“What? Of course not.”
“Because it isn’t a package deal. Our being lovers and your being a dad. The fact is that you are Nate’s father. You can be in his life, whether you’re in mine in an intimate way or not. But I’ll tell you something, Blake.” She pushed up to her knees. “I don’t want guilt in my bed. I’m not asking for a ring. I’m not asking for anything. I believe as you do, that if two people are going to be involved, they either need to be married or very careful that a child doesn’t know. But as far as my feelings about love, I don’t think it works for anyone unless both give it a two-hundred-percent shot. So don’t kiss me again if you’re going to wring your hands about it not being right.”
“Serena, I’ve hurt you somehow. I can see it in your face. I wasn’t ‘wringing my hands,’ as you put it—”
She stood, putting distance between them so that she didn’t hurt quite so much. “You’ve lost the joy, Blake.”
“The joy? I don’t understand.”
“It’s in you. A huge emotion. A huge capacity for love. I felt it seven years ago. I feel it when you touch me now. But if you don’t want to feel that joy with me, then don’t mess with my heart.”
She walked swiftly, quietly, toward the house. He’d follow her, she knew, but for just that second, she could feel tears aching in her eyes. She’d hoped so hard for this second chance with him. And was still hoping.
But there was no way she could be with him if all he felt was responsibility. She’d grown up feeling beholden, loving but always owing her foster parents. Now she wanted love—or nothing. But if Blake didn’t understand what she was asking him, Serena feared she was gambling her heart for stakes that could already be lost.
Eight
Blake slouched low in his office chair, his bare feet on the desk. Nothing was quieter than a pediatrician’s office at four in the morning, which made it an ideal place to hide from the world.
Outside, the night was still darker than a tomb. No birds were stirring, no mice, no nothing moving anywhere. Except for Blake, tapping a tongue depressor, end to end, on his desk.
He loved her.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a petrifying revelation, except that the image kept replaying in his head. Of the two of them rolling around on a blanket in her front yard, almost naked, almost making love. In front of the whole world, for Pete’s sake.
The tongue depressor snapped in his hand. He just reached for another, and started drumming that one in a worried, fretful rhythm on the desk. The strange thing wasn’t that he loved or wanted Serena. Hell, any man would fall for a woman as beautiful on the inside and the outside as she was.
The strange thing was that she wanted to make love with him. Odder yet, considering that she’d heard the whole story about the sailing incident. Blake couldn’t think of one thing he’d done right for Nate from the boy’s conception. Yet instead of shooting him for nearly drowning their son, she’d essentially praised him for messing up with Nate yet again. Furthermore, they’d come two seconds away from making love. Where the hell was the woman’s head?
The tongue depressor snapped in his hand. He dropped it onto the growing pile in his wastebasket, then slouched deeper in his chair. He kept trying to think, only his brain kept floating off to never-never land. Damn. Realizing he loved her was such a soul-blistering shock. And the enormity of the emotion swelling through him…well, it was obvious to Blake that no one else in the universe had ever experienced it before or could possibly understand. Sure, couples fell in love all the time. Undoubtedly they believed their kind of love was really something, but they didn’t know. No man could possibly feel as strongly for a woman as he did for her.
Technically, Blake kept telling himself that it was a good thing. That he was out of his mind in love. That he was so crazy about her he couldn’t think, much less sleep or eat. Except that the way Blake had always seen life, a man did the right thing—and the way a guy handled fatherhood was a critical judgment of whether he passed the Good Man test. A child was better off orphaned than stuck with a dad who didn’t love him and constantly made him feel inadequate and unwantable. Then there was that other kind of lethally hurtful father. The kind who screwed around with women and never looked back to see if there were consequences. The kind of father who could make a child believe that he was as important as trash in a wastebasket.
As it happened, Blake had had both kinds of fathers.
And there was the bullet wound of the problem. He couldn’t seem to stay away from Serena any more than he could stop breathing. But unless he could be a decent father, a provably decent father, he had no business knotting himself any tighter in Serena’s or Nate’s lives.
