Doctor, Soldier, Daddy (The Doctors MacDowell Book 1)

by Caro Carson

  The wind had been knocked out of her by the man who was even now squeezing her too tightly, smashing her glasses into her breast. She’d been lying on the floor long enough for the concrete to start hurting her shoulder and hip. She wriggled, pushing at his arms, but he was too big for her to budge.

  “Let me up.” Tears of frustration filled her eyes. “This hurts.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Or maybe it was the right thing. He rolled to his side, taking his weight off her. As she took a deep breath, he started running his hand over her arm, her waist, her leg.

  “I’m okay,” Kendry said, but his hand wasn’t quite steady, not quite the touch of a doctor. He smoothed his way clumsily up her ribs, brushed the side of her breast. She inhaled quickly.

  “It hurts where?” Jamie said roughly. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, the way his lips were firm, the way the muscles in his neck were tight with tension.

  “Just—no. My glasses were in the way—”

  His fingers were on her breast, dipping into her pocket, pulling out her glasses. He tossed the taped frames away. As they skittered across the concrete, his hand returned to her breast, fully cupping her this time, hot and sure, sliding his thumb over the peak in a single, experienced stroke.

  Her gasp was captured by Jamie’s mouth as he kissed her, one searing meeting of his mouth on hers. Her thoughts froze, until Jamie parted her lips, tasting her fully, and Kendry came alive in a burst of sensation. She whimpered with need, overwhelmed by the rush of want.

  He pressed his hand, his mouth, his whole body into her. She melted underneath him, hotly returning his kiss.

  Abruptly, he rolled away.

  Kendry lay on the floor, panting for air, feeling dazed and alone. She wasn’t aware of Jamie sitting up, but his strong arms lifted her by the shoulders, and then she was cradled with her back against his chest.

  “My fault,” he murmured into her hair. “My fault. Forgive me. I should never have...not with you.”

  Not with her? Not with his wife, who loved him terribly?

  Then with whom?

  She wanted to howl the question, but the answer came to her too quickly.

  With Amina.

  The gunfire. The desire to protect a civilian. Beyond a doubt, it all had combined in his mind with yesterday’s military training to remind him of Amina, Sam’s mother. Sam’s real mother.

  Kendry was, and always would be, second best for Jamie.

  This kiss had changed nothing.

  She’d married him for one reason: to make a family for Sam. As awful as it was, Sam had never known Amina. Unlike his father, Sam didn’t miss Amina, but he would miss Kendry if she walked away.

  I would miss him, my favorite little guy. I’d miss both of my guys.

  She couldn’t jeopardize this marriage and her chance at motherhood.

  She dashed her tears away and blew the bangs out of her eyes. She smiled brightly at the mattress of her bed, just to get her facial muscles working, then turned around to face Jamie.

  “No big deal,” she said.

  Jamie seemed a little startled at her chipper tone.

  “You were remembering Amina, I know. If all the soldiers who returned from war kissed the way you do, then I don’t think there’d be so much research into post-traumatic stress disorder right now.” She patted his shoulder and stood up. “Let’s get my stuff and go. We still need to hit the grocery store.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jamie knew he’d broken the rules. He’d crossed the line. He’d mauled Kendry on the floor of her old apartment, and she’d forgiven him on the spot for mistaking her for Amina.

  The hell of it was, he hadn’t been thinking of Amina. Not for one second. He’d known full well it was Kendry in his arms. Everything about her was different than Amina, from the shape of her to the scent of her skin and the taste of her mouth. He’d known it was Kendry he was kissing. Kendry he wanted to toss on the bed.

  Four weeks had passed, and it was still Kendry he wanted in his bed.

  If she knew, she’d hate him. She admired him for staying devoted to Amina. She’d married him only after he’d promised her that his feelings were buried.

  They were.

