To Save His Child

by Margaret Watson

  Caine looked up sharply from the fire that was just beginning to glow red underneath the leaves. He’d heard something other than the normal jungle sounds, and he sat still as a stone, straining to identify it. When it came again, a little stronger than before, he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like Lexie’s voice.

  Pausing only long enough to grab the baby, he bolted toward the river. When he got there, he saw the canteens and the water tube sitting on a rock, but there was no sign of Lexie. Setting the baby down, he frantically scanned the riverbank, wondering why she might have wandered off.

  Something splashed in the water in front of him. His gut clenched into a giant fist as he saw Lexie breaking the surface of the muddy water in front of him, and thrashing weakly.

  “Lexie!”

  She opened her eyes and he saw a spark of hope leap into them. “I’m caught,” she gasped. “My foot.”

  Throwing himself down on the edge of the river, he stretched out for her hand. “Can you reach me?” He forced himself to keep his voice calm and steady.

  She struggled against the current that tried to pull her away, but he could see she was getting weaker. “A few more inches, Lex,” he coaxed, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “Come on, you can do it.”

  He strained to reach her, pushing himself even farther off the bank until he was in danger of falling in with her. Water swirled around her, tugging at her with invisible fingers, trying to pry her loose from whatever held her trapped. He could see her fight against it, trying to push her way through the muddy brown water to reach his hand.

  Easing himself farther off the bank, he suddenly lunged toward her. He saw the exhaustion in her face, knew she couldn’t stay afloat much longer. And he was afraid that if he went in after her, they would both be swept down the river.

  His hand brushed her fingertips for one agonizing second, then she was wrenched away from him as if by a giant, invisible hand. He was going to lose her. Frantically he looked around, searching for a stick or a vine lying on the ground.

  Something protruded from underneath a bush, and he scrambled over to yank it out. It was a piece of dead vine barely two feet long, dry and brittle. He refused to think about the fact that it might not work.

  Throwing himself back on the bank of the river, he held the vine out to Lexie. “Grab on to this!” he shouted, and said a prayer of thanks as her fingers closed around the dry, dusty vine. Slowly he began to pull her closer, mentally willing the rotting branch to stay intact.

  As she drew within reach of his hand, he heard the vine rustling and crackling and knew that it was falling apart. He lunged off the bank, managing to grab her wrist just as the piece of vine disintegrated in his hand. Fear washed over her face, and he stretched out to extend his other hand to her. “I’ve got you, Lexie,” he said in a soothing voice. “Just grab on and I’ll pull you in.”

  He could see the huge effort it took for her to reach out and take hold of his other hand. He had to get her out of the water before the last reserves of her energy were used up. Glancing backward, he managed to hook one foot around the base of a jungle plant as he began to slowly pull her toward him.

  Whatever had hold of her leg didn’t want to give it up, but he pulled slowly and steadily until she was half lying on the bank of the river. Then he let her go, and as she lay gasping and coughing on the rocks, he reached into the water to see what held her foot.

  It was a vine, made tough and inflexible by its immersion in the water. Pulling his knife from its sheath in his boot, he hacked at the stubborn strands until the last of them finally separated and he pulled her foot free.

  She had turned her head to watch him, and when he closed the knife and slid it back into his pocket, she rolled over onto her back and shut her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She lay on the river’s edge, one foot still submerged, small rivulets of brown water running from her body like tiny streams etching a path in the mud.

  He reached out and touched her soaking-wet hair, stroking it tentatively. “Lexie, look at me.”

  She opened her eyes slowly and tried to smile at him. “Don’t worry, I’m still alive.”

  Cupping her face in his hand, he studied her, as if her face, pale and white beneath the dirt from the river, could tell him how badly she’d been injured. “Did you swallow a lot of the water?”

  “I don’t think so.” Her voice came out as a harsh rasp. “I tried to keep my mouth shut.”

