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Cooper’s gaze flickered away from hers when she completed the action, and she thought she saw him blush. She smiled. It comforted her that, in spite of what they had gone through together, he could still respect her modesty.
“So…” he began, his voice quiet and a little bemused, “where’s the dog?”
She frowned. “What dog?”
He gestured toward the photographs on the mantel. “The collie. Where is he?”
“She,” Katie corrected him. “She belongs to an old friend of mine back in Las Vegas. I haven’t seen either of them for nearly a year.”
“You’re from Las Vegas?” he asked, turning to look at her again. “That’s funny. I could swear you have more of a southern accent.”
She chuckled, then fumbled for a moment as she switched Andrew from her left breast to her right. When the baby was once more suckling happily, she looked up to find that Cooper had again looked away. Her smile grew broader.
“Still?” she asked. “I was hoping I’d managed to wipe it out completely.”
“So you are from the south?”
She nodded. “Originally. Western Kentucky. I have a cousin who used to live in Vegas, though, so I went out there after I graduated from high school—that would have been about eight years ago—to make my fortune as a singer. Instead, I wound up working as a waitress. Until I met my…until I met William.”
Cooper nodded but said nothing more.
“How about you?” she asked him.
“What about me?”
“Are you married? Got any kids?”
He laughed anxiously. “No way.”
“Not the marrying kind, huh?”
“No.”
The one-word answer, offered so quickly and certainly, told Katie just about everything she needed to know.
“Not the fathering kind, either,” he added hastily, as if it were very important that he clarify his position on that, as well.
She nodded her understanding and told him, “Well, if you find yourself on your deathbed regretting that decision, you can rest easy knowing you’re responsible for at least one child in the world I really don’t know what Andrew and I would have done if you hadn’t shown up last night. I’ll have to send a thank-you note to whoever got their wires crossed and sent you here by mistake.”
He rubbed his eyes wearily as he told her, “No thanks necessary. I’m sure it was destiny.”
Katie watched him covertly as he stretched again. If he was single, she thought, it certainly wasn’t because no woman found any potential in him. During the night, she’d had neither the time, nor the inclination, to give much thought to her companion. But now, in the quiet light of the dawn, as her son—her son!—drifted off to sleep again in her arms, she took a moment to consider the man who had come to her out of the darkness and snow the night before.
He was, quite simply, beautiful. Beautifully formed, beautifully arranged, beautifully packaged. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a man more attractive than Cooper Dugan. Nor had she ever met one so self-possessed. She had, understandably, been a bit anxious and panicky during the night. But Cooper had always managed to somehow keep her steady. She would never forget the sturdy, easy timbre of his voice as he’d coached her through Andrew’s birth. Nor would she forget the strong hands that had so gently settled her baby on her belly the moment he’d emerged from inside her.
She shifted a little, wincing at the pain that shot through her with the motion. Not for the first time, Katie found herself wishing Cooper Dugan was the man who had fathered her son. Or, at least, a man like him. What could she possibly have been thinking to fall under William’s spell? she wondered now. How could she have been so stupid?
She opened her mouth to say something to Cooperthough what she had meant for that something to be, she couldn’t remember—when an almost debilitating fatigue overcame her. One minute, she was tired and weak, the next, she couldn’t lift her hand to push her hair off of her forehead. “I need to sleep now,” she managed to say before her eyelids fluttered down.
Though she wasn’t absolutely certain, just before unconsciousness claimed her, she thought she heard him reply, “I understand.”
And she found herself thinking, Oh, Cooper, if only you could…
Cooper watched Katie sleep for a few minutes, then glanced down at his clothes, soiled here and there with the remnants of Andrew’s birth. Being a paramedic, the sight of blood and gore generally moved him not at all. Yet somehow, the recognition that this particular blood had once belonged to Katie did funny things to his insides. Usually, the blood Cooper washed off at the end of a run was the result of some violent act or tragic accident. Gunshot wounds, stabbings and vehicular or mechanical mishaps were the stuff of his everyday routine. And all too often, the victim he tried to save wound up dying instead.
