GUILTY SECRETS

by Virginia Kantra

  Nell glared at him. "Forget it. I need you here to talk her through this."

  "You don't get it. I can't stay. I'm male. She's Muslim. I can't see her like this."

  "So don't look," Nell snapped. "I have things to do down here. Get up there and talk to her."

  He did as she commanded, bending over the head of the bed, his voice low and questioning. The young mother-to-be was crying, shaking her head. Joe tried again, his deep voice patient and almost unspeakably gentle.

  Nell blinked. Who would have guessed shark-mouth Reilly the reporter could sound like that?

  Joe looked up. "Can you put up some kind of drape?"

  Relief flooded Nell. "Absolutely. In the drawer there." She indicated the supply cart. "Get them all. We're going to need them to absorb—" She caught an armload. "Good. Thanks."

  She covered Laila with a blanket and draped her from the waist down with a paper sheet, tenting it over her bent knees. Folding a towel, Nell bunched it under the young woman's right hip.

  Laila's back arched. The baby's matted head reappeared briefly at her opening. Laila grunted, twisting with strain.

  Nell placed her hands above and below the vaginal opening, applying gentle pressure to keep the baby from coming too fast.

  "With the next contraction, tell her to take a nice deep breath and hold it."

  Joe relayed her instructions, holding his own breath to demonstrate.

  Laila nodded, her gaze never leaving his face. She spoke in urgent Farsi.

  "She wants to push," Joe told Nell. His eyes were panicked, his voice perfectly calm.

  "She can push during the contractions," Nell said. "Exhale and push for a count of ten. Then another breath, exhale and push, for another count of ten. As long as the contraction lasts. Got it?"

  "Breathe, push, exhale, count," Joe repeated. "Got it."

  But they didn't. The next contraction was bad. Before Joe finished his explanation, it hit Laila like a train, leaving them all gasping and shaken.

  There wasn't time to recover before another contraction struck. But Joe kept talking, and doe-eyed Laila exhaled and pushed like a champ.

  "Almost there," Nell reported reassuringly. "Almost. She's doing great. Tell her just a few more… Ah."

  Laila groaned.

  The baby crowned. There was a wrinkled, red forehead. An ear, flattened to the baby's skull.

  "Breathe," Nell commanded.

  Intent on delivering the baby's head—support, turn, clear the mouth and nose—Nell was barely conscious of Joe's continuous, soothing rumble. She slipped her finger around, checking to make sure the umbilical cord hadn't wrapped around the infant's neck. Gently, she guided the head.

  Laila choked out a question. Joe murmured what sounded like encouragement. Nell glanced up. The girl's head bowed almost to her chest. Her neck was corded with strain. One of her slim hands gripped the bed rail, and the other clenched… Not Joe's hand, Nell realized, bemused. They did not touch, this Muslim woman and the Irish reporter. But at some point Joe must have given Laila his handkerchief. She clung to one end like a lifeline, and he squeezed the other.

  Nell's heart lurched at the gesture, at the connection, so tender and strange.

  The baby rotated. Another contraction delivered the shoulders. Nell cradled the slippery infant in a towel as the rest of its body emerged, wet and raw.

  "Is he here? Is he okay?" Joe demanded.

  "She's here," Nell corrected. "You have a beautiful baby girl."

  Beautiful. Breathing. Alive. Her thin squall needed no translation.

  Tears streaked Laila's delicate face as she held out her arms for her baby. Nell's vision blurred. Joe's eyes were suspiciously bright. He murmured something to the new mother, who smiled and nodded through her tears. Nell melted.

  Like she had time for that. She needed to focus on her job, not her suddenly warm and fuzzy feelings for Joe Reilly.

  She suctioned the infant's nose and mouth again. She tied a string around the cord before wrapping the baby in a towel. Nell reached over the drape to place her on her mother's stomach, careful not to pull the umbilical cord.

  "She should nurse now," Nell told Joe. "To help expel the placenta. You want to get out of here and see what's holding up that ambulance?"

