Winter Soldier (Mills & Boon Vintage Superromance)

by Marisa Carroll

  Brian grinned. “And don’t forget the strawberry pie.”

  “À la mode.”

  “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes, Margaret.”

  “Take your time. I’ll tell Delilah to hold the food until you get back. Now come on, Adam. It’s too damp to be standing out here when Caleb and your son have given me the perfect excuse to go back inside and have a piece of strawberry pie myself.”

  IT WAS late that evening when Adam started up the walk to Leah’s house. The softly glowing light beside her front door beckoned him. The street was quiet. Nothing like the well-traveled artery outside his condo in Chicago that reverberated with traffic noises day and night. This whole town was quiet. A dog barked somewhere in a backyard a couple of houses down. It was the loudest noise he’d heard in hours. His footsteps on the gravel walk disturbed a mourning dove in the tulip tree at the corner of the yard. Its plaintive cooing sifted through the new leaves and then died away. He paused outside Leah’s door. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her or what she wanted him to say, but he couldn’t stay away any longer.

  He knocked and a moment later Leah opened the door. Amazingly enough, she didn’t look surprised to see him on her front porch at ten o’clock at night. “I didn’t hear a car drive up.”

  “I walked,” he said.

  She frowned a little. “It’s going to start raining again any minute.”

  He found a smile. Somehow she made smiling easy for him. “I won’t dissolve.”

  Leah stepped back from the door. “Come in,” she said. “Brian must have found you safe and sound when he returned to the Hideaway. If you were still missing by dark, he said he’d call me to get out a search party.”

  “I was running. I went farther than I thought.”

  “We looked for you, but we took the wrong way out of town. You must have crossed the bridge and run along the river?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I did,” Adam replied.

  “There’s not as much truck traffic on that road. How far did you go?”

  “To a place called Cade’s Crossing.”

  “Quite a run. The better part of ten miles there and back.” She gestured toward a leather armchair in front of the fireplace. He shrugged out of his coat, which she draped over a straight-back chair in front of a small desk as he sat down.

  “I was pushing it a little today. I don’t often have time for such a long run.” The room was filled with shadows. There were small crystal lamps on tables in front of the windows on each side of the door. A lamp in her bedroom shone through the doorway, casting a rectangle of light onto the wooden floor, but only a small fire in the fireplace illuminated the seating area. It was a cozy room with comfortable furniture that beckoned a tired body and mind to relax and unwind.

  “I like to walk, but I gave up running years ago. I had enough of it in boot camp.” Leah grimaced. She was wearing a denim jumper and raspberry-colored sweater that framed her face with warmth.

  “It’s a good thing I did run that far. The special at the diner tonight was fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy.” It seemed to make Leah more comfortable if they just made small talk. He was willing to go along with her, at least for the time being.

  “They do have good food there.” She moved around the sofa and curled into the corner. She smoothed her skirt with her hand. Her fingers were long and slender. He remembered their softness against his skin.

  “Yes, they do. I left Brian sprawled on his bed, swearing he’ll never have to eat again.” She smiled at the small joke. “Brian told me you spent the afternoon together,” he said.

  “He was kind enough to take me to see one of my patients after we’d given up searching for you.”

  “Might that visit have influenced your decision to look for me in that direction?”

  “It might have,” she said with a rueful laugh. He saw her relax a little more, as they both continued to avoid the dangerous but inevitable topic of the baby’s future—their future.

  “Brian was very taken by Juliet’s situation. The girl’s near term in her pregnancy. Do you think the old woman will live to see the baby born?”

  “I hope so. She’s stubborn and tenacious. But the cancer is very far advanced, and there is only so much we can do.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wondered if the words sounded as meaningless to her as they did to him. Death was a part of life. Leah must have learned her own defense mechanisms to deal with that inescapable part of their professions, as he had. But Aurelia Cade was Leah’s friend as well as her patient, and even the best defense mechanisms could be breached if your emotions got the best of you.

  “It’s hard to say goodbye to a friend,” she said very quietly.

  “Yes, it is.” He changed the subject. “Brian told me Juliet has to decide whether or not to give her child up for adoption. A difficult choice for any woman to make. Doubly so for a teenager.”

  “I wish I could help her more, but it’s a decision she has to make for herself.” He imagined that it would be hard for Leah to stay neutral in this situation. She gave so much of herself to everything she did, to everyone with whom she was involved. “Brian said you were feeling much better today. You look...very well.” He’d almost said “lovely.” The right word, but far too intimate an observation to speak aloud.

  “Thank you. I’m feeling much better. I’m sorry, can I get you something? Coffee or a beer?”

  “No thanks. I won’t be staying long. I just wanted to make certain you were all right.”

  She chose to answer him, instead of saying he could have made the inquiry over the phone without coming out on such a rainy night. “Caleb says my blood pressure’s perfect. So are all the blood tests. Now if he would just tell me it’s okay to start driving.”

  “He thought by Friday—”

  “You’ve been discussing my pregnancy with him again?” Her eyebrows drew together in a frown.