  He swept his hands down her body until he reached the foot that had been trapped in the vine. Staring at it for a moment, he finally reached out to touch it, afraid of what he might find. “How about your foot?” he managed to ask in a normal voice. “Did you hurt it when you were thrashing around?”

  Experimentally she moved the ankle joint, first sideways, then back and forth. She shook her head. “It feels okay. A little sore, but I don’t think anything’s damaged.”

  “Anything hurt anywhere else?”

  He could see her gather her strength, and before he could tell her to lie still, she tried to sit up. Wincing, she managed to make it, but she reached around to massage her back. “There were some rocks under the water. I must have hurt my back on them.”

  “Let me see.” He pulled her blouse up. Several red welts crisscrossed her back, and he suspected that by the morning they would be livid bruises. Gently lowering her shirt, he said matter-of-factly, “Looks like you’re right. That must have been quite a ride.”

  She nodded, then began to shake. Turning blindly, she reached out for him and buried her head in his shoulder. “I thought I was going to die, Caine.” Her hands trembled where they gripped his shirt, and convulsive shudders racked her body. “I was so scared.”

  He drew her into his arms and held her close. “It’s okay to be scared, Lex. It’s all over now and you’re going to be fine. It’s okay.” He stroked her back and held her close, trying to keep his eyes closed. Calling himself a perverted jerk, he tried to ignore the fact that he could see her bra, see the dark outline of her nipples through the wet material. He forced himself to keep his touch comforting, when he ached to reach out for her, to turn her fear-induced shudders into the trembling of passion.

  Shifting slightly so she wouldn’t feel his reaction to her, he reached up and smoothed her hair away from her face. He was disgusted to notice that his hand was shaking, too. There hadn’t been many times when he’d sat with a woman and tried to comfort her. Hell, there hadn’t been many times when he’d wanted to. But he wanted to now, and he was determined to do it right.

  Before he could control his body’s reaction to having Lexie in his arms, she stirred and looked up at him. “Kiss me, Caine,” she whispered. “I need to taste you, to feel you.”

  Bending down, he lightly brushed his lips over hers in a fleeting caress, then tucked her head into his shoulder again. She struggled to free herself. “That’s not what I meant. I want you to kiss me, Caine, really kiss me. Like you did last night.”

  He stared at her, cursing his body’s throbbing reaction to her words and trying desperately to control himself. She stared back, and the embers of desire he saw smoldering in the depths of her dark blue eyes made him groan. “Lexie, I’m trying to do the right thing, here. You need to be comforted and taken care of, not kissed senseless.”

  Her gaze softened, and for a moment her eyes lit with a deep tenderness. Then she slowly pulled his head down to hers and took his mouth.

  The hunger he could feel in her fueled his own desire, and he felt all his self-imposed barriers crumbling. When her lips opened slightly beneath his, he groaned and swept his tongue into her mouth.

  Weaving his hands through her hair, he held her close as he tasted the dark sweetness of her. She shifted in his arms, pressing closer to him, and he groaned again as her rump brushed against him.

  He let his hand slide down her neck until it lay against the wet fabric of her blouse.
As his fingers splayed over her chest, he could feel her skin warming under his hand. Finally, unable to resist for another second, he slowly reached for the buttons on her blouse and undid them, one by one.

  She shuddered when he brushed the damp material aside and cupped one lush breast in his hand. When he slid his fingers inside her bra, she arched against his hand and murmured something, deep in her throat.

  The small sound was enough to push him over the edge. Lowering her to the ground, he began to pull the blouse off her shoulders. He’d managed to get it half off her when he realized she was wincing in pain.

  His hands stilled immediately as desire left his body with a rush. “Oh, God, Lex, I’m sorry,” he whispered, appalled at himself. “I forgot all about your back.”

  She smiled up at him. “It’s all right. I did, too.”

  She reached for him, but he gathered both her hands into his and brought them to his lips. Lingering over them, inhaling her scent, which somehow managed to overpower the smell of the river, he finally looked down at her and bent to kiss her lips.

