“She’s wet?” Bronwyn asked from the door. The dog stood beside her. “That’s a good sign she’s not dehydrated anymore. What were you doing up here?”
“Since you don’t have a crib, I wanted to figure out some place for the baby to sleep. Here, hold her while I push the bed against the wall.”
“Wait. Let me finish making it up first. It will be easier if I can get around it.” She smoothed out the top sheet, brought it to the head of the bed, and briskly folded the hem back before moving to the foot.
He liked the smooth, graceful way she performed the homey task. He especially liked the way her shorts pulled tight across her shapely butt when she bent over. Garth balanced the baby on one arm. With the other he lifted the foot of the mattress so she could tuck the sheet under. “Is that what you were doing when I got here? Making up the bed? Did I interrupt you?”
“What?” Bronwyn looked up from mitering a corner. “Oh. No. With the storm coming up, it got too dark to see. When I turned on the overhead light, the bulb flared and then went out with a loud bang. I thought for a second the house had been struck by lightning. Scared the bejesus out of me. Scared Mildred, too. If you factor in the way the floors creak and pop so that it sounds like an invisible person is in the room with you—” She laughed nervously. “Shoot, that’s the big reason I wanted to turn on the light in the first place and the reason I didn’t stay to finish the job after it burned out.”
“You think you have ghosts?”
“Of course not. It’s just, um… hard not to let my imagination run away with me.” The corners of her mouth turned up. “I have to admit coming back into this room was easier since you were in it.”
“So, do you believe in ghosts?”
She gave him a pained look. “I knew full well there wasn’t anyone in the house. It was foolishness. Do you think a doctor who imagines ghostly presences would have a chance of attracting patients?”
***
“Okay, Julia, you need fresh underwear,” he told the baby, holding her at arm’s length and looking her in the face once they were back downstairs. “We’re going to see what kind of job I do when I have directions. Will you hold her while I get organized?”
Bronwyn accepted the baby. “You don’t want me to diaper her?”
Garth rummaged through the plastic bags. He extracted a large package of diapers. “Do you know how?”
“Um, I’m sure I can.”
“That didn’t sound like a yes to me.”
“I’ve seen it done,” she defended herself.
The almond shape of his eyes became longer and narrower. The intense aqua of his irises took on a teasing glint. “Seen it?”
“All right, its mother or a nurse does the actual diapering.”
“In that case, I have more hands-on experience than you. No way am I letting the job I did before be my final grade. Kind of surprised me when I realized I’d never even watched someone change a baby. I need to achieve fundamental competence. I’m going to need to know how, someday. Someday soon, I hope.”
Bronwyn’s heart thumped, painfully. “You’re married?” Why hadn’t that possibility occurred to her? Talking with David had reassured her about Garth, but there was a lot more to a man than whether he was a good operator.
Garth pulled more baby supplies from the bags, organizing them on the kitchen’s small maple breakfast table. He grinned. “Hope to be.”
“Then what were you doing kissing me?”
“I was hoping you’d be the one having the baby.”
What? Bronwyn backed up and stumbled over a box. For one terrible second she lost her balance and was afraid she would fall and take the baby with her. Then strong arms had her, steadying her.
“You okay?” He peered into her face. “I didn’t mean to spring that on you. It just slipped out.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Well…”
“But it’s absurd. You don’t even know me.”
“Sometimes, when it’s right, you just know.”
Bronwyn stared. “You really are serious!”
“Hey, don’t get upset.”
“Don’t tell me not to get upset!” Her reaction was out of proportion, and she knew it. It wasn’t as if a patient had never propositioned her or jokingly asked her to marry him. She ought to treat the whole thing lightly.
He shrugged. “Okay, but you are upset. Hand me the baby. Look, I don’t intend to jump off the deep end with you. Why don’t we forget it?”
“If I tell you to get lost, to stay away from me, you will?” She asked dubiously as he carried the baby over to table where he’d set up his supplies and laid the baby on it.
“Well… I’d try to change your mind.” Keeping one hand on the baby’s belly, he flipped over the diaper package to read the instructions. He picked up the diaper he’d already laid out, but he was having trouble opening it with one hand while keeping the other on the squirming baby.
Bronwyn put her hand on Julia to keep her in place.
“Thanks,” he told her, still intent on the diagram. “Unfold the diaper like so… plastic side out—well, at least I got that much right… oh, I see where I went wrong. I tried to put it on her backwards. It goes this way.”
Bronwyn refused to be diverted. “Change my mind? You’ll interpret anything I do as meaning I return your feelings.”
He was silent while he ripped the duct tape from the baby’s diaper and pulled it from beneath her. Bronwyn took it, folded it in on itself, and put it in a garbage bag. She opened the baby wipes and handed him one.
He used it and held out a hand for another. “Do you always foresee this many problems anytime a man acts interested?” he asked.
“Don’t make this about me. But just for the record, the fact that you have to ask proves you don’t even know me—and I’d say having your baby qualifies as a little more than ‘interested.’”
He sighed. “Look. I know you’re not in love with me. I don’t expect you to be. Yet. I won’t push you any faster than you want to go.”