  “Yes,” he said. There was no use denying it. She fell silent for a moment, obviously trying to get her temper under control. The fragile rapport that had grown between them during the conversation evaporated in the heat of her displeasure. “Caleb means well, but there’s no way I can convince him this is none of his business. He thinks babies should have two parents. He’s old-fashioned that way.”

  “So am I.”

  “Adam...”

  There was a warning in her tone, but he ignored it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the future these past couple of days.” The baby’s future, he meant, not his own. He couldn’t see much of a future for himself right now. He only thought about the past. Day and night. Waking and sleeping.

  “Yes, I have, too,” she admitted warily.

  “What conclusions have you come to, Leah?” Adam laced his hands together and let them dangle between his knees. He didn’t want her to see him shaking. She would feel sorry for him, and he didn’t want that.

  “I’ve concluded you must be a good father. Brian is a very nice young man.”

  He heard the approval in her voice and it warmed him. He lifted his head to look at her again. He could smile and say thank-you, and Leah, so unflinchingly honest, would despise him for taking credit for the way Brian turned out. “He’s been with his mother since he was eleven.”

  “So he said, but he still thinks a great deal of you. He wouldn’t have come down here with you otherwise.”

  “He wants to be part of the baby’s life.”

  “I hope that’s possible,” she said carefully.

  “I don’t want to make the mistakes with this child that I made with Brian, Leah. When he was little, it seemed I was always too busy, too tired, or just plain not there for him. I want it to be different with this baby.”

  She stood up and moved to the fireplace. He watched as she knelt on the hearth and stirred the burning wood with a poker. Her pregnancy was not advanced enough to make her awkward or unsteady on her feet. Her movements were fluid and enticingly feminine. She rose and turned to face
him, pushing at a strand of hair that had worked loose from her braid.

  “You won’t be making those same mistakes with this child, Adam, because you aren’t going to have that kind of father-son relationship with my baby.”

  He was on his feet in a second. She didn’t flinch or try to move away as he came to a halt in front of her. He should have expected this. She had told him as much the first night he’d seen her. She didn’t want him in Slate Hollow. She didn’t want him in her life now or in the future. But he wanted her. He was drawn to her as he would be to the heat of the fire on a cold day. The rage and fear that were always there inside him, caged in the smallest, darkest corner of his mind he could force them into, howled to be set free.

  “I am going to be involved in this child’s life,” he said, hearing the anger in his voice and fighting to force it back into the cage. For the past three days, since Caleb’s out-of-the-blue phone call telling him she was carrying his child, he’d clung to the memories of their night together like a lifeline. If there was any way in the world he could find a door out of the purgatory of his memories, this woman held the key.

  “Don’t threaten me, Adam.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted...”

  She sighed. “I know you’ll be involved in the baby’s life, but to what extent? Not as a father, a real, come-home-to-us-every-night father. You’ll be a birthday and Christmas and two-weeks-every-summer father.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Leah reached out to him. She let her fingers brush the sleeve of his shirt. It was the first time she’d willingly touched him since Vietnam. “Yes, it does. This is my world, Adam. It isn’t yours. It could never be yours.”

  “I—”

  “Adam, don’t insult me by saying you would leave what you have in Chicago for a place like Slate Hollow.”

  He could see himself doing so very easily. His life in Chicago was nothing but a sham these days, a tower of evasions and half-truths that sooner or later would come tumbling down around him. But he couldn’t tell Leah this, not yet, anyway. It wouldn’t make any sense to her. Adam hesitated a moment too long answering her, as he struggled to control his emotions.

  “I see no way for us to be together,” she said softly. “I can’t give up my home, my friends and my practice to follow you to Chicago for the same kind of parenting relationship we would have if I stayed here.”

  “We could be a family, Leah. Marriages have been made for far less noble reasons than giving a child two parents.”

  She moved a little farther away from him, into the shadows. “No, Adam. It wouldn’t work.”

  “I’d do my best to be a good husband and father.” It was a hell of a proposal, but she would reject anything less honest.

  “I know you would. You would try. But I don’t think you would succeed. I think you’ve been shut away from your emotions for too long. I won’t subject my child to that kind of heartache and rejection. I won’t submit myself—”

  “What the hell does that mean?” He felt her pulling back from him. They’d connected for a few minutes back there. He’d had a glimpse of what life could be like in this house, with this woman. Quiet evenings before the fire, conversation, companionship and love. He wanted that goodness to keep away the terror.

  “I told you before—I always take on the wounded and the strays. When I left home to join the army, I had to stop taking in the four-legged ones. It took me longer to stop taking in the two-legged ones. I’m not going to make any more mistakes with relationships that are doomed from the start. Our child doesn’t need a father who is afraid of his feelings, and a mother with a broken heart. It will be better for the baby to have no father than one who’s absent physically and a stranger emotionally. It will be better for me to have no husband—”

  He crossed to her in three quick strides. “Fine, Leah, I won’t talk about marriage again. But I told you that first night I wasn’t going anywhere until we had come to some sort of custody arrangement. I’m not asking you—I’m telling you. I’m his father. He’s going to know me.”

