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Kate shrugged, aware the aching pressure in her thighs, which had been there all day, was increasing—maybe because of the amount of time she’d spent on her feet, pacing back and forth, as she talked to Michael about their situation. “We’ll see,” she replied cryptically.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.
Kate stomped closer, not stopping until she and Michael were toe to toe. She angled her head at him, wishing he weren’t so tall, so fit or so unerringly handsome and masculine. “It means once the novelty wears off, you could lose interest in this baby and in me,” she said mildly.
He flashed her a crocodile grin. “I don’t think so.”
His soft voice sent another whisper of sensual awareness spiraling through her. Feeling as though she couldn’t breathe, Kate drew a deep—albeit shaky—breath and continued to study him like a problem she had no choice but to solve immediately. In the meantime, she still had her afternoon deliveries to do, a scheduled dinner with her mother and one last Lamaze class to attend.
“Look,” she said finally, “if you still feel the same way in a couple of weeks, we’ll sit down and talk.” She was being vague, hoping against hope that time would take care of everything.
“And work something out?” Michael pressed.
Kate didn’t want to do anything like that, but she knew—out of fairness—that she had to consider his position, too. “I’ll try to do what’s right for all of us, as soon as I figure out what that is,” she promised sincerely. “Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse me, I have seventeen deliveries to make.”
Michael caught her wrist in his hand and held her in place.
“I still want to help you,” he insisted.
The skin of his palm felt like hot silk around her wrist. “Everyone does,” she replied.
His grip gentled. “What do you mean?”
Kate shrugged. “Since I became pregnant, all sorts of people have seen fit to counsel me on the wisdom of my decision to be a single parent and raise this child alone. People who wouldn’t dream of telling me what brand of mustard to buy have no qualms at all about telling me I need a husband in a hurry.”
Michael smiled in understanding, his hold on her becoming more intimate before he reluctantly released her altogether. “But you don’t see it that way,” he guessed softly.
Kate sighed and—a hand to her aching back—leaned against the edge of her desk. In a continuing effort to get comfortable, she crossed her ankles in front of her and clasped the edge of the desk on either side of her. “It’d be nice if every child in this world could have a mother and a father who loved each other desperately, a ton of siblings and live in a house with a white picket fence. But that doesn’t always happen.”
Michael pushed the edges of his sport coat back and braced his hands on his waist. “Still, whenever possible,” he repeated, his kind brown eyes locking with hers, “I think a baby should have a mommy and a daddy.”
Kate, who’d done an awful lot of thinking about this very subject before becoming pregnant, stubbornly refused to concede the same. She angled her chin at him, determined to let him know, along with everyone else, that she could handle this. “I think every child needs lots of love, security and a sense of family. My child—” not our child “—will have all that and more,” she stated.
“What about my child?” Michael asked, his expression determined.
Kate looked away evasively, and her lips tightened mutinously. “When you plan for a child, then you can also plan the environment in which you will bring him or her up.”
Michael did a double take. “Surely you’re not intending to cut me out of our baby’s life entirely?”
Kate’s shoulders stiffened as she—once again—found herself in the unenviable position of having to defend herself. “I’m sure there will come a time, when our child is much older, that some explanation will be in order,” she asserted.
Michael placed a palm on the desk on either side of her and towered over her, “And until then?”
Kate planted a hand on his chest and pushed him away. Standing, she breezed past him haughtily. “Until then I suggest you think about it as much as you would’ve had your genes merely been guinea pigs in a genetics experiment.”
He caught hold of her shoulders and turned her to face him. “I’m afraid that’s not going to work,” he said tightly, staking his claim on their baby—and, by default, her.
“It will work,” Kate insisted, inhaling the spicy, masculine scent of aftershave clinging to his freshly shaven jaw. “As long as you want it to work.” Wanting it to work was key. She headed for the front of the shop, where she informed Dulcie, Jeff and Lindy she was leaving to do her deliveries.
Michael watched her gather the turquoise duffel packed with her Lamaze stuff, the keys to the van, her cell phone, clipboard of addresses, area street maps and purse. He followed her out the back door to the van.
“I know this child exists,” he said, as Kate—who wished she could do something about the unprecedented aching in her thighs, which seemed to get worse with every passing second—unlocked the driver’s door and tossed in her gear.
“I’m going to want to know he or she is okay,” Michael continued stubbornly as the two of them continued to be buffeted by the brisk November air.
