Her voice softened a little as she said the name, and her attention strayed to Ella. Edward hastily swung Ella around, perched her on his hip again—nice job, Harper, slinging your sick daughter around like a sack of potatoes—and tried to see her through Reeve’s eyes.
His heart sank. This was not the genteel introduction he’d envisioned between the females in his life.
Ella was a red-faced, red-eyed, snotty-nosed disaster, her Afro-puff Mickey Mouse-eared hair mussed, her clothes rumpled and one shoe gone. Her big, long-lashed brown eyes looked pretty, he supposed, and her tiny butterfly earrings (Amber had insisted on getting her ears pierced at six months) were a nice touch, but there was currently no sign of the happy, adorable, fat-cheeked and dimpled angel he’d alluded to last night. An organized dad would probably wipe the child’s face now that she’d calmed down, but he’d left the diaper bag over in the waiting area, and, while he was sure Amber kept tissues in it, it’d probably be a five-minute search through the thing’s ninety-six pockets before he found them. All he needed to complete this disastrous meeting would be for Ella to screw her face up and take a giant crap right in the diaper he’d changed when he picked her up from day care ten minutes ago.
Shit.
“Pleasure, Edward,” said the doctor, whose name Edward had already forgotten. “Have we got a case here?”
“Ear infection,” Edward told him, shaking his hand. “I think.”
“Well, we’ll get her fixed right up for you.” The doctor reached out and touched the back of Ella’s hand while she regarded him suspiciously. “Yes, we will. Yes, we will.” He turned to Reeve. “Do you want to meet me in the dining room, Reeve?”
Reeve, who seemed to be mesmerized by Ella, blinked and looked around. “Yes. Thanks. I’ll be right there.”
“Take care,” said the doctor, who walked off to catch the next elevator.
Edward barely noticed he’d gone. He watched Reeve watch Ella, desperate for some sign—it didn’t matter how small it was, how infinitesimally minuscule—that she didn’t consider him to be the inept father of a bratty kid. But Reeve, who didn’t seem to want to make eye contact with him, ducked her head as she bent to retrieve Ella’s yellow blankie from the floor.
“Does this belong to you?” she asked, holding the blanket out to Ella.
Ella snatched it from her and, suddenly shy, pressed her mouth to it.
“Say thank you,” Edward reminded her, to no avail. His stomach churned. The kid could say an annoying word like no and a gimmicky word like baby, but a polite and useful phrase like thank you? Forget about it. “Thanks,” he told Reeve.
Reeve’s gaze flickered to his for one second before reverting back to Ella. “You’re welcome. Good-bye, Ella,” she told his daughter very seriously, reaching out to shake Ella’s tiny hand. “Nice to meet you.”
And Ella, to his complete astonishment, reached out her right hand and shook, something she’d never done before.
Reeve almost smiled.
But then she took a deep breath and looked to Edward. “I have to go. Lunch meeting with the other docs.”
Edward nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say because he was back in his default position with Reeve: no damn idea where he stood.
Reeve turned, then hesitated. “Don’t worry about Ella,” she told him. “We’ll get her fixed right up. She’ll be feeling better before dinnertime.”
He nodded again.
Another elevator arrived just then, and Reeve ducked her head and dashed off to get on it. He watched her go, trying to get his disappointment in check and not feel like his whole world was crashing and burning, which was ridiculous. He’d just met Reeve. She didn’t own his life. His every breath, mood and feeling did not have to be tied to what she did or didn’t do. He wouldn’t let that happen.
He wouldn’t continue to let that happen.
He was healthy. Ella was (mostly) healthy. He had a job, a house, a life.
Everything else would work itself out.
Wouldn’t it?
He was still staring at the closed elevator doors when a movement out of the corner of his eye startled him. He glanced around and discovered, to his utter horror, Amber standing in the doorway of the corridor that led to the stairs. They’d exchanged texts and she’d told him she’d meet him here as soon as she could get away from work, and now here she was.
