Her lashes were fluttering. Her fingers shook. Her whole body seemed still to be trembling from equal parts exertion and exhaustion.
“Are you all right?” Rhys demanded.
She smiled at him; tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “I’m fine,” she whispered. She squeezed his hands lightly, as if she had no strength left, which was probably the absolute truth.
“How about you go take a look at your new children,” the doctor said briskly to Rhys, “and let us finish up with Mariah here?”
And because she loosed her grip on his hands he moved. Like a sleepwalker, not really taking it all in. He watched with a kind of detached amazement as the pediatrician checked over first one baby, then the other. He watched as the nurses cleaned them and dressed them and wrapped them in tiny blankets, one pink, one blue.
They cried. They flailed their tiny arms and the boy gnawed on his little fist. He kicked his blanket when the nurse wrapped it around him.
Was he the kickboxer? Rhys wondered. Or was it the girl?
Out of the corner of his eye he could see the doctor working over Mariah. She lay so still now. She was so quiet.
“Mr. Kelly?” It was the pediatrician.
Rhys blinked, then realized the man was talking to him. “Wolfe,” he said. “My name’s Wolfe.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. We just had your wife’s name. We’ll be putting your daughter and son in isolettes for the first twenty-four hours. Just a precaution,” he said with a smile, “since they arrived a little early. They seem very healthy, actually. Small, but strong. The boy is five pounds even, the girl, four pounds eleven ounces. Come along with us, and we’ll take down the basic family information.”
He gave it all by rote. He did whatever they asked him. He didn’t think. He sat there in the office and answered questions, vaguely aware of nurses fussing over the babies. Mostly he just played over everything in his head—saw Mariah working, pushing, panting, straining. Saw it all in his mind’s eye all over again.
Where was she?
They’d whisked him out before the doctor had even finished with her. Was she all right? He needed to know she was all right!
‘‘Where’s my… where’s my wife? I need to see… see my wife.” Everyone else was calling her that. Why shouldn’t he?
“Just one more section, Mr. Wolfe,” the clerk said. “Four more questions.”
“Room 411,” the nurse told him a minute later, when he came out the door. “She’s been asking for you.”
He strode quickly down the hall.
She was in bed, her eyes closed, no color at all in her cheeks. He moved closer, desperate to be sure she was breathing. He stumbled over the edge of the bedside table.
Mariah opened her eyes. They were a little bloodshot, but bright.
“Hi.” Her voice sounded rusty as if she’d worn it out along with everything else.
“Hey.” He edged closer, brushed a strand of hair away from her face, studied it and found a beauty and power in it now that he’d never seen before.
“You were amazing,” he told her.
Mariah smiled and put out a hand to touch him and, instinctively, he wrapped his fingers around it. She wasn’t trembling now. Her skin felt soft and just a little too cool. He chafed it lightly between his fingers.
“They’re amazing,” she said softly. “The babies. Thank you, Rhys.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending.
Mariah lifted his hand and pressed her lips against it one last time, then did the hardest thing she’d ever done.
“Thank you,” she said again. “For the babies. For everything. You don’t have to stay, Rhys. You can go.”
He went.
Damn right, he went.
It was what he wanted, after all. To be on his own. Free. Unencumbered. To write a check but not to care.
He didn’t want to care. Wasn’t that what he’d said?
He went away. Went back to Long Island and grabbed his stuff. Went into the city and called his boss.
“I’m ready to go,” he said. “Wherever.”
“Indonesia,” his boss said happily. “Can you catch the next plane?”
He could. He did.
He stopped just briefly at the hospital. He took one last look at those tiny babies. He noticed they had names now. Stephen and Elizabeth.
Good names, he thought. Solid names.
He would have told Mariah so when he stopped to give her the gift he’d brought, but when he glanced in her room she had company. Finn and Izzy were there. And her boss, Stella. And Sierra. And Kevin.
He left the gift at the nurses’ station. “See that she gets it,” he told them. “I’m in a hurry.”
She had all the support she needed.
She didn’t need him.
He needed her, though.
He needed them. All of them.
Mariah. Elizabeth. Stephen.
A day didn’t go by that he didn’t think of them. A day? Hell, an hour. Less than an hour. He couldn’t get them out of his mind.
He tried to hang onto Sarah and that other baby. Tried to use them as a shield. But it didn’t work. There were no shields for the heart.
Mariah and Stephen and Elizabeth—right along with Sarah and their baby—were on the inside.
His insides.
He fought the fire in Indonesia. He fought the feelings in his heart.
But while the fire died the feelings lived.
He loved them.
He wanted to go home to them.
He wanted to call and talk to Mariah, wanted to find out how she was feeling, if she was coping, if she needed anything. If she needed him.
He was afraid she didn’t.
She was so strong, so capable, so competent. She’d clung to his hands during her labor, but she’d done all the work. She’d kissed his fingers when it was done. She’d thanked him for being there, for their children, for everything.
But then she’d let him go.
“Damn it, Mariah.” He muttered the words into his pillow a hundred times a night. Do you love me? Could you ever love me?
But he couldn’t call and ask her that.
