With Baby in Mind

by Arlene James

  She got a letter from Devon Hoyt, forwarded to her by her father, whose address she had cravenly written on the outside of the envelope when she’d written to beg off as a member of his health team. The work was hard, he said, but very rewarding. It had made him think, though, seeing all these diseased, starving children, and he had concluded that bringing additional persons into this world was a very irresponsible thing to do.

  Kendra looked at Darla and thought how hard Parker was fighting to keep her and how hard it would be to give her up, and she tried to picture herself with another child, a baby of her own, at some future date, and a void opened inside her. No other child could ever take Darla’s place in her heart. Had Darla’s parents been irresponsible to bring her into this world? She hardly thought so. Darla had enriched her life and Parker’s, not to mention those of her parents, beyond measure. Any other child that followed her in Kendra’s life would do the same. The problem was that she couldn’t quite picture a child that she would not share with Parker Sugarman. Somehow she felt sorry for Devon Hoyt. For all his compassion, caring and work, he had missed something basic and unique and beautiful in the human experience.

  Devon said other things in his letter. He wrote that he regretted not having her with him, that he’d wanted to see her again ever since she’d been a student of his, that he had put in a special request to have her join his team with the work in progress when she was able to do so. He was looking forward very much to getting to know her in a more personal way than the classroom allowed. That, he revealed, was one reason he had sought her out and offered her this opportunity. She could not even find it in herself to be flattered. Africa seemed ridiculously idealistic now. Real life was here—with Parker and Darla—and it was halfway spent. She vowed to watch her tongue and stop sniping at Parker.

  When she came home late one afternoon and found the house perfumed with the aroma of pine and Parker carefully and critically decorating a small tree for the new family room, she felt the first stirrings of genuine Christmas spirit. Apparently, the tree had put him in a good mood, too, for he had prepared a special dinner. Steaks were ready to go under the broiler. Potatoes had been baked to fluffy doneness, their skins brown and crisp. Yeast rolls had been thawed and were rising on the counter, while an oblong dish of precooked asparagus was chilling in the refrigerator and a bottle of red table wine had been decanted and left to breathe on the table.

  After broiling the steaks and baking the bread, they ate in the family room before a gentle fire, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the big, round, oak coffee table Parker had chosen to go with the heavy sofa and chairs upholstered in bold red, blue and green plaid. For Darla, he rigged up a feeding chair by attaching a wood lap tray to her plastic seat with an old leather belt. They stripped her down to her diaper, fixed a sectioned plate with a suction cup on the bottom to the tray and let her feed herself cooled potato without the skin, strained carrots and creamed beef. She delighted in squishing the beef between her fingers and, aided by a penchant to put everything her hand touched into her mouth, actually managed to consume a fraction of what she smeared on her face and chest. Parker seemed to literally delight in the spectacle she made, and Kendra felt happier than she had in a long time.

  After dinner, they gingerly freed Darla from her chair and carried her at arm’s length to a warm bath. By the time they had cleaned her up, dressed her in footed pajamas, and brushed her glossy hair dry, the child’s eyelids were drooping. They tucked her into her bed, wound up a softly tinkling music box and watched in awe as her thumb found its way to her mouth. They turned out the overhead light and stood in the soft shadows until her eyes closed fully and her breathing evened, creeping from the room as the music tinkled to an end.

  Parker put his arm around her shoulders as they walked across the living room to the kitchen. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. She knew exactly what he was feeling. It was the commonplace wonder of watching Darla grow and change before their very eyes, the small daily miracles, the delightful nuisances, the astounding depth of emotion attached to one tiny person whose communication was limited to expression and the tone of her wail. It was an overwhelming sense of responsibility and a protectiveness so fierce, it was frightening. It was love, deep, blind, selfless love for which no words had been invented.

  The dishwasher was running and the broiler drying on the counter when he poured the last of the wine into their glasses, leaned his hip against the edge of the breakfast table and turned a thoughtful look on her. “You think it’s okay for her to suck her thumb?” he asked, his voice betraying his anxiety.

  She smiled at him, ran a finger around the rim of her glass and nodded. “The conventional wisdom is that it really doesn’t hurt anything. Most babies stop when they develop other ways to comfort themselves. If she’s still doing it four or five years from now, we’ll start looking for ways to distract her.”

  “Will we?” he asked softly, a slight accent on the last word.

  Kendra cocked her head, wondering just what exactly he was asking. She whirled the ruby liquid in her glass and picked her words. “Do you think I’ll somehow stop caring about her?” And you? she added with her eyes.

  He stared at her a moment, his eyes slowly traveling over her face; then he smiled gently and shook his head. “No more than we’ll stop caring about you,” he said.

  She ached to reach out for him, to have his arms open and pull her against his chest, but neither of them seemed quite prepared for such a dangerous display of affection. Instead, she leaned against the table next to him, and they sipped their wine in companionable silence. Parker checked his wrist watch and drained his glass.

  “Want to catch the news?”

  “Sure.”

  They left their glasses on the table and went to the family room, where they watched the television, sitting side by side on the couch without touching, while the fire died away to embers and the Christmas lights winked at them from the boughs of the small, cheery tree.