“You’re already going faster than I want to.”
“Okay.” Cleansing done, he pulled the diaper between Julia’s kicking legs. “I can go slower. Give me a time frame. Are we talking a few days? A week?”
“For what? To fall in love? I might not be in love in a couple of days or a week, either. I probably won’t—I mean I won’t be.”
He pulled the backing from the sticky tab and applied it with surgical accuracy. “Right, but in a week or two you’ll know if you like me. You’ll know if you ever want to see me again. I’ll make you a deal. At the end of thirty days, if you tell me to go away and not bother you again, I will.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. There’s nothing between us, and there’s not going to be.”
He pulled the backing off the other sticky tab and carefully positioned it to match the first one he’d placed. “Don’t lie.” His deep voice held a bite. “The attraction is there. You felt it when you kissed me.”
“I didn’t mean that. Look, no offense. I can’t see the point of starting anything when there’s no chance it will go anywhere.”
Julia began to fuss and squirm in earnest, impatient to be let up. Garth lifted her in his arms and straightened to face Bronwyn. He again wore his hard mask, but Bronwyn thought his eyes were a little narrowed. “I’ll consider myself warned. But just for clarification, even if I did offer you my heart, I’d be out of the running?”
He seemed to finally be getting the message. Bronwyn sighed. She wished she felt better about it. “Right.”
One corner of his mouth quirked cynically. “Are you going to give me the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech?”
That did it. She didn’t like rejecting people, but obviously he was not going to give up until she made herself abundantly clear. “No. I’l
l be perfectly honest. It is you. From the moment you showed up on my porch, you’ve lied, you evaded, and you’ve withheld. You’ve given me a miniscule amount of data on which to make an informed decision, and if I’m making a mistake about which parts are true, I could lose my license—that means my reputation and my livelihood. I don’t have anything else.”
Bronwyn hated that her voice was shaking. She swallowed a couple of times to get it under control. “This child needs my protection. I will work with you to care for her but don’t think my willingness to let you come around means I want any deeper involvement with you. You are forty miles of bad road. There’s nothing to do but get past it as fast and as safely as I can and, when I do, not look back.”
Chapter 18
The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in the temple before the battle is fought.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Driving to Bronwyn’s house the next morning, Garth felt good. Cheerful. Something he hadn’t felt in a long time. A little surprising in the light of the overall challenges he faced.
Yesterday all his assumptions had crumbled. Nothing was as it seemed. Dark possibilities had assailed him, one after the other. Someone hadn’t wanted him asking questions or recounting his version of what had happened in Afghanistan. Someone, if MacMurtry could be believed, who was willing to let him and all his men be killed.
Bad as the news was, it was better than the frustration of spinning his wheels. He had a place to start. And since yesterday he had an even bigger problem: If the truth about the baby’s origins got out, he could wind up in Leavenworth. To top it all off, showing up with a baby had put him behind with Bronwyn even before he got started.
This morning he’d lifted the adult-sized fingerprints from the bottle and UPS’d them to a contact in San Diego. If the baby had been aboard just any plane, identifying the fingerprints would have been a long shot. She’d been on a spy plane, though, so there was a chance that the person who had put her aboard was in the system.
He’d also poured the few drops left of the bottle’s contents into another container and sent it to an independent lab for analysis. When he’d seen how active Julia was once she began waking up, and how noisy, he’d questioned how she could have been quiet for the duration of a flight. Bronwyn thought Julia had been drugged, and he suspected she was right. He wanted to know, not because he wanted the evidence of a crime, but because he needed to know what kind of people he was dealing with.
For now, it was all he could do.
When he’d returned to his trailer last night, he’d pulled up the file he’d made about the qualifications a wife should have. He’d whistled under his breath as he’d run down the list. Bronwyn got a passing grade on fewer than fifty percent. If he didn’t have the conviction way too deep to be questioned that she was the woman for him, she would be out of the running. He respected her ambition and dedication, but he had a hard time squaring her present goals with the goals she would need to be his wife. Since it was not possible that she wasn’t his mate, her goals would have to change.
Nobody these days said an officer’s wife had to jettison her career to support his, but reality trumped ideals of equality every time. Being married to someone in the military was hell on a spouse’s career advancement. Instead of being able to strategize each job change as a step forward, frequent relocations forced non-military partners to take whatever was available or even to work outside their fields. While their civilian counterparts moved up in salary and responsibility, military spouses’ resumes showed a lack of experience commensurate with their age and a series of entry-level jobs.
Bronwyn couldn’t open a new office every time he was transferred. How she would practice medicine as his wife was a bridge they would have to cross when they came to it.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Yesterday, she had been sweeping in her rejection. She didn’t want him in her life now and would be happy when he was gone. He had a lot of ground to make up.
This morning he had to start the process of courting Bronwyn.
***
Bronwyn woke to the sound of a baby laughing and cooing. A cold, wet dog nose snuffled at her neck. Supposedly, interns’ excruciating schedules trained them to come awake instantly from a sound sleep. The training hadn’t worked for her. She still needed a few minutes to detach the wisps of dreams that clung around her. She knew there was something odd about a baby being in bed with her, but since it seemed no odder or more unlikely than many of her dreams, it didn’t bother her.
