SEALed Forever

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

  She insinuated her hand between them, intending to ask for distance, and wound up spreading her fingers over the raised definition of pecs that she could no longer resist the temptation of digging her fingertips into. Reluctantly aware of how far out of hand she’d let things get, she pressed at the hard muscles that curved over the joint of his shoulder. He lifted his head but did not release her. Instead, with his free hand, he continued to press firm strokes deep into the flesh of her hip.

  She inhaled sharply when the warm, hard hand wandered to her thigh and, with casual strength, lifted it and moved it further from the other thigh. “You said,” she reminded him, “you were just going to touch.”

  His smile was unrepentant. “Yeah. But you knew I’d go as far as you’d let me.”

  Do not smile, she told the unruly corners of her mouth. Do not. “You’re going faster than I want to go.”

  “Your head is talking, Bronny. Not your body. Your body says something else.” He brought his hand back up to slip it under her top.

  He palmed her breast with his hard, warm hand, then squeezed with firm, insistent pressure. “These for instance. You know you want me to draw them in my mouth and tug on them, just as much as I want to. I want to feel you arch against me when I hit the combination that does it for you.”

  How did he know? Her eyes went hot with longing. She could have denied a lot of things but not that. She wasn’t the kind of woman who easily put sex on the back burner. She hadn’t entered into a lot of relationships because few men wanted to compete with the demands of medical school, and even men she found physically attractive didn’t feel good. She had a collection of sex toys, but nothing remotely simulated the feel of a man’s mouth or satisfied the hunger for that stimulation.

  She reached to pull his head down at the same time he pushed her top up to uncover her breasts.

  The baby made a fussy, whiny sound. They both pulled away and listened. When, after a second or two, Julia quieted, he took a moment to frankly look at Bronwyn’s breasts. In a tone of husky reverence he said, “These are about the prettiest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  With infinite care he took her into his mouth, tasting, testing, questing. Hot, wet twirling tongue, scraping teeth, and then, and then, he trapped the nipple hard against the roof of his mouth and suckled in deep tugging pulls. It was as if he pulled at her whole body. She felt the tug in her womb, and the junction of her thighs throbbed in time.

  Bronwyn moaned and fisted her hand in his hair to hold him to her. As he had predicted, her body arched as she crested the first peak.

  He lifted his head to look into her eyes. “You could get off on this alone, couldn’t you?”

  The baby made another fussy sound, this one more imperative. He went back to kissing her breast, but the mood was gone. Reluctantly, Bronwyn pushed him away. “She’s waking up. I have to go in.”

  Mildred stood up and shook all over. That clenched it as far as Bronwyn was concerned. “Mildred says we have to go in, too.”

  He straightened her top and helped her sit up. Then, with the fluid grace so characteristic of him, he rose to his feet and lifted her to hers. “If ‘Mildred says,’ who am I to argue?”

  Chapter 25

  Pick the time and place for action.

  —The Moscow Rules

  Back in the house and upstairs, they found Julia had rolled over. She lay on her stomach, propped up on her elbows. Her cheeks were flushed. She looked at them accusingly.

  She quieted when Garth picked her up. Her diaper was dry. He murmured the patter that seemed soothing to her, but as soon as he put her back in the crib, she rolled over, sat up, and began fussing again.

  While Garth held her in his arms, Bronwyn took her temperature.

  “Has she got a fever?”

  Bronwyn read the digital display. “Point eight over normal, but I don’t think that’s significant by itself.”

  Julia chewed on her fist. It glistened with a coating of thick drool, as did her chin.

  Bronwyn fluffed the baby’s hair, thinking. “She’s been acting like this off and on all day. She may be teething. Let me see your gums, sweetie.” Bronwyn pushed back the baby’s soft-firm lip and ran a fingertip over Julie’s gum. “Yep. There it is. See that little red swelling? She has an upper lateral incisor coming in.”

  “What do we do?”

