Mother by Design

by Susan Mallery

  She laid her head against his shoulder, breathed in the heavenly scent of him. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay…”

  He lifted her chin and made her look at him. “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “Really. I’m okay.” She stepped out of the shelter of his arms and pulled her shoulders back. “I have…some things to tell you. Later. But for now, let’s go. Let’s get this done.”

  His silky brows were still drawn together. “You’re nervous? About my meeting your mom? About dinner at Chelsea’s?”

  “Right on both counts. Now, let’s go.”

  Chapter 9

  Her mother was sitting in the chair by one of the room’s two narrow windows when Rachel led Bryce in. It was a double room, a drawn curtain down the center of it, masking off a second window and the other bed on the far side.

  “Rachel.” Her mother’s smile was genuine. Then the big dark eyes found the man who filled up the doorway. Her thin hand went to her uncombed hair and fluttered quickly down to her lap. “I…wasn’t expecting company…”

  Rachel reached behind her, felt for Bryce’s hand. It was right there, his fingers automatically slipping between hers, sending a message of warmth and support. He moved forward to stand beside her. “Mom. It’s okay. We won’t stay long. I just…I want you to meet Bryce Armstrong.”

  Her mother stared at him for a moment, her expression unsure. And then her smile returned. “Well. Hello, Bryce. I’m Ellen. So nice to meet a friend of my daughter’s.”

  “Hello, Ellen.”

  So, okay. They’d gotten through the introductions. Bryce was smiling. Her mother was smiling.

  What next?

  Sit, she thought. They should sit down for a minute or two. She pulled her hand from Bryce’s—well, yanked it free, really. “Uh. Chairs. We need—”

  “Right here.” He’d already picked up the one by the door. He carried it over and set it down next to her mother.

  There wasn’t another one. “I’ll ask the orderly.” Rachel started for the hallway.

  “Wait,” said her mother. “Linda?” she called. “May we use your chair?”

  “Oh, all right,” a voice from behind the curtain grumbled.

  At Rachel’s questioning glance, her mother mouthed, “Suicide attempt” with a philosophical shrug. Then, in a whisper, “They put her in here this morning.” And finally, at full volume, “Thanks, Linda!”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Linda called back grudgingly.

  Bryce went behind the curtain. She heard his words of polite greeting.

  Linda mumbled something and Bryce emerged with another chair. They sat. Her mother looked from Rachel to Bryce and back again. Rachel slid a glance at Bryce. He looked so at ease, so completely relaxed. How did he do it?

  Her mom cleared her throat. “So, this is something…special going on here?”

  As Rachel agonized over her answer, Bryce said, “Yes, it is.” He said it so simply, without the slightest hesitation. Rachel wanted to grab him and hug him—and never let go.

  Her mother’s smile widened. “Well.” Ellen shot a pointed glance at Rachel’s round stomach. “How nice…” She’d made no secret of the fact that she thought Rachel should have found a husband first and then started thinking about having a baby. It was an attitude that Rachel had found supremely irritating. After all, when you got right down to it, a fat lot of good it had done her mother to find a husband first.

  Bryce asked how her mother was doing and Ellen launched into a blow-by-blow of her most recent stay at Portland General’s psychiatric ward: which nurses were angels, which ones she couldn’t stand. How the food here was pretty good. She especially enjoyed the rice pudding, which she could get on Tuesdays and Fridays. And she was making a point to take all her medications. And she was doing better. She sent Rachel a defiant look.

  Oh, yes.

  Better every day…

  Every time Rachel dared to hope she might be winding down, Bryce would ask another question and off she’d go again.

  Rachel almost interrupted more than once to say they ought to get going. But clearly, Bryce could take care of himself. If he’d had enough of her mother’s never-ending answers, he could stop asking questions.

  She watched her mother chattering away about the minutia of her days and a certain tenderness welled up inside her. Tenderness and gratitude.

  Ellen Stockham might not have been the best mother in the world, but she had always been there, she’d stuck with it. As poorly suited as her illness had made her for mothering, she’d never walked away from the job.

