The Return of Caine O'Halloran: Hard Choices

by JoAnn Ross

  To his surprise, Nora Anderson O’Halloran, the same woman who’d taken extra pains to avoid so much as accidentally brushing against him in their cramped apartment, had suddenly sat up, flung her arms around his neck and pressed her wet face into his shirt.

  “Oh, Caine!” She lifted her doe brown eyes that were dark and heartbreakingly bleak. “I’m never going to be a doctor!”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Not after what I did in gross anatomy class today.”

  “What did you do? Make a slip with the scalpel and emasculate Irving?”

  Irving was the cadaver her anatomy study group had been laboring over.

  When he’d first heard about the class, Caine had thought the term “gross anatomy” a perfect description. Eventually, he’d become accustomed to the fact that his wife spent her mornings with a dead body the same way he’d grown used to the faint odor of formaldehyde lingering in her blond hair.

  “It’s n-n-not funny,” she insisted on a tortured breath.

  “I’m sorry.” Caine tried to understand. “What happened?”

  “My morning sickness came back today.”

  “I thought you looked a little under the weather at breakfast,” Caine remembered. “But didn’t Dr. Palmer tell you that might happen if you got too tired?”

  “Yes. But, oh, y-y-you don’t understand.” Her shoulders slumped defeatedly.

  “I’m trying.” Caine lifted her chin on a finger and looked into her red-rimmed eyes. “But you’re not exactly a font of information, Nora.”

  “It’s s-s-so embarrassing.” She dashed at the moisture stinging her eyes and shook her head in a violent gesture.

  Comprehension dawned. “You threw up in class.”

  Nora gave him a weary look. “All over Irving’s inferior v-v-vena c-cava.”

  Caine had absolutely no idea what an inferior vena cava was and decided that it probably didn’t really matter. Not to Irving anymore, anyway.

  “Is that all?” Caine gave Nora an encouraging smile. “I seem to recall you telling me about three students who tossed their cookies the first week of class.”

  “That was the first week,” Nora explained soberly. “By now we’re all supposed to be used to it.”

  Personally, Caine thought he could probably spend the rest of his life with Irving and not get used to the idea of cutting into human organs—dead or alive—but he knew that was not the point of this conversation.

  If he were to be perfectly fair, he’d have to acknowledge that Nora probably couldn’t imagine the pure pleasure of watching a batter hit a pop fly off your curveball, either. “You’re pregnant. I’m sure your professor will take that into consideration.”

  “Dr. Eugene Fairfield is an antiquated old fossil who doesn’t believe women belong in medicine, period,” she muttered. “As for pregnant women...” She sighed. “And it gets worse. After I got sick, I fainted.”

  “Fainted?” Fear raced through him as his hand dropped to her belly, rounded with his child. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. I was only out for a second, and the only person who got hurt was Irving.”

  “How the hell could Irving get hurt?”

  “I pulled the table over when I fell and the next thing I knew, Irving was sprawled on the floor, with his gall bladder and his liver lying beside him.”

  Nora drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I know Dr. Fairfield’s going to flunk me and I’ll get kicked out of medical school and I’ll never be a doctor!”

  Moisture flooded her eyes again and she clung to him, sobbing harshly into his shoulder.

  If he hadn’t been so genuinely distressed, Caine would have laughed at the idea of quiet, studious Nora, of all people, causing such havoc in class.

  But she was more distraught than he’d ever seen her. And, staggered by her misery, Caine rocked her in his arms and murmured inarticulate words of comfort into her ear.

  His hands moved up and down her back, the gesture meant to comfort, rather than arouse. His lips pressed against her hair and caught the soft scent of flowers beneath the aroma of formaldeyhde she’d brought with her from the lab.

  After an immeasurable time, Caine could tell by Nora’s slow steady breathing that her pain had run its course.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes.” Her soft eyes mirrored her surprise as she tilted her head back and looked up at him. “I am. Thank you.”

  Her quiet formality along with the lingering pain in her eyes had tugged at something elemental deep inside him. Looking down into her pale and unusually open face, Caine was engulfed with a tenderness like nothing he’d ever known.

  And with that tenderness, he realized, came love.

  “You don’t have to thank me, Nora.” His gaze moved over her pale, uplifted face. “I’m your husband. And although I’ll admit to being a little vague about husbandly duties, I think a shoulder to cry on comes with the job.”

  “But we agreed—”

  “I don’t give a damn what we agreed.” She’d pointed out the terms of their agreement innumerable times over the past six months and Caine was sick of hearing it. “Would it be against the rules if I kissed you?”

  Surprise warred with unwilling desire on her lovely features. “I think it would.”

  “Too bad.” Bending his head, he kissed her face where salty tears were still drying.

  “Caine—”

  “What, Nora?” His lips skimmed along the slanted line of her cheekbone.

  “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

  “You might be right.” His teeth closed around the tender skin of her earlobe and Nora drew in a quick breath but did not pull away. “But I can’t come up with a logical reason why I shouldn’t make love to my wife.”

  With a sensitivity neither had been aware of him possessing, his hand moved slowly, possessively, from her shoulder to her belly. “How about you?”