  “There’s not much to do. It’s perfectly normal.”

  Garth tried laying Julia down again, but she howled and lifted her arms as if to say, “Don’t leave me like this.” The sound clutched at his heart.

  “Pain is always worse at night, isn’t it?” he told the baby sympathetically as he took her in his arms again. He frowned at Bronwyn over Julia’s head. “We can’t just let her cry. We have to do something. There must be something that will help.”

  She colored slightly and shrugged. “It’s been a million years since I did a peeds rotation. Babies don’t present in an ER with teething pain.” She went to the bureau where she had placed her laptop. “I’ll see what I can find on the Internet.”

  “I’m not going to let her just cry.” If Bronwyn didn’t know what to do, he was on his own. An idea came to him. He shifted Julia to his other arm. “Hang on. I’m calling Dr. Mom.”

  Surprised at the sudden change in his tone, Bronwyn looked up.

  “Mom?” He put the phone to his ear, while Bronwyn listened with surprised interest. After a few greetings, she heard him say, “I have a question. What do you do for a baby that’s teething?… Oh, a friend and I are baby-sitting a friend’s kid for a couple of days… Bronwyn. You’re going to love her, Mom.”

  He chuckled at something that was said. “Okay. Frozen bagel. What else?” He listened for a minute, then held the phone against his chest to report, “Mom says there is homeopathic teething gel that helps.” He returned the phone to his ear.

  “Chamomile tea? All right. How long is teething going to take? A day or two? Or three?… Okay. Thanks Mom… Yes I will. Soon… Love you, too.” He closed the phone. “You heard.”

  “Do you just pick up the phone and call your mom whenever you need to know something?” Bronwyn wondered what that would feel like.

  “When I need to know mom-stuff, yeah.” His shoulders moved in a wry shrug. “Not so much when I need operating info.” With his eyes fixed in the middle distance, he looked thoughtful. “But I haven’t called her like that in a long time.”

  He looked thoughtful! Bronwyn gasped, fascinated by the change she saw in him. Suddenly, she had no trouble reading and interpreting his expression. The mask was gone.

  “It was kind of good, you know?” he asked, oblivious to her surprise at the change in him. “Why do you ask? Don’t you call your mom? Didn’t you say she was a doctor? With her, you could double-dip.”

  Bronwyn shook her head, unable to explain why a quick tapping into her mother’s store of knowledge would never have occurred to her. Nor could she explain that she’d asked only because when he’d heard his mother’s voice, the blue of his eyes had warmed and the hard line of his lips had softened. He was himself, and yet she had glimpsed another man—or a man from another time.

  Bronwyn returned to the purpose of the call. “Did she say chamomile tea was a remedy for teething babies?”

  “Yes. Give her a couple of teaspoons from a medicine dropper, or soak a washcloth in it and freeze it.”

  “I have chamomile. I’ll go put the kettle on right now. Today she was happy as long as she was being carried.”

  “Okay, I’ll walk her.”

  ***

  Downstairs, while Garth walked Julia back and forth, Bronwyn filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then dragged the step stool over to the counter. The cabinets in this house must have been built for a giant. She looked forward to renovating so that the cabinets would be lowered as much as she looked forward
to new appliances.

  “Now, let’s see if I can find the box of tea in this disorganized cabinet. No matter how hard I try to put something back exactly where I got it from, when I look for it again, it isn’t there. When we were fixing tea for lunch, JJ found the sugar inside a pot. Can you believe it?”

  Garth smiled and nodded to show he understood while he continued to stroll through the kitchen, through the family room and back, murmuring to the baby in a soft, rumbly undertone.

  She tuned into what he was saying while she poured boiling water over the tea bag in a glass measuring cup, and set it on the counter to steep.

  “Do you like history?” she heard him ask the baby. “Then when you are in Germany, you should take the rattling, clattering two-car train to Limburg. It’s a town straight out of the thirteenth century. Lots of old, half-timbered houses leaning over narrow, cobbled streets, like an illustration from a fairy tale.”