  She went into work the next day to find that two nurses in her section had come down with a nasty virus, and a third had sprained an ankle ice skating at one of the area malls. The week that followed was one of double shifts, snatched meals and exhaustion. She stumbled home in the wee hours of the morning and collapsed into bed, sometimes without even undressing. Parker stayed out of her way as much as possible, and she barely saw Darla as the little one was sleeping entirely through most nights, a mixed blessing since Kendra insisted on continuing to trade nights in her room and would have welcomed a few minutes to hold and talk to her, despite a desperate need for sleep.

  On the last night of what had been a grueling experience, Kendra drove herself home, dragged her aching body into the house and slipped into the bedroom. She did not even think about whose night it was to sleep with Darla. Indeed, her mind seemed to have suspended cognitive thought. Numbly she stripped down to panties and bra and slid into bed without even bothering to take down her hair. Rolling onto her side, she curled into a loose ball, vaguely aware of a floating sensation and a line of comfortable heat at her back, but the healing sleep of exhaustion was stealing over her body, robbing her nerve endings of feeling and her mind of awareness. She sighed and gave herself up to it, confident that she was safe and just where she ought to be,

  She was hovering somewhere between the deepest level of sleep and the shallowest of consciousness when the first sensation penetrated. It was nothing more than a brush, a whisper of skin on skin, that grew into a soft warmth and finally a gentle weight on her belly. She shifted slightly and felt it move up past her navel to her midsection. Even as she struggled toward consciousness, her mind was sifting through similar sensations, trying to identify the object lying against her. When it found the explanation, it blared it to every cell in her body, and the message read, “Hand.” Not hers.

  She opened her eyes to the softness of predawn light and rolled onto her back. Parker’s arm followed the path laid by his hand as he sn
uggled against her, his sighing breath hot on the bare skin of her shoulder. Suddenly a multitude of sharp, intense sensations flooded her. She stiffened and gasped, levering herself up onto her elbows as his eyelids lifted and recognition flooded his expression with acute understanding. She froze, trapped by the flare of desire in eyes not hers and a body that clearly was.

  For a long, timeless moment, they stared at one another, then he blinked, freeing her. Yet his arm tightened around her as she attempted to shift away. Instinctively she stilled, breathing roughly, waiting, wondering. He folded his free arm beneath his head, his gaze moving over her shoulders, bare except for the narrow straps of her bra, and up the column of her throat to her face. He smiled at the strands of hair tumbled from the once-neat bun at the crown of her head, his eyes picking out each one as if it were something to be treasured and remembered in times to come. He lifted his hand and plucked the few remaining pins, laying them side by side upon her pillow, then combed his fingers through her heavy tresses, the slow, careful movements and the gradual deepening of his breath holding her in thrall. Finally he buried his hand in the hair at her nape and splayed his fingers against the back of her head. His gaze fixed on her mouth, and he pulled her down to him, his arms sliding beneath her as he settled onto his back.

  He cradled her mouth with softening lips that parted to allow his tongue to flick out and gently stroke hers. She pressed her hand against his chest and felt herself folded close, his warmth seeping into her, welling, spreading like sunshine. Then he tilted his head, widened his mouth and deepened the thrust of his tongue, and sunshine erupted into hungry flame. Suddenly, sensation seemed to leap ahead of commission. The skin of her back prickled; his hand slid down from her nape to her waist and back up again. Her breath fled through tingling lips, and his mouth moved against hers, increasing both pressure and suction. Thought and doubt spun away upon whirlwinds of feeling and rising need.

  When his hands came together in the center of her back and gently, smoothly, released the catch of her bra then separated to slide the straps off her shoulders and down her arms, she made no protest, didn’t even think of it. When next his hands slid in tandem down her body, first cooling then heating sensitized skin, she reveled in his touch, so much that she barely noticed when his thumbs hooked in the elastic band of her panties and slowly peeled them down. She slid her arms about his neck and broke the kiss to bury her face in the curve of his neck as he rolled her carefully to her side, lifted her knees and eased the panties down her legs and off over her feet. Her toes curled and her teeth nipped at the curve of his shoulder as his palms cupped and lightly massaged her soles, then moved to her ankles and worked their way up her calves to her knees. She felt warm and vibrant everywhere his hands kneaded, so when he pressed her onto her back and slipped a hand between her thighs, she parted them for him.

  He closed his other hand in the hair at her nape and tugged her head back to plunder her mouth, and this time she gave as good as she got, the internal flame growing hotter and hotter until it seemed to melt her from the inside out. Yet, when he sank two fingers into the molten flesh at the apex of her thighs, an explosion of heat roared through her unlike anything she had ever known before. It burned away the coverings of her nerve endings, leaving them supersensitized and aching with need. She arched her spine, head flung back, breasts thrusting upward. His mouth traveled a feverish path down her throat and across her chest to claim the rigid peak of first one turgid breast and then the other. She felt the pull of his mouth all the way to the pit of her belly, and her muscles constricted about his fingers accordingly. He groaned and pushed them deeper, flexing upward. She cried out and nearly came up off the bed, the sensation almost too sharp to be pleasurable and far, far too sweet to be pain. He did it again, and again it swept through her, sharp and sweet. The third time—or was it the fourth?—she radiated with the shattering, mindless euphoria of climax. The waves were still racking her when he slid atop her, pushed her thighs wide and thrust himself home.

