Only Sophie, clutching his hand and whimpering softly, kept him from firing back a retort that would likely have landed him behind bars.
“That’s better.” The nurse nodded approvingly. “Now, I need to get some consent forms signed. Feel up to doing that for me, Sophie? Time is of the essence since that baby of yours is in such a hurry to make an appearance.”
“Give them to me,” Dominic said, reaching for the clipboard. “She’s got enough to deal with.”
Old Hatchet-face slapped his hand away. “You’re not eligible. If the patient isn’t able to sign, we’ll have to send for the next of kin.”
“Please don’t do that,” Sophie begged. “I can sign.”
“Wonderful. Dr. Overby just arrived and will be in to see you as soon as we’ve finished the paperwork.”
“This man Overby,” Dominic said, chasing the nurse out of the cubicle, “how good is he?”
She favored him with a fishy-eyed glare. “Count your blessings, Mr. Winter. From the looks of it, Ms. Casson’s going to need the best and fortunately that’s what she’ll be getting.”
Dominic didn’t like the sound of that. He liked even less the sober expression on the specialist’s face when he came out to the waiting area after completing his examination of Sophie.
“You’re the father of Ms. Casson’s baby, I understand,” he said, approaching Dominic.
“Yes. And her fiancé.”
“I see. Well, I’m afraid we’re looking at surgery, Mr. Winter.”
The words rang with a foreboding that made Dominic’s skin crawl. “What sort of surgery?”
“A cesarean section—something I normally try to avoid.”
Dominic couldn’t get used to the idea of not being in charge. It went against the grain to be at the mercy of someone else’s judgment, especially a stranger’s. “Then avoid it now.”
“That’s not possible,” the doctor said firmly. “I’m sorry.”
Suddenly, Dominic wasn’t a thirty-five-year-old man; he was a kid again, standing in another hospital like this and listening to another doctor tell him that his mother was dying and there was nothing anyone could do about it. “Why not?” he’d asked, his seventeen-year-old heart aching, because he’d known that, if she hadn’t been saddled with him, her life might have turned out differently. “Why not?” he asked now, his heart nearly breaking. “Is it my fault?”
The doctor’s gaze softened. “No one’s to blame, son. She’s very narrow through the pelvis and you...” He indicated Dominic’s breadth of shoulder. “Well,” he said dryly, “it wouldn’t have been easy under the best of circumstances. But there are unforeseen complications.”
Dominic felt the ground rock under him. “Complications?”
“Unless we intervene, I’m afraid that she’ll deliver the placenta first and that could cost us the baby.”
“How dangerous is this surgery?”
“All surgery’s serious, but...” The doctor shrugged. “It’s routine procedure.”
There was nothing routine about someone taking a knife to his Sophie! “Listen,” he said, “Sophie comes first. Do whatever you must, but if it comes down to a choice, save her and let the baby go. There’ll be other children but...” He stopped, almost choking in the effort not to break down. “But there’ll never be another Sophie.”
They had given her something that filled her with rainbows. She floated just out of reach, aware of what was happening around her but not a part of it.
She smiled. From beyond the thin wall of the cubicle, Dominic’s voice rose in frustration. He was having such a hard time taking orders for a change, instead of dishing them out....
“... her fiancé,” he said. She liked the sound of that. “... my fault,” he said, and she heard the agony in his voice and wished they’d give him something for his pain, too. “... Sophie comes first... save her and let the baby go.”
Let the baby go?
Never, she thought hazily. The baby is my gift to you, my darling.
The curtains rustled and she knew he was beside her again. She felt his strong fingers close around hers, felt his lips against her cheek. “They’re taking you upstairs in a minute, but I’ll be down here waiting, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll always be here, no matter what.”
The rainbows spread, swirling through her mind and taking her away.
“Look at it this way,” Old Hatchet-face had told him when they wheeled Sophie into the elevator. “You’ll be spared all that pacing up and down the halls. It’ll be over before you know it.”
Not so. Distracted, Dominic glanced at the wall clock for the fortieth time in as many minutes. He’d paced miles, waited centuries, and still there was no word. Her room was ready, the high, narrow bed with its stark linens mocking him with its emptiness.
As empty as his life would be without her, he thought, his heart swelling painfully. She eased his most vital hunger, answered his most quiet need. She was his whole world.
Behind him, the elevator doors whispered open. “You have a son, Mr. Winter.”
It was like a television drama. The doctor stood there wearing his silly green hat, a mask dangling around his neck, his shapeless green suit and boots making him look like one of the seven dwarfs after a hard day in the gold mine.
“A son?” Was that his voice cracking? And why, for Pete’s sake, were the geometrical proportions of the hall blurring? He hadn’t cried when his mother died, and he’d been only a kid then. “A son...!” And he a father with the tears running down his face for all the world to see. “What about my fiancée, my Sophie?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
Rubber wheels swished from behind. Swiping at his face with the cuff of his sleeve, he looked down and saw she was smiling in her sleep, the lightest flush staining the hollows of her cheeks, and so delicate under the sheets that she looked little more than a child herself.
“Sophie?” he whispered, and miracle of miracles, she heard him. Her eyes opened and focused on him.