Feeling about as graceful as a whale on roller skates, Kate levered herself up and into the driver’s seat and fit the key in the ignition. “Then I’ll send you progress reports, okay?”
Michael stood between her and the door, preventing her from closing it. “No. It’s not okay.” His voice lowered a notch as his eyes held hers in a manner that let her know he wasn’t about to be dissuaded. “I’m going to need—I’m going to want—a hell of a lot more than that.”
Kate drew an exasperated breath as she reached behind her and drew her seat belt across her chest. “Look, just because I’m carrying your child—by accident, I might add—does not mean you need to be involved in my life, too.”
Michael regarded her grimly. “If we’re going to have a child together—even by accident—we need to get to know each other. The only way for us to do that is for us to spend time together.”
She considered that notion for a moment, finding it oddly—engagingly attractive, then discarded it.
Rolling her eyes, she claimed facetiously, “Next you’ll be proposing marriage—”
Michael shook his head. “Not at this stage.”
Kate breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank heaven for small miracles,” she said dryly, as Michael leaned into the cab of the van.
“Although, now that you bring it up, maybe it’s not such a bad idea,” he replied, unwilling, it seemed, to throw out any possibility whatsoever that would bring him closer to the child she was about to bear, “should we eventually find we can get along.”
He was an attractive man. There was even, it seemed, a purely physical chemistry between them, as evidenced by the way she tingled whenever, wherever, he touched her, but the rest was just plain nuts. She studied his face. “You’re serious,” she whispered, able to feel for the first time how much he wanted this child in his life, in his heart.
“Very.”
Silence fell between them, more awkward than before.
The situation was amazing. Incredible. Unprecedented. And so very complicated. Kate had no idea what to do. She only knew she felt simultaneously threatened and oddly comforted, cossetted, by his presence.
Michael swore softly and ran a hand through his wind-tossed hair. “Look, I don’t want to make your life any harder, but this is my child—the only child I may ever have—and I want to be a part of his or her life, too. A big part.” Noting she was beginning to shiver in the increasingly cool afternoon air, he circled the front of the van and climbed into the passenger’s seat. He swiveled to face her, all the love he felt for their unborn child in his eyes. “If you were in my place, you’d feel the same way.”
True, Kate thought, as they stared at each other in contemplative silence. Suddenly she knew—as much as she might want him to—he wasn’t going to back off. If she didn’t want to end up in court, fighting for custody of her child before he or she was even born, she was going to have to cooperate with Michael Sloane. Or at least put up the pretense of doing so until he realized this was more commitment than he really wanted over the long haul. “What exactly are you suggesting?” she asked calmly as she shut the driver door and switched on the ignition.
“Only what’s fair,” Michael said as she turned on the heater. “That starting now, you let me be a part of our child’s life in every way. Including the birth.”
Kate’s knees turned to jelly as she thought about the implied intimacy of that. “You want to be in the delivery room?” she asked in a low, trembling voice as she splayed a hand across her chest.
“I am a doctor.”
But not my doctor, Kate thought. And the thought of being disrobed in front of him, for any reason, made her heart beat all the harder. Ignoring the tingles of awareness ghosting over her skin, she frowned and glanced at her watch. “I’m going to have to think about this.”
Michael looked as though he had expected that. “It’ll have to be fast,” he warned. “If the guys at the lab were correct about the date of your artificial insemination, you’ve only got a day or so.”
As if she needed reminding about that! Kate shrugged. “The baby could be late.”
“Or early.”
Swallowing around the sudden dryness in her throat, Kate glanced at her watch again. “I really do need to go.”
Michael frowned at the list of addresses on the clipboard and the rows of gift baskets in the back of the van. “You’re going to make all these deliveries yourself?”
Kate nodded. “I always do the late afternoon deliveries. Dulcie does the ones first thing in the morning. Jeff takes care of the ones at noon.” She paused. “I like this part of the business, too. It’s fun, seeing the expression of delight on the customers’ faces when they receive a gift from my shop. And I enjoy the change of pace after being in the shop all day.”
“Let me help you. You drive. I’ll carry the baskets up to the door. It’ll go twice as fast that way. Then maybe the two of us can go to dinner and finish resolving all this.”
Kate had to admit she could use the help. Because of her talk with him, she was running a good hour behind schedule for deliveries. “It’s going to take me several hours,” she warned. “And I have to go out in the country to do the rural deliveries.”
“Then you really shouldn’t be out there alone. Not this close to delivering. What if something happened?”
