“At twenty-some weeks, she wasn’t far enough along for that,” he concluded.
“Exactly.” The coffeemaker gasped. “There are some remarkable cases of survival after such extreme prematurity, but the odds against it are enormous.”
He made a soft sound that she couldn’t interpret and she took down two mugs from the cupboard, finding it easier to continue if she wasn’t facing those otherworldly blue eyes. “Cassie refused to consider any option but proceeding with the pregnancy.”
Despite the risks. Despite the odds. Cassie had bet on carrying the baby.
Bet and lost.
“She went on bed rest, and we treated her as best we could to gain as many weeks for the fetus as possible. We knew she’d have to deliver early, but at that point, every day—every week—makes a difference to the baby. And Cassie was determined to give her child the best start at life as possible.” She yanked the coffee carafe out much too early and a stream of coffee sizzled against the hot plate.
Ryan lifted the coffeepot out of her hand and set it on the counter. He turned off the steaming coffeemaker, looking into her face. “What went wrong?”
Everything.
She turned away from him again. Went to the refrigerator. Maybe he took milk in his coffee. She yanked open the fridge door only to stare blindly at the shelves.
“Mallory—”
She shut the door again without retrieving a single thing from inside. “Her placenta separated from the uterine wall three weeks before we’d planned to induce. I was on duty that night—” She broke off. She hadn’t even known at first that it was her sister on the table bleeding to death while the attending physician performed a C-section.
He muttered a soft oath.
“We couldn’t stop the hemorrhaging. Cassie went into shock.” She stared at her hands, but was only seeing the horror of that night in her mind. “She died.”
“You didn’t let her die.”
Her hands curled into fists. “I couldn’t talk her into terminating her pregnancy when she could have. I couldn’t talk her into scheduling an earlier delivery. There were so many steps along the way that could have changed the outcome.”
His hands closed over her shoulders, forcing her to face him. “They weren’t your steps to take.”
She didn’t realize there were tears on her cheeks until he wiped his thumbs over them. “But—”
His thumbs moved down to cover her lips. “Don’t do that to yourself. Cassie wasn’t stupid. You’ve said yourself how determined she was where Chloe was concerned.”
She wrapped her fingers around his wrists. They were like iron and too wide for her fingers to fully circle. “I should have worked harder to save Cassie that night.”
Somehow, she found her wrists captured in his hands, instead, with no real idea of how he’d done it. “What were you doing?”
“Trying to get Chloe to breathe. But Cassie—” She broke off.
“Were you the only one in the room with them?” His grip was almost punishing in its intensity.
She frowned. “No. No, of course not.” The O.R. had been a freaking madhouse. It had been months before she’d been able to force herself back into one. She would have lost her residency if not for the leniency she was allowed in consideration of the situation. “But—”
“But nothing. Stop taking on the responsibility for her death as if it’s yours alone to take! You did what you had to do under the circumstances. What more do you expect, Mallory?”
She looked up into his face. “Did you love her?”
Chapter Nine
Did you love her?
Mallory’s question seemed to echo around the silent kitchen, but instead of fading into indistinctness, it seemed to only increase in volume until the words were reverberating very distinctly inside her head.
His eyebrows had pulled together over his sharp blade of a nose. He let go of her wrists. “What?”
For a very brief moment, she caught a glimpse behind the deep blue barrier of his eyes to the man inside, and what she saw there had only one description.
Grief.
She wished she could erase the words.
Or turn back time. If not turning it back to that awful night seven years ago, then turning it back to just a moment ago so she wouldn’t have blurted out such a revealing question.
It was no wonder he didn’t want to get involved with her. Maybe he still loved Cassie. Maybe he avoided all entanglements because of that.
But if he’d loved Cassie, why had he let her slip out of his life? Mallory had believed her sister when she’d said she hadn’t been in love with Chloe’s father, but maybe Cassie had lied. Downplayed her feelings.
Confusion had never been Mallory’s best friend, and it wasn’t now.
It didn’t help that she wanted to rub her hands over the tingling in her wrists where Ryan had held them, either. “It…it doesn’t matter. It’s none of my business.”
“You tracked me down—somehow—and that’s what you think is none of your business?” He finally moved across the kitchen again, only to pace back and stand in front of her before she could manage to draw in the long breath her equilibrium needed. “Speaking of which, you still haven’t explained how you found me.”
No, because she’d gotten caught up in baring the horrible details of why the real mother of his child wasn’t the one standing before him now.
“It’s late,” she said, instead. “Maybe we should wait until another time.” Wait until she’d had a chance to process the stark emotion she’d seen in him.
You mean, adjust to the fact that he must have loved Cassie, even if she hadn’t loved him.
“It’s not that late.”
She begged to differ. Two days ago the man had walked into her house and everything had changed.
There wasn’t one thing about Weaver that didn’t have her in over her head. And that most particularly applied to Ryan Clay.
“I need to check on Chloe.”
For a moment, it looked as if he wanted to argue. But he just lifted his fingers slightly as if to say, Go.