But not this time. This time, instead of hearing a last gasp, Cooper had heard a first breath. This time, instead of feeling a body go limp and spiritless, the body he’d held in his arms had squirmed and fidgeted with vitality. This time, Cooper had experienced a profound joy at witnessing life instead of a helpless anger at witnessing another senseless, stupid death.
This time, for the first time, he had felt an odd, unnameable warmth surround his heart, had felt a tension unknot inside him that he’d never even realized he was carrying around. And for the life of him, he could understand none of it.
Pushing the strange workings of his mind away, Cooper returned to the kitchen, noting more thoroughly this time the sleek white design and numerous frivolous small appliances. The Brennans even had a huge, copper cappuccino maker that looked as if it had never been used. And he thought vaguely to himself that some people just had too much damned money. He headed for the sink, reached a hand behind himself to grab a fistful of his T-shirt, and pulled it over his head.
Contemplating the smudges of blood, he tossed the shirt into the trash can, then turned on the water to fill the sink. After dressing again in his relatively clean sweatshirt, he prowled around in search of Katie’s bedroom. Surely, somewhere in the house, there was one of those inevitable bags packed in preparation for her trip to the hospital. People expecting their first kid always overdid things, packing months in advance for the hospital stay, and way too much stuff at that.
To his surprise, however, when he finally located the master bedroom, he found a huge suitcase on the floor, and scattered about it were far more articles of clothing and toiletries than were necessary for a brief hospital stay. Those items also seemed to have been heaved to the floor without care, as if Katie had been doing the packing when Andrew had decided to be born.
Cooper shrugged off the uneasy suspicion that wandered into his mind. Katie had told him her baby was coming three weeks before her due date, so she obviously hadn’t anticipated his birth this morning. She couldn’t have had a hospital stay in mind when she’d been packing yesterday. So why would she…?
He halted the question before his mind could form it. Her packing yesterday had no doubt been the result of something perfectly normal. Maybe she’d planned on joining her husband, wherever he was. Maybe she’d been going to visit a relative. Maybe she’d been stowing things in the suitcase to store them under the bed.
Maybe it was none of his business.
Definitely it was none of his business, Cooper corrected himself. Whatever Katie had going on in her life was completely immaterial to him. Last night, he’d been in the right place at the right time—as far as she was concerned anyway—and he’d been able to help her out in a very precarious situation. But once the ambulance arrived to ferry her and her son off to the hospital, it would put an end to any tie that might bind him to her. They were the proverbial ships in the night. The cliché of two strangers thrown together in a crisis. After this morning, Cooper would never see Katie Brennan again.
And why, in God’s name, did that realization bother him so damned much?
Without even thinking about what he was doing, Cooper collected Katie’s scattered belongings and arranged them as neatly as he could on the bed. Then he grabbed a few items that she would need for the hospital—functional, cotton, mommy-type underwear, a functional, cotton, mommy-type nightgown, functional, cotton, mommy-type socks and a few articles of clothing that would be big and loose enough to accommodate her still swollen abdomen. A perfunctory search of the closet netted him a modest-size Louis Vuitton overnight bag, and he filled it with Katie’s things.
He tried not to think about the intimacy involved with what he was doing for her at the moment, just as he had tried all night not to think about the intimacy of experiencing with her the birth of her son. Inevitably, however, that intimacy never left the forefront of his brain for a moment.
He was a big boy, he reminded himself. He had seen women naked before, had shared things with some of them that went way beyond intimate. Katie Brennan was a virtual stranger. How could strangers be intimate?
“Jeez, Coop,” he muttered to himself as he zipped the bag shut. “When did you become such a freakin’ philosopher?”
He pushed away all the nagging, annoying questions that had been plaguing him since he’d entered the big town house, but couldn’t chase them off completely. Demanding answers, they lingered in the corners of his mind, and he realized he’d probably never quite be able to dispel his memories of the one night he’d shared with Katie Brennan and her son.
Which was probably just as well, he decided further as he bolted from the bedroom. Because it was no doubt as close as he was ever going to come to being instrumental in the birth—or the life—of a child.
