Xan and Maura had worked side by side for several months, now that Maura had delivery-room and emergency-room privileges at Quinby Hospital, and there had been many times when he thanked whatever providence had sent her his way. But this lovingly achieved moment was the pinnacle of their relationship, and Xan exulted in it.
It moved him immeasurably that this new human being, this tiny scrap of potential, his daughter, existed because of his love for this woman, his wife, his Maura, his love. Maura, adjusting to the entirely new sensation of her baby's mouth tugging at her breast, could barely take her eyes off her child. Their new daughter was a pretty baby with a damp tuft of dark hair, long curly eyelashes and a healthy sucking reflex.
Maura leaned her head toward Xan, longing to rub her tear-streaked face against the comforting warmth of his cheek. Xan looked at her with so much joy and love and, yes, ecstasy that instead she lifted her lips to his.
They kissed, and she wanted to tell him that she had never before known how sexuality and spirituality could meld into one. She wanted to tell him that he had made her calling as a midwife more clear to her by his emotional involvement in the birth process. She wanted to tell him how much she appreciated his sensitivity and perception and caring. And she wanted to tell him how much she loved him, only she knew that there was no measure to describe it.
And so they kissed lingeringly, encompassing their child in their love, and the kiss was their past and their future, and it was their present.
For now, their kiss said it all. They had their whole lifetimes ahead of them to say the rest.
The End
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followed by an excerpts.
Reader Group Guide
Cherished Beginnings
Topics for Discussion
1. When Maura flees the gynecologist's office, she thinks she's ended the chance for Xan to be the supervising physician in her new midwife practice. Considering her attraction to him, how else could she have handled the situation?
2. Xan next encounters Maura delivering Annie's baby. Did he do the right thing by allowing her to continue without interfering? Are you surprised that he took that attitude considering his belief that hospital births are superior to home births?
3. When Xan kisses Maura for the first time, it's her first kiss in 10 years. Considering that, were you surprised that she couldn't get more into it?
4. When Maura hears her sister and brother-in-law making love, she reflects on how nice it must be to be married. Do you think that this scene opens the way for her to start wanting to be intimate with Xan?
5. Maura is freshly out of a convent. How would the attentions of a virile and attentive man help her to discover facets of her sexuality that had long been ignored?
6. Maura's journey to self-discovery—does Xan play too big a part in it? Why or why not?
7. Xan believed he was doing Maura a favor by getting her an appointment with Dr. Lyles to discuss a birthing room at Quinby Hospital. Did he overreact when she refused to be a labor coach there?
8. Did Maura wait too long to tell Xan the truth about her past?
9. How do you feel about men being in the room when their partners give birth?
10. Would you want members of your family other than your mate present in the room when you're giving birth? Or do you feel it should be a private experience between the baby's father and mother? Why?
Missed the first book in the series?
Page forward for
SEA OF GOLD
The Beach Bachelors Series
Book One
or
Skip to an excerpt from Pamela Browning's
EVER SINCE EVE
Excerpt from
The Beach Bachelors
Sea of Gold
Book One
by
Pamela Browning
Award-winning Author
Fragrant honeysuckle, sweet and languorous, dipped in bunches and swirls between the bars of the trellis, separating them. But slowly, their movements seemingly inhibited by the heavy air around them, they moved toward each other, first wanting, then seeking. They met before a great loop of flowers, cool and edged with green, and she saw that his eyes, cupped by their lower lids, now revealed a new sultriness. Her own lids felt heavy, and she wondered what she must look like to him.
Self-consciousness vanished as he dipped his head toward hers through the loop of honeysuckle and caught her mouth with his.
She didn't know which was the more prominent sensation—that of honeysuckle framing their faces, wrapping them in fragrance, or Ponce Cabrera's lips touching hers for the first time. But then there was no question; his lips won, first tentative, finding her out, discovering the contours of her own lips now totally possessed by his.
Then, more confidently, he moved upon her mouth with such tenderness, with such knowing and wanting, that even the honeysuckle faded away into the night, leaving her aware of nothing but the warm moistness of his lips, so amazingly, unbelievably sensual and desirable. This one kiss seemed to lift her into a suspended world, a place where skin tingled, where sensation spread from the confluence of their lips and melted through her, diffusing hotly through her body.
The sweet fruity scent of honeysuckle brought forth a ripeness within her; she burgeoned, swelled, grew impatient for the picking.
