Their Baby Miracle (Silhouette Special Edition)

by Lilian Darcy

  It was such a simple gesture of closeness that it almost made her cry. He could show so much tenderness, sometimes—seemingly at odds with so much else about him.

  “Talk to me, Lucas,” she said.

  He picked up the thread as if he’d only dropped it half a breath ago, and left it up to her to follow his meaning.

  “You see, you operate like that, but I don’t,” he told her. “I’ve been watching you, learning about you. You have a current of emotion that carries you forward, and that’s dangerous, because it washes you up somewhere before you’ve worked out if it’s the place you want to be.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m different.”

  “And better? More successful?”

  “Yeah, I think so. No, not more successful, but less prone to damage. I’m risking less.”

  “So you want to work out how we feel about each other, before we feel it?”

  He laughed. “Don’t knock it.”

  “It’s impossible!”

  “It’s necessary. For Maggie. She can’t have this, Reba. She can’t have two parents who jump into bed at the drop of a hat, when their approaches to life are poles apart. She can’t have mess, and emotions blowing every which way, and a different decision about the future every week. I’m not going to do it!” He sounded angry now. Frustrated and impatient at the very least. He stepped back from the fire.

  “Not going to do it?” Reba echoed. “Not sleep together?”

  “That. And I’m not going to mess with Maggie’s grounding.”

  “Last year, you asked me to marry you.”

  “That was wrong. It was my lawyer’s idea, because I’d talked to him about wanting to secure certain—” He stopped.

  “Rights? Controls?” she suggested. Her scalp prickled and tightened, and her throat began to close. “Is that all it’s about for you? Rights and principles and controls and certainties. Listen, if I could have any kind of certainty, right now, it wouldn’t be about what we feel for each other. I’ll go with the wind on that. I’ll risk. I’ll ride the roller coaster. If I could have some certainty, it would be about Maggie. Only about Maggie.”

  “This is about Maggie.”

  “I don’t think so, Lucas. I think it’s about you. Something inside you that I don’t fully understand, but I don’t like. Table that issue. Add that to the agenda. See where it gets us.”

  “It proves my point, doesn’t it?” he said.

  She sighed. “Does it?”

  “We don’t understand each other well enough to know what’s possible, and what we want.”

  “Okay. If that’s what you think. I’m going to bed.”

  He didn’t try to stop her.

  Upstairs, she left the main bedroom to Lucas and chose the little room at the back, because it was the one she’d always used as a child. Earlier, she’d opened the window a few inches to air the house out, but now she closed it to a narrow crack and made the bed up with the wildflower-patterned sheet and comforter set that was folded at the foot of it. The metal stove flue jutting from one wall felt warm to the touch, and more heat wafted up the stairs, so the room soon seemed to surround her in cosy, welcoming air.

  As she undressed, she heard the squeak of the stove door and the creak of floorboards downstairs, as Lucas took a couple more logs from the cane basket next to the hearth and fed them into the flames. If he built up enough heat before he went to bed himself, they should stay warm all night.

  In bed, a few minutes later, in the dark, she heard more sounds from downstairs. Footsteps, water in the sink, the scrape of furniture legs on the floor. He was pushing back his armchair, or moving the coffee table or something.

  And it was strange, because maybe all those sounds should remind her of the fact that he was down there and she was up here, and they’d just had one of their notunheard-of heated discussions so she should be feeling miserable and hostile and stressed about the distance between them, yet instead she had a sense of peace.

  They’d argued, but the world hadn’t ended.

  They’d argued, but it was about each other, not about Maggie, whom they both loved.

  They’d lived in each other’s pockets for two weeks, in the most emotional, stressful circumstances she could imagine, but they were still speaking to each other, still tender with each other at surprising moments and still trying to communicate something real.

  And this bed was so soft and familiar, it still smelled like lavender, and the needle-clothed branches of the trees were soughing in the night breeze outside, and…mmm.

