“Not on my watch.” The nurse strode into the room, flexed her impressive biceps and cut him with a stare cold enough to freeze meat. “Are you going to take them off, or am I?”
Samuel narrowed his eyes. “I’ll pay you to go away.”
An amused twinkle flashed, disappeared. “You wouldn’t make it to the bank, hon. They’d be scraping your cold, dead body off the pavement.”
As much as he’d like to argue the point, he knew she was probably right. He was weak as a kitten, dizzied even by the insignificant effort of trying to dress himself. Since he couldn’t argue on a logical basis, he returned to the original complaint. “You took my phone.”
“Get those pants off.”
“No.”
“I’m not a patient woman.”
“Either I get my phone back, or I’m out of here.”
“So you want to play rough, huh?” She heaved a sigh, crossed her arms beneath breasts so large that Samuel could imagine the unrestrained version as lethal weapons. Her grin was positively maniacal. “Fine with me. I like ’em feisty.”
Samuel didn’t doubt that for a minute.
Lacing her fingers, she straightened her arms to crack all of her knuckles at once, then advanced with a grim leer. “I’m going to enjoy this.”
He didn’t doubt that, either. “Wait.”
Startled, the woman stopped, stared at his upturned palm as if she’d never seen one before.
Samuel sucked a breath, flinched at the pain. His lungs were clogging again. Breathing was becoming more difficult. “Please. I have to have a phone. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” she muttered, flicking her wrist as if swatting a pesky fly. “This is a hospital. Everything is a matter of life and death. Now strip bare, bucko, or you and I are going to share an intimate moment.”
Desperate, Samuel yanked the hospital gown across his lap knowing the flimsy cotton cloth was scant protection from the polyester-clad clutches of a woman who ate puny patients for breakfast and picked her teeth with their bones.
“You don’t understand,” he wheezed. “I know where they’ve taken her.”
“Taken who?”
“She’s in danger.”
“Who’s in danger?”
The room was moving again. Samuel was infuriated by his weakness. “They’re trying to steal her baby. I have to stop them.”
“Uh-huh.” The nurse eyed him as if calculating size for a psychiatric restraint garment. “Sure you do, hon.”
“It’s my fault,” Samuel moaned, frustrated that he couldn’t make her understand. “She risked everything for me, everything. Now she’s in trouble and I know where she is. I have to find her, I have to—” A ghostly specter appeared, rendered him mute.
At first he thought it was a figment, an illusion caused by illness and fear. Only when the nurse acknowledged the pale presence with a glance did Samuel realize that the specter was real.
Ellie was real, all right, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak, simply stood in the doorway, white as death. Her eyes were red. Her arms were empty. And she was crying.
Chapter Fourteen
From his unsteady perch, Samuel hunched on the edge of the mattress, his weakened lungs crumpling in upon themselves. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, could only stare in horror at the wan figure hovering in the doorway, empty arms hugging her own thin torso.
With a shuddering breath Ellie rushed across the room and threw herself upon him. Whimpering, sobbing, crazed with emotion, she kissed his face, his neck, hugged him fiercely before drawing away to study him so intently he felt as if she could see straight through him. Moist eyes darkened, soft fingers traced the jagged planes of his face, caressed a jaw slackened by shock.
Apparently satisfied that he was indeed alive, she sat back on her heels, clutching his limp hands. “You look so much better. Thank God.”
The sound of her voice forced out a single word from him. “Daniel?”
It was a harsh croak, nearly inaudible, but she heard, squeezed his hands in response. Mute lips moved, were moistened with the tip of her pink tongue. She closed her eyes as if in prayer, uttered a choppy reply. “Marjorie has him.”
A fission of fear chilled him to the marrow. He searched his memory. “Stanton Mackenzie’s wife?”
“His widow.” A fresh spurt of tears brightened her red eyes. “Stanton died last night.”