His lips released hers, and impatiently he brushed the encircling branch of honeysuckle away. He stood before her now, and his arms went around her in a singularly possessive gesture, pressing the full length of her to his hard, masculine body. Then he was kissing her again, and this was no tentative, romantic kiss; this was a kiss of power and might, of passion and promise, of forthright desire. And she clung to him, not denying her own answering passion, wondering if she had lost her mind. She ceased to smell the cloying scent of honeysuckle—her nostrils, her whole being, filled with the musky male scent of Ponce Cabrera.
"You know I want you?" The question was sharp, direct, and for a moment she buried her face in his broad chest, drawing her hands forward and resting them on his shoulders, noting the little knobs beneath the skin there, protrusions of the bone. There must be other little secrets that his body held, small deviations from the norm; everyone had those little differences, whether they were moles, odd curves or soft convexes where there should have been hollows.
Would she get to know the idiosyncrasies that distinguished Ponce from the rest of the male populace? Would he learn hers? A blanket of intimacies spread out before her, and she wondered if they would pick it up, wrap it around them and cloak themselves in its warmth.
The Beach Bachelors
Sea of Gold
Book One
by
Pamela Browning
~
To purchase
The Beach Bachelors
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
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Page forward and complete your journey
with an excerpt from
EVER SINCE EVE
The Keeping Secrets Series
Book One
Excerpt from
Ever Since Eve
The Keeping Secrets Series
Book One
by
Pamela Browning
Award-winning Author
Derek steered the Corvette around a huge puddle in the middle of the road. Tropical Storm Dondi, downgraded last night from a hurricane, had moved in from the coast and was dumping torrential rains on the North Carolina Piedmont.
He shifted uneasily in his seat, his damp shirt sticking to his back, and wished longingly for the cool, crisp weather of October. This was the last week of an unusually humid September, which meant approximately four weeks to go until relief arrived in the form of the first frost.
He slowed his speed as he approached the L & D Cafe at Dugan's Crossroads. The windshield wipers scrambled frantically, barely able to keep up with the deluge.
Believe it or not, there was a woman actually walking alongside the road in this horrendous weather. He noticed her, tried not to splash her, then cast a backward glance in utter disbelief.
She wore a loose, nondescript raincoat over a white uniform, and she held an umbrella over her head, which didn't help much to protect her from the rain. But her hairstyle, blunt-cut and precise, was familiar. So were the angle of her head and the long elegant sweep of her neck.
"Eve," he muttered, straining for a better view of her. A van loomed behind him, riding his bumper, and the last he saw of her, someone was holding the door of the restaurant so she could duck inside.
Derek had come home to the Myers Park house from his business trip three months ago and found Eve gone. He discovered the bank passbook with its untouched three thousand dollars placed in the exact center of his desk, a silent rebuke.
Still, he'd fully expected Eve to turn up after the abortion and ask for her money. When she didn't, he wondered why. The only way he might have found her was through the Queen City Fertility Clinic, but he didn't try—too many unhappy memories there. He convinced himself that after he'd left on his business trip, Eve had seen the light and had the abortion. He figured she'd find him when she needed the money.
But he hadn't heard one word from Eve. After Kelly's death, Derek had fiercely attacked the many problems at work, and so he'd never followed up on his obligation to locate Eve. Moreover, when she'd left, he was wallowing in the depths of his grief, indulging in boundless self-pity. Only recently had he begun to take mild pleasure in the things he'd enjoyed before—a round of golf, a quiet dinner with old friends, and sometimes he couldn't face even those.
Could that have been Eve going into the L & D Cafe? No. Why would Eve be at that little restaurant at Dugan's Crossroads? Still, the memory of her teased him, and the nagging idea that he'd been derelict in his duty toward her wouldn't let him rest. A week later, when he had to go to Wrayville for another round of discussions about his latest acquisition, he stopped at the L & D Cafe.
He realized as soon as he stepped inside that he was out of his element. His dark suit was clearly out of place among the yellow hardhats and denim shirts and jeans.
He slid across the red vinyl seat in a vacant booth and scanned the menu. From the jukebox in the corner blared the voice of John Denver whining for his old guitar. Derek drummed his fingers impatiently on the scuffed tabletop. The service was slow.
Where was the server, anyway? He didn't see one. There was a guy with Lenny written across his chest who seemed to be everywhere at once.
"I'd like to place my order, please," Derek said when the guy breezed by.
"Sure," Lenny said amiably before disappearing again.
