The people in the waiting room were watching him. Her. He nodded at them, quickly. “Your son came through just fine.”
She listened as he gave the couple the information they needed. They left to speak with his charge nurse, and he looked down at her. He reached out a hand for her. It surprised her so much she took it and let him pull her to her feet.
Then she was in his arms, and he was hugging her. Nikkie Jean’s arms snaked around his waist, and she hugged him back. She kind of needed that right now.
Either one of them could have died tonight. Kind of hard to miss.
He felt real and strong, his heartbeat right beneath her cheek. She just clung to him for a moment.
“I’ll give you that lift now.”
“Thanks.” She waited until he spoke with the charge nurse, then followed him outside. The parking lot at Barratt County Gen was a lot smaller than that at Finley Creek.
He led the way to his 4x4. He unlocked the door and opened it.
There was an aftermarket handle installed that made the climb in a lot easier. But he gave her an extra hand up, lifting her into the belly of the beast. “Thanks.”
“The truck comes in handy where I live.”
“Do you get flooded in?”
“It floods to the north of us, but I have a few alternate routes into town I can take.”
She fastened her seat belt as he circled the front of the truck.
It was a mostly silent ride. When they pulled into her drive, he parked right in front of her porch. “Stay there. I’ll help you down.”
She wasn’t quite ready to be alone with what she’d seen just yet. But that didn’t mean she was about to invite Caine into her inner sanctum again.
She probably weighed a third of what he did. He’d lifted her far too easily that night. She’d be stupid to remember how his hands had felt. To want that again.
“Thanks. See you around, Alvaro.”
“You really think it’s going to be that easy? We are finally alone. No toddlers or your guard dogs around.”
“What do you mean? There’s not much else to say.”
“No?” He shifted closer, until he was crowding right into her space. “You scared the shit out of me tonight when you slid out of that car. Nothing has ever scared me more except when Keller had to have her appendix out a year ago.”
“It was a pretty rough night.” Her breath came out in a gulp. “I wasn’t certain you weren’t in the middle of it. I kept looking for your truck.”
“The first thing I did was look for a purple Jeep.”
Caine’s hands went around her waist. Nikkie Jean found herself in his arms again. Hers slipped around his neck.
She just wanted to breathe him in. “It…was just random. People were just in the wrong places.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never…I’ve always been in the hospital operating rooms. I’ve never seen them still seat belted in. I had to get him out. Bailey…Bailey was just a little too big to fit, but I could. He was so little.” And his mother had been screaming. Nikkie Jean had had to force the woman to just move so Nikkie Jean could help him. Tears slipped from her eyes. “His mother was screaming. So terrified. I’ve never loved anyone like that, Caine. What if I can’t with the baby?”
“You will. You’ll love our baby so much. I…when I first held the twins, my world changed. Completely.”
“And Dalton?” His shoulder was so strong. How had she ended up with him carrying her again? She couldn’t remember. “Was it the same with him?”
He stiffened. Nikkie Jean tensed. And pulled back to look at him.
“Caine?”
“She told me he wasn’t mine,” Caine said, harshly. Nikkie Jean froze. “We separated after she told me she was pregnant and the baby wasn’t mine. I didn’t see her again until the night she died.”
“What?”
“She came to the house twice to visit the children, with my uncle there. She stayed less than an hour each time. April was finished being a mother.”
And Caine’s hurt was right there in his words. Nikkie Jean’s hands flexed on his shoulders. “Tell me.”
He shuddered, actually shuddered, beneath her hands. “We were separated. I had full, uncontested custody. She wanted to start over again with her sixty-year-old lover who was ready to retire and take her everywhere. Pamper her like she deserved. She didn’t want a husband who’d started as lowly military doctor. Not enough prestige.”
And that had hurt him. She knew it instinctively. Caine…he was the type to have become a physician to heal. To help.
Like she had.
Never for the money; and she’d known a few physicians who were in it for that very reason. Medicine was very, very lucrative. “I’m sorry. That must have hurt.”
“More than anything I had ever experienced. But more than that, how could she not want our children? That was an answer I didn’t get…until the end.”
And that end had not been pretty. She just knew it. “You can tell me. I’ll listen. Sometimes it does help to talk. I know that from years of therapy.”
His hands tightened on her as he stepped up on her porch, over the steps he’d fixed himself.
No one had ever fixed anything for her—not unless she paid for it first.
“Do you have your keys ready?”
“Yes.” She gave them to him.
Somehow he managed to get her door unlocked without even jostling her.
Then they were in her house again. Just the two of them.
Nikkie Jean didn’t feel so much as an ounce of fear. Not for this man. Not now.
He carried her to her couch. Then she felt herself going down.
He’d sat down, with her right in the center of his lap.
Nikkie Jean had never been carried around by a man in her life.
She kind of half thought she liked it. “Caine? What happened to your wife?”
“Hit-and-run.” His hands tightened on her. “She was thirty-three weeks pregnant.”
A surprised curse escaped. “I am so sorry.”