He had to see her. Had to look into her eyes. If he could see her eyes when he asked, it wouldn’t matter what she said.
If he could see her eyes, he would know.
Kansas at Christmas was a far cry from New York.
No bustling crowds, no lavish window displays, no giant tree in Rockefeller Center.
Well, Mariah supposed the tree was there, but she wasn’t. She’d come home for Christmas. She and Sierra had come, bringing Elizabeth and Stephen. Sierra had come for a week.
Mariah and the children had come to stay.
“For a month, three. As long as you want,” her parents said. They’d welcomed her—and their two beautiful grandchildren—with eager open arms.
And Mariah loved them for it. Loved them for their care, their support, their willingness to take on the burden of helping with middle-of-the-night feedings and colicky babies and her own insecurities.
“I’ll get better. I am getting better,” she told her mother. She’d been home a week. She’d got a routine. She was even finding a little time to work—an hour here, fifteen minutes there.
“You’re doing fine,” her mother said. “It takes a lot of people to raise a baby—and you’ve got two on your own.”
She wasn’t censorious. She was maybe a little sad. She didn’t ask many questions, only if Mariah had loved him.
Mariah had. Mariah still did. She pined for him. She dreamed of him. She rocked her babies and talked to them about him.
“Your daddy is a good man,” she told them. “A strong man. A brave man. Someday… someday maybe you’ll know…”
His brother Dominic had come by the apartment before she’d left. He’d come bearing gifts—stuffed animals, a certificate for a year’s worth of diaper service. She’d let him hold Stephen who’d cried and peed on him.
Dominic had taken it like
a man—he’d palmed the baby off on Sierra.
After he left, Mariah had become weepy. Dominic looked so much like Rhys. She said so to Sierra.
Sierra had grunted. “Acts like him, too. Losers, both of them.”
“No,” Mariah said. Rhys was just a man who knew his limitations.
She knew he’d gone back overseas. She didn’t know where. She never knew where, though she supposed maybe she ought to try to find out—in case…
He might have told her if she’d seen him before he left. She hadn’t. She hadn’t even known he’d come by when she was still in the hospital until later that afternoon when one of the nurses came in with a box in her hand.
“For you,” she’d said. “Your husband left it.”
“My—?” Mariah swallowed the last word. Wordlessly she took the box. It was wrapped in pastel gift paper and the card just said, “Twins,” and was signed in stark bold script, “Rhys.”
She opened it and found the two small bears in the sailboat. She blinked. She swallowed. The tears fell down her cheeks.
The twin bears sat on the nightstand in the twins’ bedroom now. Behind them, watching over them, was their very pregnant mom. Mariah rubbed her furry belly every time she passed by.
She did so now on her way to pick up a whimpering Elizabeth. If she could get Lizzie fed before Stephen woke up, she wouldn’t have to ask her mother to bottle-feed. She was trying to nurse both of them. It was next to impossible if they were both hungry at the same time.
“Shh, shh, little lady,” she crooned now to her fussing daughter. “It’s okay. Just a sec.” She fumbled with her shirt and the nursing bra. She was much better at it now than she’d been at first.
“I am getting better,” she said to herself just as she’d said to her mother. It was becoming a mantra.
Someday she would be able to cope on her own, she was sure of it. Someday life would be fine with just the three of them.
She settled into the rocking chair and cradled Elizabeth against her breast. The baby looked up at her, eyes focusing well now, and glommed on.
Mariah stroked her soft hair, dark hair. Darker than hers. Hair like Rhys’s.
She heard the doorbell and ignored it. Her dad had gone out with Sierra to cut the Christmas tree. But her mother was in the kitchen. She would answer. Everyone in Emporia who knew the Kellys had stopped by to see Mariah and her beautiful new twins.
Mariah didn’t mind showing them off. She was grateful for the concern and the interest. She was glad she’d come home. She tried to imagine who it would be this time, who hadn’t come by yet.
The door opened slightly and her mother stuck her head in. “You’ve got a visitor.”
“Who is it?” There were people Mariah would let in the bedroom to peek at the babies. There were others she’d ask to come back when the twins were awake.
The door opened wider.
“Me.” It was Rhys.
Mariah felt her heart soar up to her throat, plummet down to her stomach, then resume beating—about a hundred times faster than it had been—somewhere in between.
She stared at him, disbelieving. Astonished. Rhys? Here?
“But—”
Behind Rhys, Mariah saw her mother smile at her, then step back and shut the door.
He looked wonderful. Tanned and strong and handsome as the devil. He wore faded jeans and a sweater and there were snowflakes still clinging to his hair.
“Rhys!” She smiled. But she didn’t go to him. Couldn’t, of course, because she was nursing the baby. But she didn’t think she could have anyway. If she had, she might have clung, have grabbed on and held him. She’d been strong once.
But once might have been her limit.
She couldn’t do it again. Not and let him go.
“What a… surprise.” She tried to sound cheerful. She just sounded nervous. She wetted suddenly dry lips. “Why are you—?” No, she couldn’t ask that. “How nice you came for Christmas.”
There, that was better. Polite. Distant. Noncommittal.