If she’d told him space aliens had invaded the White House, Samuel couldn’t have been more shocked. “Mackenzie is dead?” She avoided his gaze. “How? I mean, was there an accident?” A horrible thought struck him. He released her hands, gripped her shoulders. “Has Daniel been injured, is that why he isn’t here? For the love of God, Ellie—”
“Shh, Daniel’s fine, Samuel. He’s just outside.” She cupped his face with her palms, met his panicked gaze with one of intensity and truth. “I asked Marjorie to wait in the lobby while I spoke to you. I wanted to explain...” Words failed. A helpless shrug, and her hands dropped soundlessly to his lap. She absently scratched the coarse denim stretched over his thighs, fingered the faded hem of the flowered hospital gown. A trace of a smile touched lips pale enough to be worrisome. “A fashion statement?”
A voice boomed from across the room. “Hurumph. More like a scream, I’d say.” The nurse, who’d been watching events unfold with uncharacteristic silence, stepped forward, focused on Ellie. “Maybe you can get this stubborn fool’s pants off.” She scraped them with a squinty stare. “My guess is that it wouldn’t be the first time.”
Ellie blinked. “I’ll, ah, see what I can do.”
“All righty then, I’ll leave you to it.” A brusque nod and, from the doorway, a grim warning that Samuel took to heart. “When I get back, I want to see you naked. ”
“Yes’m,” he replied meekly.
Ellie ducked her head. When she looked up, the doorway was empty and her lips were still quivering. “It’s nice to know you’re in competent hands.”
The only hands that interested Samuel belonged to the beautiful woman crouched before him, the woman who loved him so much that she was willing to sacrifice all that was dear to her on his behalf. Samuel took those trembling hands, stroked the delicate knuckles with his thumbs, repeated the process with his lips.
He kissed each of her fingers, then tugged her hand lightly, urging her to rise and sit beside him on the bed. “I’m sorry, Ellie.” His throat spasmed with emotion, nearly choking him. Stanton Mackenzie was dead. That news was shocking but Samuel wasted no grief on it. Instead he was shaken, shattered, by the sorrow in Ellie’s eyes. No matter what faults the man had, he’d fathered her child and she’d loved him. Perhaps she still did. The thought chilled him.
Not knowing what else to say, he repeated himself. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for, Samuel.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” He noted the subtle shift in her gaze, was inexplicably wounded by it. “And I’m sorry for all that you gave up because of me.”
Ellie’s gaze snapped back, widened in surprise. “Gave up?”
“If not for me, you and Daniel would be safe now.”
“We are safe.” Her mouth wobbled again, although not in amusement. Emotion jittered through her eyes, twitched her raised chin as she spoke. “There was so much I didn’t know, so much I wouldn’t allow myself to know because I ran away from it.” She paused, touched her lips, struggled to speak. “I always ran, you know. Every time an obstacle appeared I turned my back and ran like hell, rationalizing that every challenge was too difficult to overcome, and convincing myself that life was too short to waste with unpleasantness. I thought I was being sensible. In fact, I was simply being a coward.”
Samuel blinked, trembled inside. He, too, had run away from life, turned his back on those who needed him. He’d drowned himself in guilt rather than exhibit even a fraction of the courage that Drake Jackson had shown. Ellie wasn’t the cowar
d; Samuel was.
“You changed me, Samuel.” Ellie’s gaze softened. “You showed me that life is about confronting and overcoming problems, not running away from them. If I’d listened to you sooner, Stanton might have—” She bit off the words with a shudder, fortified herself with a cleansing breath. “Perhaps I should start from the beginning.”
Samuel didn’t like the sound of that but squeezed her hand in encouragement.
She nodded, gazed across the room. “When I first met Stanton, he was energetic and flirtatious, an outrageously arrogant but basically decent man who was considerate to the needs of others. He never pressured me, never tried to coax me into more intimacy than I was prepared for, and when I was ready for our relationship to change, he was gentle with me, and he was kind.”
Samuel couldn’t prevent his spine from stiffening. “A kind and decent man doesn’t seduce a woman without mentioning his marital status.”
