A Child for Christmas

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  Then Matthew came in and chaos erupted as Jaimie scurried around after Sarah, bundling the little girl into her coat and boots. An hour later, they were seated in the noisy restaurant, which, considering the filled tables, seemed to be a popular place in the small town. Judging by the greetings Matthew and Jaimie received, Sawyer figured everybody knew everybody.

  Except him.

  There was a collection of video games and air hockey tables at one end of the restaurant, and Sawyer watched the kids as they huddled around the games. One ball-capped head earned a second look, and he realized it was Ryan. Rebecca’s son.

  He reached back for the icy mug of beer the waitress had set at his elbow a few moments earlier and glanced at Jaimie. She was an easier target than Matthew. “You know Ryan Morehouse?”

  Jaimie nodded, busy unwrapping the packets of saltine crackers for Sarah, who was ready to eat the things, plastic and all. “Is he here?” She craned around, spotting the boy. “He sure is. That’s Eric Fielding with him. Do you see Rebecca here?”

  Sawyer shook his head, aware of the disappomtment he felt. For a minute there, he’d thought he’d have another crack at the cool doctor. Then Ryan saw him, and waved so enthusiastically he knocked his own ball cap askew and Sawyer’s mood took an abrupt upswing.

  What was it about the Morehouse mother and son that lightened the darkness clinging to his mind? He swung his legs over the picnic-table-style bench and grabbed his beer. “I’ll be back.”

  Ryan grinned when Sawyer approached. “Evening, sir.”

  “Sawyer will do,” he suggested. “What’re you playing there?”

  Ryan bounced on his toes, watching over Eric’s shoulder as his friend’s fingers maneuvered the video controls. He began explaining the intricacies of the game. “Blow ’em away,” was clearly the object.

  “Ah man,” Eric groaned as he watched the piles of fallen mutants surround his lone defendant. “Ryan, take it, man.” He scooted carefully off the seat which was incorporated into the structure of the game. “Hurry up.”

  Ryan slipped into place, his hands nimble on the controls as Eric raced toward the rest rooms.

  “I thought you were coming here for lunch,” Sawyer said. “Don’t tell me you’ve been here all this time.”

  “No way. My mom would have a hissy.”

  Sawyer couldn’t quite envision Dr. Morehouse in such a state, but it definitely inspired interesting possibilities.

  “This is our second time here, today,” Ryan continued.

  “Hi, Ryan.”

  Sawyer watched Ryan’s hands jerk on the control. His man bit the dust, but the boy didn’t notice. How could he when his eyes were bugging out at the young girl who’d stopped to greet him. Sawyer hid his smile in his beer and watched as Ryan’s throat worked for a second before a garbled “Hi” came out.

  She dimpled prettily, her brown eyes never veering from young Ryan. “Are you having fun on vacation?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sure.” Ryan’s knee jiggled, a sure sign of adolescent nerves. “You?”

  “Yeah.” The girl seemed ready to go on, but she heard her name called and rolled her eyes. “I gotta go before my dad has a cow.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll...uh...see you around.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled at Ryan, reluctance obvious as she backed away toward the man waiting near the entrance.

  Once she was gone, Ryan’s whole young body sighed. “Oh, man. That was Melanie. She’s like, you know, totally hot.”

  “She likes you, too.”

  “Oh, wow. Ya think?”

  “Definitely possible.” Sawyer lifted his beer, then nudged the lovesick boy’s shoulder. “Mind if I have a try at that?”

  Ryan blinked. “The game? Have you played it before?”

  “Not that I recall,” Sawyer said dryly. “Is there some age limit prohibiting old men from playing?”

  “You’re not old,” Ryan scoffed as he slid from the seat. He flipped some magical lever and the seat scooted back, allowing for Sawyer’s considerably bulkier form. “Now Ruby Leoni from Ruby’s Cafe? She is old. Like a hundred or something.”

  Sawyer laughed. And maneuvered into the game. He dropped some quarters into the slot and placed his hands on the controls. “Okay, master chief,” he said to Ryan, “let’s rock and roll.”

