The Chisholm Brothers:Friends, Lovers... Husbands?

by Janis Reams Hudson

  Two women immediately shook their heads. They each took a child, one a young girl, the other a boy, by the hand and backed away. The third woman waited for Jorge to translate, then answered him.

  “She says,” Jorge told Melanie, “that all she knows how to do is push one out. She does not know about the catching, but how hard can it be? That is her question, not mine, por favor.”

  “How hard can it be,” Melanie muttered, trying to bite back her sarcasm. “Pushing and catching. Here’s hoping it’s that simple.” Unless something went wrong, it should be that simple. Most births went smoothly, didn’t they?

  God, we could use a little help here.

  “I can get to the house and have help back here within twenty minutes,” Caleb said.

  Melanie shot him a desperate glare. “If you think you can leave me here alone and not suffer the consequences, think again. Before anybody goes anywhere, somebody needs to see how far along she really is.”

  Caleb took a step back and raised both hands. “Don’t look at me.”

  “Just like a man,” Melanie muttered. “Okay, first let’s make Maria comfortable. Caleb, give me your jacket.” She took off her own and used both jackets to create a makeshift bed for Maria. A hell of a place to have a baby, on the ground in the dark beneath the trees in a foreign land. In forty-degree weather. Fleeing from the likes of Bruno McGuire and his goons.

  If that weren’t bad enough, it seemed the height of indignity to Melanie for a woman to have some stranger shine a flashlight up her skirt, but there seemed to be no help for it. Maria appeared to be in serious labor and Melanie had to see if the baby was crowning yet.

  At least, she thought crowning was the word for what happened when the top of the baby’s head started putting in an appearance.

  And that was exactly what was happening underneath Maria’s torn and filthy skirt when Melanie looked.

  “I see the head,” Melanie said, hoping her voice was steadier than her nerves.

  Pedro squeezed his wife’s hand and translated.

  “Don’t push.”

  “¿Señora?”

  “Señorita,” Melanie corrected. “Tell Maria not to push. Not yet. Just pant through the pain. Don’t worry, Pedro, and tell Maria not to worry. Everything will be all right.” From her lips to God’s ears.

  While Pedro repeated her words to his wife Melanie prayed she was right. She could see the next contraction contorting Maria’s abdomen. “Breathe,” she told the woman. “Little breaths. Pant.” And she panted with her. And so did Pedro. And everyone else in the clearing.

  When the pain ebbed and Maria began to relax, the panting stopped and everyone looked around and laughed sheepishly.

  “She can’t be moved,” Melanie told Caleb. “It’s too late.”

  Caleb knelt beside her, but turned at an angle that would not allow him to see beneath Maria’s skirt. Melanie wondered whose modesty he was trying to preserve, Maria’s, or his own.

  “You seem to be okay with this,” he said. “Where’d you learn about childbirth?”

  “Never mind that.” She didn’t think anyone in the vicinity would appreciate hearing that everything she knew about childbirth she’d learned from the Discovery Health Channel.

  “Looks like you don’t need me. I should go to the house for help.”

  Melanie gripped his arm hard enough to cut off circulation in her fingers. “Don’t you dare leave me,” she hissed.

  Maria groaned with another contraction.

  “Pant,” Melanie reminded her. “Little breaths. Don’t push, don’t push. The head’s coming. Slowly, but it’s coming. Just let it come. There it is.” She held the baby’s head gently in her hands and beamed, her heart pounding ninety to nothing.

  Caleb’s gaze was drawn to Melanie’s hands against his will. He couldn’t help but stare in awe at all that dark hair on such a tiny head.

  Not, he thought, that Maria would consider it such a tiny head. Lord, what women had to go through to bring new life into the world.

  When Maria’s contraction eased, Melanie had Pedro sit behind his wife, propping her up to a semireclining position to help her push the child from her womb.

  “This time,” Melanie said, “when the next contraction comes, push as hard as you can. And don’t worry about being quiet. You tell her that, Pedro. Tell her she can scream as loud as she wants.”