An odd, muffled sound at the private back door made Blake raise his head impatiently. He had to be imagining the knock. No one could possibly be here at this hour.
Another heavy-knuckled rap had Blake frowning and heaving out of his chair, putting on his shoes. When he unlatched the back door, the single security light in the parking lot illuminated the tall figure of a man, half hidden in the shadow of a tree. He stepped forward.
“Dr. Remmington? I saw your light under the blinds. Thank God, I found you alone. I need your help.”
“I…” Blake searched his mind, trying to apply a name to the face. The night was eerie with black shadows and endless crickets and the moon glowing on dew-shiny grass. The man was a Native American. At least six feet and about thirty years old. His black hair was short, worn almost in a Wall Street cut, conservative for these parts, though the dark shirt and jeans made him fit right in. In his arms, he carried a bundle incongruously wrapped in a pink and aqua blanket. “I’m almost positive that I’ve met you, but I’m sorry, I don’t remember…”
Blake waited for the man to fill in his name, yet a yawning silence hung between them for several moments. The stranger met his eyes, as if encouraging Blake to look and study all he wanted. From the clothes to the posture to the intelligence in the man’s face, this just wasn’t a man that Blake would expect to find skulking in shadows. And yes, he saw the tension and anxiety in those quiet, dark eyes, but it still took time before the other man willingly spoke.
“My name is Gavin Nighthawk. Dr. Nighthawk. I’m a surgical resident…and no, you haven’t met me, but you probably recognize me from doing rounds at the hospital. That’s how I knew you, and why I’m coming to you. I need another doctor, but specifically I need someone whom I can personally trust.”
Blake didn’t like mysteries, and something definitely wasn’t making sense here. He didn’t budge from the doorway. “What’s the problem?”
Nighthawk didn’t try moving past him. “The problem is that I need your help but I don’t want anyone to know that I was here. I’d be willing to pay anything for your silence—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Money isn’t an issue. The reason for all this secrecy is. If you’re asking me to do something illegal, you’ve got the wrong ma—” Blake’s gaze shot up at a sound that seemed to emanate from the bundle in Nighthawk’s arms. “That’s a baby?”
“Yes,” Gavin affirmed.
“Hell. Come on, come on, bring him in here right now.” Knowing there was a child involved instantly shifted Blake’s priorities. He hustled the other man inside, closed the door, and attempted to take the infant from Nighthawk’s arms. Nighthawk resisted for several seconds, clearly reluctant to give up the baby. Again, he met Blake’s eyes.
“That’s what I heard. That I could trust you.”
“You can trust me to obey the law. But I’m not going to fight about that with you now. Let’s see the child.” Blake was already unpeeling blankets as he strode into the nearest examining room and snapped on the light. “My God. This baby isn’t more than hours old.”
“I know.”
“Whose is it?” Blake’s entire attention now focused on his tiny patient, although he listened to Nighthawk’s comments, which included both the questions the other man answered and those he failed to. Altho
ugh Nighthawk may not realize it, information wasn’t the only thing Blake was trying to figure out. For the sake of the baby, Blake wanted to understand everything about the baby’s caretaker that he could.
“You’d think the last thing I’d need is another doctor when I obviously have medical training myself—but I haven’t been around a baby this small since I was an intern. And the thing is, it wasn’t a normal birth. The mother suddenly went into labor. This was in the middle of the woods. At night. She was upset, not expecting labor to start this soon, and…oh, God—”
Nighthawk’s voice cracked like the sudden splinter of crystal. Blake kept quiet, tending to the baby, careful not to look at the other man. Nighthawk may not want to talk, but as far as Blake could tell, he badly needed to. He didn’t look shaken, but he obviously was.
Bits and pieces of the story kept coming—not enough to give Blake a complete picture, but damn sure enough to make his heart clutch.