Mildred blew in her ear. “I’m awake, Mildred,” she told the dog. “And you want to go out. Okay, I’ll get up.” Mildred, hearing the magic word, okay, raced to the door. Her heavy paws thundered down the long staircase. There was nothing to do but get up. Mildred would wait at the door for a minute or two, and if Bronwyn didn’t come, she would be back.
Bronwyn pushed herself to a sitting position and managed to open her eyes. The uncurtained and far from clean windows let in misty light, making it hard to tell how late it was. The significance of the baby sounds finally occurred to her. Her heart almost stopped. She had a baby to look after. Fortunately the baby was waving her little hands and kicking her feet in apparent delight. She seemed to have come to no harm, but Bronwyn was stabbed hard by guilt that checking the baby hadn’t been her first thought.
She patted the round little belly. “Oh, look at you. At least one of us wakes up ready to deal with the day.”
Knowing she would be sleepwalking for the first half hour in the morning, Bronwyn depended on inflexible routine to get her through the ordeal of waking up. She laid out her clothes the night before. She set her keys, shoes, and pocketbook in front of the front door. She set the coffee maker to come on automatically and even put a clean cup beside it. She had done none of that last night. She’d insisted Garth leave and had taken herself and the baby straight to bed.
Now, with none of her props in place, she felt like she was swimming through molasses as she picked up the baby and padded barefoot downstairs. In the hall her bare toes encountered a pool of water. Mildred was one of the most trustworthy dogs—holding it no matter what. All the changes going on must have upset her schedule. Bronwyn found a towel that had somehow made its way to the balustrade and wiped up the puddle.
She reached the kitchen. The back door was standing open, a hot bar of yellow sunlight gilding the all-too-apparent dust on the wooden floor. Mildred! Bronwyn couldn’t imagine how she’d gotten the door open. “Mildred,” she called, panicked. The yard wasn’t fenced, and Mildred was fast.
“I’m watching her.” Garth’s gravelly voice came from the porch. His masculine shape moved into the light. Bronwyn’s breath caught. Her heart skipped several beats.
Elongated by the shadow that flowed across the floor to cover her bare toes, and with his burnished skin edged in gold, he could have been a power figure from a dream, full of portent, the meaning of his message always elusive.
“Come out,” he urged. “It’s a beautiful morning. Cool.”
Her eyes not really open yet, Bronwyn let him draw her outside. The damp chill of the boards under her bare feet made her toes curl. She squinted up at Garth. “Are you supposed to be here?”
“Poor baby.” He drew her into his arms. “Morning just isn’t your time, is it?”
He threaded his fingers into her hair and massaged her scalp with deep, firm strokes while he ran his other hand up and down her back. She thought he might have pressed kisses to the top of her head. She wasn’t sure. She laid her head on his chest and listened to the heavy, slow da-dum of his heartbeat and inhaled his wonderful morning man-smell of spicy shaving soap and fresh clothes and masculine musk.
In the cool morning air his heat was comforting. A person might think all the stroking and soothing and warmth would send her back to sleep, but in a minute or two, it was apparent the man knew what he was doing.
By degrees she became more alert, more together. Her brain sped up. Her thoughts took on form and order.
With the old brain functioning again, she knew she couldn’t continue to stand there, not when her waking-up body wanted to rub itself against his, not when she longed to tip her head back and offer open lips for his kiss. Besides, the baby made a little grunt of impatience, and now that she thought about it, Bronwyn believed that smell indicated the need for a fresh diaper.
She pulled away, and he instantly let her go. Somehow he had transferred the baby to his own arm. “Um, thank you,” she mumbled, not sure why she said it, just feeling somehow as if thanks were called for.
“Anytime.”
Bronwyn held out her arms. “I’ll take her now. She needs changing. And feeding.”
“I’ve got her. Take a minute to have a cup of coffee and get your eyes open.” He whistled to the dog, then turned Bronwyn and pushed her gently through the doorway.
Standing at the chipped yellow kitchen counter, Bronwyn sipped her coffee. The coffee was finishing the job of bringing her to full consciousness. As it did, all the things she had planned for today crowded her mind. “What time is it?” she asked in alarm. “A building contractor is supposed to be here at nine.”
Garth glanced at a watch with enough dials and functions to land a spacecraft on Mars. “Oh-seven-hundred.” He carried Julia over to the breakfast table where changing supplies had been left. “What do you need a contractor for? Are you planning to live here permanently? It will take a lot of work to make this place habitable.”
She heard the slight emphasis on the word here, the trace of incredulity in his voice. After less than twenty-four hours in the house, she already knew it needed more than a thorough cleaning and a coat of paint. In its present incarnation, the house wasn’t much to look at; nevertheless, it hurt her feelings to hear it criticized. She stiffened.
“I want to make it not just habitable. I want the make the front part of the house into an office suite. Doctors for hundreds of years had had their offices in their homes. I can, too.”
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