And then, and then... he saw her. She seemed to float ethereally behind the counter, a graceful woman in white who, with her air of calm composure, looked altogether too aristocratic to be working in a place like this. But there was no doubt in his mind as he watched her slide a sandwich plate onto the counter from her tray that she indeed worked here. He held his breath.
He hadn't remembered Eve Triopolous as being so beautiful.
She turned on her heel and walked around the end of the counter, and it was then that he realized. He gasped with the impact of it, and the room tilted, bent in two. For when he saw her gently rounded abdomen beneath the skirt of her uniform, he knew.
He shut his eyes, then opened them again. Eve was still pregnant. She was something like four or five months pregnant; he had never been good at determining such things.
The buzzing in his ears reached monumental proportions, and when it stopped, she was standing beside him, marking something efficiently on her order pad, and then she inquired crisply and impersonally, "May I take your order, please?"
His hand clutched her wrist, and her eyes widened in alarm as she looked up, completely unaware. She hadn't paid any attention to him; he was just another customer.
When she recognized Derek, her knees went weak. They stared at each other for a long moment, startled brown eyes converging with steely gray ones. Eve felt her world, the one she had constructed so carefully in the past few months, crumble slowly to dust.
"What are you doing here?" was the best he could manage.
She wrested her arm away. "Working," she said evenly. "Did you want to order something?"
"My God, Eve."
She lifted an eyebrow. "Are you ordering or aren't you? I have a job to do."
"We have to talk."
"We don't have anything to talk about."
"You can stand there with my baby in your belly and say that we don't have anything to talk about?"
A curious glance from one of the construction workers made him lower his voice at the end of his sentence.
Eve flushed. "Please, Derek. Don't embarrass me."
That brought Derek to his senses. It was embarrassing enough, he was sure, to have to work in a place like this, with all these men looking at her day in and day out, watching her pregnancy progress.
One thing he knew—he couldn't eat anything. "Look," he said wearily, "can I come to the place where you live?"
"Why? Have you had a change of heart?"
"If you don't agree to meet me somewhere, I'll be back here again and again until you do," he said through clenched teeth.
"Eve? Eve!"
It was Lenny, calling her from the kitchen.
"I can't have you coming here," Eve said, glancing worriedly over her shoulder toward the kitchen and feeling something akin to panic. "You'll jeopardize my job."
"You shouldn't have a job like this, on your feet all the time."
Her features stiffened into an impenetrable mask. Her eyes were full of disdain. "This job is going to enable me to support your child, Derek," she said tightly, flipping the pages of her order book over and stuffing the book in her uniform pocket.
He tried to avoid looking at her bulging abdomen, but it was right in his line of vision. Guilt washed over him.
"My office," he said with effort. "Tomorrow. Eleven-thirty?"
It was what Kelly would have wanted. Eve was sure of that. If there was any chance that Derek would accept his child, any chance at all, Eve would have to take it.
"Eleven-thirty," she said quietly. "All right, Derek. I'll be there."
Ever Since Eve
The Keeping Secrets Series
Book One
by
Pamela Browning
~
To purchase
Ever Since Eve
from your favorite eBook Retailer,
visit Pamela Browning's eBook Discovery Author Page
www.ebookdiscovery.com/PamelaBrowning
~
Discover more with
eBookDiscovery.com
Pamela Browning was wishing she were anywhere but the gynecologist's examining room when she came up with the idea for Cherished Beginnings.
"How many women have entertained the idea of yanking their feet out of the stirrups and running before the doctor arrives? How many have actually done it? I pondered this as I lay there and counted the holes in the acoustical ceiling," she says. "I have to say that it was once of the more bizarre ways of coming up with
a plot."
"Most of us are fascinated with pregnancy and childbearing," she adds. "My heroine, Maura, is a midwife. Xan, the hero, is an obstetrician/gynecologist. They'd seem to be a perfect match—until you find out that she believes in home births and he doesn't. And she's recently left a convent, so unbeknownst to him, she's an ex-nun. Her sexual awakening plays into the story, and conflict is built in."
Pamela is a former newspaper reporter, columnist and feature writer who has written 50 books for adults and children. She's worked as a college public relations guru, an editor, and a cruise lecturer. She's never been a midwife, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't like to be. Especially if her supervising physician was anything like Xan.
Pamela invites you to visit her at:
www.facebook.com/pamelabrowning.author
www.pamelabrowning.com
www.twitter.com/PamelaJBrowning
Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
A Note from the Publisher
Reader Group Guide
Excerpt from THE BEACH BACHELORS
EVER SINCE EVE
Meet the Author
Cherished Beginnings Page 19