  One of the other women spoke to Maria, and Maria answered, gesturing toward the cloth bundle she’d been carrying. The other woman opened the bundle and pulled out a small blanket.

  “For the baby,” Pedro said.

  Melanie smiled at him, and at Maria. “It’s lovely. You’ll be needing it in just a few minutes.” She handed her flashlight to the other woman and had her aim the beam between Maria’s thighs.

  Caleb felt the tension emanating from Melanie, but bless her, she didn’t let it show. Both her voice and manner were easy and calm. His admiration for this woman he’d known all his life rose to new heights.

  How many new things, he wondered, could a man learn about a woman he thought he knew?

  “Caleb?” Melanie said. “I need a hand here.”

  A hand? She had to be kidding. He followed her line of sight and felt his throat close. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck.

  “I’ll hold his head up,” she said. “You slip the cord over it.”

  Caleb took a deep breath and felt a sense of calm settle over him that he had not felt in hours. Melanie needed him. This baby and its mother needed him. With a steady hand he slipped a finger beneath the cord and eased it up over the head. “There you go,” he said.

  “Thanks. Okay, here we go, Maria. Push hard.”

  Caleb stared in awe as Melanie held the baby’s head and a shoulder popped free. A moment later, accompanied by a strangled cry from Maria, the other shoulder emerged.

  “I could use another hand here,” Melanie said.

  Caleb leaned closer and put his hand beneath the baby’s shoulder while Melanie held the head. After that, the baby just seemed to slip right out into their waiting hands as if there had been no effort involved at all by anyone. It was the most miraculous sight Caleb had ever witnessed. He felt awed. Humbled. Exuberant.

  “It’s a girl,” Melanie whispered, her voice filled with the same reverence that Caleb felt.

  “Here.” Caleb gently ran a thumb and forefinger down the tiny nose to help clear out the mucus. He rolled the baby over in Melanie’s hands and tapped on her little back. The baby let out a small mewl of protest, then a loud, boisterous cry.

  The small clearing in the woods erupted with laughter and cheers.

  Caleb looked into Melanie’s eyes and felt a connection as deep as the one they’d shared when they’d made love.

  Then the baby squirmed and broke the moment.

  With a nervous laugh Melanie placed the baby on Maria’s belly and barely remembered the afterbirth in time to catch it when it came out a moment later. She tucked it up next to the baby and wrapped them both in the blanket Maria had brought for her newborn.

  “Here she is, Maria, Pedro. Your daughter. Do you realize she’s a U.S. citizen?”

  Pedro gasped. “Truly?”

  “Truly. Born in the U.S.A. Right here on the Cherokee Rose ranch in the middle of Oklahoma, the center of the whole country.”

  Quiet tears streamed down the new father’s face as he repeated this news in Spanish for his wife.

  Maria held her daughter against her, with Pedro’s arms around them both, and cried tears of joy and exhaustion.

  “You do good work,” Caleb told Melanie.

  She squeezed his hand. “We do good work. I guess you can go for help now. We’ll need to cut the cord, but I’d feel better if Rose and Emily were here before we tried to move her. She needs padding and blankets and water and—”

  “I get the idea. I’ll hurry.” Before he stood up, he leaned over and kissed her hard on the mouth. “You’re really something, you kno
w that?”

  She grinned. “So are you, pal. Now, get going. See how fast those boots can carry you.”

  His boots carried him as fast as they could, but, damn, they were not made for running, particularly on rough ground. They were made for holding a man’s footing in the stirrups. They were made for dancing a two-step or the Cotton-Eyed Joe. They were made for kicking butt. And okay, they were made for looking cool. They were not made for running.

  By the time he broke through the trees and saw the yard light ahead in the distance, he was starting to breathe hard. He had to crawl through one barbed-wire fence, then cut across the corner of a pasture. A final fence, then the gravel driveway to the house.