  He shifted Julia to his other shoulder and continued. “You’re too young to drink the beer, and you should think twice about the cheese—but the really bad stuff comes from the other Limburg. You should try the pretzels. If you like cathedrals, and I’m not saying I do, the one there is kind of pretty.”

  “You’ve been to Limburg?” Bronwyn asked. “I loved the cathedral there. It was great to see a cathedral painted in rich colors the way they looked originally.”

  He rocked Julia side to side. “When were you there?”

  “JJ and I did a junior year abroad. How about you?”

  “I don’t come from people who ‘do’ junior years abroad.” He grinned. “When we want to see the world, we join the navy. I went to college on an NROTC scholarship. Were your parents rich?”

  “Not in JJ’s class, but… I guess most people—except for the really rich—” she grinned, “would say we were. They could afford a junior year abroad for me.”

  “I don’t get it. You told us at lunch that you have huge med school debts. Are you saying your parents paid for a junior year abroad, but not medical school?”

  Bronwyn’s face felt tight. “They would pay for anything that looked like it would distract me from medicine.”

  “They weren’t proud of you?”

  Bronwyn wouldn’t mind telling him, but her old, well-worn feelings of hurt mystification were like dusty curtains obscuring the windows into the past. She didn’t see through them well enough herself to explain her family’s dynamics to anyone else. She shrugged. “It’s complex.”

  He made another circuit of the room. If Bronwyn heard right, he was describing how to build something called a “hide” for the purpose of “laying up” during the day. His red shirt now had a darker red wet spot on the shoulder where Julia’s head rested.

  The tea had steeped five minutes. She removed the bag and poured the brew from cup to cup to cool it. When she judged it to be room temperature, she filled a five milliliter dropper with the pale brown liquid.

  “I’m ready to start Operation Chamomile,” she called.

  With Garth holding her, Julia readily took the tea a few drops at a time.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “That’s it. One dropper full is one teaspoon. I gave her two per ‘Dr. Mom’s’ instructions. I guess we wait and see what happens.” The baby was quieter now, whether from the travelogues and training lectures or exhaustion, it would be hard to say. “Why don’t you try rocking her in the rocking chair? Or if you like, I’ll take her.”

  “I’ve got her.”

  Bronwyn relished the strength and control with which the tall man lowered himself into the low rocker while holding the baby to his broad chest. The chair squeaked slightly as he set it in motion, in this case a pleasantly creaky sound. Mildred lay down on the floor beside him. In a few minutes, the down-covered globe of Julia’s head nestled deeper into the brown curve of his neck.

  Chapter 26

  Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.

  —The Moscow Rules

  Garth kept Julia balanced while she squirmed her way into a new position on his chest. He’d never thought holding a baby would be such a comfortable, satisfying thing to do. She seemed to find the alignment she was looking for and went lax again. He smoothed her little shirt across her narrow back.

  Bronwyn had retreated to the kitchen where she was rinsing the tea things and setting them in the yellow plastic dish drainer. Her back was to him. The light above the sink brought out the deep red of her hair. He liked the clean efficiency of her movements. He didn’t like the shadowy look that had come into her eyes when she talked about her parents.

  The more he saw of her, the more he knew she was his. Just being with her made joy and lightness expand deep within his chest. And the way she responded to him—God, he wanted her—and it was going to be so good.

  But the more he saw of her, the more he realized something held her back. Something dimmed her. He wanted to know what it was. If it was pain, then he wanted to comfort her, and if it was just part of how she was, he wanted to add it into all the other things he loved about her.

  “Bronny, when people give ‘It’s complicated’ as an answer, they mean they don’t like the looks of the truth, so they’re trying to chip enough pieces off it to make it look like something else.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “Like a bust of Elvis they’re trying to tell themselves is a bust of Lincoln. Chip off as much as they want to. It still doesn’t look like Lincoln. It just looks like an uglier and uglier Elvis.”

