A Child for Christmas

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  Twenty minutes passed before Rebecca walked into sight. She went right to the desk, not acknowledging his presence with so much as a grimace as she sat. Her pen busily moved across whatever was on her desk.

  He sat there wondering which of them would give in first. Then the familiar scent of her drifted along his senses. “Emily okay?”

  The pen paused. “Yes.” She didn’t look up. Not until they heard wheels roll too fast and slow too abruptly outside the office and they both looked out the windows to see two tall men jumping out of a big black pickup truck.

  Then the door flew wide and Jefferson stood in the doorway, Daniel right behind him. “Why is Emily here?” he barked. Rebecca didn’t answer him fast enough and he was moving across the reception area, a faint limp in his rapid stride that took him right on past the desk. “Emily?” He called her name loudly.

  Rebecca hopped up. “She’s fine,” she assured hurriedly. “Just more false labor.”

  “Where?”

  “Room two.” She’d barely gotten out the words before he brushed past her. They heard a door open, and a startled squeak. Then low murmurs and the door slammed shut again.

  Daniel shrugged out of his sheepskin coat, his expression relieved as he grinned at Rebecca. “He saw their truck and steered my pickup right on over here,” he said. “Not smart, considering I was in the driver’s seat. How you doing, Doc?”

  She smiled and answered Daniel, easily making conversation.

  Easily making Sawyer’s nerves knot. It obviously was no exaggeration that she reserved her icy bedside manner for him, alone.

  Rebecca could have cried with relief when Jefferson and Emily finally appeared. Emily’s cheeks were rosy, and her velvety brown eyes were sparkling. She looked thoroughly kissed, and the faint smear of lipstick still on Jefferson’s face confirmed it.

  Rebecca didn’t dare look Sawyer’s way. She handed over the paperwork to Jefferson and reminded Emily of her next appointment, then busied herself with her appointment book while they all trooped out of her office, leaving her in solitary peace.

  She heard one engine start, then watched thankfully when it drove away from her office. But her relief was short-lived when the office door opened once again and Sawyer stood there. She could see Daniel’s pickup behind him in the parking lot, still parked crookedly over the curb. There was no sign, however, of Daniel.

  He stepped through, pulling the door closed, cutting off the rush of cold air. “More patients today?”

  “No.” He turned to the door and flipped the lock and she chastised herself for not thinking to lie. “What are you doing?”

  He shrugged out of his bomber jacket and tossed it onto one of the chairs. Most men in these parts wore sheepskin coats or parkas at this time of year. Sawyer Clay, of course, had to wear black leather that looked as soft and supple as a newborn baby’s skin. Idiot macho man. He probably froze outside.

  But she didn’t care about that. She did not. “I asked what you’re doing.”

  “Making myself comfortable,” he finally said.

  “Office hours are over.”

  He touched the bandage on his jaw. “I think these are ready to come out,” he said easily.

  She nearly told him to take them out himself. Nearly. She’d spent a sleepless night before, thanks to this man and the words that had come so easily to his lips in the restaurant. “Fine.” She wheeled on her heel and went into room one. He came in and started to close the door. “Leave it open.”

  He closed it anyway. “Afraid to be alone with me?”

  “Hardly.” She yanked open the drawers, staring stupidly at the contents. What was she doing?

  He reached past her and she nearly jumped out of her skin. His eyes were darkly blue and knowing as he dropped the bandage he’d pulled from his jaw into the trash receptacle. She snatched up what she needed from the drawer and slammed it shut with her hip.

  He sat on the exam table and Rebecca wished she didn’t have to get so close to him. But she couldn’t very well remove the tiny sutures while keeping the safe distance of the room between them.

  Oh, who are you kidding? The only safe distance from this man was afforded by hundreds of miles.

  She pushed his chin until she could see what she was doing, and rapidly removed the stitches. “Done,” she said. “What about the ones in your shoulder?”

  “I took ’em out myself yesterday. They were itching.” He pulled the collar of his button-down shirt to one side, showing her the healing wound. “No problems there.”

