by Janice Lynn
“Tomorrow?”
“I fly home late tomorrow afternoon. I’ll relax then.”
“Hmm.” Surprisingly, he didn’t say more. She’d hoped to spend her time with him, but maybe he wouldn’t have anyway once she told him about Ryan.
“You ready to make rounds? Then we’ll go out to celebrate the end of your training.”
“It’s not really the end.” She was observing three CRT pacemaker placements in the morning.
“Semantics.”
“Thanks again for letting me use the computer.” Sorry, I pried into your pictures. “I got most of my work done.”
“Great. You can’t use that as an excuse not to go with me tonight.”
“You think I’d make excuses not to go out with you after last night, Daniel?”
“Something’s bothering you. Has been all day.” He read her too easily. “I thought you might be having regrets about last night. Or about me pushing you for more this morning,” he added sheepishly. “I know things are moving fast, but it’s not like we were strangers to begin with.”
“I’m not upset at you about this morning.” How could she be when if it hadn’t been for the secrets between them she’d be ecstatic at the prospect of starting over with Daniel?
“I’m glad.” He took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go make rounds so we can get out of here.”
CHAPTER TEN
“I’VE been with Cardico for almost five years,” Kimberly said, stuffing a shrimp into her mouth. “I took the position after working for a pharmaceutical company for a couple of years. I pushed a blood-pressure medicine that I believed to be superior to its competitors, but my products changed and so did my love of my job.”
They’d finished at the hospital, and although she wouldn’t have been averse to heading straight back to her hotel room so she could tell him about Ryan, they were at a place called Bubba Joe’s Seafood, an out-of-the-way, rough-looking pub that he’d sworn had the best seafood in all of Boston.
From what she’d sampled, she agreed.
“But you started out as a cardiology nurse?” Daniel asked. He leaned back against the cheap vinyl cushioning of the booth and took a sip of his beer.
Kimberly’s gaze zeroed in on where his lips met the glass bottle. She closed her eyes and for a brief moment imagined those lips next to hers as they’d been last night, this morning.
“I worked on the cardiology unit for five years.”
“Where did you do your nursing training?”
She told him the name of a local community program. “I went for an associate’s degree in a two-year program.” She’d had a baby to take care of. “After I earned my degree, I enrolled in a bachelor’s program and earned my BSN.”
“Why didn’t you go straight for your Bachelor of Science?”
“I worked full-time from the moment I graduated from high school. Earning my associate degree first enabled me to gain experience while providing a better living for Ryan and me.”
His forehead furrowed. “You got pregnant before college?”
Kimberly choked on the shrimp she’d just popped into her mouth and coughed to clear her throat.
Daniel slapped her back, trying to help her catch her breath.
She took a long drink of her beer, more to stall than to wash down any remaining food.
She’d wanted to tell him last night and again this morning, but it hadn’t happened. Last night Daniel had been tired and they’d been distracted by lust. Daniel wasn’t on call tonight and they had the entire night ahead of them, with only a few patients in the morning.
Now’s the time. Tell him about Ryan. Tell him that he has a gorgeous, wonderful fourteen-year-old son.
Seeming to sense her thoughts, he took her hand and lowered his voice to a soft, seductive purr.
“Tell me about your son, Kimberly. I’ve not asked much about him because I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear about someone else’s kid, but I do for the simple reason that everything to do with you interests me.” He interlaced their fingers. “How old is he? What’s he like? Does he look like you?”
“He looks like his father.” She needed something stronger than beer to drink. Much stronger.
“Your ex-husband?”
She shook her head. “No, Ryan was three when I married Thomas.”
Daniel looked taken aback.
“He worked in administration at the hospital where I worked while earning my BSN,” she explained. “I didn’t trick him in any way. He knew I loved my baby’s father very much and despite the time that had passed, I was still on the rebound in many ways.”
Too many ways. She’d been scared and trying to figure out her life when Thomas had come along. His friendship had offered her hope and she’d desperately taken it.
“Ryan’s father left you?” Daniel sounded incredulous.
“He didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” he snorted, disbelief written all over his face.
This wasn’t the lead-in she’d hoped for to tell him about Ryan. Maybe there wasn’t a good lead-in.
“Sometimes life’s choices aren’t easy ones and a person has to do what they think is right.”
“He thought leaving you to raise a baby by yourself was the right choice?” He shook his head. “He didn’t deserve you.”
She closed her eyes, prayed her eardrums wouldn’t burst from the loud roaring of her heartbeat. She had to tell him, right now.
“Daniel—” she began.
“It’s none of my business, right?” He smiled wryly, turned her hand in his and traced her lifeline. “You know, I wasn’t sure how I felt when I saw you on Monday morning. But I’m glad you came to Boston, Kimberly. Glad our paths crossed again.”
He lifted her palm and kissed the center. “Very glad.”
“Daniel, I need to tell you something.”
Her tone must have warned that what she had to say was serious, because he squeezed her hand. “Tell me.”