  This wasn’t love. It was lust, an unfortunate part of that caveman satisfaction he felt toward all things Kendry. It was undeniably gratifying to watch the changes marriage made in his wife. She no longer sneezed and sniffed. The dark circles under her eyes were gone, and her new glasses with their barely there frames let her look at the world without squinting. She was no longer gaunt, but fit and slender. The doctor in him appreciated how healthy she now looked.

  The caveman in him did not appreciate how the other doctors looked at her, but Jamie buried that emotion with grim determination. Jealousy. Lust. Love. He would allow none of them to destroy what he had with Kendry.

  Sam was blossoming in the new family they were making. Between Kendry’s personal history and her true interest in medicine, Jamie understood why she hadn’t wanted to quit her hard-won job at the hospital, but he’d been touched when she cut her hours down to one day per week. On most days, Jamie came home to find her on a blanket on the floor with Sam. Sam had started crawling, early for a premature baby. All that blanket time with Kendry was paying off.

  Jamie would be a fool to lose everything for the sake of a purely physical tumble with Kendry. She’d think less of him for betraying Amina, and she would be right to think so. How could he love another woman, when he’d loved Amina?

  Jamie would leave the blanket time to Sam. If the phrase conjured visions of a tousled Kendry amid tangled blankets on his bed, that was his personal problem. He would never risk his family for something purely physical.

  * * *

  The anxiety Kendry felt during Sam’s first surgery made her feel like a real mother. The threat of pneumonia had passed, and Sam’s doctors had decided to repair the hole in his heart first. It was, as Jamie had warned her on their wedding day, not easy when a child she loved was scared and in pain.

  The repair was a relatively simple procedure, performed in the cardiac cath lab. A wire was threaded through an artery, then positioned over the hole between the upper chambers of the heart. Between beats, a patch was unfurled through the same wire and set in place over the hole, where it stuck by the force of pressure within the heart itself. Within months, Kendry was told, the heart tissue would grow over the patch, making the repair permanent.

  To Kendry, it was a miracle. To her husband and her brother-in-law, it was routine. Still, Jamie held her hand during the two-hour wait, and she knew that it wasn’t a ploy to silence the hospital gossips.

  He took a few days off to be with Sam during his recovery, holding Sam most of the time to limit his activity for the first forty-eight hours. Jamie did everything himself, even turning down Kendry’s offer to change Sam’s diaper.

  “I want my son to know I’m always here for him,” Jamie explained.

  “You make changing a diaper sound very noble,” she joked in response, but for the first time, Kendry started to wonder if it was a bit obsessive. By the third day, Kendry realized Jamie stuck like glue to Sam because he had nothing else to do.

  She didn’t, either, so she decided to tackle the stack of boxes that prevented them from parking the truck in the garage. She’d expected to uncover winter clothes, or perhaps a kitchen gadget. Instead, she discovered mementos that revealed the man Jamie had been before she’d met him. A whole life existed in the boxes, one that Jamie had evidently packed up before leaving for Afghanistan. One he had never picked up again.

  “I didn’t know you rode horses,” she said over dinner, watching Jamie patiently spoon mushed-up bananas into Sam’s mouth.

  “I don’t anymore. Sam’s too young.”

  After dinner, K
endry brought in a framed football-team photo. Jamie was the team doctor, crouched in the front row with the coaches. The team had written thanks for his volunteer work in black marker. “We should hang this somewhere. Who is the team doctor now?”

  Jamie looked at the photo like it had nothing to do with him. “One of the kids’ dads took over when I was deployed.”

  She found a motorcycle helmet and snowboard gear.

  Jamie had nothing to do with any of it.

  The Jamie she knew returned to work the next day, then came home and cared for Sam. The Jamie she knew had never done anything else.

  In his quest to be a great father, he’d given up too much. He was expecting Sam to fulfill all his needs. That couldn’t be good for him, or for Sam. No baby, no matter how cherished, could meet an adult’s every social, mental and emotional need.