  There was much Rachel would have to learn for herself about raising a child. But when it came to loyalty and commitment and sticking around…

  Thanks to her mother, she had those qualities.

  When they got up to go, Bryce bent to kiss her mother’s dry cheek. “I’ll see you again, Ellen. Soon.”

  Her mother beamed up at him. “That would be so nice…”

  Chelsea and Thad and Ariel lived in a three-bedroom cottage nestled in the oaks on Bryce’s property.

  “This way they have their privacy,” he explained. “And I’m right here if they need me. There’s a driver to take them wherever they need to go. And Mrs. Davenbrook, who’s worked for our family for over thirty years, is devoted to Chelsea. She looks in on her several times a day.”

  Bryce rang the bell. When the door flew back, a tall, stunning blonde in a sweet-looking floral-print dress stood on the other side. Childlike pleasure flooded her angel’s face. “Bryce! You’re here!”

  He held out his arms and his sister, long, silky hair flying, flung herself into them. She clasped her slim hands around his waist, squeezing hard. “Hug, hug,” she crowed and laughed in delight.

  Behind her, a man stood holding a wooden bowl full of pretzels. He was six or seven inches shorter than Chelsea, with brown hair and dark eyes and a slightly befuddled expression. “Hello, Bryce,” he said shyly and then he looked at Rachel. “Hello,” he said carefully, as if not quite sure of the word.

  “Hello,” Rachel replied.

  Bryce managed to pry his sister’s hugging hands away and made the introductions.

  “Rachel!” Chelsea repeated when Bryce said her name. “Hello!” She reached right out and patted Rachel’s tummy. “A baby. How nice.”

  “Sleeping,” Chelsea announced when Bryce asked about his niece. “But you can see her…”

  So they all tiptoed into the nursery and stood over the crib and Chelsea pantomimed “Shh…” with great enthusiasm as they admired the dreaming darling in the pink fleece footie pajamas.

  They trooped back out into the living room. “Please have a pretzel,” offered Thad solemnly.

  So they sat and munched a few pretzels and chatted for a while. Rachel explained that she was a nurse and Thad spoke of his own job. He worked full-time at a local Burger King.

  “He is the best worker there,” Chelsea piped up proudly and patted her husband’s leg. “And sometimes he brings me home a Whopper.”

  Eventually they moved into the kitchen for the meat loaf and mashed potatoes Chelsea had prepared.

  “But Charles helped,” Thad announced. Charles, Rachel remembered, was Bryce’s cook.

  Chelsea took that extra few seconds both she and her husband seemed to require to digest whatever was said to them and then nodded. “Charles is always helping. I like Charles.”

  Thad considered. “Me, too,” he said.

  Chelsea turned to Rachel. “And I like you.” She beamed and Rachel’s heart just went to mush. “You can come see us any time. You and your baby, too, when your baby comes. Ariel will like that. She will want to have friends.”

  Rachel promised she would come again and a little later, when Thad and Chelsea walked them to the door, Chelsea made the offer a second time. “Please come back. Come back soon.”

  “I will. I promise…”

  Rachel and Bryce walked out into the brisk early-May evening, Thad and Chelsea moving into the
open doorway behind them. Bryce took Rachel’s hand and they started down the walk to the garages behind the main house.

  “Goodbye, come again!” Chelsea called from behind them. Rachel glanced back and saw Bryce’s sister and her husband standing in the doorway, the flood of light from inside pouring out around them.

  “I will!” Rachel called back.

  At Rachel’s house, Bryce came around and opened the car door for her. He took her hand to help her out. The cracked concrete walkway was too narrow for them to approach the house side-by-side, but she held tightly to his hand anyway, leading him along.

  Inside, she turned on the lamps and they sat on the sofa, shucking out of their shoes, shifting around so they were facing each other.

  “You were so great with my mother,” she said. “Thank you. And your sister and Thad…they’re really happy together, aren’t they?”

  He nodded. “They have what matters most. In fact, I’d say the two of them showed me what life—and love—could be.”