Ellie met his gaze without blinking. “There’s no doubt that Stanton was a philandering cad. I’m not defending that.”
“It sounds like you are.”
“I suppose it does.” Easing her hands from Samuel’s grasp, Ellie stood, hooked her fingers behind her neck and avoided his gaze. “Marjorie knew the kind of man her husband was. She knew, and she loved him anyway. My heart aches for her. She’s been through so much.” Ellie’s eyes clouded briefly, cleared with a blink. “But I’m getting ahead of myself.” Samuel waited as she cleared her throat, tangled her fingers as studied them as if she’d never seen them before. Eventually she continued, sounding small and weary. “Anyway, there came a point when Stanton disappeared for two or three weeks. When I saw him again, he was different.”
Samuel recalled Ellie mentioning Mackenzie’s sudden change in demeanor at the cabin, when she’d first revealed the truth about Daniel’s father and the brutal betrayal that sent her fleeing in fear. Now he said nothing, waited for Ellie to continue.
After a moment, she did. “There was an urgency about Stanton then that I’d never noticed before. He seemed tense, preoccupied, almost desperate even when we were—” a flush stained her cheek “—together.”
Concealing his clenched fists beneath crossed arms, he willed an impassive expression. He didn’t want Ellie to see his pain, to know how the image of her with Stanton Mackenzie ripped his heart out.
But she did see. She did know.
Ellie saw the pain in Samuel’s eyes, and it shattered her. But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t conceal the truth from him no matter how deeply wounding that truth might be. She’d seen the devastation avoidance had caused. Although she feared Samuel’s reaction, she was nonetheless determined to see this through to the bitter end no matter how painful, regardless of consequence. The time for running was over.
And so she went on. “I’d always known Stanton wanted a child, but suddenly becoming a father was an obsession with him. He begged, he pleaded, he told me that I was the only woman on earth with whom he wanted to share the Holy Grail of parenthood. I refused because I wasn’t ready to settle down, and I certainly wasn’t ready to be a mother.” Ellie’s heart was pounding so hard she paused for breath. Beside her Samuel waited in a shroud of silent misery. A dry edge flattened her voice. “But Stanton had become a man who would not take no for an answer.”
A subtle flinch was all the emotion Samuel revealed. “You’ve told me all that. You also said he’d sabotaged your birth control.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how?”
“No, but at least now I know why.” She shuddered, faced him. “Stanton had learned that he was dying of cancer.”
The bed vibrated. Samuel looked as if he’d been struck.
It was too late for retreat. Ellie stared at her own twitching, tangled fingers and forged on. “Stanton believed having a child would provide a ticket to immortality. It became an obsession to him, and eventually to his wife as well.”
Incredulous, Samuel could only stammer. “His wife was in on this...this obscenity?”
A lump formed in Ellie’s throat. She remembered that final night, remembered holding the shattered widow in her arms, offering scant comfort as her husband took his final breath. It had been a night of bereaved tears, of grief, of exquisite sadness and haunting guilt It had also been a night of redemption.
Now Ellie blinked away her own tears, ducked her head to wipe her wet cheeks with her sleeve. “Marjorie didn’t know anything in the beginning. Stanton only confided in her after I became pregnant Can you imagine that?” she murmured, misinterpreting the sadness in Samuel’s eyes as empathy for the betrayed and bereaved wife. “That poor woman had barely recovered from the shock of learning the man she loved was terminally ill when she was hit by news of his most recent infidelity, and the fact that another woman was carrying the child she had been unable to conceive. I think the pain and the guilt must have driven her mad.”
“Guilt?” Samuel’s derisive snort shocked Ellie, as did the bitterness in his voice. “What in hell did she have to feel guilty about? She wasn’t the one running the streets boffing anything that smelled good and felt warm.” As Ellie drew back, Samuel sucked a ragged breath, squeezed his nape in frustration. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
Ellie was fairly certain that he meant every word, but simply patted his hand without reproach. “Don’t you see, Samuel? Marjorie felt as if she’d driven her husband into the arms of another woman because she couldn’t give him the family he craved. Oh, she understood Stanton’s faults, knew that he’d been cheating on her long before I came along, but she accepted his duplicity because she loved him, and because she blamed his behavior on her own failure to produce the .family he so desperately wanted.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Ellie laid a gentle hand on his thigh. “It might, if you were a woman.”