“I didn’t come for Christmas,” he said. His voice was rough, and as nervous as hers, she thought with surprise.
Her eyes widened. She saw him swallow, saw his knuckles whiten against the Christmas present he clutched in his hands.
Why, then…? she started to ask.
But before she could he answered. “I came because I love you.”
She went perfectly still. She stared at him, looked into his eyes—unhappy eyes, she thought. Anguished eyes. Desperate eyes.
Desperate for her?
It didn’t seem possible.
And yet…
His fingers were crushing the box. His eyes were boring into hers. “I know you don’t need me, Mariah. I know I didn’t want you to. I can’t expect you to love me, but—”
“I do.”
The sound of Christmas, Mariah always thought, was silence. It was expectation. It was hope. It was possibility, however unexpected.
It was Rhys’s sharply indrawn breath.
And then he crossed the room in three quick strides and knelt beside her. He wrapped his arms around her, around Elizabeth. He pressed his face into the curve of her neck, and he wept.
Mariah wept, too. She dripped salty tears on Elizabeth’s cheek. She rubbed more against Rhys’s soft hair. She said, “I love you. I love you. I love you,” over and over and over.
And he said the same to her.
When he drew back at last, they looked at each other and smiled, then they laughed a little. Then he wiped the tears off her face and she did the same to his. Then he looked down at Elizabeth who had nursed through the whole event with supreme indifference and now regarded her father curiously.
“She’s huge,” he said, awe in his voice.
“Almost six pounds,” Mariah said.
Across the room, Stephen began fussing. Mariah shifted Elizabeth to her shoulder to burp her. “Could you bring me Stephen?”
For a moment Rhys didn’t move. Then he nodded. He went to the crib and carefully, gingerly almost, lifted out his son. Holding him with awkward tenderness, he brought the baby to his mother.
“How can you—?” He nodded at Elizabeth, then at Stephen, clearly wondering how Mariah was going to handle both.
She wasn’t. “Trade you,” she said and deftly handed him his daughter.
For a second he bobbled her, then clasped her firmly against his chest.
“Pat her back,” Mariah said. “She needs to burp. Here. Put this diaper on your shoulder.”
One-handed, Rhys arranged the diaper. And as Stephen began to nurse Rhys patted his daughter’s back and was rewarded with a tiny belch.
He grinned. He laughed. “I did it!”
Mariah laughed, too, though a few more tears leaked out as well. “You did.”
He walked around the room, still patting Elizabeth while Mariah nursed Stephen. They were a team.
Moments later her mother stuck her head in again and smiled at what she saw. “Exactly the way it should be,” she said and went off to tell her husband and Sierra the good news.
She showed Rhys how to change the babies. He didn’t think they were so big then. His fingers seemed all thumbs as he tried to get the diapers on.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” she promised him. “I did.”
“I will,” Rhys vowed.
They stood there together, watching their children, and Mariah felt Rhys’s fingers wrap around hers. They clung.
“What’s in the package?” she asked him.
He picked it up from where he’d set it on the floor and handed it to her. “Open it.”
“I don’t have to wait for Christmas?”
“I hope you won’t.”
She opened it with nerveless fingers, tore off the wrapping, took off the lid.
It was the fireman bear. With his hat and his boots and his yellow slicker. There was a tiny paper folded in the pocket of his slicker. Mariah pulled it out.
There was
a ring attached. Will you marry me? it said.
She turned to Rhys and handed him the ring.
He looked first at it, then, desperately, at her.
She held out her hand and gave him her love in her eyes. “Will you put it on?”
He did.
The first time they’d made love, it had been a love born of pain. It had been beautiful and life-giving in more ways than one. It had redeemed him even though he hadn’t known it at the time.
This time, Rhys vowed, was for her.
This time he would love her with joy and with passion, with care and consideration. He would show her with his body how deeply he loved her.
When the doctor said it was all right—and the babies were eight weeks, not six—he got his parents-in-law to watch their grandchildren for the night, and he spirited Mariah away.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “What are you up to?”
He just grinned. He’d made plans. Done research. Found a hideaway.
It was in the middle of nowhere. A cabin on a farm. Rustic and out of the way, but perfect for a couple who had no need of anyone or anything but each other.
“Trust me,” he said, folding her hands in his.
She did.
It looked a little more rustic now than when he’d come here to check it out. The wind was whipping across the hills, the first snowflakes stung. He wondered if maybe this was a good idea.
“I love it,” Mariah said. She put her arms around him. She kissed his cheek. He shifted so she kissed his lips. And he kissed hers. It was a hungry, desperate kiss.
“You build a fire,” Mariah said. “I’ll make the bed.”
“Bed’s made,” Rhys told her. He’d been there this morning, had brought the champagne glasses and the meal he intended to cook for her. But now that they were here he wasn’t hungry.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her.
She laid her hands on his chest. “For you,” she said.
They barely made it to the bed.
So much for care and consideration. So much for finesse. But at least there was passion. He had that. And intensity. God, yes.
Their clothes lay where they fell. He would build the fire later. There was already a fire burning hot and deep within both of them.
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