Dear God, it can’t be! She stared at the still, blood-soaked figure in stunned disbelief.
“Robyn? Robyn, who is he to you?” Dr. Cain’s voice seemed to come from a long way away.
“Nobody,” she whispered, wishing it were true.
“They were engaged once,” Jane said, then picked up the phone and spoke quickly. “Portable X-ray in E.R., stat.”
For a long, painful moment, Robyn’s heart seemed to freeze. Then it began to pound wildly inside her chest. She couldn’t get enough air. She drew in one deep breath, then another, and slowly her vision began to clear. “It was a long time ago.”
“Well, he’s going to be a dead nobody if we don’t get this chest tube in. Help or get out of the way.” Dr. Cain’s voice was harsh as he began to swab Neal’s chest with antiseptic.
“What?” She looked at him in confusion.
“You heard me. Help, or get out of here. I need a nurse, not a jilted sweetheart. Someone start another IV line, and get this shirt out of my way.”
“Of course, I’m sorry.” Robyn picked up a pair of scissors. Her hands trembled, but she managed to cut away the bloody fabric from Neal’s chest.
Neal flinched and moaned when the chest tube went in, and she grabbed the hand he raised. “Neal, can you hear me? You’re in the hospital. You’re going to be okay.”
God she hoped that was true. His hand tightened on hers, and he tried to speak. She bent close to hear his voice, which was muffled by the oxygen mask. “Robyn?”
“Yes, Neal, it’s me. You’re going to be okay.”
His grip tightened. “I’m sorry,” he rasped. “Want you...to know...” His voice trailed away, and his hand fell limp.
“How soon on that Air-Life flight?” Dr. Cain’s question spurred her back into action. She wrapped a tourniquet around Neal’s muscular forearm and began to prep for another IV line.
“Twenty minutes,” Jane said.
“Type and cross for two units. We’ve got a lot of blood coming out of this chest tube. Get a unit of O neg. in as fast as you can. Do you have that IV yet?”
“Yes.” Robyn slid the needle into place and taped it.
“Start Ringer’s lactate wide-open, and Robyn?”
“Yes?”
“Good job.”
She nodded. “I’d better notify his family.”
“Let Jane do it. I need you.” He held out a gloved hand and said, “Suture.”
Somehow Robyn managed to keep working, but she couldn’t stop glancing at the clock. Time seemed to move in slow motion. Where was the transport crew? How much longer before they arrived? She listened to each rattling breath Neal took and prayed he would keep breathing. The nurse in her kept functioning, snipping sutures, checking vital signs, starting blood, while another part of her watched the whole scene with a sense of disbelief.
It was the nightmare scene she had always feared when they were together.
She wasn’t surprised Neal had been seriously injured. He was a world-class bull rider. He risked injury, even death, a hundred times each year. That was part of the reason she’d walked away from him five years ago. A small part.
What did surprise her was how much she still cared.
At last the outside doors slid open and the transport crew rushed in. Dressed in blue-and-white jumpsuits and carrying large red-and-white cases, they set up on the scene with practiced ease. It was a relief to step out of the way and let them take over. Within minutes, Neal had been assessed and was loaded onto their stretcher. He was quickly wheeled out the door, across the parking lot and up to the waiting helicopter.
Neal’s mother’s white Buick Regal tore into the lot as he was being lifted aboard. Ellie Bryant jumped out of her car and raced toward the chopper. The crew let her in beside him as Dr. Cain and Robyn hurried toward her. Leaning in the chopper, Ellie spoke to her son and kissed him before the crew urged her aside.
Robyn took Ellie by the shoulders and pulled her away. Covering their faces with their arms, the two women huddled together as the chopper rose into the air and clung to each other until the sound of it faded away.
Ellie used both hands to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “I’ve always been afraid of this. At least he was close to home and not a thousand miles away.”
Turning to Robyn, she asked, “Will he live?”
“He’s getting the best care possible, but it is bad.”
Dr. Cain came up and rested a hand on Ellie’s shoulder as he spoke. “Do you have someone who can drive you to Kansas City tonight? I think you should go as quickly as possible.”
“My oldest son and his wife are in Dallas. I’m fine to go by myself.”
“I’ll go with you,” Robyn surprised herself by offering.
“Are you sure?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, I’m sure. You shouldn’t drive all that way alone. Let me call Mom and make some arrangements for Chance.”
Robyn rushed back inside to make the call. She couldn’t rest until she knew that Neal would live. If he didn’t, she’d never have the chance to tell him he had a son.