  He let himself in the back door.

  The house had four bedrooms upstairs and what they used to call the guest room downstairs behind the kitchen. Since Sloan and Emily married, Justin had moved downstairs to the guest room so Emily’s daughters, Janie and Libby, could have the room next to their parents upstairs. Caleb had the third room, and their grandmother the fourth.

  Caleb went to Justin’s room first and woke him up, thankful to find him home and not out somewhere on an all-nighter.

  “Wake up, kid, we’ve got a problem. Get dressed while I get Sloan and Grandmother.”

  Justin groaned. “You’re gonna wake Grandmother in the middle of the night? Either it’s damn serious or you’ve lost your mind.”

  “Probably a little bit of both.”

  When he ran upstairs he made sure to make plenty of noise, clomping extra hard on the risers. He didn’t like surprising people in their bedrooms in the middle of the night. He preferred they hear him coming.

  When everyone but Janie and Libby was downstairs in the kitchen, Caleb finally explained.

  “I need your help. Melanie and I do. But before you agree, you have to know you’ll be breaking the law.”

  Justin perked up instantly. “Do tell.”

  “Is it a big law, this one we’ll be breaking?” Grandmother asked, straight-faced.

  That pretty much broke the ice, as well as announced the family’s decision to help. Caleb had never been more grateful for and proud of his family.

  He told them as quickly and briefly as possible about the Mexicans, the baby and the need for speed.

  Rose stood and instantly began issuing orders for items to take with them to retrieve the Mexicans, and in particular the new mother and baby, and bring them to the house. She determined that Emily would be more useful helping her and Melanie with mother and child, but since someone had to stay home in case the girls woke, Justin was assigned that job.

  He didn’t get a chance to protest being left out of the excitement before Rose gave him a list of instructions as long as his arm: gather all the blankets, extra clothes and anything else their guests might need. Start making sandwiches and don’t stop until he had three dozen.

  There was more, but Caleb left it to Justin to worry about. He went out and started up the SUV they would use to bring Maria and her baby to the house. Sloan would drive the pickup to carry the others.

  The baby would be called Rosa, after the American ranch where she’d been born.

  When Caleb heard that upon his return to the woods, he smiled curiously at Melanie. “Did you think that one up?”

  “Not on your life. It was Maria and Pedro. Caleb, you wouldn’t believe how excited they are that their daughter is an American citizen.”

  Caleb took her hand and pulled her aside. “Won’t she have to have a birth certificate for that to be official?”

  “I don’t know,” Melanie said. “But we’ll figure it out.”

  He smiled. “We? You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, like you’re not? Like it doesn’t make you feel good to help these people?”

  “I confess. Yes, it makes me feel good,” Caleb said. “But we better leave everything else tonight to my family, so you and I can get back to your family before Bruno shows up and finds his ‘goods’ have disappeared.”

  “You know, if I thought about it too much,” Melanie said, “it could really scare me how often you and I think alike.”

  Melanie introduced Maria to Rose and Emily and helped them clean her up and get her and the baby ready to move. Caleb then carried Maria through the woods to the SUV where he placed her, with the baby in her arms, on the blankets waiting for them in the back. Pedro climbed in beside her.

  Melanie helped Sloan herd the others into the bed of the pickup he’d brought.

  “What will happen to us now?” Jorge asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “But I don’t want you to worry. We’ll figure something out.” While Caleb had been gone, Jorge had told her that some of them had family in New Mexico, others in Texas. “Maybe we can find your families here in the States. Or help you find jobs.”

  “Oh, that would be very good.”

  Melanie hoped so, but she worried about how they would be able to avoid the long arm of Immigration. The one saving grace for the Mexicans was that Immigration had most of their attention focused these days on other nationalities.

  When both vehicles were loaded and everyone was ready to go, Sloan stopped Caleb and Melanie.

  “Are you going to need some help when this Bruno character shows up and finds these people missing?” he asked.

  “We wouldn’t turn it down if you’re offering.”

