One Night That Changed Everything

by Tina Beckett

  “A little birdie told her.”

  Annie laughed and, in a quick move, tugged the hat down over her bare head, showing it was a perfect fit. “I can wear this under the hood on my winter coat.”

  “You can wear it whenever you want to. And you’ll stay warmer than I will, as I don’t have a special hat.”

  Hannah’s teeth came down on her lip, and her hand went behind her back. He only realized she was trying to find the doorknob when the door opened and she slid through it and around the corner. Was she crying?

  Pregnancy hormones.

  Even as the thought pressed in on him, he rejected it. Hadn’t his own eyes moistened when Martha Brookstone’s daughter had come by the office a week ago with an update on her mother? The hospice had been wonderful to them, she’d said. “Mom is weaker, but still insists on knitting hats for your patients.” When she’d seen Annie in the waiting room she’d told her mother about her, and Martha had used some of her precious remaining energy to knit one last hat. She’d passed away yesterday morning, but her daughter had brought the hat in anyway, insisting her mother would have wanted Annie to have it.

  His throat tightened with sadness and frustration. He hated cancer. Fought it with every ounce of strength he had, and yet it was never enough. He couldn’t save every patient, no matter how hard he threw himself into his job.

  He’d barely made it back to his office for his Saturday appointments after spending the morning in bed with Hannah. While the sex had been amazing, the closeness hadn’t lasted longer than it had taken her to retrieve her clothes. She’d gotten up and showered, then slid out the door and out of his life.

  Well, not out of his life because she was still here at the office a week later. But they’d both kept their distance, neither speaking about what had happened between them. In fact, Hannah was the consummate professional. Cool as a cucumber.

  He should be glad. But he wasn’t. He’d rather she came at him in a fury, asking what the hell he thought he was playing at.

  Only he had no idea. All he knew was that whatever it was, it felt like fire…and silk. At the same time. Seducing him even while it burned him to the core. Hannah had hit the nail on the head: it was like playing with matches…thousands of them.

  He brought his attention back to Annie and her mother. “That hat looks perfect on you.”

  Annie’s mom smiled. “Tell the angel who knitted this we said thank you.”

  Greg wasn’t about to tell her that Annie’s “angel” had earned her wings and flown away, never to return.

  He set up the next appointment and made sure the treatments were still on track. The child hugged him around the waist before she and her mother left, the fuzzy strands of the hat waving as she bounced her way down the hall. A very different little girl from the pale, despondent soul who’d sat silently in her chair.

  Maybe he should see if he could find someone to knit hats for him on commission. If they could raise one person’s spirits, it was worth it—because he was certain, no matter what the scientific world might say, the mind did play a role in a patient’s recovery. Sometimes the illness was too great, but finding ways to rev up the immune system was a good thing. And if a simple hat could do that, then he was all for it.

  Hannah came wandering down the hallway, another chart in her hands. “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “You saw. She loved it.” He paused. “You know, I’ve been thinking, maybe we could find someone who could knit those on a regular basis.”

  “That’s a great idea. I used to knit, maybe I could—”

  “No.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “I’m not putting anything more on you right now.” He should have kept quiet about the idea, but he’d never expected her to immediately raise her hand and offer.

  “You’re not putting anything on me, Greg. I’m volunteering. Once I get home at night, I don’t have all that much to do. Knitting would be a welcome distraction. I just need to practice to get back in the swing of things.”

  “You should be resting, not taking on more work. Especially now.” His glance went to her stomach, trying to banish the thought that he knew exactly how it looked without a stitch of clothing. “When’s your next doctor’s appointment?”

  “In a couple of weeks. She wants to do an ultrasound and check the position of the baby because I was on fertility drugs.”

  He glanced down the hallway to make sure no one was around, remembering Hannah saying she didn’t want anyone to know yet. “What do the drugs have to do with position?”

  There was a pause, and her cheeks lit up like red balloons. “Well…she wants to make sure there’s only one.”

  “One?” A light bulb flashed inside his skull, blinding him for a second. Of course. Fertility drugs could cause more than one egg to be released. Oh, hell. “She thinks you’re carrying more than one?”

  She stepped closer and put a hand on his arm, making him realize his voice had risen to match his skyrocketing blood pressure. “Relax, she doesn’t think anything at this point. She goes through the same procedure on all her fertility patients.”

  Relax? That was kind of hard when his brain was filtering through all kinds of scenarios. None of them good. What if Hannah did end up carrying more than one? What did that mean for him?

  A nightmare, that’s what. One that was increasing exponentially.

  Even as he thought it, the opposite picture rose in his mind of Hannah propped up in bed with a baby in each arm, smiling up at him. There was a diamond on her left hand and the babies were a melding of their mother’s facial features and his. Once inside his head, the image took hold, looking nothing like the nightmare he’d imagined.

  Instead, the idyllic scene looked like a dream come true.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE hat was lopsided, the lump along one side taking on the appearance of an ear flap, rather than a smooth round head covering. Maybe she could make one for her own baby this way.

