rain.
She looked down into the guy’s youthful face and shook her head. Probably a student on spring break, she thought. EMTs were always busy this time of the year, rescuing kids from their own ambitions.
“Hang in there, handsome,” she yelled, aware that in the fifteen minutes she’d been there, he’d been slipping in and out of consciousness. She suspected a ruptured spleen and she’d already wrapped his leg in an inflatable compression cast.
Concerned about what was taking so long, Frankie looked up as a deep voice in her ear warned, “Heads up,” and the next instant a large figure dropped onto the ledge. Dressed in a red and black jumpsuit and wearing a half-face helmet with comms mouthpiece, he looked like a huge bug from an alien world.
Frankie didn’t need to see his eyes to know who it was. The hard, masculine jaw and the unsmiling line of his sensual mouth would have been a dead giveaway even if the hair on the back of her neck hadn’t stood up like a freaked-out cat.
Nathan Oliver. The man who’d been back for months without at least letting her know he was home.
What the hell was he doing here? Wasn’t he some super-secret commander of the Maritime Security Response Team or something? Unless her patient was a terrorist, or a foreign national in the country illegally—which Frankie doubted—she was pretty sure a member of the nation’s deployable operations group stationed at Port St. John’s wouldn’t normally be part of search and rescue.
Then again, maybe the landslide and current conditions in the strait had put all coasties on call, including the MSRT. And, yeah, wasn’t it just peachy that he had to be the one dropping from the sky?
Unhooking his line from the chopper, he gave a couple of hand signals to the pilot above before his safety line disappeared into the lashing rain.
With her heart in her throat, Frankie ruthlessly squelched the urge to reach out and grab him before rotor wash blew him off the ledge. Or maybe before she gave him a little shove over the edge herself.
Okay, fine, so maybe she was tempted for about a nanosecond, but even though Nathan Oliver was the last person she wanted to see, she didn’t want him to die either.
They’d meant too much to each other—once.
Besides, balanced on the rocky ledge and sure-footed and powerful as a mountain lion, Nate was more than capable of rescuing them both. He’d been a Navy SEAL before transferring to the Pacific North West unit of the US Coast Guard as Lieutenant Commander of the MSRT. Granted, the present conditions probably weren’t the worst he’d experienced, but even he couldn’t walk up sheer cliffs in this weather.
He dropped to his haunches beside her and she felt the sweep of his penetrating gaze. The resultant shiver, she told herself, was from being soaked through and freezing. It couldn’t be that he still affected her.
That ship had sailed a lifetime ago and Frankie didn’t make a habit of repeating her mistakes. Especially the very public ones that had devastated not only her pride but also her heart.
She saw his mouth form words that looked like, “You okay?”
But instead of replying, she yelled, “Where’s the basket? He’s going into shock.”
He pointed skyward and she looked up to see the rescue litter swinging wildly in the gusting wind as it descended toward them. Nate barked out an order to the chopper and the pilot edged closer to the cliff face. But instead of controlling the swing, it caused the litter to spin.
He rose to his feet in one smooth move and stretched out a long arm to snag it. Almost in slow motion, Frankie watched as it abruptly shifted in the wind. She opened her mouth to yell a warning as the medevac litter flew through the air toward him.
He saw it coming too late to get out the way and it clipped him on the side of his helmet, sending him staggering backward toward the edge.
Time slowed and stretched, narrowing into an endless tunnel of pure horror as Nate fought to regain his balance. Then his foot slipped and in that split second before he went over, his gaze caught and held hers.
In that timeless instant, all the wild conflicting emotions she’d managed to suppress for twelve long years exploded through her, blinding her to everything but him.
Everything but the need to keep him from disappearing from her life forever. And before she realized she was moving, Frankie rose and leapt for him in one desperate move.
She reacted. As she always did.
Fear gave her strength and speed and before she could even process her actions, her icy fingers closed around his harness. Her momentum sent her thudding into him and Frankie wrapped her legs around him like a vice as they shot off the ledge.
Through the frantic yelling in the comms, she heard him curse as his arms enveloped her like banded steel. Her line went slack and for one awful moment she thought they were headed for the bottom of
the gorge. She sucked in a breath, tightened her grip and pressed her face into Nate’s throat, thinking stupidly that maybe it wasn’t such a bad way to go.
Wrapped around his big tough body and with his uniquely potent masculine scent filling her lungs, Frankie could think of a dozen worse places to be.
It was the closest she’d been to him in twelve years. The closest she’d been since the night of her eighteenth birthday, the night he’d completely humiliated her in front of half the town.
He’d been around forever and as well as she’d thought she’d known him, she couldn’t have known how much he’d changed or that he’d lost friends on his last mission. He’d looked the same—although bigger, harder and fitter—and acted the same as the boy she’d known her whole life. And if she’d noticed the closed-off expression in his eyes, the tight line of his mouth and jaw that night, she’d put it down to typical male arrogance and the fact that he was a member of the nation’s elite fighting force, mixing with a bunch of wild immature teenagers all because she’d begged him to come to her party.
She should have known better than to try to measure up to all the women in his life. To him she’d always just been his best friend’s kid sister; wild, reckless—always wanting to tag along.
Besides, she’d never measured up, to him or to her brother Jack. At least not in her parents’ eyes. Jack had been their golden child and Nate, popular, sporty and incredibly smart, was like their second son. They’d excelled at everything and it had been daunting, living in their shadow.
The birthday incident had been humiliating and she’d said things that filled her with guilt and shame whenever she thought about them. She’d lost him that day...and then seven years later she’d lost Jack in a mortar attack.
Her champions. Her own personal superheroes.
Frankie’s heart squeezed. And now she and Nate were heading for the bottom of the gorge and she’d never get the chance to prove that she’d—
The safety line abruptly snapped taut, halting their graceful pendulum arc into empty space; halting the wild, regretful thoughts flashing through Frankie’s mind. The next instant they were headed straight for the unforgiving rocky surface of the cliff face.