“It’s going to be a football team, Dominic,” she murmured drowsily. “They were all out of little girls.”
Of course, it would have been easy to wallow in the euphoria and forget there’d ever been a cross word exchanged between them.
“After all, Sophie,” her mother had said, beaming down at her new grandson the next afternoon, “you and Dominic are together again. He stayed with you all last night, despite everything the hospital staff did to try to evict him, and look at the beautiful flowers he sent. Obviously, whatever the problems were, this little fellow’s banished them. So why don’t you put the past behind you and enjoy your little son?”
“Problems don’t go away because you ignore them, Mother. Dominic and I still need to sort out a few things.”
“They can wait until you’re home and settled down again.”
But where was home?
“I’d make it clear it’s wherever he hangs his hat—not to mention his pants,” Elaine declared when she stopped by that afternoon after work to meet her godson. “For heaven’s sake, don’t keep adding to your misery! The most gorgeous guy this side of heaven’s built you a mansion, he’s the father of this adorable, wrinkled creature, and you love him. I should be half as lucky!”
The baby stretched, waved a tiny fist in the air and let out a screech of protest. “Just like his daddy.” Sophie smiled. “Less than twenty-four hours old and already expecting to run the show.”
“Ganging up on me already?” Dominic inquired from the doorway.
“Oops! Time I was out of here.” Elaine scooped up her bag and planted a kiss on the baby’s head. “Nice seeing you again, Dominic,” she said in passing, “and congratulations.”
Even after she’d gone, Dominic continued to hover on the threshold as though unsure of his welcome. “Come on in and say hello to your son,” Sophie suggested.
He half shrugged and deposited a huge bunch of white lilies on the foot of her bed before going to stand over th
e bassinet. Sophie watched him reach out a long, tanned finger and saw the look on his face when the baby grabbed ahold.
“Wouldn’t you like to hold him, Dominic?” she asked softly.
He shuffled his feet uneasily and closed big awkward hands around the tiny bundle. “I’m not sure I know how.”
“Then you’d better learn,” she said. “Unless, of course, you plan to leave me to do all the work of caring for him.”
He lifted the baby clear and cradled him against his chest. “Isn’t that what you said you wanted, Sophie?”
“Oh, Dominic,” she sighed, wishing he’d just come and put his arms around her, as well, instead of keeping such a safe distance between them, “we’ve managed to say so many things to each other that we didn’t mean. What I accused you of when you came to see me in Wells, what I said about Barbara...”
He looked at her over the top of his son’s head. “It wasn’t my baby, Sophie. There was no way it could have been and I knew that right away.”
She dipped her head. “I guessed as much.”
“I shouldn’t have left you guessing. I shouldn’t have pressured you into coming home.” He heaved a great sigh and tucked the baby back in the bassinet. “I’ve done and said nothing but the wrong thing ever since I met you and I never meant things to be like that.”
“Did you mean it last night when I heard you say, ‘let the baby go’?”
He looked down at their child again, his eyes full of pain. “Yes. But that was last night and I thought I might lose you. Now, today, I have a son and I can’t unwish him. We hardly know each other, yet already I love him.”
And what about me? Sophie longed to ask. Do you love me, too?
Outside the window, the sunbaked hills rose above Palmerstown. The waters of Jewel Lake shone blue and aquamarine beneath another cloudless sky. And across the room, Dominic looked at her with eyes the color of jade. “I’ll never try to take him away from you, Sophie, I promise. I’ll do whatever you ask, but please, let me see him once in a while. Let me know my boy.”
“Is that all, Dominic?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Is there nothing else you’d like to say to me?”
“There’s nothing else I can say, except I’m sorry.”
That wasn’t all he could say! It would be so easy to set everything right between them if only he could tell her the one thing she most needed to hear. But he had turned away and was staring out of the window at the melon-colored tones of early sunset tinting the western sky.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said quietly, “because I don’t know where to go from here.”
He pivoted toward her, looking as close to shamefaced as she ever expected to see him. “All my talk about repossessing the house was just so much hot air, another example of my not knowing when to keep my mouth shut. The house is yours if you want it, you know that.”
“And what do you want, Dominic?”
He shook his head and the expression in his beautiful eyes undid her. He had never looked more vulnerable or uncertain. “I want you,” he said. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted. I love you.”
Just that. The simplicity of it knocked everything else—the hurt, the loneliness, the doubt—clean out of her head and into the past where it belonged. “Oh, Dominic, then that’s all that matters because I love you, too.”
He stared at her unbelievingly. “But how can you? After everything—the way I am, the business with the house—”
“I don’t care about the house!” she cried, holding out her arms to him. “Don’t you know that I could live in a shoe box and be happy as long as you’re there to share it with me?”
“I’ll try to change, to be a better person—”
“No. I love you, Dominic.”
“Enough to marry me?”
“More than enough.”
The beginnings of a smile illuminated his eyes and softened the sober line of his mouth.
“Thank God!” he breathed, and finally took the first step in the last two yards that separated them. “Thank God!”
The baby let out a squawk of annoyance just then, as though to remind them that he was supposed to be the star of the show.
