Now she smoothed her palm over the infant’s head in a gesture that looked like affection and smiled when one of the baby’s flailing hands latched onto a finger and brought it to her mouth.
The baby’s arms and legs were moving more now than when he’d first found her. More than when the doctor first started to examine her. Her gaze was not so distant and unfocused. He didn’t know if she was better, but it made her look not quite so sick.
The doctor gently reclaimed her finger and turned to face him. “Her heart and lungs sound good. The main thing is that she looks dehydrated. The question is, how did she get that way? Has she had vomiting? Diarrhea?”
There had been a lot of what looked like wet yellow clay in that loaded diaper, but he hadn’t taken time to examine it. She hadn’t done anything since. “No. Not in the last hour.”
“How about before…?”
He already knew his story wouldn’t stand up to any official probing. That’s why he wanted to avoid hospitals. He needed to stop mooning over the doctor’s womanly attributes and remember she was still a doctor who would have questions. His task now was to feed her the right information so that she would ask only the questions he wanted her to.
“You’re thinking I’m not much of a dad, aren’t you?”
She didn’t deny it. “I’d rather try to help you than judge you. This child lacks the basics. She doesn’t even have on a shirt. Where is her mother?”
“No telling.” God knows that was the truth. Now for the part he needed her to buy into. “She left. She said since I was the father, I could have her.”
She assessed him with a long look. “Are you the father?”
“Yeah… Probably… I could be.” A certain amount of acting ability was part of a SEAL’s skill set. The heat that rose to his cheeks was real, though. Garth didn’t have to dig deep to find the shame he would feel if his carelessness had resulted in a child he didn’t even know about. He jammed his hands in his pockets. The doctor would have more questions about the baby’s condition so he had to stick as close to the truth as possible. “I didn’t find her until an hour ago.”
“Find her? You mean the mother just left her—without even telling you? That’s reckless endangerment of a child—not to mention abandonment. Crimes. She needs to be reported.”
“I don’t want to get her in trouble. She wasn’t careless about it, not deliberately. I would have found Julia sooner if I hadn’t been delayed by the weather. The important thing is I have her now. I want her, and I’m willing to take care of her.”
“You want her.” The doctor lifted one of the baby’s feet and pressed her palm against it. Smiled when the baby pushed back. “Where did you find her?”
“In a hangar.” Close enough.
“Hangar, as in ‘airplane hangar’? There’s an airport around here?”
“I run a small airfreight service.”
“What do you do there?”
“Log flights in and out. Load planes and accept deliveries. Maintain the physical plant. Routine maintenance on the planes. Stuff like that.” True. All too true. He also sometimes took a boat past the three-mile limit, where he met fishing boats and occasionally dove to retrieve particular bits of hardware that had been dropped off. And, of course, helped spies into and out of the country.
“How long was she unattended before you found her?”
“I’m not sure.” How long would the flight have been? “Maybe as long as six hours. Maybe more.”
“Six or more hours as hot as it’s been today? If you hadn’t found her, she would have died.” The doctor’s eyes widened in shock and horror even though her voice stayed low and controlled. It did him good for someone else to react as he had. It validated him and formed a connection between them.
“All right,” she said, moving on. “We might not need to look any further for the cause of her dehydration. We’ll start with fluids. She’ll perk up pretty quickly if that’s the problem.”
“She’s just dehydrated? That’s a relief.” If she had been really sick, he would have had no choice except to take her to a hospital and leave her there. If there was any hope at all of saving his career, there could be no official records of a connection between them.
He would have relinquished the baby to save her life, but for the rest of his life, abandoning her would have weighed on him. He had taken responsibility for her, and until he could return her to whomever she belonged to, he would trust no one else to be in charge. “Does she need an IV?”
“No, you can give her a rehydration formula, like Pedialyte—not water or milk. If the baby is strong enough to suckle, rehydration by mouth is really better. The trouble is I don’t have any nursing bottles.” She gave him a dry look. “I’m betting you don’t, either.”
“There was one with her. I didn’t bring it.”
The bottle had been in the box with her, covered with feces like everything else. Knowing it might be the best source of fingerprints, he had bagged it, feces and all. It might offer the best chance of tracing her origins and returning her to whomever she belonged to. He would lift the prints later and have a contact run them through Interpol AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system. “I’ll get some bottles. Do I need a prescription for the Pedialyte?”
“It’s over the counter. You should be able to find it anywhere that carries diapers and baby food.”
“Good. I appreciate this, doc.” Making sure he had his back to the light aimed at the ceiling, he thumbed off the flash he had been holding and hung it on his belt. He reached for his wallet. “We’ll get out of your way now. What do I owe you?”
She flung out a hand, as if she could keep him from reaching for the baby. “Owe me? You’re not leaving!”
When he had made his plan to avoid tangling with the establishment, he’d been thinking about all the security cameras at a hospital that would record his and the baby’s presence, the number of people he would have to interact with, and the very real possibility that someone would see the condition of the baby and turn him over to a welfare worker.
