His forehead creased into its familiar groove, which seemed deeper than usual. "Of course, I'll paint the blasted thing. But that's a damn pathetic present."
"Not to me."
He drew an impatient breath. "How about one of those changing things? The one with drawers and a padded top. Or a rocking chair? Every new mom needs a rocking chair."
With soft, welcoming cushions and a stool for her feet, she thought wistfully. "Someday, when I can afford it."
"Damn it, Stacy, you're being stubborn again. And for no good reason."
"Pregnant ladies don't have to have reasons," she murmured, glancing down at her belly. "That's one of the benefits of being an expectant mama."
He arched one eyebrow. "Ah, but one of the benefits of being an expectant mama's friend is the right to spoil said pregnant lady." He dropped a kiss on her nose before releasing her. "If you won't make a list of what you'll need, I'll just have to do it for you."
His grin was shaded toward cocky and his eyes glinted with so much mischief her heart turned over.
"Boyd, I don't even know where I'm going to live, or how much room I'm going to have there." She hesitated, then added, "I'm thinking about returning to Washington when the baby can travel."
Something changed in his eyes. "We'll work that out after you deliver."
She sighed, then turned to rest both hands on his shoulders. "Boyd, if it were just me, I'd be willing to take a chance on working anything out with you."
His grin came faster than usual and warmed her all the way to her toes. "Sounds promising. Why don't we start with this?" He cupped her shoulders in gentle hands and lowered his head to nuzzle her ear. She shivered and tried to resist the quick rush of pleasure.
"More?"
She made a sound that had him sliding his hands from her shoulders to the outer curves of her breasts. When he massaged them with his palms, she felt her breath stutter out in a soft moan.
"Come back to bed with me, honey."
"We have errands." Her protest sounded abysmally weak, and he chuckled.
"Later."
She melted against him, her pulse quickening. His mouth found hers a moment before the phone jangled. Boyd groaned and drew back. "Damn Alexander Graham Bell to hell," he grumbled before leaning past her to jerk the receiver from the hook.
"Yeah?" he demanded impatiently.
Her face still flushed and her heart still beating too fast, Stacy returned her attention to the half-beaten eggs while Boyd listened.
"Dr. Ivans, yes, sir, I did get your messages, and I appreciate—"
Stacy shot a glance over her shoulder and caught Boyd plowing stiff fingers through his hair. His gaze fastened on hers, and he scowled as he spoke into the receiver again. "Sir, I would hate to waste your time … no, it's not that, but—"
He closed his eyes on a wince, then braced his shoulders. "Yes, sir, I've got it. Tomorrow at twelve at the Mallory."
When Boyd hung up Stacy was smiling down at the eggs she'd whipped into a happy froth. She was so pleased she didn't even wince when he muttered a blistering oath.
* * *
Fourteen
« ^ »
Buying the bassinet had been a mistake.
Sick at heart, Stacy stared down at the wicker she'd just scrubbed with disinfectant and strong soap, wondering how she could have been so insensitive. Why on earth hadn't she foreseen that the elderly proprietress of Grandmother's Attic would quite naturally assume that a man walking in with a waddlingly pregnant woman was the proud husband and father?
To his credit, Boyd had handled the sweet little old lady's beaming congratulations with a quiet dignity. While Stacy had counted out the money for the bassinet, he'd patiently listened to Mrs. Muldoon's effusive description of her own six pregnancies, followed by a detailed recitation of the ages and occupations of those six offspring, as well as numerous grandchildren.
Is this your first? Mrs. Muldoon had asked in all innocence as he'd prepared to carry away the bassinet.
On the drive home Stacy had apologized for putting him into such an awkward situation. In turn, he'd assured her that he'd enjoyed Mrs. Muldoon's rambling. Stacy had wanted to believe him. But the grim look around his eyes and the tension around his mouth told her that he was suffering.
They'd been silent as he'd carried the baby bed into the house and set it down in one corner of the living room. Silent, too, while he helped her put away the groceries they'd picked up on the way home. As soon as the last can was in the cupboard and the last carton of milk in the fridge, he'd changed into cutoff jeans and a tank top and gone outside to work in the yard.
To prune the hedge between his place and Prudy's, he'd said. The hedge that already marched drill-team straight from the sidewalk in front to the carport in the back. Running a finger over the nubby wicker, Stacy thought about her own experience with grieving—from the first tearing pangs of grief to a final acceptance of a reality she couldn't change, no matter how many tears she cried or how many prayers she prayed.
As though it were yesterday, she vividly recalled the awful anguish she'd felt the day she'd cleaned out Len's side of their bedroom closet. She'd cried over the ratty old bathrobe she'd hated and he'd loved, sobbed over the trophies and personal mementos he'd stashed on a top shelf. Packing the accumulation of his thirty years of living had symbolized the end of their life together. A final closure.