  She felt at first that he would split her apart, and then as he held himself inside her and the waves began to recede, she began to feel that the fit was perfect, their bodies made for each other. When gradually he began to move, and she felt the pressure building surely and steadily inside her, she knew that nothing and no one else could make her feel like this. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight, mating her mouth to his while he rocked them closer and closer to completion. When the rhythm increased and she felt the tension rippling through his muscles, she wrapped her legs about him, as well.

  “Oh, sweetheart!” he exclaimed, tearing his mouth from hers and driving cleanly, deeply, to her core. “Kendra!”

  She felt the hot, fluid pulsation within her and the tremors that shook him, but he paused only momentarily, resuming his strokes, his body never breaking contact at that one essential point until, unbelievably, fulfillment swept though her again, less intense but somehow more encompassing than before, and sweet, so very sweet. When at last he collapsed against her, his mouth plying hers tenderly, they were both flushed and breathless and sated.

  After a moment, he rolled his weight from her and gathered her against his chest, his hands lightly stroking her skin as he whispered words of comfort and praise. He told her how glad she had made him, how wonderful he felt, how sleek and beautiful her body was, and how precious and unforgettable their joining remained. He loved her hair, he said, filling his hands with it, and her face, and the curve of her waist and the flatness of her belly, and that sweet, wet, female place that gave him access to her body as none other could. He had wanted this so long, he said, had wanted to wake at her side and be free to pleasure her as she was meant to be pleasured, to spill himself inside her, to feel the fit of her body to his.

  “I need you,” he said. “Oh, how I need you, more than ever, more than I knew I could.”

  And if he didn’t say that he loved her, she didn’t care, not while he held her, not while her body thrummed with the after-effects of his lovemaking. She tangled her legs with his and laid her cheek against his heart, and was content. Almost at once she began to slide into the blankness of sleep. She was tired still, achingly tired, and yet she felt wonderful, too. The thought occurred just before the blankness that if she had managed to climb into the right bed last night, she would not be feeling so wonderful now.

  * * *

  He kissed her awake to bright, cold light sometime later. She stretched, feeling the lazy undulation of the water bed beneath her, and let the remembered sensations of his lovemaking wash over her again. She smiled up at him, surprised to see that he was dressed, cleanly shaven and standing beside the bed.

  “Good morning, beautiful.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Want some breakfast? Or should I say lunch?”

  “Lunch?” She pushed up onto her elbows. “What time is it?”

  “Oh, about one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “One o’clock!” She started to throw back the covers to get out of the bed, remembered that she was nude and subsided warily.

  Parker grinned. “Feeling a little shy this morning, are we?”

  She bit her lip, trying to will the color out of her cheeks.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed, crossed his legs and leaned over her, one hand planted on the mattress, the other fingering a strand of her hair. “I certainly can’t see that you have anything to be embarrassed about,” he said gently. “God knows you’ve nothing to be ashamed of where your body is concerned. You’re simply beautiful, head to toe.”

  “Thank you.”

  He kissed her temple, his lips butterfly soft, and got up again. Reaching inside the closet, he brought out his own bathrobe, heavy white terry cloth with his initals monogrammed on the breast in gold. He walked to the bedside and held up the robe for her. “Up and at ‘em, sweetheart. I left an omelet warming up for you in the oven.”

  She reached for the bathrobe. He moved it away, then back again
when she lowered her arm.

  “If you don’t get out of that bed,” he said, eyes twinkling, “I’m getting back in there with you, but as that’s what I’d rather do, anyway, I won’t complain.”

  She would prefer the latter herself, but a squeal from the other room reminded her that they were not the only ones to be considered—and she was not so sure, in the bright light of day, that it would be wise. “I think we’re being paged,” she said, tucking the sheet beneath her arms.

  He lifted both brows. “So it seems. I guess that means you’ll be getting up, then.”

  “I guess it does,” she agreed, sitting up and swinging her bare legs over the side of the bed. With a yank, she pulled the sheet free of the foot of the bed, stood and turned, winding the sheet around her. She backed up and slid first one arm and then the other into the sleeves of the bathrobe.

  Parker conceded gracefully, delivering the robe onto her shoulders. He leaned close and nuzzled her ear, whispering, “Cheater.”

  Uncertain how to respond, she flashed him a shy grin and lifted her hair free of the robe. He gathered it in his hand and kissed her on the back of the neck. A pleasant warmth rippled through her, and she knew that if she turned, he would take her in his arms and kiss her thoroughly. She was about to do just that when an insistent scream reminded them they were expected in the other room. They both laughed, aware that her communication skills were improving. Only a few short weeks ago, she would have resorted to wobbly, heartrending wails and genuine tears to summon them.