  In fact, Kendry was feeling a little stir-crazy herself. She couldn’t hire a babysitter, though, and take her husband on a date. As nice as her new mother-in-law had been when they’d visited with Sam, Kendry couldn’t ask her to watch the baby for a weekend while she took her husband snowboarding in nearby New Mexico.

  They didn’t have that kind of marriage.

  She was, however, the only wife Jamie had. Like a million wives before her, she decided it was time to manage her husband—for his own good.

  * * *

  Kendry decided to start small: a family outing to a high school football game. Quinn had told her he’d never seen Jamie take Sam anywhere except their mother’s house. It was appalling to her that the people who’d known Jamie his whole life hadn’t met his son yet. If she’d had this adorable baby, she’d want everyone to meet him.

  “Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy,” Kendry sang to Sam as she snapped the bottom of a red Onesie over his fresh diaper. The high school’s colors were red, white and blue, so Kendry added blue overalls to complete Sam’s school spirit outfit. “What’s the point of having a gorgeous baby like you if we don’t get to show you off? Your daddy is going to bask in your reflected glory tonight.”

  Jamie was going to enjoy fatherhood, by golly, and Kendry was going to make sure of it, even if she had to kidnap him tonight to do it. Unfortunately, she was pretty sure she that was exactly what she was going to have to do.

  Kendry buckled Sam into his car seat and headed the truck toward the hospital to pick up Jamie, doubt assailing her every mile of the way. She was more nervous to take Jamie to a football game than she’d been to marry him. She’d been certain Jamie wanted to marry her. She wasn’t at all sure what he would do when she drove him to his alma mater’s stadium.

  Of course, showing off his son meant Jamie would be introducing his wife to old friends, as well. How many times at the hospital had Jamie put his arm around her shoulders, silently defending her when any member of the hospital staff raised their eyebrows in surprise that she—plain Kendry Harrison—was his wife? How many times had Jamie repeated his “Sam and I like you just the way you are” line?

  She was supposed to be lightening Jamie’s load, not adding to the burden. Superficial or not, having people think his wife looked pitiful was, well, pitiful. The new glasses helped, of course, and at the hospital, everyone wore scrubs, so that was a certain equalizer. But this morning, as she’d stood in front of the bathroom mirror, scissors in hand, ready to trim her bangs for tonight’s outing, she’d wondered if there was more to her routine than being thrifty and frugal. Perhaps she was being plain stubborn, refusing to change because she was too proud. Perhaps it had been easier these past two years to pretend that everyone else was shallow, rather than that she had fallen into poverty.

  She tossed the scissors down and picked up the phone. She wasn’t doing Jamie any favors by sticking to her old routine. It was hard to spend someone else’s money on herself, but in this case, she was spending it to make Jamie’s night a little less stressful. That made all the difference.

  It was amazing how easy some things were to accomplish once she set her mind to it. Bailey had answered the phone, and Kendry had arrived at Bailey’s stylist within two hours. Sam had reveled in cooing female attention while Kendry let the stylist have his way. He’d cut long layers into the rest of Kendry’s hair to blend it with the long bangs, gushing about “sexy beach waves” the whole time.

  Kendry’s experiences with beaches were that they were sandy and left her hair a tangled mess, but when the stylist had turned her toward the mirror to see the final result, she’d decided to skip her ponytail for the evening. She looked like the carefree coed who’d worn a mini while waitressing in the latest Austin hot spot. Kendry had almost forgotten that person.

  Now, sitting in the truck, waiting at the last red light before the hospital, Kendry fluffed and finger-combed her hair. Maybe Jamie meant it each time he said he liked her just the way she was. Maybe he didn’t want Sam’s new mother to look different. When he said she should spend money on herself, maybe he meant on her education, not on something frivolous like a hairdo.

  Enough. The money had been spent. The damage, so to speak, was done.

  The light turned green. She’d find out what her husband thought soon enough.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As soon as she saw Jamie headed from the E.R.’s ambulance entrance toward the truck, Kendry’s heart sped up. As usual, he’d changed from scrubs to jeans. The October air was crisp in the evening, so he wore his leather jacket. He looked like a movie star with his military haircut, handsome, tall and strong. Memories of that hot kiss on the floor were never far away.