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  « ^ »

  The ambulance carrying healthy baby, happy mommy and proud but anxious dad rolled away from the curb.

  Nell watched the flashing red lights retreat down the street, her adrenaline draining through the soles of her rubber-soled shoes, leaving her tired and empty. Alone.

  Okay, not quite alone.

  She stole a glance at the man beside her. Joe Reilly stood with his hands in his pockets and his weight on one leg, looking as unshaven and disreputable as ever. But she would never be able to see him the same way again.

  Nell understood the bonds that crisis created between members of a medical team. Before she'd been forced out, she'd fought in the front lines of an E.R. She'd laughed at the med techs' bad jokes over bizarre accidents and fought shoulder to shoulder to save the victims of overdoses and heart attacks.

  But birth was a miracle. Sharing it with anyone was a moving experience. Sharing it with Joe threatened the barriers she had been so careful to erect between them. His sensitivity and competence caught her off guard. His utter reliability invited her trust. His tenderness melted her heart.

  The sudden intimacy created by the birth was unexpected and awkward. As if they'd fallen into bed on their first date and now had to deal with the morning after.

  Nell's face heated. She'd made that mistake in the first desperate months after her divorce, and she hadn't felt nearly as warmly toward her partner then as she did toward Joe right now.

  She slid another look at him and cleared her throat. Going for casual so he couldn't guess how he affected her.

  "Well," she said brightly, "that was exciting."

  The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened when he smiled. "You were amazing."

  She was suddenly breathless. A reaction to his crinkly good looks? Or his unaccustomed approval?

  "I was just doing my job."

  "You do it very well."

  For once, he didn't sound mocking.

  Nell shrugged, uncomfortable with praise. "I couldn't have done anything if you hadn't brought Laila to the clinic. She was lucky you found her."

  It was Joe's turn to shrug. "I was in the neighborhood."

  "Why?"

  Nell's heart beat faster. Did a tiny part of her actually hope he'd answer "to see you"?

  "I had a meeting." He didn't elaborate.

  She refused to feel disappointed. "Where? This is hardly your neighborhood."

  "Our Lady of Hope."

  The Catholic church, two blocks away. Nell arched an eyebrow. "You don't strike me as the Knights of Columbus type."

  Joe grinned. "You can't see me helping at the Christmas fruit sale in a blazer with a crest sewn on the pocket?"

  "No, you seem more like the reporting-from-the-front-wearing-camouflage-with-a-recorder-in-your-pocket type to me."

  His smile faded at the edges. "Once, maybe. Not anymore."

  "Do you miss it?"

  He stared across the street at the grilled and barred windows of the pawnshop, but Nell got the impression he didn't actually see them.

  "Yeah," he said finally, quietly. "I do."

  "Then why don't you go back?"

  He looked at her then, his blue eyes nearly black in the shadows cast by the streetlight. "Kind of hard to ride mules and dodge bullets with a screwed-up ankle."

  The nurse in Nell insisted there had to be a medical solution to his problem. Hadn't his brother mentioned an operation? And physical therapy ought to restore partial strength and mobility to his leg.

  But the woman in her responded to the controlled frustration in his voice, to the pain she sensed beneath his careless words.

  I don't want you to see me as one of
your patients, Nell.

  So instead of arguing with him, she wrinkled her nose. "You know, you've just ruined your image. I pictured you in a Humvee. A Jeep, at least. You rode mules?"

  "We don't use Jeeps anymore, sweetheart. They've been replaced by Bradley fighting vehicles. When I was with the Seventh Marines in Iraq, I was in a tank. In Afghanistan, I was on a mule." He glanced down the darkened street. "Can I give you a ride home?"

  "That depends." She barely recognized that teasing, flirtatious voice as her own. "What kind of transportation are you offering?"

  "My car's still parked at the church."

  "It's nice of you to offer," she said.

  He stepped closer, close enough for her to see the stubble on his chin and the deep dip of his upper lip, impossibly soft-looking in his hard face. Her heart thumped.

  "I am not nice," he said.

  She didn't believe him. Not after observing his tenderness with Laila.