  The next morning, the sun was shining again, reaching beckoning fingers of bright light around the sides of the pale curtains and into Lucas’s room.

  Last night, he had built up the fire, turned down the air intake, left the dishes soaking in the sink and followed Reba upstairs only about half an hour after her. He’d slept like the dead for nine hours.

  Passing the slightly open door of her room on his way downstairs, he could tell she was still sleeping, which was good, because she needed it. She’d probably been woken at some point by her sore breasts, and sure enough, when he checked the freezer he discovered two more little jars.

  Way to go, Maggie’s mom!

  The fire had sunk to a few sullen coals and the cabin felt cold. He coaxed them back into life with a couple of twists of old newspaper and some splinters of kindling, and soon had the blaze roaring again.

  In the kitchen, he washed last night’s dishes, put on coffee and explored the pantry, where he found an unopened packet of pancake mix and a plastic jug of maple syrup, still sealed. Easy. His stomach began to sing for its breakfast, and the smell of the coffee must have sneaked upstairs and awoken Reba, because she came down, dressed and smiling—

  Yeah, really.

  Smiling.

  As if she didn’t mind how much they’d argued last night, how long they’d kissed and how suddenly they’d stopped.

  Just as he dropped the last of the pancake mix onto the griddle.

  “I’ll cut up some fruit,” she said.

  “You look good this morning.”

  “Feel it. I slept! I don’t think I even dreamed.”

  “Truly. I’d almost forgotten how it felt. Must be the air.”

  “You look good, too. You have eyes instead of creases.”

  He almost said, “So we’re not mad at each other?” But why risk ruining a perfectly beautiful day?

  After breakfast, eaten in front of the fire, they went riding, and the horses acted as if they’d slept well in their outdoor shelter after a hearty meal, also. Reba took him via a different forest track down to a bend in the river farther upstream from where he’d fished last fall. On the higher slopes, they were tracking through mushy spring snow in places, but down on the stream bank it had all disappeared.

  “We’ll follow this trail for a bit,” she said. “There’s a place we can cross farther up. Then we can ride the property line all the way out to the back road, if we want—we’ll see the place where the house has been moved to, which I think…I guess…might be a good idea—before we turn back and come up the main track.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Most of the way, they could ride side by side and could easily have talked. Didn’t seem necessary, somehow. As she’d suggested, they crossed the river and rode the fence. There was a broken top wire at one point, and she said carefully, “Might want to mention that to Lon,” because this was a Halliday holding, now, not her family place.

  They reached the back road, and she suggested turning back, but then on the section of neighboring fence that fronted the verge, she saw a couple of rectangular boards wired in place that interested her. Lucas didn’t know why, and she didn’t explain, just kicked her horse to a canter and rode ahead.

  He let her, content to ride slow and lazy in the saddle and watch her firm seat on the horse, her straight shoulders, her flying hair. At the corner post that marked the intersection of Seven Mile, the road, and the adjace
nt property, she halted, dismounted and tied Moe to the fence before scrambling through it. The boards were blank on the back so she had to get to the road and look from that angle in order to read them.

  “For sale,” she shouted back to him, standing motionless in front of the board. “Gordie McConnell’s ranch is for sale.”

  “That’s a surprise, I take it,” he said a few minutes later, when she’d climbed through the fence and into the saddle again, and they’d begun the homeward ride.

  “Totally,” she answered, then lifted her hand to point to a place in the distance. “There. Look. The house. Huh. Huh.”

  She waited for a moment, as if not knowing, herself, yet, what emotion would come bubbling forth about it. Lucas looked where she’d pointed and saw the familiar farmhouse-red shape. Behind it, on the far side of a low hill, he could just see the rooftops of the sheds and barns.

  Finally, Reba sighed and shrugged and said, “Yes, if Gordie’s really selling the ranch—he must be, he wouldn’t have signs up all along the fence like that if he wasn’t—it’s a big surprise to me. I had no idea. I thought he was set for life. I thought he might even eventually raise the capital to make your father an offer on Seven Mile.”