“I was the assistant chief of trauma medicine. I was called in before they realized who she was. The man she’d left me for had been killed on impact. But April…he’d managed to push her out of the way slightly. But he wasn’t a strong man, and she was a taller woman. She was still hit. She landed on her abdomen. Dalton…he had a slight concussion before he was even born.”
Nikkie Jean wrapped her arms around him and just hugged him. “I’m so sorry.”
He used those strong hands of his to shift her slightly. Nikkie Jean didn’t care. She just wanted…to comfort. To help erase the pain she heard in his voice.
“I’d stopped loving her long before that. He wasn’t her first affair. But I…we had two children together. Children who deserved their mother. I’ve learned since that she wasn’t always kind to our children. I wish…I wish I had left her earlier, but then I wouldn’t have Dalton, Nikkie Jean. And I will never regret him.”
“How could you? He’s…perfect. Wonderful.”
“He’s my son. He was from the moment they performed an emergency C-section and delivered him at less than thirty-four weeks. It didn’t matter that I didn’t think he was biologically mine until almost three months later. Dalton was my son, and he needed me. I…April woke. She was awake long enough to know they were going to take the baby. And that she most likely wouldn’t survive. She coded on the table two minutes before our son was born. She never got to see him.”
Tears flowed over her cheeks. Tears she also heard in his voice. Caine had loved his wife. Once. And he loved their children.
He cleared his throat. “It took me a while to forgive her. She told me at the end…she just didn’t feel like she could be a good mother. A good wife. She needed someone to take care of her, not the other way around. And she had to leave the children before she did any more lasting damage. She’d been married before; to an older man, then, too. But she had loved me.”
> Nikkie Jean just nodded. What was she supposed to say to the sheer amount of pain in his words? She didn’t have a clue. But she hurt for him. So much.
“She’d just never thought she’d measured up to what I needed, to what kind of doctor she thought I was. But I didn’t see any measuring up. I just…I’m not sure I loved her the way she needed to be loved from the beginning. By the time I realized that, we had two toddlers and a life I didn’t want to destroy. I tried my best to be the husband she needed. But I was always going to be second best to the memory of the man before.”
“Oh, Caine. I don’t think it was you that was second best. It sounded like that was how she felt about herself.”
Nikkie Jean pressed her face against his heart again. He was just that much bigger. Larger-than-life. Intimidating and intense.
But she knew in that moment that those large, strong hands of his would never lift in anger to her, or anyone smaller or more vulnerable. She just knew it.
Caine cared about people just too darned much.
Nikkie Jean pulled back and looked at him for a long, long time. And then she leaned forward and kissed him.
Kissed him just to comfort.
Caine fought the urge to just crush her against him and hold her. It had been the first time since Dalton’s birth that he’d fully shared what had happened that night. Henry knew some of the story. But not all.
Not that Caine had sat next to his dying wife and promised to take care of all three of her children for her. She hadn’t known if Dalton had been Caine’s either.
But he had promised. And he had held her hand until the moment they took her away for the emergency C-section.
He’d been forced to watch from the window. And he’d known the moment she’d died.
He’d known.
Nothing.
He sat there for a long time, kissing Nikkie Jean. Some of the anger he’d felt toward April dissipated.
She’d just…been doing the best she could, trying to measure up to ideas that she had. Trying to be who she needed to be in order to find peace with herself.
It had just been rotten fate that had led to her death before she could find that peace.
He pulled back. He needed to finish the story. To tell her why she’d meant so much to him from that first moment.
“I…Dalton was in NICU for three weeks. I signed the birth certificate, gave him the name she’d chosen—Dalton was her maiden name—and took him home when the time came. And I had a DNA test done.”
Nikkie Jean stiffened against him, then visibly forced herself to relax. “Did it matter, though?”
“Not for a moment. He was mine from his first breath. I never opened the results, Nikkie Jean. They’re still in the safe in my home office. I doubt that I ever will.”
“He’s your son, biologically. He has to be. He looks just like you.”
“He does. And he is my son. I don’t care what those results say. He’s my son because I say he is. Period.”
“I wish my father had said the same,” she said in a small, broken voice.
Caine’s hands slipped around her back, then dropped to rest lightly on her ass. “What do you mean?”
“My father wanted nothing to do with me until I was sixteen, fighting ovarian cancer and recovering from his medical partner raping me. He never claimed me as his daughter—until the DNA test my mother requested from the hospital where my father worked came back showing I was his kid, after all.”
Caine’s hands tightened as what she said sank in. “Dear God.”
“Yeah, I know, right? He had a single sheet of paper saying I actually was his spawn, so I was supposed to forgive him everything and just let him in my life. I recently got a letter from him. Apologizing. Said a father should protect his child and he’d failed. No kidding.”
She’d been raped.
By a physician.
Caine’s hands trembled. What was he supposed to say now? “Sweetheart—”
She stiffened. “Don’t get all freaked out, Caine. We both know everyone has scars. Some are just deeper than others.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t tell you to make you go all freaked.”