  Her eyes widened in sudden alarm. He reached out to take her by the shoulders, to shake some sense into her. She raised her hand as though to ward him off. “No, Adam. Don’t.” He dropped his hands and stepped back. He shoved his fists in his pockets to hide their trembling. She’d caught a glimpse of the rage at the center of him, and she was frightened.

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “You...startled me, that’s all. I’m sorry I sounded as if I was issuing an ultimatum. And yes, please, don’t talk about marriage again. But you’re right, I can’t order you out of my life even if I want to. You have rights.” Her lips curved slightly in a mirthless smile. “I have to remember that.”

  “We have to sit down and work this out, Leah. I want this baby to know he has a father and mother who are there for him.”

  The grim smile disappeared. “It’s going to take me a while to get used to the way things have changed. I don’t know what’s best for the baby—or for me. Give me a little time, Adam. You said you would stay as long as it takes.”

  It wasn’t much of a victory, but probably all he could hope for tonight. “You’re right. It’s getting late.” He moved to the little desk and picked up his coat. Leah stayed where she was in the middle of the room, her arms crossed defensively in front of her. “I’ll leave now, but I’ll be back in the morning.”

  “Brian said he’d drive me to the clinic and then to—”

  “I know. He told me. But there’s been a change of plans. Caleb offered to let Brian use his pickup so he could have a set of wheels of his own. It was an offer Brian couldn’t refuse. He’s going in search of kayaking water tomorrow. I’m going to be your chauffeur for the rest of the week, not my son. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE SUN WAS SHINING when Leah saw Adam pull up in front of her house at eight sharp the next morning. She hoped the return of clear weather was a good omen. She’d spent another restless night. So far the only feeling she could trust was the instinct that warned her she was still dangerously attracted to him and needed to keep him at arm’s length until she could decide what was best for the baby. She only hoped she had the strength of will to carry the plan through.

  Adam came up the sidewalk to meet her as she closed and locked her front door. She was wearing white leggings and a long, white lab coat over a pinkand-white-striped tunic that pretty much announced itself as a maternity top. She saw where his eyes had strayed and smiled nervously. “Thanks for being so prompt. I hate to be late for work.”

  His eyebrows drew together in a slight frown. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “Today’s the day I’m going to tell my friends and co-workers about the baby,” she said, rushing her words a little.

  “And what about me?” he asked.

  “I’ll introduce you as the baby’s biological father,” she said, making no attempt to keep the challenge out of her voice. “If it makes you uncomfortable, you can drop me off at the clinic and go back to the motel.”

  “I have no objections,” he said, then threw out a challenge of his own. “But are you comfortable making the announcement this way? After all, you’ve kept your secret for a long time.”

  “The sooner I get it over with, the sooner it will cease to be a nine-day wonder.”

  “And if I’m introduced at the same time as your pregnancy, the possibility of it being a virgin birth is also laid to rest?” His expression was as sober as ever, but his tone barely masked his pleasure at being able to gently tease her.

  He was doing it again, drawing her to him, reaching out to make the connection she both dreaded and craved. She laughed, although a little nervously. “The thought had crossed my mind.” This time he smiled. He had a wonderful smile. It was a shame he used it so little. “Would you do me a favor?” she asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “Would you get my emerge
ncy kit out of the back of my Jeep? I don’t like to go up into the hills without it.”

  “More house calls?” he asked as she led the way around the house to her garage and showed him the big gray metal box in the back of her Jeep.

  “You appointed yourself my chauffeur, so I might as well take advantage of you. I’ll be seeing patients at the clinic until after lunch, and then I want to check on Aurelia again this afternoon. We’ve been working on a different combination of meds for her pain. Caleb initiated the new regimen yesterday. I’ll need to check on her at least once a day for the next couple of days.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to admit her for a day or two?”

  “We don’t like to admit our pain patients unless it’s absolutely necessary. Don’t you treat chronic-pain patients in your practice?”

  “It’s not my field of expertise,” he said curtly.

  He opened the door of her Jeep and tipped the seat forward. “Who does your surgical interventions?” Adam was referring to neurosurgical procedures that blocked or eliminated pain impulses to affected parts of the body, such as he’d performed on the old man with cancer in Vietnam. They were often methods of last resort when the pain had become unbearable, and Leah fought hard to keep her patients from going under the knife.

  “Dr. Peter Assad in Lexington.”

  “Good man. I’ve read some of his papers.”

  He picked up the metal box and grunted in surprise at its weight. “What do you have in here? One of those mobile hospitals B.J. dreamed up?”

  Leah shook her head. “Not quite. But we can’t count on a ten-minute response time from the emergency unit up in the hills. It’s best to be prepared to act on your own.”

  “What have you had to do on your own?”

  “Here? Nothing, thank God. But I helped deliver twins in Somalia.” She had to lengthen her stride to keep up with him.

  “Twins?” He wasn’t even breathing hard, although she knew the emergency chest weighed over fifty pounds.

  “Goats—twin baby goats. The headman from the village near our aid station brought the nanny in. The first kid was breech. Our chief medic delivered them and I assisted. We were made honorary citizens of the village. The mother was their last producing nanny. It made her kind of a symbol of hope that good times would come back someday.”