The juxtaposition of the two women was jarring, he discovered. Amber was taller and thinner than Reeve, her pretty light-skinned face a study in angles and delicate lines.
And Reeve was...Reeve. Simply Reeve. And all other women, he'd begun to realize, suffered by comparison.
Frozen to his spot, he watched while Amber crept toward him as if sleepwalking. Her face was expressionless at the moment; stunned, maybe, but he knew anger would come, and come soon.
She got to him at last and took Ella from his arms when the baby reached for her. “Who was that?” she asked.
For one shameful, cowardly second, he thought about giving an answer that would make his life easier rather than the one that would put him in the middle of one hot-ass seat. He thought of playing dumb, or making a vague comment about thinking Reeve might be one of the new doctors here, or maybe even reverting to that old Eddie Murphy joke about what boyfriends said when they’d been caught with another woman: Wasn’t me.
Except that he didn’t want to be that guy, and there was no part of him that seemed capable of denying Reeve, to himself or anyone else, even Amber.
“Reeve Banks,” he admitted.
Amber recoiled, the name seeming to hit her like a spray from a fire hose directly to her face.
With a deep breath, she managed to shore up her courage. “Is she the reason you dumped me?”
“No,” Edward said, profoundly grateful that he’d kept the engagement ring and anticipated engagement a surprise, and Amber therefore didn’t know how close he’d come to actually proposing. But he felt he owed Amber some sort of explanation. “I met her just after we broke up the other day.”
“Who is she, then?” Amber asked slowly.
Edward opened his mouth and found there was no answer he could give Amber, not yet, not now, not when he hadn’t fully processed it himself much less discussed it with Reeve. And—ah, shit— he could see tears welling in Amber’s eyes and knew how much this must be hurting her.
And, while she deserved the truth, she certainly didn’t deserve that.
“I’m sorry, Amber,” he said helplessly. “I’m sorry.”
She blinked, her mouth twisting when she got the picture, her level gaze turning to a beam of purest bitterness. “So, I can know you for years, and invest time and energy into our relationship and bear your daughter, but I’m not the one.”
“Amber—” he tried.
“Meanwhile,” she continued, her voice thick with suppressed emotion, “you can meet her ten minutes later and know that she is the one?”
Edward kept his mouth shut. There was no answering that question, and he was far too clumsy to attempt it.
“Answer me!”
“Amber,” he said gently. “You dodged a bullet with me. Because you need a man who takes one look at you and knows that you’re the one. And I can’t be that guy for you.”
“You’re right,” Amber said, squaring her shoulders and swiping the first of her tears as they began to fall. “I dodged a bullet. Thanks for not wasting any more of my time.”
* * *
Chapter 15
Reeve went to the medical center's ICU, which was attached to the medical arts building, at the tail end of her lunch break. She hurried through the heavy automatic doors, nodded at the staff behind the nurse’s station, and hesitated outside the glass-windowed room that belonged to Mrs. B. Inside, almost lost amidst the IV and oxygen lines, beeping monitors and tray table with a plate of uneaten food and a Bible on it, lay the patient.
Reeve stared at her for a minute, shoring up her courage while wondering how the old woman
could possibly still be alive. The Hermes scarf was gone now, leaving only wisps of gray hair against Mrs. B’s blue-tinged scalp as her head rested on the pillow. Her eyes were shut. The cannula was stuck in her nostrils. Her mouth gaped open. Her frail chest heaved for air beneath the white sheets, as though the weight of the linens was enough to keep her lungs from expanding.
Alyssa, who was sitting at her usual post at the head of the bed, looked around, saw Reeve and got up to greet her.
Which forced Reeve to unstick her feet and actually go inside the room.
Once again, she was assaulted by the smells (sickly sweet) and sounds (gospel music; Mahalia Jackson, she thought, turned down low) of Mrs. B’s dying process. Much to her surprise, they didn’t repulse her the way they had at Mrs. B’s house, and she felt much calmer now than she had then. Maybe because the house was Mrs. B’s turf, where she was still queen.