Three (#ulink_b0b7e024-265c-5455-8e04-f25595dddf2d)
Katie awoke to the sound of voices and realized she must have dozed off on the gurney as the orderly wheeled her to her room. When she opened her eyes, she saw Cooper Dugan, laughing in response to something a woman wearing raspberry-colored hospital scrubs was saying. Katie smiled, too, for a minute forgetting exactly who she was or what had happened to her. For one very brief, very magical moment, all she was aware of was her own existence in the same room with Cooper. And for that very brief, very magical moment, that was all that mattered in the world.
Then the baby in her arms snuggled closer to her, and she remembered that there was in fact something in the world infinitely more important than a laughing, handsome man. She bent her head to nuzzle her son’s soft, downy black hair, and her smile deepened. She placed a kiss on the crown of his head and hugged him tight. The nurse and orderly helped her into her bed, and in the bright white light of the fluorescent bulb buzzing above her, she marveled again at Andrew—the new man in her life.
Men had come and gone in Katie’s past, some leaving her with more than she’d had to begin with, some leaving her with nothing at all. But Andrew would be with her forever. And already, she could sense that the changes he wrought in her were, without question, changes for the better. Where before she had been wandering through life with absolutely no destination in mind, the birth of her son had endowed her with a sense of purpose, and a drive to make sure the two of them would never be torn apart.
It was almost terrifying, really, the genesis and immediacy of these new emotions inside her—this fear of harm coming to her child, this love that overwhelmed everything that had come before. She knew utterly and irretrievably that she would die before she would allow anyone—anyone—to hurt her son or take him from her. But instead of being frightened by such a certainty, she was oddly calmed by it. Motherhood was something that had always awed Katie in the past, when she’d observed other women participating in it. And now, finally, she understood why.
“Katie?”
Cooper’s voice came to her softly from the other side of the room, and she lifted her head to find him slowly approaching. When he stopped beside her bed, he extended a hand to brush her hair back from her forehead. He completed the gesture with such familiarity, she doubted he even realized what he was doing. Then he dropped his hand to Andrew’s head, cupping it softly over the baby’s scalp before stroking his finger over one of the infant’s pudgy cheeks.
“How are you two doing?” he asked quietly. “That wild ride in the ambulance didn’t jar you too much, did it?”
She shook her head and whispered, “No,” the singleword reply all she could manage for the moment.
“The nurse here…” He gestured over his shoulder toward the dark-haired woman in the hospital scrubs. “…she said she needs to check you and Andrew out. Think you’re up to that?”
“Sure.”
He straightened some, then hesitated for a moment, as if he didn’t like what he was going to say next. “Um, listen, I’m really sorry, but I’m going to have to run out on you for a little while. There are still some snowbound people who need help, and I’m in a position to offer it.”
“That’s okay, Cooper,” she said softly “Hey, you did the important thing. You gave me my son.”
He grinned at her, a crooked, very endearing grin that set Katie’s heart to flip-flopping madly. “Yeah, well…I think you had more to do with that than I did.”
“Maybe Maybe not.”
He covered her hand with his and squeezed hard for a minute before releasing it. “I’ll come back tonight to see how you and the little guy are doing.”
She nodded.
“Can I bring you anything? Make any calls for you?”
She knew he was referring to her husband, whom she had earlier assured him was always impossible to locate when he was traveling on business. She handled the question now as she had then, and simply repeated, “Thanks, but I can take care of that myself.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Then I’ll just bring you a strawberry milkshake, how’s that?”
This time Katie was the one to grin. All night long, she had screamed out a number of insistent, often colorful, demands for a strawberry milkshake to help her through her labor. And as far as she was concerned, the idea still had merit.
“A strawberry milkshake sounds wonderful,” she told him.
“You got it.” He brushed an index finger tenderly over her cheek, an action so soft and quick, Katie almost thought she imagined it. Then he was gone, and she watched as the door swung closed silently behind him, and wondered why she was going to miss him so much once he was gone from her life.
“This won’t take long.”
The nurse’s voice brought Katie’s attention around. Reluctantly, she surrendered Andrew, and watched closely as the other woman swaddled her son in a flannel blanket and settled him in a clear, plastic bassinet.