  Except there was no guarantee she could replicate the mistake—or have it come out the same for each ear. She needed a pattern to do that.

  Hannah sighed and ripped the stitches out until she reached the part where things had first gone wonky, counting the rows carefully. The circular needles made for a seamless construction, which meant she wouldn’t have to sew it together at the end, but keeping track of where she’d decreased her stitches was also more complicated. And she was only using regular knitting yarn right now. If she wanted to make those furry hats that were all the rage, it was going to be even harder because that kind of yarn had a lot of fringy fibers. Maybe Greg was right, she shouldn’t be taking this on. Except hearing the constant click of the needles soothed her in a way that her own thoughts couldn’t nowadays.

  What Greg didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. And once she brought in her first finished hat, he’d be so impressed with her talents that he wouldn’t say another word.

  Right. So why hadn’t she just barreled her way through that disagreement and stood her ground? Because it had been easier not to. And she didn’t like fighting with him.

  Yes, she liked doing other things with him instead. Just the memory of that day they’d spent together made her stomach tighten. He had gone slow that second time. And by the end she’d been quaking with need and asking him to hurry all over again. He had, and the result had been an experience that still had the power to wake her up at night and turn her into a blathering idiot when she saw him at the office day after day.

  What did that make her?

  Infatuated.

  He was the doctor who had treated her during her cancer scare. When she’d hugged him all those months ago, her heart had zigged when it should have zagged, sending her to a place she didn’t want to be. Wasn’t that what this was all about? She saw it happen time and time again with patients. They got a crush on the person they credited with saving their lives.

  And if anyone deserved all that adulation, it was Greg.

&nbs
p; Only it wasn’t right for her to add one more set of doe eyes onto an already overburdened doctor.

  Except, as far as she knew, he’d never shown a hint of attraction for any other of his patients, not even Claire Taylor—for whom she knew Greg had a soft spot.

  Instead, he’d been a perfect gentleman during her treatments.

  All it had taken was one weak moment on both their parts to start an avalanche neither of them seemed capable of stopping.

  But she had to. He’d made it plain he didn’t want a wife and a family no matter what he’d said during their last encounter. Besides, what had he said exactly? That he hadn’t wanted a child…until the thought of this one being his had messed with his head?

  So he hadn’t wanted a family, until one had been forced on him.

  Maybe his whole overdeveloped sense of responsibility had switched itself on and tricked him into thinking he wanted the baby. As a way to make him step up to the plate.

  That was the last thing Hannah wanted. Especially as her own feelings about her boss were jumbled and confused.

  If she wasn’t careful, her heart could be snared in a trap of its own making. And then where would she be? In love with a man who could never truly love her back—whose desire to honor his sister’s memory eclipsed anything but the need to work for a cause.

  Laying the knitting needles in her lap, she set her wooden rocking chair into motion, closing her eyes and gripping the armrests. But Greg’s face was right there, smiling down at her as he told her he had better places for her to kiss. The tenseness of his jaw as he’d finally reached the limits of his control and let go.

  Her lips curved at the memories and then her eyes popped open.

  Oh, no!

  What if it wasn’t infatuation at all? What if she really did have feelings for him? Big, honkin’, end-of-the-line feelings that wouldn’t simply go away once the baby was born?

  Her hands went to her stomach, pleading with all she had in her that her heart not go in that direction.

  But it was hopeless. Her mind and her heart never saw eye to eye when it came to stuff like this. Her heart had wanted this baby while her mind had argued that she needed to wait a few years to be sure that her cancer really was gone for good.

  Her heart had won in that instance.

  Lord. She couldn’t afford to let it win now. Not with everything that was at stake. The last thing her child needed once it was born was the tumultuous push and pull of an unstable relationship—one where she and Greg devoured each other one minute and avoided each other the next.

  Neither did she want to end up as the “booty call” for a man who didn’t have the emotional energy to nurture a relationship until it could withstand the wear and tear of normal life.

  She deserved more than that. So did her child.

  So what did she do? Find another job? Put her foot down and tell Greg that she was done with anything outside a professional working relationship.

  The silence in her head was deafening.

  Gee, thanks for the advice.

  Picking up her knitting needles, she put one point through the first of the row of stitches and threw the yarn over them. For now, all she could do was knit and hope that—like the screwball stitches she’d just ripped out—she could go back undo the mistakes she’d made with Greg and start all over.

  Only she had a feeling that returning to an earlier time was going to be a whole lot easier to accomplish with yarn that it would be with Greg.

  * * *

  A hat.

  Greg had to look twice before he realized what the item in the brown paper gift bag was. There was a little card on the handle that listed the name of a patient—Dorothy Acres. There was no indication who had sent it, although he had a sneaking suspicion.

  So three days after he’d asked her not to take up knitting, she was already churning out hats. Who knew how many hours she’d burned through, doing this?