  Suzanne Fielding called Rebecca around seven-thirty with profuse apologies. She’d left the boys at the pizza parlor around six and had planned to pick them up by now, but her six-year old daughter suddenly took sick. Rebecca offered to go by and take a look at Eric’s sister, but Suzanne said she was sure it was just the “flu that was going around.” Instead, she asked if Rebecca could pick up the boys from the restaurant.

  So Rebecca pulled on her coat and hat and gloves and got her Jeep out again for the short drive to the restaurant. She scurried into the town hot spot, her eyes immediately picking Ryan out from the kids milling about.

  Unwinding her scarf from her neck, she started for her son who hadn’t yet noticed her. She smiled when Ryan hooted and pounded enthusiastically on the roof of the video contraption he stood next to. “Oh, man,” she heard him say reverently. “Even Eric hasn’t gotten to this level. Wait’ll he sees it.”

  She didn’t hear the words, only the low timbre of the response her son received, and her steps faltered. Then annoyance flowed hotly through her veins. The nerve. The gall.

  She walked up beside the game, going to the opposite side of Ryan and looked at the man crammed inside. As usual. Acting the hotshot just like he used to do. “I should have known better than to think you’d respect my refusal to see you,” she said tightly.

  Sawyer looked up at her, his dark blue eyes narrowing. “Excuse me?”

  “You just blithely do whatever you want just like you always—” She snapped her mouth shut, horrified at her lack of control. Ryan was staring at her as if she’d grown two heads. And Sawyer...

  “Like I always...what?” he asked silkily. He looked up at her with his eyes intent and she felt as if she were the one pinned into that contraption of a game. “Bec?”

  She swallowed, pushing her hands into her pockets. “Like the captain you are,” she finished, knowing it was weak.

  She was a physician. She wanted this man restored to full health.

  She was also a woman. She hoped he never remembered. Ever.

  “Ryan, why don’t you finish off the game?” Sawyer suggested, catching her elbow when she started to scoot back from the game.

  “No,” Rebecca said hurriedly, stiffening under his touch but refusing to jerk out from it the way she yearned to do. “I need to take Ryan and Eric home.”

  “Mo-om! Not yet! We’re in the middle of the game.”

  Rebecca barely heard her son’s fervent plea as Sawyer climbed from the game to tower over her. “Ryan, don’t argue—”

  But her son had already assumed the controls and was muttering over the game. Eric appeared, waving at her, then exclaimed over something Ryan had apparently succeeded at.

  “Let ’em play,” Sawyer said softly.

  No matter what it displayed, she yanked her elbow from his hand. “This does not concern you.”

  “Considering you fly off the handle and start screaming at me that I’m plotting some—”

  “I do not scream.”

  “Could have fooled me, Bec.”

  He didn’t need to touch her to make her blood run shrieking through her veins. All he had to do was call her that. Next thing she knew he’d call her “sweetness” and then “sweet Becky Lee.” And he’d remember just where they’d been when he’d said those words. When his voice had been husky with tenderness, then rough with passion.

  She trembled. Hated herself for it and forced her mind toward coherency. “Stay away from my son.”

  The command was as effective as a slap. But she should have known that Capt. Sawyer Clay, former Navy SEAL, hotshot intelligence expert and God knew what else wouldn’t be deterred by a verbal slap.

>   “Why are you afraid of me, Bec?”

  She wished she could retract everything she’d said to him. Pull it back in where he couldn’t wonder and puzzle over it. When he’d just think she was the standoffish town doctor. “That’s ridiculous.” She made herself look him in the face. “I’m only...concerned that you have no regard for my disinterest.”

  Sawyer nearly laughed with amusement. The doctor was trying so hard to recover her composure. He far preferred her brown eyes spitting gold flames between her thick lashes than remaining encased in ice. “Concerned. Sweet Becky, you wanted to tear my head off and we both know it.” He caught her elbows when every speck of color drained from her face and her knees buckled. “Whoa.”