The young mother had asked to meet Nighthawk at a secluded spot in the wild virgin woods to the far west of the reservation. Obviously, Blake concluded, the two must have known each other, or why would the girl have asked to meet him? And why would Nighthawk have agreed to such a meeting?
Whatever had propelled the girl to contact Nighthawk, he’d gone to the woods having no idea that she was pregnant, much less that she was near term. According to Nighthawk, the young woman had been agitated and upset. So much so that he hadn’t at first realized that it wasn’t just emotional pain causing her tears and jerky motions but physical pain. The baby was coming. Fast. The young woman was terrified.
So was Nighthawk.
I would be, Blake thought, in the same circumstances.
According to Nighthawk, there’d been no time or way to get her out of the woods fast enough. The doctor couldn’t see, wasn’t sterile. Having no blankets, no drapes, and nothing but a knife on his key chain, he’d used his jacket for a mattress. Nighthawk’s face was sweating, just trying to survive the telling of it.
“To be honest, the birth seemed to go fine. As good as it could possibly go—and for darn sure, fast. But everything started to worry me. I needed her checked out by another doctor, someone who knew babies and someone who wasn’t as emotionally involved as I am. The circumstances of the birth just carried too many risks. I didn’t have drops for the baby’s eyes, no sterile clothes, nothing… Look, I just want you to examine her, all right? I—”
Blake was, and had been, examining the little one. “Where’s the mother?” For the first time in quite a while, the examining room was completely silent. Blake looked up and pierced Nighthawk with a single stare. “I asked you, where is the mother?”
“Right now the issue is just the health of the baby.”
“Is the mother sick? Was there excessive bleeding after the delivery? Fever? Why didn’t you bring her when you brought the baby?”
“I couldn’t.”
For a moment Blake let that go. It was obvious from the razor-edged anxiety in Nighthawk’s tone that the man had been pushed as far as he was willing to go, at least for the moment. And Blake didn’t need two patients on his hands, until he’d figured out exactly what was going on with the first one.
“Well, you can stop worrying about the baby. Maybe she had a rough start in the woods, but she doesn’t seem any worse for wear. You know what? Babies survived for centuries without us docs. Personally I think we’re way overrated in the birth process.” Instinctively Blake’s voice had dropped to a calming, reassuring tone. For damn sure, he wanted more answers. But everything Nighthawk had said had also alerted Blake to the frantic worry in his tone. With Nighthawk being a surgeon, such panic could only have one reason. “I take it you’re the father.”
He heard Nighthawk suck in a breath, but not answer. Just as well. Temporarily, Blake had his hands full with the black-haired, dimple-cheeked, wrinkled-faced beauty. “I see all ten fingers, all ten toes. Did your daddy tell you that you were gorgeous? I’ll bet he did. Let’s just see what you weigh, okay, sweetheart? Shh, I’ll have you off there in a second…. Under five pounds. But just, and her lungs are strong, heart good. Babies have a faster heartbeat, which you know—or I’m sure you’d have remembered if you hadn’t been shook up at suddenly discovering yourself to be a new father. I want the rest of the story on the mother.”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
“I want the story,” Blake repeated. “Come on. You’re a doctor yourself, so you know the law. If you attended a live birth, or even a stillbirth, you’re required to report it to the health department. If you fail to do that, you could face charges, even risk losing your license. And now you’ve made me part of this mess. For the record, I don’t break laws. More important than that, you know darn well that you described a potentially dangerous situation for the child. There’s no possible way that I’m letting you take this baby unless I’m satisfied that she’s going to be properly taken care of. So start talking.”
Blake was increasingly worried about the whole story but not so concerned that he didn’t swiftly, willingly, cradle the baby back into her daddy’s arms. Something was obviously wrong, drastically wrong. But Blake had already made certain assessments, and how Nighthawk looked at the baby reinforced his characterization perfectly. The man was in love with his newborn. The protective and loving way he held the baby only affirmed for Blake that the bonding between father and daughter was as real as sunlight.