“When I told you that Ryan doesn’t look like me, that he looks like his father, well, there was more to it. About his father, I mean.”
He winced. “I don’t want to hear about this guy. What’s in the past is in the past. Ryan’s father no longer matters.”
“He does. I need you to understand why I made the choices I did.”
He regarded her, his eyes dark and unreadable. “Okay, tell me.”
“I loved Ryan’s father.”
“You’ve already said that,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “You’re talking in circles.”
Frustrated, she glanced around the noisy restaurant. Maybe telling him that he was a father while in the middle of a boisterous pub wasn’t such a good idea, but the moment pressed urgently, and she had to tell him. Right now, before she found an excuse not to.
“You’re Ryan’s father.”
His hand fell away from hers and he stared at her, his eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”
“You’re Ryan’s father.”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “I didn’t hear you. Tell me again.”
She took a deep breath and started over. “I was pregnant when I broke up with you, Daniel. You’re Ryan’s father.”
Stunned didn’t begin to describe the look on his face. “You’re sure?”
“Positive, Daniel.” She smiled softly. “Every time I look at him, I see you in his eyes, his smile, the way he carries himself. He’s your image.”
“I have a son?” His face pulled tight and dazed eyes stared at her, but she wasn’t sure they saw.
Fighting the panic in her belly, she nodded. “Ryan’s fourteen.”
“Fourteen?”
She nodded. “He’ll be fifteen in April.”
“I have a son who’s almost fifteen and you’re only now telling me?” Daniel snapped out of his shocked haze and glared. His fist came down hard on the thick wooden table, sending bottles toppling.
Wincing at his anger, Kimberly sc
urried to straighten them before anything spilled. “Daniel, please.”
“Please?” he mocked. “Please, what? Please, ignore the fact that you’re telling me I have a son who’s almost grown up and I’ve missed out on his entire life?”
“It’s not like that,” she began, but Daniel had a point. It was like that.
That’s exactly what she’d cheated him out of for fourteen years.
Sure, her reasons had started out noble, but she had to face the truth.
Fear of losing Ryan the way she’d lost Daniel was the only reason her son didn’t know his father, was the only reason Daniel didn’t know his son.
After Daniel had graduated from medical school she should have gone to him, told him the truth, begged him to forgive her and still love her. But time had passed and she’d been afraid. Afraid of rejection. Afraid of losing Ryan.
Afraid of not being good enough.
Even now, fear besieged her. Fear of how Ryan would take this, but even more, fear of the hatred she saw blazing in Daniel’s eyes.
Hatred she understood because she’d have felt it herself if someone had told her she’d had to give up the last fourteen years with her son.
“I’m sorry, Daniel. I made the choice I thought was right.”
“The right choice?” he scoffed, his breath coming out in heavy puffs, his jaw flexing. “You had my baby and didn’t tell me. How is that the right choice?”
When he put it like that, her thought process was difficult to recall. But she had believed it to be the right choice.
So had his mother.
Leona had begged her not to tell Daniel, to have an abortion, and let Daniel have his dream.
She’d even given Kimberly money to pay for the procedure.
For all she knew, Leona believed she’d had an abortion because she’d not spoken to the woman since breaking things off with Daniel.
Then again, if Leona had read her mother’s obituary last year, she would have seen Ryan listed as having survived his grandmother. At the very least, Leona had to have wondered about Ryan.
All she would have had to do was pick up the sports section to see article after article mentioning Ryan.
“I’m not perfect,” she began, battling memories of just how imperfect she’d felt when confronted by his mother. “But I truly did what I thought right.”
She reached out to touch him, but he jerked away.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and she fought to keep from running out of the restaurant. Running back to Atlanta and the comfort of her carefully orchestrated life.
“Daniel, no matter what you think, I never meant to hurt you. I was only seventeen, and I was scared.” God, she’d been scared. Scared of being so young, of having to tell her mother, having to face her senior year of high school while pregnant, having to face the rest of her life as a single mom, but she’d done it. “I made the best decision I could at the time.”
He stared at her, his teeth gritted, his hands clenched, his body tight with tension.
When his eyes closed, she noticed the bulging vein at his temple, the rapid beat jumping, showing just how much he strained to hold in his wrath.
When he opened his eyes, he seemed to have reached decisions, and he motioned for the waiter. “We’re leaving.”
Unsure what to say, she nodded.
The waiter brought their bill and Daniel dropped money onto the table. “Let’s get out of here.”
He took her hand, but in more of a viselike grip than the tender caress of earlier. Without a word, he led her around crowded tables toward the front of the restaurant.
A commotion a few tables over caught her eye about the same time as it caught Daniel’s.
A morbidly obese man slid out of his chair and onto the wooden-planked floor. A young boy and woman also sat at the table.
“Ken?” the woman screeched, jumping out of her seat and going around to where the man lay still. “Oh, my God, someone call 911. My husband’s passed out.”
The little boy’s face turned white. He dropped to his knees and began tugging on the man’s straining shirt. “Daddy, wake up. Daddy, you aren’t supposed to lie down in the food place. Daddy, please, wake up.”