  She stopped wiping the counter to look up at him.

  “So I’m going to ask you again. Why wouldn’t your parents be happy to see you become a doctor? They should have been proud of you for wanting to carry on the family tradition.”

  She rinsed the sponge and set it on the sink rim. “They didn’t need me for tradition. They had Landreth.”

  “Your brother,” Garth clarified. “Because he was male?”

  She dried her hands on a paper towel and crossed them over her waist. Despite the casual way she leaned against the counter, he noticed the protective gesture. “I can’t accuse them of chauvinism. No, it had nothing to do with gender. They just didn’t think I had what it took. They thought a medical education would be a waste since I wouldn’t last through my first year in med school.”

  “Why? You’re obviously smart enough.”

  Her slender shoulders twitched in the suggestion of a shrug. “I’m going to have a glass of wine.” She took a bottle of merlot from the refrigerator. “Can I bring you one?”

  “Thanks.” He waited while she poured two glasses and brought him one. “Sit down,” he said, and returned to his questions. “Why, Bronny?”

  She curled into the big, fake-leather easy chair and ran her fingers across the duct tape patch on the arm. “They thought I was too imaginative and too emotional to succeed. But I never wanted to be anything but a doctor, so it put us on a collision path.”

  “I’ve only known you a couple of days, but I can see what being a doctor means to you. How could they fail to understand?”

  Bronwyn’s shoulders moved. She took a sip of wine and looked into the distance. “Even before I could read, I liked to study the pictures in my parents’ medical texts. They let me because I could be trusted not to destroy them and it kept me amused. I think they thought it was kind of cute to see a tot poring over a big, thick book.”

  He could just see her in a big chair with her legs sticking straight out and a book bigger than she was in her lap. He couldn’t help but smile. “Did you have bright red hair?”

  She touched her hair self-consciously. “It was always dark. It hasn’t changed much.”

  “I threw you off-topic. When did you become a problem child?”

  “I wasn’t one at all. My parents’ guests often remarked what a quiet, well-behaved child I was because I was playing quietly on the floor, entertaining
myself with a toy.” She added an ironic lift to her lips. “I seemed good because I was happy listening to my parents and their friends discuss cases and medical procedures.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Four? Five?” Again the tiny shrug. “I didn’t tell anyone I wanted to be a doctor—I didn’t know I needed to. Everybody knew Landreth would be a doctor. They were proud of him. I assumed they knew the same thing about me.”

  Julia was beginning to list badly, threatening to slide off Garth’s shoulder as she became boneless with sleep. Bronwyn followed him with her eyes as he rose and tenderly transferred her to her infant carrier, making maximal use of his big hands to keep her supported so that she hardly felt the motion. He moved the carrier to a corner further away where the light wouldn’t be in her eyes. She squirmed a little to resettle herself, smacked her rosy lips a couple of times, and slipped back to sleep.

  “And when you found out they didn’t ‘know’ it?” he prodded.

  “I couldn’t believe it.” Bronwyn struggled to convey how absolutely befuddled she had felt. “Literally couldn’t believe it. I just knew if I studied hard enough and demonstrated my interest in all forms of healing, they’d get it.”

  Bronwyn’s look of pained incomprehension triggered Garth’s instincts to comfort and to shelter. He walked over to where she sat. “This chair’s too big for you, and that one is a little low for me.”

  “You’re right.” She had to scoot to the edge just so she could put her feet down. “Did you want to change?”

  “Got a better idea.” Better for him anyway. He scooped her into his arms and sat with her in his lap. He stroked the silky skin of her arm until she nestled against his chest, her head tucked underneath his chin. The fit was perfect. Holding a baby was good; holding a sweet-smelling woman was better.

  And there was something about her. A fizz, a vibration just at the edge of awareness like suddenly he was getting more juice. He felt himself brighten, lift, as if gravity had lost a little bit of its pull.