  “I’m going to carry you back to the clearing,” he said. “You need to rest and eat something, then go to sleep. As much as I don’t want to stop, you don’t need to make love on the rocky edge of the river.”

  She opened her mouth to answer him, but he put his fingers on her lips. “You’ve just been through a dangerous experience, Lexie. It’s normal to want to reassure yourself that you’re alive afterward, and sex is a good way of doing that.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then finally she smiled. The tenderness in her gaze made him yearn for something that he knew he would never have, and he had to close his eyes to stop himself from reaching for her.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” she said, and her voice was soft and low. “I wasn’t trying to reassure myself that I was alive. I know that very well. I was trying to reassure myself that I hadn’t lost you.”

  He was swept by a need so profound and deep that he knew if he looked at her he would blurt it out. He wanted to hold her close, tell her that she could never lose him because he belonged to her, heart and soul. But he kept his eyes closed and clamped his mouth shut, because he knew it could never be.

  After a few minutes he heard her stirring, and he reluctantly opened his eyes. She’d seen the baby lying on her shawl not far from the river, and she was trying to reach her.

  “The kid is fine,” he told Lexie, scooping her up into his arms. “I’ll take you back, then come for her.”

  “No,” she said sharply. “I don’t want to leave her down here alone. Put her into my arms and I’ll carry her back with us.”

  He did as she asked, then carried her the short distance to the clearing. It was getting late, but it was still light enough to make a fire without the smoke betraying their position. Setting Lexie and the baby down next to the trunk of a huge tree, he tried to concentrate on getting dinner fixed.

  By the time the agouti was ready and the hot water had been poured into the pouches of dehydrated food, Lexie was sound asleep. The baby was still lying on her lap, her head supported by one of Lexie’s arms, but she looked damned precarious. He stared at the two of them, wondering what to do. He needed to wake Lexie for dinner, but he was afraid that if he startled her, the kid would roll off her lap onto the ground.

  Finally, gritting his teeth, he picked up the baby and looked around for the shawl. When it was nowhere in sight, he realized he must have left it down at the river. Holding the baby in the crook of one arm, just the way Lexie had done, he started to walk down toward the water.

  He remembered too vividly the first time he’d held the kid. The memory of her smiles still stabbed at him whenever he thought about it, piercing him with a sharp, deep pain that penetrated to his soul. It didn’t mean anything, he told himself. A kid this age would probably smile at anyone. Still, as they walked through the jungle, he couldn’t stop himself from glancing down at her again.

  She was looking around, and if he didn’t know better he would say she was cataloging everything she saw. Her serious gaze drifted from the trees to the vines, then fixed on the enormous flowers that seemed to grow right out of the trunks of the trees.

  “Pretty impressive, aren’t they?” he heard himself say to her. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he called himself a fool for talking to a baby, but to his surprise she looked up at him, apparently startled by the sound of his voice. As she stared at him, her mouth curled up into a smile, and while he watched, fascinated, she began to wriggle in the whole-body grin he was beginning to recognize.

  “Hey, do I look like a comedian?” he growled down at her. To his delight, she opened her mouth and a noise that sounded suspiciously like a giggle emerged. Her arms and legs whirled like four little windmills and her grin threatened to split her face.

  “Shows what you know,” he muttered, feeling a fist reach out and smash into his heart. He knew better than to let this tiny baby sneak in under his defenses. He had nothing to give her except heartache. But he had no choice tonight, he told himself. Lexie needed to rest, to recuperate from her near drowning. There was no one but him to take care of the kid. Just because he held her for a few hours and talked to her didn’t mean he was tied to her for life.

  Scooping up the shawl from the place he’d left it earlier, he draped it over his shoulder and headed back to the clearing. Every time he looked down at the kid he found her studying him, and even though he warned himself to ignore it, he felt his heart soften each time he caught her eye and she smiled.