Daniel and Kimberly exchanged a lightning-fast look. Setting their private concerns aside, they headed to where the man lay. A crowd had already started to gather.
“I’m a doctor,” Daniel announced, pushing his way through the onlookers. “Please, step back so I have room to check him and he has room to breathe.”
Daniel did the ABCs of first aid. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. From the look on his face, Kimberly could tell he didn’t like what he found.
And that the little boy’s tears were getting to him.
Because she’d told him about Ryan? Because he’d missed out on seeing Ryan at that age? Because if he’d died, Ryan would never have known him, and vice versa.
She’d cheated him out of so much.
She sank her teeth into her lower lip to hold in a cry full of regret.
“No pulse,” Daniel told her, grimacing, though whether at her or the man she wasn’t sure. He loosened the man’s clothing in a quick yank that popped the straining buttons and started chest compressions. “I think he’s had a heart attack.”
“My mouth guard’s in my purse,” Kimberly told him, stopping him from doing mouth to mouth unprotected, although he’d been going to do so without hesitation, with no regard to his own health.
Daniel nodded, taking over the compressions so she could find the guard.
Not wanting to waste precious time searching through her cluttered bag, she dumped the entire contents of her purse on the floor and grabbed the Cellophane-sealed mouthpiece that prevented the exchange of germs, including if the man vomited, which sometimes happened.
Putting it on, she bent and blew a breath into the man’s mouth. Due to his large size, she honestly couldn’t tell if his lungs expanded or not, but she knew Daniel would tell her if she wasn’t profusing them with air.
Keeping in rhythm with Daniel, she gave a breath to every five of his compressions.
“He’s only forty. He can’t be having a heart attack.” The man’s wife wobbled. “Men don’t have heart attacks at forty.”
Unfortunately they did.
Kimberly motioned for a bystander to help the woman into a chair and for the little boy to join his mother, but he shook his head, glaring at Daniel.
“My daddy’s just sleeping.” Panic lifted his young voice to a high pitch. “He’s just sleeping.”
His face tightly controlled, Daniel ignored the boy and glanced at a frozen-to-the-spot waiter. “Call 911, and request an ambulance. Now.”
His eyes giving the lifeless man one last look, the waiter rushed toward the front of the restaurant, presumably where he’d make the call.
In between giving breaths, her gaze met Daniel’s.
He nodded at her unspoken question.
Without missing a compression, she relieved him and began counting in her head as she used pent-up frustration to give her the strength to press hard against the man’s huge chest over and over in a synchronized rhythm.
“Does anyone have any nitroglycerin?”
The little boy’s eyes went round. “You’re not blowing up my daddy!”
Daniel’s gaze touched on the boy for a split second, but he didn’t comment, just took a tiny brown medicine bottle from a fifty-ish man who stood watching and who looked quite pale.
In between blowing air into the man’s lungs, Daniel turned to the heart attack patient’s wife. “Is he on any medications? Or does he have any known health problems?”
“His cholesterol, but that’s it. He’s as healthy as a horse.”
“No Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis?”
The woman looked appalled, and gave her son a blushing glance. “Of course not.”
Kimberly continued to compress, and Daniel placed a small white tablet under the man’s tongue. The medication would dissolve on i
ts own and cause the blood vessels to dilate, allowing more easy passage of blood to vital parts.
The moment he’d done so he motioned for her to change spots and she readily did so, taking over giving the man air in sync with Daniel’s compressions.
CPR was hard work. Anyone who hadn’t performed it had no idea of the stamina required to keep at it, of the strain it took on a person.
After what seemed like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes at most, Kimberly offered to trade, to give Daniel a break, but he shook his head.
That’s when she saw it.
The way he kept glancing at the little boy, who was sobbing in his mother’s arms.
She knew what he was thinking, what he was remembering.
Not about Ryan, but the day his father had died.
How his own mother had held him while he’d cried.
He’d already been kicked in the gut by her revelation about Ryan. Being subjected to this, to the memories it would bring back, might down him.
Never had she wanted to hold him more, to take him in her arms and love away his worries. Or at least do her best to try.
Daniel’s pain was her pain and she’d caused so much of the hurt he’d experienced tonight. Although nothing could atone for what she’d done, she’d spend the rest of her life attempting to make up for what she’d robbed him of.
Never had Kimberly been so relieved as when she heard the wail of the ambulance’s sirens.
The paramedics quickly took over, injecting the man with atropine and shocking him with a mobile defibrillator. And again.
“We have a heartbeat!” one of the paramedics exclaimed, and a cheer went up from the crowd.
Not that the man was out of danger, but the fact he now had a heartbeat gave better odds of survival.
The man’s size made transport difficult and every second could mean the difference between life or death. The paramedics placed him on the stretcher and rolled him out to the ambulance.
The man’s wife had gone into shock and his son flew into hysterics. He screamed and cried after the paramedics.
“Don’t take my daddy. Please, don’t take my daddy. I’ve got to wake him up.”