  "Are you warning me, Reilly?"

  "I'm being honest."

  "Then I'll be honest, too. It's late, I'm wired, I don't want to wait for a bus, and I would love—"

  To take you home and see if you could make me forget that my feet hurt and I'm thirty years old and alone.

  Nell inhaled. Not that honest. "—a ride home," she said. He nodded. Did she imagine it, or did his gaze drop briefly to her mouth?

  "You got it."

  He waited while she did a hurried cleanup of the acute-care room, turned off the lights and set the security system. It was nearly midnight by the time she locked the front door.

  "Ready?" Joe asked, which was a natural question under the circumstances, but her tired mind loaded it with sexual significance. Or maybe that was his voice. He had a great voice, deep and sure, with a hint of a rasp. The kind of voice that could sell expensive whiskey. Life insurance. Ice to Eskimos.

  Was she ready?

  She hadn't been last night. I don't get into cars with strange men, she'd told him, and here she was about to go home with him. About to let him take her home, she amended, which was a different thing. Or it ought to be. She really didn't know him that well yet.

  They walked down the sidewalk, and it was just like the night before except the moon was behind the buildings and the buildings were dark. Night in the city. Nell shivered in her red wool cloak and moved closer to Joe.

  He was limping. He covered it well, but now that she knew what to look for she could tell.

  "What were you doing in Afghanistan?" she asked.

  "What?" He sounded preoccupied.

  Tough. She was preoccupied, too. She was thinking about sex. Or trying not to think about sex. More specifically, she was trying not to think about how long it had been since she'd last had sex. Twenty-two months and six days. So he could answer the damn question.

  "You said you learned to speak Farsi in Afghanistan. What were you doing there?"

  "Traveling with the Eighty-seventh Infantry."

  "On a mule."

  He didn't smile. "Sometimes. The country's resources are drained. Their infrastructure's been bombed out of existence. Up in the high mountains, there are communities where the people are almost completely cut off from news. From aid. From health care."

  Why had she thought he didn't care? It was obvious from the grimness of his voice that he cared passionately. But she still didn't understand where he was coming from.

  "And you went there … searching for terrorists?"

  His breath expelled in a pale cloud. "I went there in search of a story. Did you know that in the province of Badakshan, there's only one hospital in a hundred miles that serves women? And a lot of men don't want their wives treated by strangers. Sixty-four percent of the women of child-bearing age die in pregnancy and childbirth. That's more than anywhere else in the world."

  "That's terrible," Nell breathed.

  "That's news," Joe corrected. They had reached the church. Its spire loomed above them. "I wrote about it for the Examiner. And you know what? Nothing I wrote made a damn bit of difference in those people's lives."

  "But if you build public awareness…" Nell said.

  Joe unlocked the black Range Rover in the parking lot and opened the passenger door for her. Nell thought it was stupid—he was the one who was injured, she was the nurse—but the novelty of having someone else actually trying to take care of her kept her from objecting.

  He slid in beside her, maneuvering his left leg carefully into the car. "Don't kid yourself, sweetheart. And don't kid me. You're the public. Do you remember that story?"

  "I don't get the paper," she said.

  Weak excuse. They both knew it.

  "Then I didn't improve your awareness, did I? I did more to help that girl tonight than I did for those other women in three weeks humping over the mountains." He turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life. "Where do you live?"

  She gave him her address and relaxed into the leather upholstery, enjoying the unfamiliar freedom from thinking about where she was going or how she was getting there. But she was trained to alleviate suffering, and Joe Reilly was hurting. It wasn't just his broken ankle. He was wounded in ways Nell could only guess at. And she couldn't shrug off his pain anymore than she'd been able to shirk her obligations to her mother the Queen of Need or her husband the King of Speed.

  She waited until they pulled in front of her apartment before she said, "If you hadn't written that story, you wouldn't speak Farsi. You couldn't have helped Laila. And you wouldn't have been as sensitive to her needs."

  Joe shut off the engine and angled his shoulders against the window. He looked very broad and very dark. "I am not sensitive."