  “You don’t want to call the sheriff?”

  “No,” Melanie said quickly. “No sheriff if we can help it. I’d rather nobody got a hint of these people.”

  “All right,” Sloan said with a nod. “What do you want us to do?”

  They discussed ideas and settled on the simplest. At a prearranged signal to Sloan’s cell phone, Sloan and Justin would rush in.

  “Just the two of them?” Melanie said when she and Caleb made it back to the PR side of the fence beyond the trees. “Is this going to work?”

  “I guess that’ll depend on how many men Bruno brings with him,” Caleb said.

  “Which we won’t know until they show up and storm the house, demanding to know where their aliens went.”

  “Don’t worry.” He reached out and took her hand. “We won’t be helpless. There are four of us even without Sloan and Justin.”

  “Don’t worry,” she mimicked. “How can I not worry? Are we doing the right thing?”

  “It’s a little late to ask that, isn’t it?” He squeezed her hand gently.

  His hand surrounding hers, holding it, steadied her. “Yes, definitely too late. And useless. We are doing the right thing. The only thing we can do. When you showed up this afternoon I was mad at you for not staying home.”

  “Were you?”

  “I didn’t want you to get caught up in our problems. I wouldn’t have asked for your help.”

  “Melanie.” He stopped in the moonlight and turned her to face him. “If I had a problem and you thought you could help, would you wait to be asked to help?”

  “That’s—”

  “Of course you wouldn’t. You saw a problem Saturday night at the party, and it was headed right at me.” He grinned. “You didn’t wait for me to ask for help, you just jumped to my rescue.”

  “Yeah, and look where it got us.”

  “I am.” He slid his arms around her waist and pulled her close. “It got us out here alone in the moonlight.” He dipped his head lower. “Just the two of us, right near the place where we made love this morning.”

  “Stop it.” Melanie turned her head away and stepped out of his embrace. “All this sex business between us is just going to screw up our friendship. You’re my best friend, the only one I can really talk to. You’re the only person who believes in me and takes my side, no matter what. I don’t want to lose that for sex, no matter how great the sex.”

  “Sex?” He took a step closer. “You think this is just about sex? Maybe for you, but for me it’s more than that.”

  “I just think w
e need to take a big step back.” And she did just that, and hated herself for it. “Look how you tried to protect me earlier by telling me to stay at the house. You’re already treating me differently after just one time together.”

  “I can’t help it if I want to keep you safe,” he claimed.

  “You’re not in charge of my safety,” she proclaimed heatedly. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Caleb felt her slipping away from him. It wasn’t only her words. Words could be argued with. But how did a man argue with hunched shoulders and eyes that wouldn’t meet his? “Dammit, Melanie, look at me.”

  When she didn’t, he felt a sense of desperation that threatened to swamp him. He grasped her arms and said it again. “Look at me. This is me, Melanie. The one who’s been right beside you all this time. How many more years do I have to wait while you bounce from one man to another looking for something that’s been right in front of you your whole life?”

  “What?” she demanded, clearly shocked. “Wait. Back up. How many more years? Who are you trying to kid? You haven’t been waiting on me for anything.”

  “Haven’t I? I didn’t realize it myself until just recently.” Not until that day, in fact. Perhaps that very moment. “Yes, I’ve been waiting for you to look at me, to notice me. To love me.”

  Chapter Nine

  A shiver of sheer terror raced down Melanie’s spine. Love him? He was waiting for her to love him?

  What was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to know what she was feeling? How was she supposed to know what love was and if it was real?

  All those years she’d thought she loved Sloan, but whatever it was she’d been feeling—adoration, hero worship, puppy love—had not been the love a woman should feel for a man. She hadn’t been concerned so much that he be happy. Instead she had believed that having him for her very own would make her happy. That was not the basis for a lasting love.

  Thinking about all of this, particularly now, in the midst of their present circumstances with the Mexicans and Bruno and her parents, was giving her a pounding headache.