The medical center, on the other hand, was Reeve’s turf. Here, Mrs. B was more dying patient than she was Reeve’s oppressor.
Here, Mrs. B was just pitiful. Nothing more or less.
“Hey,” she said, meeting up with Alyssa at the foot of the bed and hugging her. “Thanks for calling me.”
Alyssa, whose bleary eyes were nearly as sunken with exhaustion as her mother's, shrugged. “I knew you’d want to know.”
They stared at Mrs. B in silence for a while. She didn’t stir.
“Did she get any rest last night?” Reeve finally asked.
Another shrug from Alyssa. “I don’t know. Maybe. She hasn’t been as fretful, so I think they’re getting a handle on the pain, which is the main thing. Hopefully they’ll let me take her home later. She wants to die at home.”
Reeve nodded sadly, not sure what her responsibilities were here. She needed to get back to work. She wanted to stay. Why, exactly, she didn’t know. Only that it felt important to be here.
“Have you been reading to her?” she asked, noticing the Bible again.
“No,” Mrs. B said faintly, before Alyssa could answer. “She hasn’t.”
Startled, Reeve and Alyssa hurried to Mrs. B’s side, where Alyssa took her hand. “I didn’t know you were awake, Mama. Do you want me to read to you?”
Mrs. B, who hadn’t opened her eyes, didn’t answer.
They waited, watching her with bated breath, but nothing happened.
Clearly crestfallen, Alyssa looked over her shoulder at Reeve, who put a comforting arm around her back. Reeve was about to excuse herself to go back to work, when Mrs. B moved restlessly.
“Reeve can read to me,” Mrs. B said in the thinnest of voices. She heaved in a serrated breath. “She has a nice voice.”
And Reeve, who had never, to her knowledge, received a compliment of any kind from her mother-in-law, nearly fell over backward in a dead faint.
Alyssa, luckily, had her wits about her and passed Reeve the Bible while edging out of the way and pushing Reeve closer to the bed. Reeve quickly flipped through the tabbed passages, trying to find something appropriate.
“Would you like Psalm Twenty-One?” she asked, trying to remember her childhood Sunday school verses and not wanting to blow this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get something right in Mrs. B’s eyes. “Or maybe something from Second Corinthians?”
Mrs. B, who still had her eyes closed, shook her head. “Dylan.”
“Dylan?”
Reeve looked to Alyssa for an explanation, but Alyssa was already on the job. Pulling out a paper that was stuck between the Bible's pages, she handed it to Reeve.
And Reeve, remembering that once, a million years ago, Mrs. B had been a high-school English teacher, smiled, cleared her throat and began to read to her from Dylan Thomas's most famous poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
* * *
Chapter 16
Later that night, Edward stretched out on the sofa in front of the muted TV and watched the Orioles beat up on his beloved Yankees while listening to one of his favorite songs by one of his favorite artists, Sarah Vaughan’s “Summertime.” Yeah, that was something else he and Reeve had in common, wasn’t it? The same taste in music. He’d played the song in a continuous loop in the hope that it would relax both him and Ella, and it seemed to be working. Moving gingerly, he raised his head off the pillow to check his daughter’s current sleep status.
Out like a light.
Thank the Good Lord.
Heaving a huge sigh of relief, he adjusted her warm—but no longer hot—and solid weight, which was sprawled across his chest, kissed her messy curls, now shampooed and free of their pom-poms, and collapsed back against the cushions. Entertaining a sick and therefore cranky baby all afternoon and into the early evening had not been a day at the driving range, but he’d done it somehow. With a great deal of help, let’s face it, from his cable TV’s various kiddy channels and his mother, who’d stopped by at dinnertime to bring soup and to check on them. By then, it was time for a bath (as always, lots of playing, splashing and mess had ensued, but he’d tried his best not to let her get any water into the infected ear), story time (her current favorite was that cardboard classic, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar), and, finally, bedtime.