  He hadn’t seen much of her as he’d spent the past couple of days in surgery at the hospital. He’d just gotten back from one, in fact, and had decided to write up his notes while they were still fresh in his mind. He’d closed his office door to have some privacy.

  It wasn’t like he was intentionally avoiding her.

  But there was a kernel of discontent lodged inside his gut that just wouldn’t go away, no matter how many antacids he’d consumed over the past couple of days. He’d stripped his bed and washed the sheets on the hot-water setting of his machine, trying to pretend he was washing away his own misplaced sentiments right along with the reminder of their time together. Like when he’d replaced his old desk?

  It hadn’t worked then, and it didn’t work now. Finding the hat only augmented his irritability. And the thought of her sitting at home all by herself with a pair of knitting needles wasn’t helping any. Because his nights had been spent alone, as well.

  That had never bothered him. Until now.

  He’d had women before—not every weekend, or even every month, but often enough to know that something was off with his reactions to this situation. It had to be the pregnancy. Or maybe it was just Hannah herself.

  Bethany would have liked her. Would have liked Hannah’s spark of life, the way she always tried to do the right thing, rather than just making it easy on herself.

  He shoved his chair away from the desk and stood, picking up his phone.

  He paged Stella and waited for her to pick up. “Is Hannah still here somewhere?”

  “Um, I think she’s with a patient,” his receptionist said, as if that fact should be obvious to even a simpleton like him.

  Okay, so the sarcasm was probably a product of his own guilt and nothing to do with Stella dissing him. “When you see her, could you ask her to come to my office?”

  As soon as he put the phone down he cursed himself as an idiot. Hannah had not set foot in his office since their fiery encounter there six weeks ago.

  Six weeks. Had it been that long?

  He counted back. It had.

  Hannah had gone from bringing him coffee every day to avoiding him as much as he appeared to be avoiding her.

  Although, someone had put that bag in his office. He somehow doubted it was Hannah.

  The last thing he needed today, though, was for her to stand in front of his new desk while he sat behind it and pictured her sprawled across it all over again. He quickly picked up the gift bag and his patient’s file and went over to the sitting area on the other side of the room. There, that was better. They could still see the desk but they wouldn’t have to look across it in order to have a quick conversation.

  And he intended this to be a quick, non-emotional session that put both their minds at ease.

  A knock sounded at the door. He frowned. It had been a rare day when his PA didn’t just open the door and come in. Just like on that fateful day when he’d gotten the news about Mrs. Brookstone.

  “Come in.” He laid the file on the coffee table, letting it remain open, as if he’d just been casually reviewing it.

  Hannah poked her head inside, but didn’t enter. “You wanted to see me?”

  His irritation grew. If he could handle this like an adult, then so could she, dammit. “Would you mind coming in for a minute?”

  You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that stretched between them. Finally, Hannah pushed through the door, making no effort to close it behind her. It was a telling move.

  Was it him she didn’t trust? Or herself?

  That was a very dangerous question, and one he preferred not to answer right now.

  He motioned to one of the wingback chairs that sat across from the leather sofa. Once she’d perched on the edge of it, her eyes went to the gift bag. So she already had an idea why he’d called her in. He nodded toward it. “Is this from you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I think you just answered my question. Didn’t I say I didn’t want you knitting hats?”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly, she leaned b
ack in her chair. “Were you ordering me not to make them or just suggesting that I shouldn’t?”

  A good question. He’d asked her not to, but was he so stupid as to think he could tell her how to spend her free hours and expect her to roll over and obey? Someone like Hannah? Not bloody likely.

  Then what had he been doing?

  He thought he’d been showing concern for her health. The baby’s health. “It was a suggestion.”

  She nodded. “Okay. I found it…comforting.”

  She’d found what comforting? The suggestion or the knitting itself?

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

  “It gives me something constructive to do without brooding over the future.”

  The bald words reminded him of the ones she’d uttered at his house. Was she really that worried about a possible relapse? Or was she worried that she might be stuck with him as the father of her child and wondering how much interference she’d get from him?

  He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees, his chin on his fisted hands. “What part of the future?”

  She shrugged, cheeks turning pink. “About the babie—baby. Whether or not everything will go okay with the pregnancy.”

  Had she been about to say “babies,” plural? Was she actually expecting the doctor to find more than one during her next appointment? His mouth went dry.

  “Did your doctor give you some cause for concern?”

  “No, but you never know what could happen.”

  True. But other than finding multiple fetuses, Hannah was young and healthy. Her cancer was unlikely to return. She’d been able to get pregnant with the eggs she carried in her body, rather than the ones she’d frozen. It seemed like the odds were lining up in her favor. Then why wasn’t she meeting his eyes? Was she still worried about Bethany’s myeloid leukemia being passed down? If so, he could at least set her mind at ease regarding that.

  “I talked to Bill Watterson a couple of days ago. He confirmed my family isn’t one of those that carry the defective gene. So there’s no chance of me passing it down.”

  “That’s good. I wasn’t worried, though.”