  “No.” Nora’s soft breathless voice was a whisper of surrender. “I can’t.” With a sigh, she closed her eyes, relaxed and let him guide her into the mists.

  His hands slipped under her maternity top, unhooked the front clasp of her bra with ease and cupped her breasts. When his thumb brushed against her nipple, Nora gasped and would have pulled away. But before she could move, Caine’s lips fused to hers.

  Caine felt the last vestiges of her resistance ebb. He felt it in the softening of her lips and the strength of her fingers as she clutched his upper arms. Heat simmered at the base of his spine, making him ache.

  He pulled off her oversize blouse and tossed it onto the floor. Her nipples, which he remembered as being a rosy pink, had darkened to the hue of the cranberries that grew wild in bogs along the coast. And they were just as hard, Caine discovered as he brushed his hand over one dusky bud. The intimate touch made Nora stiffen in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he soothed. “I promise not to take you anywhere you don’t want to go, Nora.”

  Passively, she relaxed again. Sensing her trust, Caine took pains not to abuse it. Slowly, banking the rising desire born of six long and lonely months of celibacy, he ran whisper-soft kisses across her lips, from one corner of her mouth to the other, before going on to kiss her cheeks, her forehead, her temple, the bridge of her nose.

  All the time, his fingers circled her breasts, caressing, stroking. Caine could feel her pulse beginning to thunder; still he took his time, determined not to succumb to any quick burst of pleasure.

  “I’ve been going crazy, thinking about this.” His tongue traced a line from her throat down to her breasts. “Remembering the sweet, sexy taste of your skin.” When he took a nipple between his teeth and tugged, she gasped, then arched against him. “How you turn to liquid silk in my arms.”

  “Oh, Caine.” The softly spoken name seeme
d to echo off the wall, surrounding them. Embracing them. “Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me everything you’ve been thinking.”

  “Everything?” He wove his fingers into her hair, holding her gaze with his. “Are you sure a woman in your delicate condition is up to some of my more graphic fantasies?”

  “Why don’t you try me and see?” she suggested with a smile that managed to be both shy and seductive at the same time.

  “All right.” He coaxed her onto her back and skimmed a trail of wet, openmouthed kisses down her rib cage. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Her maternity jeans had an elastic insert to allow room for her expanding belly. The jeans were, Caine considered, highly practical and decidedly unsexy. After unbuttoning them at the waist, he began pulling them slowly down her legs.

  What he found beneath the durable denim came as a distinct surprise. “Black silk?”

  “They were a wedding present from Karin.” Nora’s cheeks flamed.

  “I think I like these a lot better than the pots and pans my parents gave us.” Caine smoothed his hands over her stomach, where the child—their child, he thought wonderingly—had been growing all these months. Imbued with tenderness, he pressed his lips against her flesh.

  Then, moving on, Caine slipped his fingers beneath the lace-trimmed legs and inched upward to secret pleasures. “Remind me to thank your sister-in-law, first chance I get.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “It won’t do any good to pretend to be scandalized, my dear wife.” He lowered his mouth and drew a wet swath just above the waistband of the low-rise panties with his tongue. “Because any woman who’d wear panties like this in your condition is a wild woman at heart.”

  “I must be.” Nora combed her hands through Caine’s hair and writhed beneath his increasingly intimate touch. “Because this is just about all I’ve been thinking about lately.”

  “Really?” The admission brought a burst of male pride.

  “Really. My obstetrician says it’s raging hormones, but I’m not so sure she’s right.”

  He dipped his tongue into her navel. “Then what do you think has been making you all hot and bothered lately?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was lying. Caine could read it in her eyes. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who’d found forced celibacy a burden.

  “Perhaps you’ve been reading my mind.” He lay down beside her and cupped her breast. “Perhaps you tuned in on how much I wanted to taste you again.” He took the hardened nipple into his mouth, causing a moan of pleasure to slip past her lips.

  The soft moan brought a fresh surge of arousal—one Caine managed, with effort, to bank.

  “Maybe you knew how I’ve been imagining the feel of your body against mine.” He yanked his T-shirt over his head and pulled her against him, heated flesh against heated flesh. “And how the thought of you, hot and wet, makes me hard.”

  He took her hand and pressed it against the placket of his jeans, letting her feel the full extent of his need. “See how much I want you?”

  “I’ve tried to understand,” she murmured with reluctant wonder. Her fingers began stroking his burgeoning flesh through the thick material. “I’ve lain awake nights trying to analyze why everything’s so different with you, but I can’t come up with a logical answer.”

  “Then don’t think.” With fingers that were not as steady as he would have liked, Caine unfastened the five-button jeans, vowing to go out and buy a pair with a zipper as soon as the stores opened in the morning. “Don’t analyze. Just feel.”

  The room was washed in shadows. A full moon rose in the sky outside the bedroom, bathing the lovers in a soft silvery light. But still Caine refused to rush.

  Even when they were laying together, naked, he kept his own flaming hunger tightly reined as his hands continued to stroke and his lips took long, leisurely tours over her body—her rounded stomach, the small of her back, her shoulders, that sensitive spot he’d discovered on her ankle—always to return again and again to her soft, pliant lips.

