If she wanted more from him, things would get messy. This was probably just a reaction to their situation. She needed something, and he was in White Knight mode. Who knew how far that was from Husband mode?
As she settled, he took her mug and headed for the kitchen, cellphone already out to start making calls.
Probably hadn’t even noticed her needy lapse in judgement. Which had to be good. It just didn’t feel like it.
* * *
“Am I carrying you to bed or are you walking?” Gabriel asked, standing above the Penny-shaped lump burrowed under the blanket on the sofa. Somehow, he was again willing to forgo his rule never to sleep beside any of his lovers. A rule he’d only broken once since his divorce. With her, that night.
With the frown he saw marring her still-pale face, he knew he was testing the boundaries of her gladness at having him around, but after about thirty-six hours of very little sleep he was willing to push a little. That’s what he told himself for the thirtieth time, that this was just practical. His decision had nothing to do with the little rush he felt when he considered it. That feeling was worry, not anticipation. Definitely not anticipation.
She rolled her head around dramatically and forward until she cupped one hand over her eyes. “I can sleep on the sofa. It’s comfortable.”
“But we can’t both sleep on the sofa, and I don’t want to sleep on the floor.”
She squinted at him, starting to catch up. Since she’d downed the first antiemetic, she’d been sleeping so much she barely knew what time it was, let alone how many hours he’d spent hovering. “Did you sleep on the floor last night?”
“Dozed off and on in the chair.” Had woken up every time she’d made a sound. And part of that was not wanting her to go through this alone, but another part of it was pure manipulation, something he wasn’t sure how to think about. Penny wasn’t his enemy, but she could become his enemy if she decided she didn’t want him involved with their child after all. Keeping her close, where he could keep an eye on her and pay attention to make sure he spotted it if things suddenly began to go sideways, was the less humanitarian aspect.
“You could’ve slept in the guest room, still can. It’s made up.”
“I wouldn’t hear you if you woke in distress if I was asleep in another room,” he said, and then just confronted the issue. “Do you have a problem with me sleeping in the bed with you?”
“I’m just surprised...”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he reminded her gently.
She looked at him a beat too long. “I know, but are we talking about that now? Obviously, I’m not going to put the moves on you this time, if I put them on you last time. I’m not entirely sure if I did.”
“You did.”
“Which moves did I make?”
“You went and bought wine to get me drunk and take advantage of me in a seedy motel.” The smile blooming on her face made him glad he’d gone with the joke, even if they shouldn’t really be trying to make this more comfortable than he already knew it would be.
She picked up her bucket. “That’s not how I remember it. But if you want to pretend I stole your virtue...”
It had been hours since she’d needed the bucket, but it obviously made her feel more secure, so he didn’t say anything. Just double-checked the door was locked, and then followed her upstairs. “You were the one to suggest underwear hugging.”
“I was freezing to death.” She must be feeling better, she was arguing again. “I sleep on the right, which is good for bucket placement. I have nightmares of barfing on you.”
“It’s high on my list of hellish situations too.” All he could think to do was revert back to their between-cases banter, treat everything as business as usual for now. And he kept telling himself that as she crawled into the bed and he stripped down to his boxers and T-shirt.
“If you’re staying here in this bed because of obligation...”
“I’m staying because I want to be here. Do you prefer me going to the guest room? I can assure you nothing is going to happen.” He sat on the edge of the bed, turned to regard her, and bit the bullet, addressing the elephant in the room directly. “It’s pretty impossible not to think about our night together, but a woman who might really vomit if I kissed her makes it easier to ignore those memories right now.”
Scarlet stole across her face, briefly giving her cheeks some color. “I didn’t mean to insinuate that something was going to happen. I know I’m not in danger, I just didn’t want to take bigger advantage of your good nature than I already am. And I really hate feeling like an obligation.”
Rolling to his side, he stretched out, put his cell on the bedside table, then opened one arm for her. “You’re not an obligation. Didn’t we go over this earlier?”
“That was hours ago, and maybe even yesterday.”
“It was today.”
“And I’m such a mess I had to double-check.” She looked at his outstretched arm. “It’s kind of breaking my self-esteem that I’m this wretched at only two months pregnant.”
He let his arm drop. Whatever she needed from him, it was possible he’d become too tired to riddle it out. “I want to stay.”
As he settled, she switched off the light, and despite her declaration what side she slept on, and despite ignoring his offer of a comforting hug seconds before, as soon as he closed his eyes he felt her shifting toward him on the bed and wriggling under the arm he’d offered. Her cheek pillowed on his chest and she wrapped one arm over his waist.
In moments she was asleep and he drifted off right behind her.
CHAPTER FOUR
GABRIEL HAD AWAKENED the middle of the night because she’d made a noise, only to find her bottom was nestled against his groin and the immediate realization of just how far past businesslike the whole situation had gone.