Copyright © 2014 by Patricia MacDonald
ISBN-13: 9781460324523
EVERYWHERE SHE GOES
Copyright © 2014 by Janice Kay Johnson
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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www.Harlequin.com
He always does the right thing
There’s one exception to Karl Milek’s rule—the Vegas weekend that leaves him with a night to remember, and a beautiful new wife he’d rather forget. Those divorce papers are put on hold, however, when Vivian shows up on his doorstep pregnant.
Karl offers her shelter and everything else she needs until their baby is born. Yet soon he realizes that he could definitely get used to seeing Vivian in the mornings, sharing dinner with her at night…and inhaling her jasmine scent. But he doesn’t think he can risk giving his wife the one thing she wants most—his love.
This was exactly what he wanted to avoid!
When Karl walked through the doorway to his apartment at eleven o’clock on Friday, he found Vivian sitting on a dining chair in the entryway, reading What To Expect When You’re Expecting. He should have known it had been too much to hope that he could dodge her for eight months.
“Good evening, Karl.” She rested the book on her lap and looked up at him. “Have you been avoiding me?”
It sounded cowardly when she put it like that. He stared at the curve of her bottom lip over her pointed chin. soft over sharp, and he had to stop himself from running his thumb over the bow. He didn’t have to be drunk to be susceptible to the arcs of her face, but he needed to remember that she was only temporary. The baby was permanent, but Vivian was fleeting.
“I work a lot.” It came out like a defense.
“
Well, you’re home now and I’m still up, so we can finally talk.”
Dear Reader,
Jo Beverley has a post on the blog Word Wenches where she talks about the marriage-of-convenience trope, calling it “vows before love.” This trope appeals to Beverley because the vulnerability of the heroine required for the story shows her strengths to the fullest effect. (Beverley compares this to a thriller where the hero starts out trapped.) To me, this is Vivian in a nutshell. When the book opens, there is little more in her life she can lose, and we see her battle her fears, weakness and, occasionally, her husband to become a fuller, stronger person.
Karl has a different journey to take. If you’ve read the other two books in the Milek series (Reservations for Two, February 2013, and The First Move, April 2013), then you know Karl is a bit uptight and a serial dater. Finding the perfect match for him was hard; my laptop is full of first chapters where Karl meets a heroine who is great—but not for him. It took me several tries before I realized Karl needs someone to challenge his preconceived notions about himself and the world, without shaking him loose from his core. Love stories work best when we have to push ourselves to be worthy of our beloved.
If you’re interested in Vivian’s background and family in the novel, I recommend Iris Chang’s The Chinese in America: A Narrative History.
Enjoy!
Jennifer Lohmann
A PROMISE FOR THE BABY
Jennifer Lohmann
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Lohmann is a Rocky Mountain girl at heart, having grown up in southern Idaho and Salt Lake City. After graduating with a degree in economics from the University of Chicago, she moved to Shanghai to teach English. Back in the United States, she earned a master’s in library science and now works as a public librarian. She was the Romance Writers of America librarian of the year in 2010. She lives in the Southeast with a dog, five chickens, four cats and a husband who gamely eats everything she cooks.
Books by Jennifer Lohmann
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
1834—RESERVATIONS FOR TWO
1844—THE FIRST MOVE
Other titles by this author available in ebook format.
To big brothers everywhere, especially mine.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Epilogue
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
VIVIAN SAT ON an uncomfortable chair in the starkly decorated lobby of her husband’s apartment building and waited for Karl to come home from work. She’d been waiting for hours, her feet propped up by a couple of suitcases, garnering suspicious looks, but the doorman hadn’t kicked her out yet. He’d tried, but she had a marriage certificate that said she was Karl Milek’s wife. Unwilling to throw her out onto the street, he’d also been unwilling to let her into Karl’s apartment.
She was pretty sure he was regretting both decisions. At least Xìnyùn, her father’s blue parrot, had stopped talking an hour ago. His chipper conversation wasn’t welcome in this modern building and his brightness was an unwanted distraction in the white-and-black interior.
Every time someone came through the rotating doors, the February winds whistled and Xìnyùn responded with his own tune, dancing up and down the rainbow ladder in his cage. Not a single person who’d walked past had smiled at Xìnyùn’s antics. Her husband lived in a building as cold as his hands.