After the storage company's van had driven away, she'd sat in Len's chair at the kitchen table and cried until there'd been no more tears. Her life with the man she'd loved was over. Gone forever. Nothing would ever change that.
It was at that moment that she'd begun to heal, she realized now. When Len had returned with gasoline and rage to destroy the house, she'd been able to forgive him—and to forgive herself for being glad to be alive, even though, in all ways that mattered, he was dead.
Biting her lip, she turned slowly to look down the hall. The door at the end had been firmly closed since that first morning when she'd mistaken the nursery for Boyd's office. To her knowledge, Boyd never went in there. Certainly the layer of dust she'd seen on the remnants of the furniture suggested that the room had sat empty and abandoned for years.
Perhaps it was a good thing she hadn't broached the subject of clearing away the debris this morning after all, she thought as she walked resolutely toward the hall. Perhaps, if she made a start, Boyd would feel more comfortable finishing. And in the process, perhaps he'd find the sense of closure he needed.
Odds were he'd be upset with her, she reminded herself as she opened the door to the nursery. He might even become angry, in that steely, tight-lipped, tip-of-the-emotional iceberg way she'd glimpsed at the Budget Motel when they'd been discussing her toad of a landlord.
Anger she could handle, she told herself firmly, even if it was directed at her. And forgive, because she understood the depth of the pain and guilt fueling it. It was the image of him living out his future embittered and alone that gave her the courage to step into the hot, stuffy room where grief still hung like a smothering pall of smoke.
Pressing a hand to the muscle in her back that had begun aching while she scrubbed the bassinet, she stood in the middle of the room and turned a slow, complete circle. She would start in the middle and work toward the corners, she decided with a heavy sigh. Good thing she'd had the foresight to buy a box of extra-sturdy trash bags. As she retraced her steps to the kitchen to fetch the box, she had a feeling she was going to need every darn one.
"What in holy hell are you doing?"
Seated awkwardly in the middle of the floor she'd only half cleared, Stacy was startled into gasping aloud, more because of the barely restrained fury in Boyd's voice than its volume which, in fact, was scarcely louder than a hiss.
Stiffening her aching back, she turned to look up at him. The dangerous light in his dark eyes took her breath, and she required a frozen moment to get it back.
"You need an office, and this room isn't being used," she
told him calmly when she could speak again.
"I have a corner of the living room, a desk and filing cabinet. That's all I need."
"You need two filing cabinets at the very least, and a table big enough to spread out blueprints. Provided you continue working as a contractor." She glanced down at the shards of bright yellow porcelain in her hands, the remains of what had once been a child's lamp with a smiling sun face. "If you go back into medicine, which is where you belong, you'll need a study."
She couldn't have imagined his eyes growing even more dangerous than they were, but the sudden chill slipping down her spine proved her wrong. "Back off, Stacy," he said slowly and distinctly. "I agreed to have lunch with Fred Ivans as a courtesy, nothing more."
"If you say so."
Boyd took a deep breath and tried to loop a knot around his unraveling temper. Get the hell out, he told himself. Walk it off before you do something you'll regret. But an impulse born in the dark and seething part of his soul prodded him to step into the room instead.
It wasn't anger driving him. That would be too easily vented.
No, it was the shock of being in this room again, with the memories waiting just beyond his field of vision to slam him bleeding and raw to the ground as they had before. And it was the look in Stacy's eyes that told him she understood exactly what he was feeling. Understood and was determined to help.
To care for him.
Nevertheless, anger was a part of it, the part that tore the hardest at his control. "When I said we'd work something out, I wasn't giving you permission to take over my house, or my life," he said, punching out each word in a low, flat tone that seemed to echo inside his head.
The hurt that flashed into her eyes tore even more savagely at him. But once said, the words couldn't be recalled.
"Isn't that exactly what you did a month ago? Take over my life?" Stacy tossed the bits of broken glass into the nearest trash bag with such force they shattered.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Ridiculous? Hah! What I'm being is honest. The old double standard is alive and well on this end of Mill Works Ridge. Practiced with great skill by the great Boyd MacAuley, a man who's so busy feeling sorry for himself he can't see just how blessed he is."
Boyd glowered down at her, his eyes the color of ice over flint, his skin bleached white along the hard line of his mouth. "Go ahead, get it all out," he said, barely moving his lips.
"You think it's perfectly okay to come marching into my motel room and scoop me up against my will, okay to concoct some kind of thinly disguised story about needing clerical help as an excuse to give me money."
Stacy jerked in air and felt a tug in her belly. "And then, to top it off, make me fall in love with you when I know perfectly well how stupid that would be."
Color flooded Boyd's face, turning it dark. But it was the flash of pain in his eyes that had her heart tearing. A man in love feels joy when his love is returned—not anguish. "But that's my problem, not yours," she went on, determined to say it all. "Just about everyone who knows you wants to help you get past the tragedy you suffered. And it is a tragedy, Boyd. All I had to do was look around in here to see how well loved that little girl of yours was."