She escaped.
There was simply no other word for it.
She went upstairs and checked on Chloe who was sound asleep just like Mallory—if she’d been truthful—had expected her to be.
She straightened the edge of the blanket and crept out of the room. But how long could she hide out on the landing before Ryan would get suspicious?
Not long, since he’d left the kitchen and was looking straight up at her.
The knot in her chest was beginning to feel far too familiar. Ignoring it, as well as the stinging need to close herself in her bedroom and away from his prying eyes, she forced herself to go back down the stairs and return to the kitchen.
He’d filled the two mugs with coffee and they were sitting on the little round table by the window, but she didn’t sit down on one of the chairs.
Nor did he.
Neither one of them really wanted coffee.
She closed her hands over the back of the wood-slatted chair. “After Cassie died, we were inundated with condolence cards from all over the world,” she offered baldly. “Gram read through them at the time.” Much the same, she supposed sadly, as she’d had to do when her daughter had died. “She saved them all for me, but it was over a year before I could face looking at them. When I finally did, though, one of the cards was from a man named Coleman Black.”
Ryan’s gaze sharpened, but he said nothing, so she forged on.
At least telling him this part didn’t feel as though she was peeling back her skin. And it gave her something to focus on, other than what she’d seen in his eyes.
Or so she told herself.
“Mr. Black’s note was…brief. I still have it if you want to see it.” She didn’t know why she’d offered that. What would he care that something had made her keep the note, tuck it inside her jewelry box where it remained to this day?
“We’ll see.”
She hesitated, but he’d gone silent again, leaving her with the sense that she’d stepped into something else sticky and uncomfortable.
She moistened her lips again. “Anyway, he expressed his regret and said that Cassie had been a wonderful employee and it was clear he’d been her boss. The envelope was with the card. It had a handwritten return address for HW Industries in Connecticut.”
“You followed up on the address?” For some reason, he seemed surprised at that.
“It was only logical. But it still took me months before deciding to do that,” she admitted. Chloe had been a toddler by then. Both Mallory and Gram had been exhausted trying to keep up with her; Mallory because of the continuing demands of her career and studies and Gram simply because of her age.
“So what prompted you?”
Her lips parted. “I had our pictures taken for Christmas.” She hadn’t even really remembered that until now. “Chloe’s and mine. One of those inexpensive packages that the discount stores are always pushing around the holidays? I wanted Gram to have a nice picture of us.” She had an identical framed eight-by-ten on her dresser. Her and little Chloe wearing matching red sweaters.
The little family. Only both of Chloe’s real parents were missing.
“When I went to the address, I’d hoped to find this Black person if he was even still there, and see if he could provide any information about you.” She grimaced. “Obviously I shouldn’t have let so much time pass, because the only thing I found there was a toilet paper warehouse, and even though I asked around, nobody recalled him or Cassie or a company called HW Industries.”
Ryan almost snorted.
He’d bet that was the stonewalling Mallory would have received.
People did not walk in off the streets and expect a sit-down with the elusive boss of Hollins-Winword. Which was in fact the real agency hiding behind the odd—and at times ironically appropriate—toilet paper manufacturer. Only Mallory had no way of knowing that. “And then what?”
“I went back to New York,” she said. “I sent a letter to the address, explaining who I was and the information I was trying to find and hoped it would get forwarded to the company’s new location. I assumed that it had because I didn’t receive it back in the mail. I didn’t get an answer, though, so I sent another. And another.” Her amber eyes were lost in the past. “It was about a year after I’d given up thinking I’d get a response when I got one. Of sorts. It wasn’t the letter that I’d expected or hoped for at all. It was a small box containing a few items that had belonged to Cassie. The note accompanying them said she’d left them behind when she’d left the company. An adventure novel, and a small cosmetics case.” She looked up to the ceiling. “I was so discouraged I nearly tossed them out. But there was a postcard inside the book postmarked from here, in Weaver.”
He remembered the postcard even before she finished recalling the details.
He’d mailed the card to Cassie from Weaver years ago. Back when he hadn’t had a hole inside him where his soul used to be. “I told her if she ever got to this side of the country, to check out Weaver,” he said.
Mallory’s lashes drooped, hiding her expressive eyes. “The postmark was clear enough. And Weaver is small. There were only a few men named Ryan that I found listed anywhere in the area. One was an elderly man whom I ruled out. The other was some hotshot naval guy. The navy part didn’t sound right, but he was at least about the right age.”
He grimaced. He had been in the navy. He’d followed in his father’s footsteps there. And if he’d have stuck to the navy, lives—more than just his own—might have been very different.
Instead, he’d had the astronomical ego to think he could accomplish more good by throwing in league with Coleman Black.
“Gram and I weren’t entirely in agreement about contacting Chloe’s father,” she said after a moment. “Or I should say contacting the man I suspected might be her father.”
“But you went ahead and did it. Why?”
“I told you. Chloe deserves to know she has a father.”