Midway between the bed and the bassinet, Dominic stopped and looked at Sophie uncertainly. “Do I have to pick him up again?”
She laughed. “You might as well get used to it, Dominic. I have the feeling he’s going to be just as demanding as his daddy.”
“Maybe he’s hungry.” Dominic made a face. “Or wet. Listen, Sophie, I’m not sure I’m going to be much help when it comes to diapers and that sort of thing.”
“You’ll learn,” she said. “We’ll learn together, about all sorts of things. Bring our son here, Dominic, and let’s get started.”
He carried the baby to her and perched beside her on the bed. “I want to hold you, but I’m afraid of hurting you,” he said, sliding a tentative arm around her shoulders.
She lifted her face to his. “I could stand being kissed without experiencing too much discomfort.”
His lips hovered over hers. “I will never disappoint you again,” he murmured against her mouth.
“Oh, Dominic,” she sighed, leaning into his embrace, “all that matters is that we love each other and our son, don’t you know that?”
He kissed her then, a deep, possessive kiss. It might have lasted the rest of the night if the baby hadn’t let out another outraged squawk.
“He’s got quite a set of lungs,” his father observed.
“He needs to be fed,” his mother replied. “He also needs a name.”
“How about Tiger?”
“How about Screecher?”
“Do you want to name him after your family?”
“I want to name him for ours, yours and mine. Let’s choose something fresh to mark our brand-new beginning.”
“Before we do that,” Dominic said, running a loving hand through her hair as she settled the baby at her breast, “let’s choose a wedding date. He might as well understand from the beginning that sometimes we come first.”
EPILOGUE
THEY decided on a Christmas wedding.
“Business is pretty quiet in December,” Dominic said when they put the idea to Sophie’s parents. “We’ll be able to take a nice, long honeymoon.”
“And by then the baby won’t need to be fed quite as often,” Sophie said, referring to the fact that in the weeks immediately following his birth, Ryan demanded meals at regular two-hour intervals.
Sophie’s mother was ecstatic. “It’s the perfect time! Paul and Jenny are coming home for Christmas anyway, and we’ll have a full three months to organize something lavish.”
“Lavish?” Sophie’s father echoed. “I’d have thought discreet was a better choice, considering they’ve both done everything backward. In my day, a man usually married a woman before he got her pregnant and, in the event that he couldn’t manage that, definitely before the child was born.”
“Oh, Doug, how can you be such a hypocrite?” his wife admonished with a coy little smile. “Why, as I recall—”
“Never mind,” he interjected hastily. “Anything you decide is fine with me.”
They chose a late-afternoon ceremony at St. Jude’s church, and a dinner reception at the Royal. Elaine agreed to be maid of honor and in early September the three women went shopping for Sophie’s wedding dress.
Given the circumstances, Sophie refused to wear white but compromised with a long gown of heavy blush pink satin embroidered with pearls. “Because I know you’ve been looking forward to this from the minute I was born, Mom,” she said.
“And a veil,” Anne begged. “Please, Sophie! The gown cries out for a veil, even if it’s just one of those short affairs.”
“All right, but no train or it’ll still be coming in the door when I arrive at the altar. St. Jude’s is a very small church, you know.”
“Stuffed quail,” Anne and Sophie suggested when it came time to choose the dinner menu.
; “Roast beef,” Doug insisted, and Dominic concurred.
“Actually,” he confessed that night, climbing between the sheets and leaning on one elbow to watch Sophie giving the baby his last feeding of the day, “I’d have agreed to stewed truck tires if that’s what he’d wanted. Anything to earn a few brownie points with my future father-in-law!”
“He’s mellowing by the minute, sweetheart,” Sophie said placidly. “After all, you fell in love with me, so you can’t be all bad.”
“Speaking of which,” Dominic said, tracing a possessive fingertip over her lush breast as she propped the baby on her shoulder and patted him on the back, “how much longer do we have to wait before we can make love again?”
She cast a quick glance at the clock on the bedside table. “About five minutes, I’d say—or as long as it takes me to coax a burp out of your son.”
For once, Ryan cooperated.
In the weeks that followed, everyone cooperated. Plans meshed with the ease of well-oiled machine parts slipping into place. The long, hot days of summer were forgotten as autumn slipped into winter. By the end of the first week in December, Jewel Lake sparkled under a thin coating of ice.
The Saturday before the wedding, Dominic brought home a nine-foot-tall Noble fir Christmas tree. That evening, he draped it in colored lights while Sophie hung spun-glass balls from its branches. Ryan supervised the entire operation from his swing by the fire, gurgling approval the whole time. Later, with the baby fast asleep in his nursery, they toasted their first Christmas in their new home with champagne and made love on the rug before the fire.
In a passing nod to tradition, Dominic moved back to his penthouse two nights before he was to meet Sophie at the altar. And instead of Sophie going to stay with her parents, they came to stay with her because their place was so small and it was much more convenient.
“I’ll miss you,” she whispered, snuggling up to Dominic at the front door of their house just before he left. “This’ll be the first time we’ve slept apart since Ryan was born.”
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