  “I can see how they could do that.”

  He looked so solemn suddenly, as solemn as Thad. “I’ve…been with a lot of women, Rachel.”

  She felt her mouth twisting wryly. “So I’ve heard.”

  Now he looked earnest. He leaned in a little closer. “But in the last couple of years, I have been seriously looking for the right woman. The one who’d not only have me wanting to make passionate, wild love to her—but the one I’d want to talk with for hours, the one I’d want to hold so close while we’re sleeping. The one who, when the day’s over, I wouldn’t be able to wait to come home to.”

  “Tall order,” she whispered.

  “That day,” he said. “That first day, that first moment I saw you, all dewy-eyed over that little sweater with the ribbons all over it, a voice in my head said, There. That’s the one. Too damn bad she’s already taken…I almost turned and walked away. Fast. But then I couldn’t stop myself from getting you talking, couldn’t fight the need to hear your voice. And when you looked up at me with those big brown eyes…pow. I was done for. I was gone for good. And then you told me that you weren’t taken. From that moment on, my fate was sealed…”

  Rachel knew she should say something. But what do you say when a guy you almost didn’t dare dream of tells you he knew the moment he saw you that you were the woman for him? There were no words, just a warm pressure at the back of her throat, a lifting feeling in her chest.

  He asked, so gently, “What happened to you, tonight, before I picked you up? Can you tell me now?”

  She nodded.

  He waited, then gave her his crooked grin. “Well?”

  Oh, where to start? She didn’t know how to explain. But then she just opened her mouth and said, “When I was little…” and it was okay. She was talking about it, all of it, from the father who abandoned her to the men she had kept waiting who’d finally given up and left her, too. She said, “So I was making myself sit on the porch and wait for you. I was…proving to myself that I could trust you, that you would come through, you wouldn’t let me down.”

  “I won’t let you down, Rachel. I swear to you. I’ll be here, for you and the baby. If you’ll have me.”

  “Oh,” she said, her heart light as air. “Oh, yes. I’ll have you. I…” Her nerve kind of wavered. She cleared her throat. “But what about your grandparents? How are they going to react when you tell them you’re marrying an ordinary, everyday woman who’s six months pregnant by a man she’s never met?”

  “They’ll be shocked. At first. And then they’ll get to know you and everything will work out fine.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Rachel. They will accept you. And if they were really stupid and didn’t, well, it would be their loss—but it’s not going to happen that way. Don’t forget, in the end, they accepted Thad.”

  She was shaking her head. “You’re a brave, brave man.”

  “I’m a smart man. I know what I want. And Rachel, what I want is you. And your daughter. I want her to be my daughter, too. And I want to be your husband for the rest of our lives.” He leaned closer, whispered, “I love you…and do not start telling me how this is so sudden.”

  “Well, but it—”

  He put a finger to her lips. “There you go again.”

  “Oh, Bryce…”

  “Sudden,” he whispered, “is fine with me. Sudden is just great.”

  “Oh, Bryce…”

  “I love you,” he said again, the words so simple, direct. Honest.

  With a glad cry, she reached for him. His arms were there to take her in. “Oh, Bryce…”

  “I love you,” he said one more time.

  And she bravely whispered, “I…love you, too,” just as his lips met hers.

  JENNA’S HAVING A BABY

  Laurie Paige

  To the Wanderers, for whom no mountain is too high.

  Chapter 1

  Jenna Cooper glanced at the clock. Time for her dinner break. Actually it was two hours past time, but who noticed the little things when one was having fun? Fun, as in a wreck on the freeway during rush hour, a shoot-out between neighbors over a cat using a flower bed as a litter box—a flesh wound, but it could have been much worse—and a fist fight between two teenage brothers that had resulted in their mother getting a black eye and a scratch on her cornea when she stepped in to break it up.

  The boys were contrite and shaken by the incident. As they should be.

  What was with people this weekend? It was only the second Friday of May. The Oregon weather was balmy; it wasn’t like July, when tempers frayed due to the heat.