“Even if the father isn’t the kind of person you want him to be?”
She was worrying at her lower lip, drawing his attention in a way that wasn’t wise.
At his question, though, a troubled frown replaced the nibbling. “But I knew that you were a good man. Cassie said so.”
He’d known Cassie before he’d gotten involved with trying to bring down Krager. Cassie didn’t know the man he was now. If she did, she’d have made damn sure he was nowhere near her…their…daughter.
“Anyway, when I finally tried to contact you—” Mallory’s soft voice drew him back again “—I ended up reaching your parents. I didn’t know what to say, so I just claimed to be an old friend of yours and that I was trying to catch up to you.” Her lashes finally lifted. “Your mother was very kind on the phone, but she told me that her son—that you—were deceased. Something to do with the military, which again just made me wonder if I had the right man at all.”
Ryan ignored the confusion she couldn’t hide, but it was harder than it should have been. “Is that why you didn’t tell her about Chloe, anyway?”
Her hands lifted, asking for understanding or expressing defense. He couldn’t tell.
“Partly. I guess I realized that you could have gone into the service after you’d worked with Cassie. But I only had speculation to go on where you and she were concerned in the first place,” she said. “Telling your mother that Chloe might be her grandchild when there were so many unresolved questions just didn’t seem right. What if I’d been wrong? What if it ended up being just one more loss to her? Maybe that sounds like a poor excuse now, I don’t know. I just believed that Chloe would grow up the same way that Cassie and I had.”
“How’s that?”
“Without ever really knowing anything about who we were or where we came from.”
“You know who you are, Doc,” he countered. “The guy who left your mother to raise two daughters is pretty immaterial. Look at everything you’ve accomplished.”
A tide of pink rose in her cheeks and, even though he’d done his share of pushing her off keel, he was the one ending up feeling discomfited now.
“Anyway,” she said, seeming anxious to deflect that sort of observation, “I never expected to meet your mother in person, but she attended a medical symposium in New York in September. I was participating on a panel there and afterward, she introduced herself to me. I remembered her name but I was very surprised that she remembered mine and that phone call I’d made a few years ago.”
“What was the panel for?”
“I—” She shook her head slightly and raked her fingers through her hair, tucking it behind one ear. It slid loose again. “Uh…it was on pregnancy after thirty-five. Why does it matter?”
“Curious.” As much as he wanted to know how she’d ended up finding him, he still found himself just as interested in sidetracking her. Nudging her off the well-defined course she seemed to follow.
Didn’t make it right, but there it was.
She gave him another look that plainly told him she was trying to figure him out and failing. “What was much more stunning than her remembering me was her telling me that you were alive, after all.
“Your mom…she glowed when she told me. I didn’t know what to say. But it doesn’t matter because Gram arrived with Chloe in hand—they were meeting me in the city to see a matinee after the last lecture—and your mother took one look at Chloe and knew the truth. It didn’t matter that there were so many things that made no sense about it. Your mother pulled out a wallet-size baby photograph of you from her purse to show me.”
Mallory looked up at him. “It was astonishing. I could have been looking at a baby picture of Chloe.”
He sat down on one of the hard chairs, trying to equate the mother he knew with the woman who hadn’t breathed a word about any of this to him. “She talked you into coming to Weaver.”
“She…encouraged it,�
�� Mallory allowed. “Dan Yarnell had been wanting to go on sabbatical but had no replacement for his practice and she suggested that I might be suitable.”
“What else did she tell you?”
She hesitated. “She said that, well, that she believed you needed to know about Chloe just as much as Chloe needed to know about you. Particularly now.”
“And why’s that?”
Her lips pressed together. “We didn’t get into particulars, exactly, Ryan. She had one miracle already—you weren’t dead!”
He spread his hands, staring at his palms. “Why didn’t you lay all this on me when you got to town? Why wait all these weeks?”
She didn’t answer immediately. “I could tell you that I was focusing on getting settled at Dan’s practice and making sure that Chloe was doing okay in her new school. Because no matter what happened with you, I was committed to staying here until Dan returns in March. And all that would be true…but mostly…” Her eyes looked apologetic. “Mostly, I was afraid.”
He eyed her. There was good reason for her to be afraid, but there was no way in hell that she could even know what those reasons were.
Nobody knew.
Not his father. Not his cousin Axel who was about the closest thing that Ryan had once called a best friend. And certainly not his mother who—well intentioned or not—had a surprisingly manipulative streak hiding inside her that he never would have expected.
“Afraid of what?”
She made a soft sound. Seemed to hunt for words. “First, do no harm.”
A tenet of every doctor. “This isn’t a medical situation,” he countered.
“But the premise still applies.” She pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.
The neatly groomed, unvarnished tips of her slender fingers brushed against him, leaving him feeling nearly scorched.
The urge to escape started to expand inside him like some deadly balloon. The only thing that kept his butt planted was the soft earnestness in Mallory’s eyes.
A Weaver Holiday Homecoming Page 10