  When he finally slipped into her, a deep current of love flowed through him, like a river, and he realized how fulfilling tenderness could be.

  Very soon after that day, Nora’s obstetrician had cautioned against engaging in intercourse. But that hadn’t stopped them from exploring myriad other imaginative ways to pleasure one another. Nora was the only woman Caine had ever met who could actually be brought to orgasm by nibbling on the tendon at the back of her knee.

  And he was positive that she was one of the few women who’d ever climaxed during labor. At the time, he’d only been trying to take her mind off her pain. But when his stroking hand had moved under the hospital sheet, beyond her undulating belly and between her legs, to recklessly toy with the hard pink nubbin of flesh, Nora had cried out, not in pain, but in absolute, stunned pleasure. Her noisy response had brought the nurse, who, after examining her, had found her not fully dilated. The nurse had patted Nora’s head in a maternal way, and told her to go ahead and yell whenever she felt the urge.

  The moment she’d left the room in a rustle of starched cotton, Nora and Caine had collapsed in gales of shared laughter.

  The memories made Caine’s body throb. He tipped the bottle back, only to discover it was empty. “Damn.”

  Cursing inarticulately, he flung it into the lake, struggled to his feet and wove his way back to the cabin.

  He staggered across the living room and crashed onto the newspaper-strewn sofa. The painkillers were on the coffee table where he’d left them that first night. Caine picked up the plastic bottle, shook a handful of the pink pills into his palm and stared blearily down at them.

  What would happen if he just said the hell with everything and swallowed them all? It would, he considered for a fleeting second, solve a hell of a lot of problems.

  Except he couldn’t do it. He might be nothing but a drunk, washed-up ballplayer with two failed marriages behind him, but he damn well didn’t want his fans to remember him as a coward.

  Cursing, he flung the tablets away. They scattered over the clothes-covered floor and were immediately forgotten.

  Then, exhausted by the too-vivid memories and numbed by too much alcohol, Caine fell instantly into a deep sleep.

  Chapter 9

  “What in the blazes do you think you’re doing, Caine O’Halloran?”

  Maggie crossed her arms over her chest, where a trio of pilot whales swam against the bright blue background of today’s sweatshirt. “Chasing after Nora Anderson when you’ve already got yourself a wife back in New York City.”

  “Now, Maggie,” Devlin soothed as he put a cup of coffee down in front her. “Don’t you think you’re bein’ a little hard on the boy?”

  “That’s just my point,” Maggie snapped. “Caine is not a boy. He’s a grown man with a wife.”

  “Tiffany and I are getting a divorce.”

  Caine took a bite of one of the glazed doughnuts Devlin had brought to the table along with the coffee. He’d come to turn over his grandmother’s garden, a spring ritual Maggie was definitely not up to this year.

  Maggie frowned at Caine over the rim of her mug. “Even if that’s the case, like it or not, the law still says you’re a married man, Caine. Which means you have no business chasing after Nora.”

  “I wasn’t chasing after her,” Caine argued. “Hell, after Harmon beat me up, Dana and Tom took me to the clinic to have her patch me up.”

  “You’re not going to try to tell me that you invited her to your cabin the other night for medical reasons, are you? I may be old, but I’m not senile. Least, not yet,” Maggie muttered.

  Caine silently cursed Trudy down at the market. The woman had the biggest mouth in town. Second biggest, he amended, remembering Ingrid Johansson.


  “I invited her to the cabin for dinner. And to talk.”

  “It’s still not right, Caine,” Maggie said. “It isn’t fair to your wife. And it damn well isn’t fair to Nora.”

  “But—”

  “Better hear your grandmother out, Caine,” Devlin said in a quiet but firm tone.

  “All right.” Feeling like he had when he was nine years old and had accidentally driven Maggie’s Cessna twin engine through the side of the hangar, Caine tilted the kitchen chair back on its rear legs, crossed his outstretched legs at the ankle and waited. “Fire away.”

  Maggie nodded, satisfied that she had his undivided attention. “Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with your feelings for Nora. Everyone in town can see that you and that girl are ripe for a second chance. And the way things ended the last time, Lord knows you both deserve one.

  “But you were brought up to do the right thing, Caine. And courtin’ your first wife while you’re still married to your second one just isn’t the right thing to do.”

  “Even if it feels right?” he couldn’t help asking.

  Maggie’s stern gaze softened for a moment. “If everybody did what felt right at the time, Caine, the world would be in an even worse pickle than it is now.”

  “You gotta choose, Caine,” Devlin advised. “One wife or the other.”

  “Hell, there’s no choice.” Caine dropped the chair back on all four legs. “I want Nora.” The moment he heard himself say the words out loud, Caine knew they were true.

  “Then take care of your problem with the other one,” Maggie instructed. “This Tiffany. And then, when you’re free, you can do whatever it takes to get Nora back.”

  “Speaking about doing the right thing,” Caine ventured carefully, “I’ve been talking to Nora about you.”

  Maggie’s expressive face instantly closed. “You had no right doin’ that, Caine.”

  “I’ve every right. I love you and I can’t stand by and watch you...”