  No wonder parents were so loopy about their kids, he thought, catching her eye again and feeling himself smiling back at her. They were damned close to impossible to resist.

  He set the shawl on the ground and gently laid the baby on top of it, then touched Lexie lightly on the shoulder. “Time to wake up, honey. You have to eat something.”

  She opened her eyes and stared at him. He could see the effort it took for her to focus on him. “Ana?” she asked groggily.

  “Right next to you. She’s fine.”

  Pushing herself into a more upright position, she looked around at the lengthening shadows in the clearing. “How long was I asleep?”

  “Not long enough. While you’re eating I’m going to put up the tent so you can go right to sleep.”

  “I have to take care of Ana.”

  “Feed her, then let me take care of the rest. What else is there, anyway?”

  She looked up at him quickly, and an odd expression flared in her eyes. “I have to change her diaper, for one thing, and clean her up. She’s sweating so much that she’ll get a rash if I’m not careful.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he repeated, wondering how on earth to change a diaper.

  “Are you sure?” She looked at him doubtfully, but she could barely keep her eyes open.

  “Positive. How tough can it be to change a diaper and clean a kid?”

  It wasn’t tough at all, he realized a while later. Lexie had finished eating and then fed the baby. She’d barely had enough strength to hold the kid up, and when she’d finished and laid the baby back down on the shawl, Caine had picked her up and carried her into the tent.

  “Go to sleep,” he told to her. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  She murmured something about diapers and her backpack, but she was asleep before she’d finished. Caine backed out of the tent and looked over to where the kid lay on the shawl.

  Not just a kid, he reminded himself. His kid. His heart twisted at the thought, leaving him with an ache in his chest. He stared at her for another moment, then looked around for Lexie’s backpack.

  Rummaging inside it, he brushed against a flat object as his hand closed around what he presumed was a clean diaper. As he pulled the diaper out of the bag, the package shifted again and his hand stilled. It had to be the packet of pictures that Lexie had insisted he get from her house, the pictures of the baby as a newborn.

  He hesitated, his fingers touch
ing the cool paper, then slowly withdrew his hand. Looking at those pictures was just asking for trouble. He didn’t need to see what his daughter looked like when she was born. He could see her now just fine. How much could a kid change in two months, anyway?

  Pulling Lexie’s pack shut with a snap, he turned to the baby. There was still some water left from dinner, and by now it had cooled to the temperature of bathwater. Gently he unwrapped her diaper, being careful to notice how it was put together. Then he pulled her shirt over her head.

  She looked so small and defenseless, lying naked on the shawl in front of him. Her legs and arms continued to wave around, but without her clothes he could see how tiny and fragile she really was.

  A fierce surge of protectiveness swept over him. He had never really thought about her as an entity separate from Lexie before —she was always just a package that came with her mother, something extra to worry about. Now he looked at her and saw an individual; a miniature human being who, for some reason, had decided that she trusted him.

  He watched her as he dampened one of his T-shirts and carefully wiped her down. Her eyes widened in surprise at the feel of the water, and she tensed for a second. Then, as if she recognized the sensation, she relaxed again. When he looked at her face, she gave him another hundred-watt smile.

  Rocking back on his heels, he just stared at her. It couldn’t happen, he told himself desperately. He couldn’t be a father to this child. It would just bring sorrow and heartache down on her. His ex-wife had been so certain of it that she’d—

  He shut his mind down, refusing to think about the past. Even without those memories, he knew damn well he wasn’t father material. He had no idea what a father was supposed to do. All he knew was what they weren’t supposed to do; and that couldn’t ever be enough.

  He quickly finished cleaning the baby and wrapped a fresh diaper around her. It seemed as if it could wrap around her tiny body twice. Refusing to think about her anymore, he put her shirt back on and washed and wrung out his T-shirt. Hanging it over a bush to dry during the night, he carried the baby into the tent and laid her down next to her mother.