  She lifted a trembling hand to her forehead. “Ryan,” she said. “I have to get him...home. And Eric.”

  She frowned and Sawyer knew instinctively she was on the edge of tears. He nudged her toward the lone, unoccupied table sitting in the middle of the video games. “In a bit.” She sank onto the bench—a sure indication she was not herself. He hunkered down in front of her, ignoring the protest in his sore body and curled his hands around hers. They were cold. “What’s gotten you in such a tizzy? You hate uniforms that much?” Her fingers curled, but he didn’t let her go.

  “You’re not in uniform,” she said after a moment. Her lashes swept down, and he knew she was looking at their hands. “Sawyer, please.”

  Maybe his crouched position was cutting off the blood from his brain. Maybe he was having a stroke. Maybe he was going stark raving mad.

  He’d heard those words before.

  Heard them spoken by this woman and the realization made his head tighten as if it were in a vise. Sweet Becky. The endearment echoed hollowly through his aching head. Why? “Who are you? Why do I know you?”

  Now that he was the one reeling, she seemed to regain her composure. “You don’t,” she said, a shadow of her former crispness returning to her demeanor. “If you’ll excuse me, I must take my son and his friend home.”

  She tugged at her hands, and this time, Sawyer let her go. He pulled himself onto the bench and watched her aim straight for her son. Ryan’s argument was short-lived, but Sawyer recognized the frustration in the boy’s eyes as he and his young friend trudged after Rebecca, who sketched a wave toward Matthew and Jaimie, but didn’t slow her progress toward the exit.

  Sawyer was frustrated, too. There was more to Dr. Rebecca Morehouse than met his eyes. One way or another, he’d find out what it was.

  And how she figured in the memories locked inside his murky mind.

  She was, hands down, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. The knowledge should have relieved him, that he had some sense of this, when looking at his own face aroused no familiarity.

  All it did was eat at him. How could he know something so assuredly about a woman he’d never met?

  Just as he knew one day he’d taste her lips and would hold her beautiful, curving body against his. Maybe it would bring some memory back into his murky mind. Maybe it wouldn’t.

  He strongly suspected that when he held her the way his gut urged him to, he wouldn’t care if he remembered anything or not.

  That just holding her, tasting her, loving her, would be enough.

  Chapter Four

  “You’re a lot like him.”

  Sawyer looked up from the photo album opened on the kitchen table to see Jefferson’s wife, Emily, standing in the doorway. He’d been thinking more about the previous evening at the pizza parlor than about the photos in front of him. “Like who?”

  She smiled and tucked her rainwater-straight hair behind her ears. “Squire.” She walked—waddled, really, considering the pregnant belly she had to counterbalance—toward the table and looked over his shoulder. “I recognized that old album,” she explained. “From Squire’s early days with Sarah.”

  Sawyer rose and pulled out a chair, wondering how she could keep her balance as she sat and exhaled a heartfelt sigh. Unlike Jaimie, who was leggy and tall, this sister-in-law was so short, he could have tucked her in his pocket. “How long you got to go with that kid?”

  She folded her arms across her distended belly. “Nineteen days.” She sighed. “And I came over to see Jaimie to distract myself from the interminable wait. But she’s busy with Sarah just now.” She scooted forward in her chair, reaching forward for the corner of the album. “That’s your dad’s wedding picture,” she said. Her fingertip hovered over the youthful Squire. “They were only seventeen when they got married.”

  “Babies,” Sawyer murmured.

  Emily made a sound that could have been amusement or dissent. “Young or not, they managed to make the Double-C a successful operation.” She raised her eyebrows, then turned the page of the album when Sawyer didn’t protest. “They built this big old house and filled it with sons.”

  “Squire didn’t remarry.”

  “No.” She smiled wryly. “But we live in hope.”

  “I got that impression yesterday from Jaimie.” He flipped back to the previous page with its larger, single photo and studied the black-and-white image. Squire looked wet-behind-the-ears young, yet there was nothing but confidence in his expression; and nothing but adoration in the long, gangly arm he had wrapped around his petite bride. “What day did they get married?”