He’d never spooned with another partner. He hadn’t told her no relationships because he didn’t specifically want her, it had been his basic operating system since Nila. He dated, casually. He had lovers, and did not bring them to his apartment because if he went to their beds, he could leave before things got snuggly. Spooning, like sleeping alongside lovers, had ceased to be part of his life along with Nila. It was too intimate, and felt like promises, or declarations that he felt more than he did, or at least was willing to go further than casual.
And this was intimate. And easy. And felt good. Outside winter winds rattled the windows, but the bed was warm, and her hair smelled like honey with just a hint of something smoky.
Probably the fire they’d enjoyed the previous evening. It would be beyond ridiculous to associate her with smoky hotness. Even if she was.
Sighing, he edged back toward his side of the bed and tried to go back to sleep, but he was decidedly less comfortable there, physically and mentally.
After twenty minutes, languishing in a vicious circle of thoughts that most closely resembled an ouroboros, he eased off the bed, took his phone and clothes, and left the door open so he could hear her from downstairs.
Over the next few hours he read everything he could about juvenile dermatomyositis, the one thing he could control right now, to see if he could find answers that would set both their minds at ease.
At first light she came down the stairs, wrapped in a fluffy bathrobe, and curled right up with him on the couch, where she promptly went back to sleep with her head in his lap.
When he’d read every journal and website he could find about JDM, he slid out from beneath her and headed for the kitchen.
“Did you sleep at all?” She sounded groggy, but when he looked back, she was sitting up.
He slipped his phone into his pocket and stayed at the kitchen island, sitting on a stool there to face her. “I slept fine, but then I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I came downstairs to read.
”
“Find anything good?” Her sleepy gaze sharpened and she sat up straighter, like it would be better to hear bad news with her best posture employed.
He shook his head in answer.
“You mean you didn’t find anything, or what you found wasn’t good?”
“I found articles discussing the illness being triggered by viruses and infection, and another stating that it was theorized to have a genetic component, but nothing to suggest the alleles responsible had been identified, only hypothesized about,” he explained, and she relaxed back into the sofa cushions again, which seemed like a good reaction. “Which means you might not even be able to pass it on.”
“But I still may be able to.”
Although still sluggish, she got off the sofa and made her way into the kitchen. “Can you show me the ratios on tea to cider, so you don’t have to keep waiting on me for tea? I think I want some toast too. It feels like a day with food in it.”
“Take your antiemetic and wait twenty minutes. Just in case?” But what bothered as much as it pleased was the easy domesticity that continued between them. First sleeping. Then spooning. Then breakfast together, sleepy smiles over tea and toast.
He knew what she’d call it, or maybe he didn’t know the exact words, but he knew the gist. It was simply them falling into the New Family pattern. He struggled to even wrap his mind around the definition. Family meant something precise to him, and that wasn’t this, no matter what he was going along with right now.
Toast and tea went down easily enough, and before the morning was through she was asleep again on the sofa.
Now coming on afternoon, he’d done everything he could think to do to keep from going stir crazy. His research had wandered from diseases to custody, the rights of fathers in New York. That led him to contact a lawyer to arrange a meeting so that he could start the process to draw up papers.
And now he was again out of things to keep busy. The more time he spent in her presence, especially when not busy and unobserved, the more his thoughts strayed into dangerous territory. Like those first awkward days when he couldn’t close his eyes without flashes of their night together singeing the pleasure-seeking parts of his brain.
The silken skin he’d become reacquainted with last night.
The remarkable—he now knew—strength in her slender feminine frame. How she’d gripped him with her thighs in the dim candlelit shower. Her heat against him, around him, when the tile wall had been so cold.
He alternated between mindless fantasies and the ones that formed around shared holidays and vacations, with warm-skinned, blue-eyed children running around. It could work, he knew it could. She wanted him physically, she liked him—she hugged him too much to discard the notion that she was actually fond of him.
They needed to talk about this stuff, once she could stay awake long enough for conversation. Until then, he needed something to do. To distract himself, he went to the bookcase lining the far wall of the living area and prowled the shelves.
Organized by color, genres mixed together, she had a little of everything. But there was a shelf in the center that didn’t match the others, having spines of every color poking out. Thick spines, leather bound, embossed decoration... Photo albums.
He pulled the first one out and clawed into it, looking for some sort of focus, some sort of decency.
Pictures from last year’s work holiday drinks looked like a good place to start.
There would be no pictures from this year’s holiday get-together, as Penny hadn’t made it to the pub earlier in the week, and he’d pointedly not asked why. Not coming to a pub made more sense now—she’d said she’d suspected for a while. Making understood his unwillingness to speak about their night had been a mistake, and one he wasn’t going to make again. They had to talk about this stuff, no matter how worked up either of them got. It was an emotional subject, they were bound to get emotional, but if she wasn’t talking to him, he couldn’t fix whatever went wrong before it spiraled out of control. He didn’t want to miss something like that, like he’d missed with Nila.