He’d neglected to factor in the personal responsibility. It was well known that people were more likely to rush to a rescue when alone than in a crowd. In a group, faced with a difficult choice, people could justify their disinclination to get involved by telling themselves it was someone else’s job. Whereas if they knew that if they didn’t act no one would, they sometimes surprised themselves with their courage.
Now the tiny doctor was standing in front of him, feet planted like she thought she could bar his way. Something about it made him smile. Physically, she was no match for him. He could take the baby and leave anyway. She couldn’t stop him, but she didn’t seem to know that.
She was kind of cute, believing that delicate-boned hand could hold him. Just out of curiosity, to test her mettle and see what she would do, he went under the slender arm, fingers curved as if he intended to scoop the baby up. “Thought I would.”
Chapter 10
Don’t bother running. You’ll only die tired.
—SEAL saying
“Think again!” Bronwyn grabbed his arm.
She hadn’t wanted him there, and she ought to have been relieved to get rid of him, but she wasn’t in the ER anymore, and she didn’t have to play by ER rules.
She had decided to open a medical office here so she could practice the kind of medicine she believed in, instead of the “treat ’em and street ’em” philosophy driven by a need to see as many patients as possible to make a practice profitable.
She wanted to get to know patients, to understand what they needed. To understand the environmental influences that were producing their symptoms. Too many of the problems she saw in the emergency room didn’t need to be emergencies at all. They were chronic conditions that weren’t being managed. Instead the patients went from crisis to crisis.
She wanted to do more than dispense drugs. She wanted to deliver health care—to see patients get healthier and help them stay healthy. She wanted to be part of her patients’ world and have them be part of hers.
No way was she letting her first patient disappear in what was obviously a crisis, never to be seen again—not until she had addressed some of the conditions that had put the child in crisis to begin with. At the very least she needed to see, with her own eyes, the baby’s recovery.
Still, Bronwyn might not have been so determined to stand up to him if his lips hadn’t curled in that slightly dismissive smile with his laconic, “Thought I would.”
Her heart pounded. She lifted her chin. Now that she was in a confrontation with him, she was not going to back down. “I’m not releasing this baby. I don’t have an adequate history, much less any tests. I’m only guessing she’s dehydrated. Until I’ve seen how she responds to some fluids and electrolytes, she’s not going anywhere.”
Bronwyn dug her fingers into his forearm, determined to make the point that she would stop him by whatever means necessary. Except for that one brief moment of visceral awareness of him when he had pulled off his poncho, she had been happy to look at the baby more than at him. Now, having thrown down the gauntlet, she tried to read his expression. And discovered she couldn’t.
Her heart stumbled and banged against her breastbone. From the beginning, he had positioned himself so that the light was always behind him, his face in shadow. In fact, she hadn’t seen his face clearly at any time since his arrival—by his intention, she suddenly realized.
A chill went up her spine. She looked at her hand on his forearm. Her fingers didn’t go even halfway around and in the dim light looked impossibly white against his darkness. Despite her size, she rarely felt small or delicate. Suddenly she did. She felt small and delicate and soft and feminine and vulnerable. Not her own strength, but his held him back.
Her whole body shook with the force of each heartbeat. She breathed deeply, aware she was close to gasping. Unable to decide if the mix of sensations flooding her was fear or sexual thrall, she withdrew her hand and lightly clasped the baby’s round little legs, needing to anchor herself, to remember it was the baby’s well-being she was fighting for.
“Let’s talk about this a minute.” Touching him had been a mistake, but Bronwyn wasn’t about to give up. She strove for a tone of reasonableness. “If her symptoms aren’t caused by not getting enough fluids in this heat, we could be looking at anything from a stomach virus—to name the most likely—to ingestion of drugs, to serious or even fatal diseases. Do you really want to be off by yourself somewhere when you realize the fluids aren’t making her better?”
“Are you trying to scare me?” She couldn’t really see his expression, but she could see the white flash of his teeth, as if he was grinning at her. And aren’t you just the cutest little thing to think you can?—that’s what his inflection said.
Jerk. She ignored his provocation. “I want you to understand that I consider this baby’s condition serious. I’m hoping we’re both on the same side—hers. She can’t speak for herself. I have to be willing to go to bat for her.” Bronwyn wished with all her heart she could see his face. She couldn’t tell whether she was getting through to him or not.
Just then, the ancient fluorescent tubes in the ceiling flickered into life.
Three things happened. The baby began to cry and flail her little hands in front of her eyes.
Mildred woofed softly in surprise and scrambled to her feet, snapped out of her doze by the sudden retreat of darkness.
And, finally able to see the man’s face, Bronwyn slapped her cheeks in surprise and laughed aloud, more purely relieved than any time since she had first heard the pounding at the door.
Chapter 11
Never go against your gut; it is your operational antenna.
—The Moscow Rules
In the sudden light, Garth saw the mud-green appliances and yellow countertops of a kitchen unchanged since the sixties. It not only hadn’t been remodeled since then, it looked like it hadn’t been painted or cleaned many times, either. Brown shipping boxes covered most of the floor.