One of these days, very soon, he’d have to start putting the child to sleep by herself in her crib upstairs, like Amber kept telling him to do. But he just couldn’t give up these quiet moments, so precious at the end of long days like today, of holding his sweet-smelling and powdery fresh baby in his arms.
He kissed her again, nuzzling those fuzzy curls. The detangling hadn’t gone so well tonight. Ella tended to shriek whenever he so much as picked up a brush in her presence, so he’d have to—
Knock-knock-knock.
Tensing, his entire body reaching sudden and full alert in half a second, he held Ella and surged to his feet. His mother had already been by. Amber rang the bell when she came. None of his brothers were in the habit of just dropping by, which meant there was only one person that could be.
His heart doing a pretty good impression of a jackhammer, he hurried to the front door and swung it open.
It was Reeve.
The professional ponytail was gone now, which meant her hair was soft and loose around her shoulders, the way he preferred it. She’d changed out of her work clothes in favor of a little skirt, and she wore a loose white tank that showed plenty of skin, but not as much cleavage as he’d have liked.
Her expression was warm. Searching. Uncertain.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“So.” Shifting on her sandaled feet, she shoved her hands deep into her pockets, shrugged and smiled. “I see our patient’s resting comfortably. I thought you might need a house call.”
He raised a brow. “You thought I might need a house call?”
Grinning now, she ducked her head and flushed that gorgeous color that made her look like she’d just come in from a day spent hiking. When she looked up at him again, her gaze swept over his T-shirt and knit shorts.
“You look perfectly fine to me.”
“What can I say? I’m a trooper. I’d probably need to be examined thoroughly to rule everything out, though. It’s the only way to be sure, Doctor.”
“Are you coming on to me with your sleeping daughter in your arms?”
“She sleeps like the dead, but I can put her down if it’d make you feel better.”
She laughed.
His heart soared.
“I’m not doing very well at calling first,” she said. “Sorry about that. Can I come in anyway?”
“Absolutely. You know I just want to see you. I don’t care when or how you get here.”
She stared at him, the question in her eyes.
“Believe it.”
Dimpling, she nodded. “I do believe it. Thanks.”
He swung the door open the minimum amount that allowed Reeve to come in yet forced her to edge by him as she did. Tacky and desperate, sure, but he was all about getting in touch with his lower f
eelings where Reeve was concerned, and the light brush of her bare arm against his sure did his body good.
Just as he was about to shut the door behind her, a fat and furry orange ball of cat streaked past their ankles, bell tinkling.
“Muffin!” she cried. “I was invited inside! Not you!”
“It’s okay,” Edward said, laughing. “I like cats. I’m a vet, remember?”
“Are you sure? I can kick him out.”
“Yeah, but look how much fun he’s having.”
They both glanced around at the cat, which was now enjoying a leisurely stroll around the living room, his tail in the air. He seemed to like the plush area rug in front of the fireplace, because he dropped to his side and rolled over onto his back for a good wriggle with his paws in the air. Then he got up again and continued with his circuit around the brown leather sofa and love seat.
“He doesn’t have fleas,” Reeve assured him.
“Duly noted. You can come in, you know. You don’t have to linger in the foyer.”
He led her into the living room. She followed, turning in a slow circle and noting the drapes, the mantel with its many framed pictures of Ella and the playpen littered with toys in the far corner nearest the kitchen.
“I kept wondering how I’d been to your house and never noticed any signs of a baby,” she said wryly. “Guess we were a little busy with other things the other night, eh?”
“Yeah. And it was dark.”
“True. But you didn’t have a car seat in your SUV...?”
“I keep it in the trunk when she’s not with me.”
“Ah,” Reeve said, smiling. “You don’t want it messing up the fine look of your luxury German driving machine?”
“Exactly.”
“You’ve got a pretty house.”
“Thanks,” he said, trying to moderate his grin.
“Love the quilt.” She nodded to one of his prized possessions, a black and white star quilt, shot through with navy and red, that adorned the wall behind the buffet in the dining area. “Did your grandmother make it for you?”
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