But someone had before. “You’re not the first rape victim I’ve known, Nikkie Jean. Or childhood cancer survivor. You are, however, the first one I’ve made a baby with. Our conversation will be a bit unique because of that, right?”
“At least, you haven’t just stood up and walked away. The second guy I was with—willingly—said he couldn’t deal with damaged goods. Hightailed it out of my apartment like his shorts were on fire. I guess he didn’t want his own goods to be damaged by association.”
Caine cursed that bastard’s antecedents. Vocally. “He didn’t deserve you.”
“No kidding. That’s ok. He was such a fail in the bedroom I don’t think I was missing much.” She was holding herself stiff, her arms over her midsection. Defensive. Frightened.
No wonder. Opening old wounds after a night like they’d just had was bound to make them both feel more than a little raw.
“He was an idiot, Nikkie Jean. There’s nothing damaged about you. No more than there is anyone else who’s experienced a trauma. Of any kind.”
“You and I know that. But he didn’t. But he was young. Hopefully, he’s learned his lesson. Or some enterprising little witch has turned him into a toad.”
Jokes and little quips. She was feeling unsettled and insecure again. Caine loosened his grip on her immediately. “I’ll listen. If you want to tell me. If not…I’ll just hold you. As long as you will let me.”
“Maybe, Caine Alvaro—” Her breath hitched once. Her fingers toyed with the V-neck of his scrubs. “Maybe you’re just a far better man than the ones I’ve known.”
“I’m not sure I am. I just…I’ll never deliberately do anything to hurt you. Ever.”
“I know.” She just looked at him from those eyes of hers. Eyes that always saw straight into his soul. “And that is what makes me so terrified of you. You…can make everything about my world change.”
“And would that be a bad thing? Change isn’t always necessarily bad.”
“No. But in my experience, it can be. It always has.”
“Nikkie—” His cell buzzed, jerking both of their attention to where he’d placed it on her end table.
He cursed and grabbed for it. He checked the screen. The curse got louder. He answered, curtly. “Henry? What is it?”
He listened for a long moment. His gaze shifted to Nikkie Jean. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
After he disconnected, he turned to her. “I…damn it, I hate to do this right now.”
“You have to go.”
“Yes. The twins. They are both vomiting and feverish. Henry’s not great with the kids when they’re sick. He starts to panic.” Caine let his hands linger on her back. He brushed another kiss over her forehead. “I…will see you again, soon.”
“Of course you will, Alvaro. I pop up when a man least expects it.”
“And that’s one of the things that fascinates me about you. Just remember that. No woman has ever fascinated me more.”
56
HIS UNCLE HAD LEFT A light on for him. Caine appreciated it. His ranch that he’d bought with insurance money from April’s policy wasn’t in the best of shape yet, and the driveway had a tendency to wash out a bit during heavy rains. He’d been meaning to get a security light put up, but hadn’t managed that yet, either.
And sometimes there were bikes and toys left right in his path.
He hurried up the steps out of the rain, his mind not on the horrors he’d seen earlier—those would probably hit him just as he was crashing—but on what Nikkie Jean had told him.
Caine knew enough of trauma and its aftereffects to know it wasn’t going to be easy. Healing never was.
Hell, he’d finally felt like he’d started to heal from what had happened when he’d found his wife dying in his own damned ER.
&nb
sp; Healing was a lifelong battle. And it could reshape a person’s entire life.
He’d wanted to hold her and tell her that he wished he could go back and fix everything for her. All of it. But no one could fix the past. They could just listen and be there for the now.
He couldn’t erase what had happened to her—any more than she could erase what had happened to him.
All they could do was try to build a better future together. Caine wanted the chance to try.
He stopped in the first bedroom on the right.
The female he should be worried about wasn’t where she was supposed to be. Caine fought off panic, Nikkie Jean’s words earlier running through his own head.
A father was supposed to protect his children.
Caine forced himself to calm down. He suspected he knew exactly where Keller was.
And he was right—she’d made her way to the bottom bunk in her twin brother’s room. Keller was a sensitive little girl. And when he wasn’t home, easily frightened. He covered her with the special blanket she’d dragged in with her. It had pink-and-purple ponies on it, her only concession to girliness.
Sometimes, he wondered if maybe living in an all-male household wasn’t doing Keller a disservice.
He didn’t even think his daughter owned any dresses.
Why that worried him at the moment, he didn’t know.
A father was supposed to protect his children.
He crossed the hall into his youngest’s room. Dalton still slept in the fetal position every night. He was a good-sized, sturdy kid. He was built like Caine had been as a child. Caine studied this child he’d considered a gift from the first time he’d held him. Dalton did resemble Caine more than the others.
He checked each of his children quietly. Fever-free. Probably something they’d eaten hadn’t sat quite right. They were sleeping peacefully now.
Everett was a taller kid, as well, but he was thinner than Caine had been. Keller was tall, thin, and delicate.
Sometimes, he was afraid she’d break. She was the kid he worried about most. He couldn’t imagine how Nikkie Jean’s father could have denied his daughter for sixteen years.
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