His mouth jerked, and Stacy felt tears welling in her eyes. "But you won't let anyone close enough to help. You talk to me about pride, and yet you've got yours wrapped around you so tight I'm surprised it hasn't strangled you long before now."
"Pride, hell! Just because I don't go crying to my friends when I'm feeling blue doesn't make me the kind of jerk you've just described."
Stacy looked around her in a slow, meaningful way before returning her gaze to his. "A man who would live with this for three years isn't just feeling blue, Boyd. Surely you can see that." She bit her lip, lifted her chin. Met his gaze. "You need help. Professional help."
She held her breath and prayed to see hope replace the icy distance in his eyes. Instead they suddenly looked terribly tired. "I've had professional help. A padded room, a strait-jacket. Hell, I did it all."
Stacy felt her jaw drop, and her skin chill. "What?"
"I cracked up, Stacy. Split wide open. Ended up in a county mental hospital down near Roseburg." He glanced away, his jaw taut.
"But when … why?"
When his gaze came back to hers again, he looked resigned. "The when and the why are the same. I committed myself right after I looked down at the patient whose belly I'd just opened and saw my wife looking back at me. My wife who'd been dead for months." He bit off a harsh laugh. "I even heard her voice, clear as a bell, begging me to cut her open at the side of the road that night and take the baby."
Stacy blinked, scarcely able to wrap her mind around the enormity of what he'd just told her. "Prudy said you'd gone away," she said quietly, crowded by a regret she knew would be with her for the rest of her life.
"I went to visit my sister Marty in Roseburg. I made it as far as her front porch sometime in the middle of the night. She found me sitting there the next morning, staring at nothing. Or so she said. I don't remember."
Stacy heard only a flat declaration of fact in his tone, but she sensed the effort he was making to tell her even a fraction of what he must have gone through. What she'd seen Len go through.
"You must have gotten help. In the hospital."
One side of his mouth slanted. "Oh yeah, I got help. A nice heavy slug of Thorazine every four hours."
She drew a careful breath. "Not all psychiatrists are drug happy. In fact, I know a woman in Washington—"
"You're fighting after the bell, Stacy. I threw in the towel years ago."
Before she could find the words to plead, he turned and left her sitting exactly where he'd found her. In the ruins of his life. And of her dreams.
Scowling down at the cat meowing plaintively around her feet, Prudy rapped an impatient tattoo on Boyd's back door. It had been almost three hours since he'd nearly broadsided her and her Volvo at the entrance to their driveway. He hadn't so much as glanced her way as he gunned his truck into traffic. If Stacy had been with him, Prudy might have assumed he'd been tearing off to the hospital, but he'd been alone.
Because the plumbing contractor and his helper had been waiting on her doorstep when she'd pulled into the carport, she hadn't stopped by to check on Stacy immediately. "Damn it, I shouldn't have waited," she muttered to the kitten before lifting her fist to knock again.
Before her knuckles made contact, however, she heard the bolt turning.
"Are you all right?" she demanded the moment Stacy had the door open.
"Definitely not," Stacy muttered, stepping back with what Prudy gauged to be considerable effort.
"You're in labor?"
Stacy's tired grin twisted into a grimace. "Oh yes."
After an initial flare of anxiety, Prudy felt her emotions settle. "How far apart are the contractions?"
"Seven minutes last time I checked."
Prudy glanced at her watch before slipping an arm around Stacy's waist. "Come on, let's get you into a nice comfortable chair."
"I'm not ready for this. I am really not ready."
Prudy heard the rising note of panic in Stacy's voice and fought down a grin. "Have you phoned Jarrod?"
"His service. He's in the delivery room."
Prudy nodded. "Once I get you settled, I'll get through to him for you."
Stacy felt another cramp begin in the middle of her back and finger inch by inch toward her belly where it twisted into an agonizing knot. "Breathe into it," she heard Prudy murmur, and tried to comply. But her concentration kept fragmenting. "I wish Boyd were here," she muttered when at last the contraction eased off.
Prudy helped her into the corner of the sofa, then knelt next to her to take her pulse. "Where is the big lug anyway?" Prudy asked when she was finishing counting.
"Running."
"Come again?"
"We had a fight." Stacy let out a puff of air. She was scared and tired and worried sick. "Oh Prudy,
I blew it big-time."
"I doubt that, Stace."
Stacy rested her head against the cushion and closed her eyes. After the first few contractions, the baby had stopped moving. Preparing herself, Stacy prayed. "He's given me so much." Everything but the one thing she prized above all. The one thing he didn't have in him to give. "I wanted to give him something in return. I thought, if I cleaned away the mess in the nursery, it might … oh, no, not another one!" The contraction lasted longer and bit deeper, leaving Stacy panting and damp from the sweat that had oozed from her pores.
"Five minutes," Prudy murmured before getting to her feet. "Try to relax. I'm going to track down Jarrod and tell him we're on our way."
Daddy by Accident Page 17