Even now, none of that made sense to him. They’d grown up together, became high school sweethearts, dated on and off in college, and then really got back together at the joint barbecue their parents had thrown to celebrate each of them graduating university. Dating exclusively, marriage in medical school, and divorce in residency. Now, having had years to examine it, he still couldn’t point to any symptoms of a marriage dying.
Snagging four other albums, he tucked them under his arm and went to sit down to look at something besides the glowing screen giving him a headache since the middle of the night.
The department party photos flowed on to another Christmas scene, and he realized it was moving backward in time. She’d been out of the country last Christmas, so this had to be the year before that.
There organization disappeared after just a few pages. He expected another Christmas, but he got somewhere sunny. Different Davenports graced the pages, and he looked a little closer every time he saw a face he knew. How people spent their holidays said a lot about them. What could these pictures tell him about his child’s future family parties?
Were there clues here that he could spot to help him understand Penny better than he already did? Nila’s leaving had changed that about him, he paid attention to everything now. Everyone. He examined not just the external but the glimpses he got of the internal. Those glimpses just didn’t show enough to make him feel comfortable with any of this.
And the pictures? Well, he could see the Davenports summered in the Hamptons. Fourth of July came with a beach party of some kind. New Year’s Eve was always somewhere that glittered. In every picture, the Davenports always appeared perfectly presentable, precisely as he’d have expected.
It was the family Christmas parties he kept stopping at. Something bothered him about those photos. They looked like magazine spreads. Perfectly polished. The trees sparkled but had no personal touches he could see, unless they’d gathered as a family to learn how to blow glass and make ornaments.
It had probably been erected by a hired hand who’d picked every piece for beauty, not for sentimentality. Did the fabulously wealthy decorate their own trees or bake their own Christmas cookies?
He’d liked all the Davenports he’d met, so picking out, or possibly manufacturing flaws for these perfectly good people left a bitter taste in his mouth.
He flipped that album closed and reached for the next in his stack.
This one was both more interesting and more alarming. It looked like Penny’s Book of Dangerous Stunts.
Pictures of her racing a horse.
Pictures of her steering a parachute in for a landing.
Pictures of Penny the white-water rafter. The derby-car driver. The hang glider.
Penny caught by the belt by Charles Davenport as she dangled over the safety railing at Niagara Falls, her hands reaching for the water!
That one was older, but no more than a decade, and he could feel his expression mirroring the look he saw on Charles’s face—brows down, mouth open and horrified, and angry.
He snapped that album closed before his head exploded.
“Hey,” she said from the couch, sitting up, her face also mirroring Charles’s.
“Are you all right? Did I wake you?”
She ignored his questions, looked at the albums, her head tilted to see the colorful spines, then suddenly catapulted off the sofa to stumble over to snatch up the remaining albums. No words, she just hauled them right back to the shelf where he’d found them.
And didn’t even seem to notice that in her haste she’d stepped in one of her buckets and it was still on her foot.
“Glad those are clean,” he murmured.
Something she might also be thankful for when she realized her foot was in a
pail.
Which hadn’t happened yet.
She just turned to look at him. “Don’t look at these. Old photo albums are off-limits.”
That tranquil bubble that had been making him too comfortable all morning evaporated, which he was thankful for, but not enough to stop himself trying to understand. This was one of those glimpses.
“Why?” He stood up and when she clomped back to him, took her by the hips and lifted her up, booted the bucket out of the way, and set her back on her feet. “You’ve been wearing your barf bucket like the ugliest shoe in history.”
Coming out of a dead sleep and launching herself across the room wasn’t great for her powers of perception. But when her feet touched the cool wood floors, the sleepy haze started to lift. “These pills... I don’t know what’s worse, the nonstop vomiting without them or the nonstop sleep with them.”
“You’ll get used to them. In a few days you’ll be able to stay awake.”
She made some disgruntled sound and pulled away so she could put the remaining albums back, he realized. It was the fastest she’d moved in days, speeding from the chair to the bookshelves.
“What’s the point of albums if you don’t let people look at them?”
“They’re ugly,” she argued, then took two specific albums and wedged them behind the others so they were trapped between the books and the wall and not immediately visible, as if he hadn’t seen her put them there.
“You don’t want anyone seeing your awkward puberty photos?”
She sighed, then sagged against the shelves, but when she looked at him he could see clarity returning to her.
“I don’t want you to see those pictures. You don’t see me like that.” She straightened and walked back much more sluggishly, as if all the energy she’d had moments before was gone. “You know I was ill, but when you look at me you don’t see that girl. Poor little Penelope. You see Penny, pilot and paramedic, energetic and...maybe sometimes too impulsive. But you don’t pity me. You don’t look at me and think, can she physically do this or that?”
The Rescue Doc's Christmas Miracle Page 6