His attention was all for the doctor, though. He had thought her hair was dark brown, but it was actually deep, mahogany red, and her skin was the smooth matte cream that sometimes went with hair like that. Her cheeks were delicately tinted by her laughter, and her eyes, sparkling with humor and surrounded by starburst lashes, were the rich, transparent red-brown of perfectly brewed iced tea, like his mother made. He thought she was flavored like tea, too. Brisk, clear, refreshing, uncomplicated.
He understood now why he hadn’t known, and would never have guessed, she was a doctor. If he didn’t already know she was strong, decisive, and brave enough to stand up to a man who intimidated a lot of people, he might have thought she looked like a kid with smooth, round cheeks and a round chin—a kid too young to wear cosmetics. She wasn’t beautiful, but God, she was pretty in a fresh, innocent way he found enchanting and guessed she probably hated. She had no armor at all.
He wanted her. Wanted to cup those delicious little muffin-top breasts and run his tongue over their sweetness. Wanted to let his hands overflow with the generosity of her tush while plunging into her wet heat.
He wanted her courage and tenacity. Wanted the true grit that would make her take on a man trained in lethal arts who outweighed her by ninety pounds. Wanted the dedication to selfless values that made her do it. Wanted the tenderness she showed the baby and the gentle authority with which she managed a strong animal.
Wanted her now and beyond a shadow of a doubt, he wanted her forever.
The sense of completion, of trust, of sheer rightness he’d had since he’d handed her the baby to hold while he went back for the flashlights suddenly made sense. She was the one. His mate. The woman he would marry. The woman who would bear his children.
Was this what falling in love at first sight was? He’d always imagined something sweeter, milder than this bone-crushing certainty that he had to win her. Something terrible beyond his capacity to imagine would happen if he failed. Some glue that held the world together would fail, and everything he cared about would be destroyed.
He looked down at the whimpering baby. This was so not the time to have a cosmic awakening. This was not the moment to crash into portentous thoughts he only half understood.
And holy shit, if this wasn’t the worst possible moment to fall in love at first sight, he didn’t know what was. He had a baby to care for until he could return her to those whose she legitimately was. He had to keep her off the radar until he could do that, both for her sake and because he could kiss his career good-bye if the powers that be found out he had gone off the reservation—and once he had her squared away, he had a career that had to be gotten back on track before he had anything to offer a woman.
Why he hadn’t understood that Bronwyn was his forever love the first time he saw her, he didn’t know. Probably it happened now because Murphy was still screwing with him. He couldn’t have looked more like a loser.
She thought he was an unwed father, and a neglectful one at that. And he couldn’t even start over once he had the baby stowed in a safe place. He couldn’t appear with a baby in his arms one week and come back without her the next.
It didn’t matter what the obstacles were. This might be the wrong time and the wrong place, but she was still the right woman. He focused on the present. “What are you laughing at?” he asked her.
“Not at you.” She brushed away his concern with a wave of a tiny hand. “Mostly I’m laughing at myself. I’m just so relieved. I know you!” She tsk’d at her own denseness. “Garth Vale. Of course. You were at JJ’s wedding. I’m sorry I couldn’t place your name when you introduced yourself, but if it helps, I kept having a feeling there was something familiar about you! I’m Bronwyn Whitescarver,” she beame
d expectantly.
Garth nodded slowly. Davy’s wedding the previous Thanksgiving had been a spur of the moment affair. When Davy had asked Garth to be his best man because all Davy’s real friends were either operating in far-flung corners of the world or had holiday plans already scheduled, Garth had done it, even though he’d had to give up part of his leave and delay his trip home to see his folks. Here was the proof, if he needed it, that no good deed goes unpunished.
Now, when it was way too late to undo anything, she remembered him. She was waiting for a reply, but what the hell was he supposed to say? I recognized you instantly and have been trying to duck you? Oh, yeah, that would win a girl’s heart.
Bronwyn picked up the crying baby. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?” She slanted him an amused glance. “I’m not surprised. We weren’t in the same room more than twenty minutes. Besides, who would look at me if I were standing beside JJ?”
She said it with a twist of humor and without any touch of self-pity. JJ was phenomenally attractive, movie-star beautiful. She was also tall and voluptuous. She would make two of this elfin-looking creature. But God, he hated to think Bronwyn believed she was insignificant beside her. It was too late to correct her mistaken impression that he didn’t remember her. If only he could go back and do the whole thing again… either leave the second he recognized her or use their acquaintance to further his mission.
No. Knowing what he knew now, he couldn’t wish he had done the first, and knowing what he did now, he didn’t really want her mixed up in this. He wanted her safe, set apart, untouched. If there was one thing a SEAL wouldn’t do, it was second-guess himself. Hanging around had been a calculated risk. The possibility that he would jeopardize his future happiness had been unforeseeable.
The only time he could do anything about was now. “How did you recognize me?”
“JJ hauls out wedding pictures every time we’re together. You’re in a lot of them.”
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