  “You speak as if you’re angry with him, when you talk about him.”

  “I wasn’t, when we first broke up. I’ve gotten angrier.”

  “Not supposed to work that way. Time heals.”

  “Not if someone keeps picking at the wound. There’s no wound,” she corrected herself quickly. “Gordie’s had no dignity about it, that’s all. He gets in my face, whining about us making a big mistake. I can’t respect that. The wishywashyness of it. If we’d gotten married, he would have spent the rest of our lives giving with one hand and taking away with the other. I’m angry with myself, because it took me so long to see it.”

  “Let it go.”

  “Mostly I have.”

  “Except when you see his for sale signs.”

  “Something like that.” She shook her head. “He couldn’t possibly be doing it because of me.”

  She frowned, kicked her horse on again, and Lucas followed, curious, too. It came to him in a flash of insight that if a man ever did sell a ranch because of a woman, Reba was that kind of woman—the kind whom, for better or for worse, you never forgot.

  Back at the cabin, they saw to the horses then made grilled BLT sandwiches for lunch. Reba filled a couple more jars, and Lucas told her, “Have a nap now, okay? Don’t lose your momentum.”

  “My sleep momentum?”

  “Sleeping, pumping. Just look after yourself.”

  “I’m not arguing, notice! But how about you? You’re going to sit in a rocking chair on the porch and work on your embroidery?”

  “I’m going to saddle Ruby and ride down to the sheds, talk to Lon for a bit, make a couple of calls.”

  “The NICU being one of them.”

  “The first.” They’d left Carla’s phone number and the main ranch phone number as emergency contacts, but there was no land line or cell phone range up here at the cabin. “As long as you’re okay here on your own, that is.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Safe. Content. Untroubled.

  Because it was the closest thing she had to home, he knew.

  Until the cute little Swiss chalet took its place.

  No.

  He couldn’t let that happen to her, if he had any chance at all of stopping it.

  It was crazy, because he’d never experienced that yearning sense of home before, and in some ways he knew he wouldn’t want to. If you had a place in your life that felt like home, then you could lose it, and you suffered what Reba was suffering now. If you had no home to begin with, you were safe. It worked the same with relationships. If you tested all the boundaries and the possibilities and the pitfalls before you fell in love, you had a hedge, a level of insurance, against the emotional risk.

  His parents had never done that. His father, in particular, had moved blithely from one marriage to the next, in the belief that he wasn’t creating any hurts that money couldn’t salve. He was wrong about that.

  “You have to look before you leap, Ruby,” Lucas told the horse as he heaved her saddle into place. “There could be rocks, holes, snakes. You just have to.”

  So why have I let myself love Maggie the way I do, he wondered. I never looked once. And I parachuted. It’s going to tear my heart out if…

  Don’t go there.

  Problem was, he’d had no choice. Just as he’d told Reba last night, in relation to her own emotions, his almost instantaneous love for Maggie had washed him up in a place before he’d had the slightest chance to work out if it was where he wanted to be. He didn’t want any other emotions to carry him along in the same way.

  Last night, too, Reba had said there was something inside him that she “didn’t fully understand but didn’t like,” and it had to be this—his business-oriented determination to have all the facts and as much control as he could before he took a risk.

  Well, he wasn’t going to apologize for that.

  And he wasn’t going to change.

  Saving her cabin, on the other hand, could well turn out to be a different issue…

  Lucas was back late. Not late enough that Reba was worried—after all, wouldn’t he get back here faster, if something was wrong at the hospital?—but late enough that she had already looked at her watch and carefully settled on the time when she would start worrying, supposing he still hadn’t shown up.

  She heard Ruby’s metal-shod hooves outside the cabin ten minutes ahead of her crazy deadline, and went to the door to greet him.

  “Everything okay?”

  “You mean Maggie? She’s gained seven grams. She’s fine.”

  “Who did you speak to?”