While Nighthawk held the baby, Blake had other things that needed doing. Without knowing where the nurses stocked supplies, he had to putter around the cupboards and cabinets. One cabinet stocked baby diapers of all sizes for the obvious reason—his teensy-size patients had the tendency to spring a leak while being examined. Sometimes moms were prepared; sometimes they weren’t. Another cupboard stocked a variety of bottles and formula. The little one was starting to fret so Blake kept looking for a ready-to-feed bottle of formula. It took some time to find, which was just as well, since it took quite a while before Nighthawk finally found the courage to talk.
Blake almost had a heart attack—not when Gavin Nighthawk confessed to being the father which was as obvious as the sun rising in the morning—but when he admitted that the mother of the child was Christina Montgomery.
“You mean, the girl that’s been missing? The girl the whole town’s been talking about all week?”
“Yes.”
The more Blake heard of the story, the less he liked it. Nighthawk claimed they’d never been a couple, just that this Christina had chased him hard for a while. One night when he was getting over a love affair gone sour, she’d come on to him and the obvious had happened. He’d had no idea she was pregnant, though, as she’d literally dropped out of his life after that. She had only contacted him a matter of hours ago, when she’d gone into labor and needed help. Apparently she’d kept the pregnancy a secret from everyone, including her family.
The whole story—true or not—bit on Blake’s own conscience. It just hit too close to home. He’d turned to Serena once upon a time when his mind had been on his own problems. And he’d left her pregnant, no different than Nighthawk had left that young woman.
“So where is this Christina now?”
“She disappeared.”
“Quit screwing around, Nighthawk. I need to know the answer. Why didn’t you bring her in with the baby?” Blake looked at him. He wasn’t buying his story.
Nighthawk gestured. “Christina had just given birth. She wasn’t strong enough to walk out of the woods on her own. I needed to get both of them out of the elements and to a safe place, but I had no possible way to carry both at the same time. Both of us concluded the same thing, that as long as Christina wasn’t in any immediate medical crisis, I should get the baby to safety first. So I took the baby, got her to a safe place, to someone I trusted. But it’s not like I could do that in ten minutes. I couldn’t get back to Christina for almost two hours—” His voice cracked.
“Take it easy.�
� Blake could see Nighthawk’s eyes hollow with stress. “Just tell me. What happened when you went back to her?”
“She was gone.” Nighthawk swallowed hard. “There was no note. No sign of her. Nothing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that area outside the reservation, but it isn’t just woods and hills. There used to be sapphire mines around there. So many things could have happened. There was no excess blood on the scene, so I wasn’t worried about her hemorrhaging from the birth, but where she could have gone, or why she would have left, I don’t have a clue. She came to me for help, and God, I’d have given her help. But she went into labor so fast, I never got it all straight—what she was afraid of, why she was so upset and desperate.”
“Take it easy,” Blake said again, even more gently.
“I can’t take it easy. You wanted the story, but the whole story is I didn’t know what to do. All I could think of was handling one crisis at a time, in order of priority. And my priority was the baby. I brought her to you because that was the most immediate critical thing—making sure she was all right.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Nighthawk wasn’t going to relax or let down his guard, but Blake saw the softening in those dark eyes for his daughter. “Yeah. She is, isn’t she? Of course I examined her and she seemed okay, but…hell, I can’t explain this. You’d think a doctor would have more confidence. But the more she seemed okay, the more I started worrying how ignorant I was about babies. And I just had no way to judge how difficult a birth in the open might have affected her. I had to be sure. She’s my daughter.”
Damn but Blake was starting to like the man. Nighthawk said “my daughter” as if that explained the moon and the stars. Blake had felt the same way the instant he realized that Nate was his own.
“And there was another issue. Another immediate priority, as far as I was concerned. If something happens,” Nighthawk said, “I need you to be her doctor.”
You Belong to Me Page 11