  “February 26.”

  If his wallet hadn’t burned inside the car, he would have pulled it out to look at his driver’s license. It irked him that he didn’t know what day he’d been born.

  Emily patted his arm and pushed back from the table, levering herself to her feet. “August first,” she said.

  His eyes narrowed.

  “You may not remember me just now, Sawyer,” she said softly. “But I know you. I can imagine what your mind is puzzling over, trying to fit all the pieces together until it comes back to you as memories rather than facts you’ve pulled from photo albums and such. Jefferson would behave the same way. You and he are the most like Squire.”

  “Jefferson looks like Sarah.”

  “He has her coloring,” Emily agreed. “But his stubborn nature is pure Squire. Like you.”

  “I’m not stubborn.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed, though her soft smile said otherwise. “But memory or not, you are a man who knows what he wants. With confidence instilled in you right down to your bone marrow. We know it, even if you have temporarily forgotten.

  “Tell Jaimie that I had to leave, would you please?” Emily said, glancing down at her watch. “She’s upstairs with Sarah and frankly I can’t stomach the idea of climbing them all just now. If I don’t leave now, I won’t make my doctor’s appointment with Rebecca.”

  He figured what he knew about gestating females would have filled a thimble, even if he did have his memory. But Emily was obviously miserable, despite her serene expression and gentle smiles. He followed her through the kitchen. “Are you sure you should drive?”

  “I drove over here from our place.”

  “But that’s only ten miles or so.”

  “You and Jefferson.” She shook her head, waving away his concern. She reached for the coat she’d hung on a hook in the mudroom. “I’ll be...oh—”

  He took the coat from her nerveless fingers when she halted mid-stride and mid-sentence. “I’ll call Jefferson.”

  “He and Daniel are gone for the day at some farm auction.”

  “Then I’ll drive you.”

  “Sawyer, really, that’s not necessary. You’re barely out of the hospital.”

  He snorted, watching the way she was rubbing her slightly puffy hand over her massive belly. “And you look like you’re ready to go to the hospital. I’ll drive. I remember how,” he said dryly. “Get yourself bundled up while I start your truck.”

  There were two other cars parked outside Rebecca’s office and Sawyer pulled up next to them, then went around to help Emily. “You’re not gonna have that kid now, are you?” The thought sent horror right to his toes.
/>   Emily chuckled and shook her head. “Not on your life. Jefferson would never forgive himself if he went off to buy a tractor only to come back and find our son had already arrived.”

  He pulled open the office door, hoping Emily’s certainty wasn’t misplaced. “It’s a boy?”

  “That’s what I think. Your brother, of course, disagrees with me.” She unwound her scarf as they entered the empty reception room. “We won’t know for sure until the baby arrives.”

  She didn’t settle in one of the chairs as Sawyer expected, but apparently preferred to pace slowly back and forth across the gray, tweedy carpet. Twice, he suggested that she sit. And more than twice, he offered to get Rebecca. Emily just waved her hand, calmly telling him to relax, and continued to slowly pace.

  Five minutes passed before an elderly woman appeared with Rebecca following. Sawyer watched Rebecca with her patient, calmly and warmly answering the woman’s questions.

  Rebecca even escorted the woman across the reception area, her steps faltering momentarily when she saw him sitting in one of the chairs. But she didn’t take her attention from her patient, helping the woman into her coat and opening the door for her. She even waited until her patient was in her car and driving away before turning back inside.

  Her eyes skated over him, focusing on Emily. “You made it,” she said, smiling easily. “Come on back.” She dashed one look over her shoulder as she waited for Emily to precede her back to the examining rooms.

  Sawyer stretched out his legs, crossing them leisurely at the ankle. And smiled.

  Rebecca’s cheeks flushed, and she hurried after Emily.

  Feeling better than he had all day, Sawyer closed his eyes, listening to the soft, piped-in music. He’d have figured she’d play country rather than this slow, bluesy jazz. His thoughts drifted along with the low, mournful wail of a sax.