She had called his office five times, but “he is in a meeting,” they said. “We will pass on the message,” they said. She didn’t tell them she was his wife. With divorce terms agreed upon, he probably hadn’t told his coworkers about his Vegas mistake. He’d probably figured—as she had—that their secret would keep until the divorce was finalized, and then it wouldn’t matter anymore. They’d be divorced and have moved on with their lives. But now she needed him, and she needed him to be her husband. Outing him to his coworkers seemed a poor way to gain his cooperation.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
She was supposed to have stayed in Vegas.
The energy in the lobby flared when her husband walked through the door. He was the cold, stiff man she remembered from their morning after, and he didn’t seem to be any warmer with all of his clothes on—and not hungover. Maybe he didn’t notice the freezing temperatures outside. He wore a forest-green scarf wrapped around his neck and a tan wool coat as though they were for show, so the people around him wouldn’t wonder at his ability to walk through snow naked and not get frostbite. No hat covered his brown hair. His hazel eyes were more attractive when not bloodshot, but glasses didn’t soften the sharp planes of his face. She had assumed his face only looked hard when angry—but he didn’t have a reason to be angry. Yet.
She needed Karl to be the man whose eyes had been mostly brown when he’d offered to buy her a drink, but had turned a lush green when she’d brushed her hand against his as she reached for that drink. The man who’d noticed her shiver and tucked her tightly against him as they walked out of the hotel, even though they had both known she wasn’t cold. The man who had made her laugh when she felt as if nothing in her life could ever be funny again.
Perhaps that man had been an illusion and as fake as the Luxor pyramid, given flesh only by the carnival lights of Las Vegas. That she was even sitting here in the lobby of this apartment building was evidence that she wasn’t as immune to Las Vegas magic as she thought she’d been.
The doorman scurried over to her husband, his arms out in supplication and face creased in apology. Tingles shot down her spine when Karl looked over at her. He showed no hurry as he walked across the lobby to her, his face as blank as she remembered.
“You were the woman calling my office today,” he said in greeting.
“Hello to you, too.” They hadn’t planned on seeing each other again, but there was no reason not to be civil. In theory, theirs was an amicable divorce. “Can we talk somewhere private?”
His eyes took in the pile of suitcases and the birdcage sitting next to them. He didn’t nod or say a word, just picked up the birdcage and a suitcase and walked toward the elevator. Vivian scrambled to her feet, slung her purse over her shoulder, picked up two more suitcases and hurried to follow him, the heels of her boots clicking on the marble floor.
On the elevator ride up to his apartment, Vivian opened her mouth a couple times to speak, but Karl silenced her with a raise of his eyebrow. “You wanted private. We can at least wait until we are in my apartment.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She’d waited for hours; another couple of minutes wasn’t going to kill her.
In his apartment, she put down her suitcases in the entryway and followed him to the couch, taking the birdcage with her. Dark wood floors made his apartment more welcoming than the lobby, though his furniture looked to be just as uncomfortable. The only sign of softness amidst the leather, glass, steel and ston
e was a plush rug in the living room. He didn’t even have any curtains to soften the floor-to-ceiling windows. She sat on the couch. He sat in one of the armchairs and looked at her expectantly.
If she was waiting for a greeting of some kind, apparently she would be disappointed.
“I’m sorry to drop in on you like this,” she said, gesturing to the luggage near the door. “I didn’t feel I had any choice.”
“Were the terms of our divorce not sufficient?” His elbows rested on the arms of the chair and he’d laced his fingers together in a bridge over the chest of his charcoal-gray suit. Anyone looking in on the scene through the windows would see Karl’s cocked head and casual pose and imagine they were discussing some local curiosity. Vivian imagined that he must have soon-to-be ex-wives drop in on him as a regular occurrence if he managed to remain so self-possessed about the whole thing.
His absolute composure was the reason she’d answered “sure” when he’d gestured to the doors of the chapel, a half smile on his face, and asked, “Shall we?” She had wanted to be a part of his stability then; it was unfair of her to be irritated by it now. And what if she also wanted the passion they’d shared? Well, that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
“Yes. I mean, no, they were fine. But I don’t want a divorce right now.”
If she’d shocked him, his only reaction was to lean back in the chair and lift his left foot to rest on his knee. She was glad he hadn’t sat on the couch next to her. She felt crowded enough by him without having to make room for his knees and elbows—and his infinite placidity, which took up far more space than any single lack of reaction should.
Xìnyùn said, “I fold.” At least the parrot showed a reaction.
Harlequin Superromance January 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: Everywhere She GoesA Promise for the BabyThat Summer at the Shore Page 29