  “Weekend staff. Helen, remember? She’s good. I like her.”

  Reba nodded. “She wouldn’t tell you Maggie was fine if it wasn’t true.”

  “Took a bit longer than I thought down with Lon, though, and Ruby is tired.”

  “If you want to see to her, I have the fire going and I’ve started on dinner.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Smells good, too, I can tell you.”

  “Hang on, I brought this up from the house.” He reached into Ruby’s saddle-bag and pulled out a bottle of red wine. “I thought it might go better with pasta than the beer.”

  “I’ll hunt up a corkscrew.”

  Back in the kitchen, putting a foil-wrapped packet of garlic bread into the oven and a packet of cheese ravioli into a pot of boiling water, Reba wondered what exactly had kept Lucas so long, this afternoon. Problems with the ranch? Business phone calls to New York?

  He’d been so focused on Maggie for the past two weeks, he must have let a lot of things slide. She’d expected him to make use of the business center at the hotel, but when he did, it was only to look up preemie-related topics on the Internet.

  They’d both begun to surface a little since leaving Denver yesterday, to take notice of other things—like a hauled away house, and a neighboring ranch for sale. Tomorrow, back in the NICU, she suspected it would all quickly fade again.

  Suppressing a powerful longing for Maggie, she forced herself to focus on the present moment, instead—on the crackling sound of the fire in the other room, on the rich red glow of the wine when she poured it into two glass tumblers, on the smell of garlic and mushrooms and cream sauce.

  There was a danger in focusing on the present moment, though, especially later, when her glass of wine had seeped into her veins and softened her limbs. The present moment contained too much Lucas.

  Still wearing the pair of old riding boots he’d borrowed from the tack room at the ranch, he had his feet propped on the edge of the cane wood basket and his whole body stretched back in his chair, with his arms wrapped around his head. When she looked across at him, he saw it at once, and gave her a slow, lazy, gorgeous smile. “Nice meal. Now I’m falling asleep,” he said.<
br />
  “So am I.”

  “Want me to carry you upstairs?” He still had his gaze fixed on her face. The fire light was so soft and warm. His half-closed eyes looked black.

  “As long as you promise to put me on the right bed,” Reba answered, wishing she sounded firmer about it…wishing she felt firmer about it.

  “Which one is that?”

  “You know. The same one as last night. The little, skinny, dipped-in-the-middle, one-person-only bed.”

  The safe bed.

  The lonely bed.

  The bed where she’d probably think about him all night, even if he wasn’t there.

  “I promise.” He stretched again, as if preparing to haul himself to his feet and actually do it, actually pick her up, slide his warm hands under her back and thighs, cradle her against his chest and carry her.

  Reba told him quickly, “I wasn’t serious.”

  “About which bed you want?”

  “About you carrying me.”

  He laughed, then blew out a breath. “Good decision. Admirable clarity of insight.”

  Because they both knew that if he got hold of her, if she felt his arms around her and his shoulder against her cheek in reality, instead of only in imagination, they’d end up in his room, taking full advantage of the larger bed, despite all his clearheaded arguments against it.

  “I’m going to take the plates into the kitchen and soak them in the sink overnight,” Reba said carefully. “And then I’m going straight upstairs. Why don’t you build up the fire for the night? By the time you’ve done that—”

  “—you’ll be safely out of my way. Again, impeccable decision-making, faultless strategy.”

  “Are we laughing about this?”

  “We’re trying to. We’re wondering if the wine was the right idea, after all.”

  “I’m going, Lucas.”

  “I won’t look.”

  She narrowed her eyes as if to say, huh?

  “I’ve always liked your back view a little too much,” he drawled, and she went hot all over.

  Reba didn’t fall asleep quite so quickly that night, but once she did, her rest was deep and she didn’t awaken until first light, when her rock-hard breasts demanded action. Going downstairs, she built up the fire and sat in front of it, and by the time she’d put her jars in the freezer she was too awake and the light was too bright to think of sleeping again.