  “Good. Then you can go.”

  “Not yet.”

  Of course he wouldn’t go. Sawyer Clay had never done anything he didn’t want to do, in whatever time he chose, at his own convenience and no one else’s. “Fine,” she retorted. “Then I will.” Her heart was pounding only because of annoyance, she assured herself. He didn’t inspire anything other than annoyance in her anymore. She made for the door.

  He stuck out one long arm, stopping her progress. She refused to struggle. That third room was definitely going to be considerably larger. “I don’t enjoy being groped by patients.”

  “Since my hand is respectably around your upper arm, I hardly consider this groping.”

  His hand was around her upper arm. His knuckles, however, brushed against the side of her breast. But she’d rot before acknowledging the wave of heat that contact created.

  “What is it about you, Sweet Becky, that pulls at me?” He was the one doing the pulling. Pulling her around to face him. Pulling her forward until she stood between his thighs against the cushioned surface of the table.

  She swallowed, vowing to ignore him. If he didn’t get a reaction from her, he’d tire of his prying. She’d given away far too much when he’d called her that at the pizza parlor. She wasn’t going to fall for it again.

  “And what is it about me, Dr. Morehouse, that pushes you away?”

  She set her teeth, keeping her eyes trained toward the door. Toward freedom.

  “Your heart is racing,” he murmured. “Why is that?”

  “Dislike.” The word escaped.

  It didn’t seem to offend him. Just intensified the curiosity in his eyes. “Why? If we haven’t met, as you say, then what have I done to inspire your dislike?” He shook his head and her eyes unwillingly focused on the strands of silver threading through the lustrous strands at his temples.

  She’d always known his hair would be prone to wavmess if he ever let it grow past an inch or so. She dragged her eyes back to the doorway.

  “I don’t think it’s dislike,” he continued. “I know it’s not.”

  One of her eyebrows peaked. “You know nothing.”

  “Only because I can’t remember.”

  “Because you don’t know me,” she said flatly. No more now than he had before. He hadn’t really known her. He certainly hadn’t loved her, despite his words. Because if he had, he wouldn’t have ripped out her heart and trampled it underneath his polished shoes.

  She’d been a med student focused on her studies, on the career she had mapped out in her head. They’d met in the emergency room over his bleeding leg, and she’d been lost after one look into his midnight-colored eyes. When he’d pursued, she’d been so easily caught that even now, years later, it still mortified her. One week she was a serious med student, the next she was making room in her bureau drawers for his skivvies. He’d never “officially” moved in with her, but he’d spent more nights under her apartment roof in San Diego than he had his own roof at the naval station. He’d been sexy and fun and difficult and cocky. But when he’d taken her virginity, he’d been gentle and loving and intense and commanding.

  She’d thought he’d been honest, too. Believing his husky words of love. She was wrong.

  He’d taken her love and her trust and her faith and dismissed them with a casual flick of his fingers. She would never forgive him for that. And she’d never give him a chance to hurt her son, either.

  Never.
<
br />   “I want to change that.”

  Rebecca’s stomach plunged to her feet. But he wasn’t talking about her unspoken thoughts. “Change what?”

  “Knowing you.”

  “There is no point.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Then we’ll have to agree to disagree.” Why on earth couldn’t the confounded man remove his hands?

  “There are worse things in the world,” he said. “None of which explains why your pulse is thundering so unevenly that I can see it beating like a wild bird trapped against your lovely throat.”

  “Wild birds don’t like to be caged.”

  His lips curved faintly and Rebecca lowered her eyes, fiercely reminding herself why she couldn’t succumb to his masculine appeal.

  Then she realized he’d lowered his hands from her arms, and she was still willingly standing there. His thighs brushed her hips, hard and warm through his blue jeans and her lab coat and slacks.

  Move away, move away, her mind cried. Go. Fly away.

  Then his hand—long fingers and broad palm—slid through her hair, cupping her neck, while his thumb rested on her pulse. “Sweet Becky,” he murmured.