  The facetious streak evaporated as she thought of the victims of the car accident. Luckily only two vehicles and three people were involved in the mishap. The drivers had escaped with minor injuries, but the two-year-old girl who had been in one of the cars was now in critical care in the pediatrics wing of Portland General.

  Jenna hated for children to be hurt. Adults were supposed to protect the little ones, not tailgate each other on the interstate highway at seventy miles per hour.

  Frowning with disapproval, she closed up the Emergency Room report on the toddler, placed it in the stack to be filed, then stood, yawned and stretched. Using the tips of her fingers, she massaged her lower spine.

  Had anyone mentioned that pregnancy was hard on the back in those baby books she’d been ardently reading of late? Now in her fifth month, she was beginning to burst out all over, one might say.

  “I’m going to eat,” she told the E.R. receptionist.

  “Got your pager on?” the woman asked.

  Jenna checked to be sure. “Sure have.”

  Last night the E.R. doctor had been irked with her when she couldn’t be reached because she’d accidentally hit the off button. However, she hadn’t been goofing off.

  As the senior nurse on her shift, it was part of her job to make sure the emergency medical supplies had been replenished from the main stockroom, and that’s what she’d been doing when the next case, a heart attack patient, had come in. Dr. Thompson had been coldly, but politely, furious when she’d returned, innocently unaware of a problem.

  There were other nurses in the E.R. besides her, she’d felt like telling him. Instead she’d checked the pager, apologized and continued her duties as if her feelings weren’t smarting at the reprimand, the first she’d ever gotten from him.

  Oh, well. She shrugged philosophically and stopped in the bathroom to freshen up before going to the cafeteria.

  Frowning at herself in the mirror, she noted the fact that she’d forgotten mascara so that her eyes looked like two chips of lapis lazuli surrounded by barely discernible light-brown fringes. Her string-straight hair hung like limp curtains at each side of her face when she removed the band that held it out of the way.

  At least the hair was naturally blond. That was the only good thing she could find to say about it at present.

  After combing, then refastening the fine strands into a po
nytail, she splashed water on her face, dried off, put on lipstick so she didn’t quite look as if she should be laid out on a gurney bound for the morgue and hurried out.

  She retrieved her food from the refrigerator in the E.R. supply room and walked briskly along the corridor. It seemed to be a slow night in the rest of the hospital.

  Dr. Thompson, head of E.R., was at the table reserved for medical personnel in the cafeteria. A surprise, that. He was sort of gruff, taciturn and aloof from the rest of the staff. But very handsome.

  He was thirty-eight to her thirty-four, four or five inches taller than her five-eight height and had black hair and brown eyes. While he was invariably civil, his thoughts and emotions were as inviolate as a sphinx.

  Since there wasn’t another soul in the staff area, she plunked her home-prepared food down at the round table where he was reading the paper. A muffin and a cup of coffee were in front of him.

  “Is that your dinner?” she asked, setting a pint of milk on the table, then opening the containers that held her own nutritious meal.

  He glanced at her, at the plastic dishes filled with good things, then the muffin. “It’s enough,” he said.

  “Huh,” she said in disagreement.

  He glanced her way again. She expected a frown, but he smiled slightly.

  “Wow,” she said softly, “you’re incredibly good-looking when you do that.”

  The thick eyebrows rose fractionally. His eyebrows and lashes were jet black like his hair. She envied him that.

  “When I do what?” he asked.

  “Smile.” She wrinkled her nose at him, then grinned.

  He was technically her boss, so she probably shouldn’t be teasing him. Her smart mouth was her besetting sin…well, the main one, at any rate.

  “I’ll share if you will,” she told him.

  Before he could object, she went to the counter and grabbed a paper plate, along with a plastic fork and knife. She returned to the table and divided her bowl of chicken salad, which was crammed with almonds, apples and raisins as well as white chicken cubes, into two even portions. She did the same with the fruit salad, baby carrots and whole wheat, low-fat, low-sodium crackers.