Then she turned back to Katie and said, “We’re going to have to take Andrew to the nursery for a little while for—”
“No.”
The quietly uttered objection stopped the nurse short. “What?”
“You can’t take Andrew anywhere. He’s staying here with me.”
“But—”
“He’s staying here with me.”
There must have been more fortitude in her voice than she thought she had been able to manage, because the nurse nodded once and said, “Okay. I’ll have the neonatologist come examine Andrew here.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, let’s see about your blood pressure.”
Obediently, Katie extended her arm, then remained silent for the rest of her exam. The neonatologist came to look over and measure Andrew, deeming him fit and hearty and perfectly capable of facing up to life. When it was all over, the nurse presented Katie with a sheaf of papers in a rainbow of pastel colors. Most of them simply required her signature. But one of them—the one she had known was coming but dreaded nonetheless—required information for Andrew’s birth certificate.
Automatically, she filled in the blanks that requested the pertinent information about herself, but she hesitated when she came to the line that asked, Father’s name. She wondered helplessly how she could avoid identifying William as Andrew’s father, wondered, too, what would happen if she just left the line blank or filled it in with the word unknown. Would William still have a strong case for taking Andrew away from her if she failed to identify him as the baby’s father? Would the act of identifying no one at all— thereby making herself sound promiscuous enough that she didn’t even know who had fathered her child—make it easier for William still?
Katie was still pondering her dilemma when, as if prompted by providence, the nurse in the raspberry-colored scrubs said the magic words for her.
“That husband of yours is quite a guy.”
Katie’s head snapped up, and she stared at the other woman. “What?”
The nurse stared back. “That guy who came in with you,” she said with an indulgent smile. “You know…your husband. I mean, I only got to talk to him for a minute, but he seems like a great guy. He’s been so attentive since you arrived, fussing over you like a mother hen, ordering everyone in the hospital around like a general. He obviously loves you and the baby very much.”
“But Cooper’s not…he and I aren’t married.”
The nurse nodded knowingly. “Well, maybe the birth of his son will bring him around. Men usually start to settle down when they have a child to think about. I’ll bet the two of you tie the knot before long.”
“But…”
Katie wasn’t able to complete her objection, because an idea exploded in her brain when she understood the other woman’s misconception. It was an idea she really had no business entertaining. An idea she tried to squash the second it fired to life. Really, she did. Because the idea she had was unthinkable. Reprehensible. Immoral. What she had in mind was no way to repay all the kindness and patience Cooper had shown to her and her son. He may very well have saved both their lives last night. There was no way she could allow these people think the two of them were romantically linked.
There was no way she could inscribe his name on the line where the birth certificate application asked for the name of Andrew’s father.
But as if they had a mind of their own, Katie’s fingers gripped more tightly the pen in her hand, and she watched with an almost detached fascination as they wrote out, in big, block letters, COOPER DUGAN. The next lines, however, stopped her short. Father’s Social Security number. Father’s age. Father’s place of birth.
Okay, she could probably guesstimate Cooper’s age to be late thirties. And, considering his accent and the manner in which he spoke, she thought it might be reasonable to assume he had been born in the area—the area being either Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Delaware, which at least narrowed the search to three states. Probably. But Social Security number? That was a tough one.
“Um,” she began when she realized the nurse was waiting for her to finish completing the documents, “I can’t seem to remember…uh…Cooper’s Social Security number right now. Is it okay if I finish filling this out when he comes back?”
The nurse shrugged. “Sure. No problem. Just as long as we have it before you check out.”
“Okay. I promise.”
The nurse turned to leave, calling over her shoulder as she went, “Ring if you need anything.”
“I will. Thanks.”
The moment the door swung closed behind the nurse, Katie’s mind lurched into action. She had to get out of here, she thought frantically. As soon as she could do so without raising too much suspicion. Never mind that she was still exhausted from the birthing experience. Never mind that she was still in pain. Never mind that she had just done something heinous to a perfectly nice man, making him legally responsible for a child that wasn’t his.
Never mind that the act of fleeing would ensure that she never saw Cooper Dugan again. At least in disappearing, he’d know she had no intention of forcing him to acknowledge that fake responsibility.