  A cry rose in her throat. Don’t call me that.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  You already have. But how could she tell him that?

  Then his lips covered hers, and she forgot everything. Past, present and future.

  There was only his lips against hers, gently brushing. Softly tantalizing. Soothing. Seducing.

  She trembled wildly and grabbed for something, anything, to steady her reeling senses. But what she grabbed, what her hands plastered themselves to were his strong thighs. And his breath hissed and his head lifted. He ran his thumb across her lower lip, his shoulders lifting with the deep breath he drew. “You make me forget,” he said, and his low words rumbled across her heart. “That darkness in my head goes away when I see you, Bec. Why is that?”

  She shook her head, moistening her lips. “Don’t.”

  He caught her face between his palms, his touch gentle and painfully familiar. Painfully new. “Take away the darkness, sweet Becky. Just for a while.”

  Tears burned behind her lids. When his mouth covered hers, she opened to him, unable to withstand the temptation. His tongue met hers, and she couldn’t stop the soft moan that rose in her. Then his hands weren’t cupping her face, but were running down the unbuttoned lab coat, slipping underneath to find her waist. To burn against her back when he delved beneath the hem of her red and green sweater.

  As if by magic, he found the clasp of her bra and his fingers nudged it away, sliding over the thrust of her breasts. Finding and conquering the tips that tightened frantically against his sure fingers. His mouth left hers and she gasped for air, her fingers sliding up his chest, flexing uncontrollably over his shoulders, sinking into the satin heaviness of his silver-laced hair.

  “It’s okay, sweet Becky,” he murmured, running a rain of fire along her jaw. Tasting the thundering pulse in her neck with his tongue.

  Time swayed and blurred and folded.

  “Ah, sweet, sweet Becky.” Her lab coat slipped heedlessly to the floor and he drew her sweater upward.

  She shivered and he shushed her, gathering her closer, ever closer. And it was that first time all over again when she’d been so frightened and eager and so in love with him that she’d do anything he asked of her. Her fingers pressed against his scalp, feeling the shape of his head, his ears. His hard, angled jaw and lean, bristled cheeks, hollowing ever so slightly as he gained the peak of her breast and drew the agonizingly tight nipple between his lips.

  She arched mindlessly against him, and he helped her with his other arm slipping behind her waist, holding her on her toes for his hunger. Then his palm moved down over her bottom, shifting, rearranging until instead of standing between his thighs, he’d nudged one leg between hers, pulling her up hard and tight against him

  “I can’t do this,” she gasped, her forehead falling to his shoulder.

  “Yes.” His breath was rough, his kiss urgently crossing to her other breast, treating it to the same devastating attention. Then to her shoulder. Her neck again. Meeting her lips, delving, tasting, devouring. His palms surrounded her hips, his thumbs reaching toward the heat of her where his thigh pressed so intimately against her. “So good, Bec,” he praised roughly when their lips parted for air. “Let it go, sweetness. Let me have it.”

  She would. Only because she loved him so. She’d give him what she wouldn’t give any of her fellow classmates; her boyfriends. He was different from all of them. Older and experienced and so sure of himself. She felt the tightening in her belly spread and clung to him, grateful for the hands that moved her when she lost the ability to speak. To think. He notched his thigh higher between hers and swallowed her breathy cries with his lips.... Oh, she loved him—

  “Mo-om! You back there?”

  Rebecca’s head whipped up and she stared at Sawyer with horror as the past slammed into the present. A present with years of disillusionment and tears and pain standing between them.

  Her eyes burned, and she shoved out of his arms. But getting away from him wasn’t enough. Not when he watched her, his eyes dark with a wanting that she remembered too well. Wanting that hadn’t really been the love she’d foolishly believed it to be.

  “Damn you, Sawyer Clay,” she cursed hoarsely. And raised her hand before thought could stop her.