  Her nerves hummed. She refused to listen to them. "Fine. You're not nice, and you're not sensitive. What are you, Joe?"

  "Try 'frustrated,'" he suggested. "Or 'turned on.' And unless you want me to prove it, you'll get out of the car now."

  Nell stayed where she was, her heart pounding. "You need a better threat than that to get rid of me, Reilly."

  It was a dare. A goad.

  And he responded as she knew, as she hoped he would, leaving his post by the window to close the space between them. His arm was hard against her arm. His breath was hot on her cheek. Nell closed her eyes, braced for the sensual assault of his teeth and tongue and felt … the lightest brush of his mouth before he withdrew. She quivered in surprise. He did it again, touch, brush, withdraw, achingly soft, temptingly sweet, seductively gentle.

  Her hands curled in her lap. He wasn't supposed to kiss like this. She'd never known anyone who kissed like this, teasing, exploratory kisses that promised as much as they withheld. Maybe back in middle school…

  But no teenage boy in the world had this much restraint. Or this much knowledge.

  Joe's mouth was firm and hot and clever. Coaxing. When her lips parted, he took the kiss deeper, dragging her unresisting down and down until her head spun and she was breathless and clinging to him. Her fingers flexed on the rough sleeve of his jacket. He covered her hand with his.

  "Invite me up," he said against her lips.

  She wanted to.

  She'd known the man less than two days, and she was ready to risk disease and discovery because he'd been kind and she was lonely.

  Well, and because he kissed like the devil. Nell swallowed. "I could make coffee," she offered.

  "Do you want coffee?" he asked, low and amused.

  "No," she admitted.

  "Neither do I. And before you ask, I don't want a nightcap, either. I don't drink."

  Something set off a tiny alarm in her mind, like the warning blip of a heart monitor. But it was hard to focus when every nerve in her body was pinging, bleeping or tingling.

  No coffee.

  No nightcap.

  No pretenses.

  Nell shivered. She wasn't ready yet to accept the consequences of her choice. She'd never been any good at asking for what she wanted. She needed some excuse to invite him up.

 
; She moistened her lips. "So, is this part of my interview?"

  Interview? What interview?

  Joe drew back to study Nell's face in the slanted light of the street lamp. Her smooth blond hair tumbled against the back of his seat. Her eyes were dark and heavy lidded, her mouth swollen and slick. His blood rushed. His groin tightened. She didn't look like an angel anymore. She looked like a siren, one of those women who lured guys onto the rocks and wrecked them.

  All these personal questions sure sound like you're interviewing someone for a girlfriend position. And I'm not interested in applying.

  Nell had said that last night. Had she changed her mind?

  Or was he wrong about her? Could he take her to bed and trust her to understand it was all about sex? It was only about sex. He couldn't afford for it to be anything more.

  Except… Genuine liking and respect mixed with his lust and messed with his head. Didn't she deserve something more? She was a nice woman. A nurturing woman. The kind of woman his family wanted him to get involved with so that they didn't have to worry about him anymore.

  He must have been silent a really long time. Too long. Because the heat in her eyes shifted, sharpened to another kind of awareness, and she struggled to sit up. Reluctantly, he loosened his hold on her.

  "I didn't think," she said. "Is that a problem for you? I mean, if you haven't filed your story yet…"

  She trailed off, looking at him with those wide, clear, expectant eyes.

  She was talking about the damn newspaper article. She was concerned about his story. She actually cared about his journalistic integrity.

  He wanted to laugh. Or smack his head against the steering wheel in frustration.

  "I haven't written the story yet. That is, it's written, it's just—"

  "Unfinished?" she supplied.

  "Crap," he said. "I need an angle. A hook."

  Nell frowned. "What do you mean, a hook?"

  How had they gone from high-school necking in a parked car to Journalism 101?

  Joe sighed and explained. "The story needs something to catch readers' attention. To make them care enough about the subject to keep reading."

  Nell ran her fingers through her hair, unconsciously setting herself to rights. "The problem of the uninsured in this country—"