“This isn’t a gender thing, Ellie, it’s an issue of right and wrong.”
“A week ago I would have agreed with you, but a week ago I hadn’t met Marjorie Mackenzie, hadn’t seen the agony in her heart. She’s been through hell this past year, Samuel, a hell that you and I can’t possibly understand.”
“You’re right. I can’t understand.” A glint of anger, a flash of bared teeth. “The woman tried to take your child away from you. She kidnapped you, for God sake—” Anger slipped into dark suspicion. “Or did she?”
“Technically, I suppose, although it was her brother and Stanton’s lawyer who drove me from the airport.”
“I knew it,” he muttered. “I knew it had to be him.”
“Him?”
“Stanton’s brother-in-law. By the time I’d figured out they were holding you at his place, Attila the Nurse had given me a double dose of knockout drops, and when I woke up, she’d stolen my damned phone.” His expression crumpled in remorse. “I tried to find you, honey. God knows how hard I tried—”
She touched his lips, silencing him. “I’m glad you didn’t find me, Samuel. I needed to go through these past days to understand. And to forgive:”
“Forgive? How on earth can you possibly forgive what those people have done to you?”
“I can forgive because I understand the despair and desperation that drove them to it. Marjorie knew that Stanton’s plan to take custody of Daniel was wrong, but she went along with it out of guilt and grief and because she wanted a part of her husband after he was gone. After I ran away from the ski lodge, it was Marjorie who convinced Stanton to drop the custody suit.”
Clearly Samuel still did not consider the aggrieved widow a candidate for sainthood. “She had no qualms about directing her family to pull every political string they had to get Daniel back.”
“They were desperate,” Ellie repeated quietly. “Stanton didn’t have much time left. They wanted him to see his son before he died.”
A veil lifted, as if Samuel suddenly understood at least a small part of what she was trying to convey. “So you weren’t being held against your will?”
<
br /> “No, not after I learned why Daniel and I had been brought there.” That damnable lump of emotion wedged into her throat again, bringing fresh tears, unbearable pain. “Stanton spent the last few hours of his life gazing on the face of his only child,” she whispered. “If I hadn’t run from my fear and my responsibility to Daniel’s father, he could have spent months with his son. I kept them apart. I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself for that.”
The fingers in her lap blurred. She bit her lip to keep from crying. So much wasted time, so much unnecessary pain. It shouldn’t have happened. She shouldn’t have let it happen.
A warm arm encircled her, pulled her close. Samuel pressed her face to his shoulder, murmured against her hair. “It’s all right, honey. You didn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t let myself know.” She sobbed against his throat. “I just took off without considering how others would be affected. All I could think about was getting away. All I could think about was myself, and a man died without having a single moment of quality time with his only child.”
“Stanton saw Daniel.” Samuel lifted her chin, gazed into her eyes. “He spent his last days with his son. That has to count for something.”
“It’s not enough, don’t you see?” Sniffing, Ellie fought panic, fought the crushing blame. “Stanton was so weak at the end, he couldn’t even hold him—couldn’t even hold his own child. It’s all my fault—”
“Stop it, honey, don’t do this to yourself.” He shook her mildly, waited until she’d stifled her sobs and focused her attention. “We can’t change what was, Ellie. Believe me, I know. If there was any way I could go back to that flood and make things different, I would, but I can’t go back, and neither can you. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is a gift waiting to be opened. All we ever have is today, right this minute. That’s what we have, that’s what counts.”
Ellie clung to him, caressed his face, had never loved him more than she did at that moment. There was knowledge in his eyes, a sense of resignation; perhaps even peace, that she’d never seen before. “Something else has happened, hasn’t it?”
Baby In His Cradle Page 20