  Sawyer caught her hand before it could connect with his face, however. The slap would have stung like hell, he knew, but the expression glittering in her golden-brown eyes hurt more. Such pain. Such hurt.

  Such accusation.

  She twisted against his hold, apparently forgetting the voice that had jerked them both to their senses before things got out of hand.

  “She’ll be out in a second, Ryan,” he raised his voice loud enough for the boy to hear out in the reception area.

  The color drained from her cheeks. She stared at him, no doubt unaware of the mute pleading in her expression.

  Sawyer would have given everything he owned—if he could only recall what all that was—to have more time with her. More time to figure out why holding her felt like home. Why her eyes told him things he knew he should know, but didn’t.

  He didn’t even know why he felt such sorrow in his gut. Only that he did.

  He stood from the table and finished the job that she’d begun of yanking his shirt out of his jeans. Her eyes widened, then flickered away when she realized what he was hiding with the long shirttails. Then she seemed to realize her own clothes were far more disheveled than his, and whirled around, presenting her back to him as she fumbled her clothing back into place and snatched her lab coat off the floor.

  He reached for the tangled sleeve, trying to help her, and she bared her teeth like a wounded kitten, backing away and finishing the task unaided. “The next time you need a doctor, drive to Gillette.” Her voice shook almost as much as the hands that attacked the buttons on her lab coat.

  He wasn’t too worried about medical care, just now. “This isn’t over,” he warned.

  “Yes, it is.” She raked her fingers through her hair. Fumbled with her stethoscope, the pen that had fallen out of her pocket. “It was over before it even started.”

  “You admit it, then.” He felt as if he were standing on the precipice of a bottomless abyss.

  She yanked open the door. “I admit nothing.” She ran her fingers through her hair once more and hurried out to the reception area.

  Ryan was sitting on the desk, swinging his legs. The pleasure Sawyer felt when the boy’s eyes lit at the sight of him knocked him sideways for a bit.

  “Hey, Sawyer!” Ryan hopped off the desk. “Wicked slash on your jaw, man. Bet that hurt plenty.”

  “That’s enough, Ryan.” Rebecca gestured toward her son, obviously trying to hustle the boy out of the office.

  Ryan, however, had a mind of his own. “You think maybe you
can go with me to the pizza parlor to play video games again? I’d sure like to see you reach the sixth level again.”

  “Ryan! Captain Clay is not here to entertain you. Go set the table for supper.”

  Ryan’s blue eyes widened at his mother’s vehement tone. He gathered up his young frame, only a few inches shorter than his mother’s. “Jeez, Mom, what’s—”

  “We’ll work out something, Ryan,” Sawyer promised before the boy said anything to send his mother toppling over the edge. “Better do as your mother says.”

  Ryan made a face. But he didn’t argue. “Yes, sir.” He headed back through the open door that Sawyer now realized must lead to their living quarters.

  Rebecca whirled on Sawyer the second Ryan was out of earshot. “I don’t need your interference with my son.”

  “I will figure it out. Or I’ll remember,” he said as he picked up his coat from the chair where he’d left it. The relief fairly rolled in waves from Rebecca’s slender frame when he unlocked the office door. “Rebecca—” God, he hated the way she stiffened when he spoke her name, vowing right then and there to get to the bottom of the animosity that went beyond discomfort over what they’d shared in the examining room. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry. Not for what happened in that little room back there. But for whatever it was I did in the past that’s got you upset.”

  Her lips tightened, and she didn’t look away fast enough for him to miss the liquid glimmer in her eyes. Her jaw worked, then her words finally came. “I don’t like being attacked by my patients,” she said tightly.

  The statement enraged him, just as he figured she’d intended. And knowing it, the anger dissipated, leaving his head aching and his gut clenched. Before he could say another word, however, Rebecca turned and went through the doorway that Ryan had used, slamming the door behind her.

  Raking his hands through his hair, Sawyer briefly debated going after her. But she probably would call the sheriff, and then he’d have to explain things he couldn’t even explain to himself. Retreat and regroup, he reminded himself.