  Stop it.

  Her husband was her friend, a caring man, one who’d given her that same jacket to wear for her own safety. He was devoted to his son. Knowing Sam was in this E.R. without him had torn him up that day.

  Jamie flashed a quick smile as he came up to the truck door, and Kendry was right back to square one: her husband looked like a movie star. Her platonic husband, the devoted father...

  Lord, she needed to keep it all straight.

  “Hi.” She waved as Jamie walked up and opened her door. She gripped the steering wheel and delivered her first, carefully constructed line. “Why don’t you let me drive tonight? You look tired.”

  He actually looked very alert at the moment, openly checking out her clothes. She’d spent a little more money on herself in that department, too. Football in Texas was big, an Institution with a capital I. Her new red sweater, worn over a good pair of jeans and boots, would take her anywhere in Austin before, during or after the game, according to Bailey.

  “What’s the occasion?” Jamie asked.

  Kendry let go of the steering wheel with one hand and ran her hand down her thigh. “I don’t think wearing jeans calls for an occasion.”

  Jamie raised his gaze from her boots to her face and quirked one eyebrow. “I meant, what’s the occasion, because you are choosing to drive. Are those new jeans? They look good.”

  Kendry put her hand back on the wheel. “You could sit in the back with Sam, if you wanted to.”

  “Wow. What did you do to your hair?” Jamie ducked his head a bit to look into the cab.

  “I got it cut.”

  “It’s...really different.”

  Some feminine part of Kendry felt put out. Just a tiny bit. Couldn’t he say something besides it’s different? It was bad enough he’d thought her choice to drive was more noticeable than her new outfit.

  Jamie rounded the hood of the truck and jumped in the front seat, but he kept staring at her.

  “It’s not that different,” she said, putting the truck in gear.

  “It’s nice. Really nice.”

  Jamie rested his arm across the back of the bench seat, and she felt him finger a curl near her shoulder. The sensation of being touched in such a personal way crossed the line from friendly to intimate. Maybe nice wasn’t so bori
ng. If he felt the desire to touch her hair, then Kendry could love nice.

  Jamie gave her hair a slight tug. “I bet Sam has been yanking on this all day.”

  Lesson learned. She was Sam’s mother in Jamie’s eyes. They were pals. Co-parents. If she’d expected a new hairstyle to be a turning point in that relationship, then she wasn’t keeping real life separate from her fantasies.

  “It gives him something to grab besides my glasses,” she said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jamie smile at her dry joke.

  She took a deep breath before her next rehearsed line, inhaling the traces of Jamie’s woodsy aftershave, enjoying it more than ever, now that it didn’t make her sneeze. It smelled masculine and inviting. “I want to take you somewhere special to eat.”

  Lord, that had come out all wrong. Too husky. Too serious. She changed her tone to flippant. “Ask me what’s for dinner.”

  “What’s for dinner?” They’d come to a red light. Jamie let go of her hair and turned around to interest Sam in a toy.

  “Stadium nachos.”

  He stopped jiggling the toy. “Nachos?”

  “Doesn’t that sound delicious?”

  “That sounds hard to swallow.”

  “For a baby? Yes, which is why I already fed Sam. Quinn told me you graduated from Sam Houston High, so I looked them up. They’ve got a home game tonight, and I thought this would give you a chance to go somewhere besides the hospital and the house.”

  “My work schedule keeps me away from Sam too much as is.”

  “Well, you’ll notice he’s coming with us.”

  Oops. That had sounded a little more irritated than cute, but she’d been anxious with the light turning yellow as she’d entered the intersection. She came to a halt at the next light, stopping a full length behind the car in front of her, and tried again. “You must like football. We have that picture of you volunteering to be the doctor for a team.”

  “That was before Afghanistan. I had more time then. I couldn’t begin to volunteer for the football team now.”