“Then I’d call for help on my cell phone,” she told him calmly, knowing first babies were generally notoriously slow in arriving. And she had yet to suffer her first real contraction. Nevertheless, he had a point. She didn’t want to put her baby in danger. And she had been feeling a little achy and tired all day. Maybe it was best if she accepted his help and let him tag along with her. It would give her a chance to show him she could handle work and a baby and subtly persuade him he didn’t want to be a father as much as he thought he did. If she were successful, it would be well worth the additional time she spent with him.
While she drove, Kate told him about the preparations she had made for the baby, going into detail about the nursery she had prepared, the type of crib and changing table and rocking chair she’d selected and the extensive layette of baby clothes. Michael was interested and impressed. Nevertheless, by the time they had gotten halfway through the list of deliveries, Kate felt oddly trembly and exhausted. When he offered to do some of the driving, too, she agreed with barely a murmur of dissent.
“You feeling okay?” Michael asked as he got behind the wheel and steered the delivery van onto the lonely country road.
“Sure,” Kate fibbed with a lot more assurance than she felt, then abruptly doubled over with a sharp cry of pain.
“What is it?” Michael asked, alarmed.
Kate clutched her tummy all the harder. “Guess.”
Chapter Two
“You’re in labor,” Michael proclaimed, surprised to discover that beneath the usual physician’s calm he was feeling the initial panic all first-time fathers felt.
Kate groaned and sank even farther into her seat. Breathing through the contraction—which appeared to last about thirty seconds—she put her hands on the edges of the upholstery and gripped it until her knuckles turned white. “It would certainly appear so, yes.” Kate pushed the words through a row of even white teeth. Delicate beads of perspiration dotted her upper lip.
She seemed awfully uncomfortable for a very first contraction, Michael thought. Unless… Oh, no. “Was this your first contraction?” he asked.
“I—” Kate gasped between panting breaths that told him another contraction was starting, just seconds after the conclusion of the first. “Suppose.” No sooner had she spoken than she let out a sharp little cry.
“What do you mean you suppose?” Michael demanded. Figuring the rest of the delivery baskets could wait, he turned the van in the direction of Chapel Hill.
“I’ve felt a little funny all day,” Kate confessed as she grabbed a tissue from her purse and pressed it to the dampness at the back of her neck.
“Funny how?”
“I’ve had this pressure—this sort of aching—in my thighs, like I overdid it exercising or something.”
“But no actual contractions until just now.”
“Right.”
“And you’re sure what you felt just now was an actual contraction?” Michael persisted.
“Oh, yeah. Definitely.”
The important thing here was to stay calm. “When did the funny feeling—the pressure—start in your legs?”
“This morning, when I got up.”
Which meant, Michael thought, she’d likely been in the very early stages of labor all day. “I noticed you rubbing your back in the shop. Was your back aching all day?”
“Yes, but that’s been the case off and on for several weeks now, so I didn’t think anything of it. But—” Kate caught her breath as the cramping in her lower abdomen intensified. “It’s never been this bad,” she said with tears in her eyes.
Michael reached over and squeezed her hand. “Hang in there,” he said.
“I’m trying.” Kate waited until the worst of it had passed, then, still panting, reached behind her and grabbed the duffel bag she took to her Lamaze class. Inside were clean workout clothes, a blanket to stretch out on, a pillow, an unopened bottle of mineral water and a stopwatch.
“Try breathing in through your nose and slowly breathing out through your mouth,” he said as the next contraction gripped her without warning. “That’s it,” he said, as Kate gasped again and hit the start button on her stopwatch. “Take deep, slow breaths, just the way they taught you in Lamaze class. That’s it, Kate. Again. And yet again—”
At long last, the pain subsided. As it did, Kate released a long, ragged breath. And suddenly became aware—as did Michael—that she was drenched with sweat. From the looks of it, Michael thought, as she turned the temperature control knob to cool, this was going to be one hard and fast—maybe too fast—labor.
“How long was the contraction?” Michael asked as Kate’s color slowly returned to normal and he continued to drive in the direction of the hospital at a safe, steady pace.
Kate glanced at her stopwatch. “Three minutes and fourteen seconds.” She seemed surprised as she contemplated that, murmuring, “No wonder it felt like an eternity!”
“Okay, let’s time between contractions now,” Michael said. “Then we’ll call your doctor.”
Kate reset the stopwatch and absently rubbed her tummy. Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen, Michael noted with relief. All blissfully free of pain. Beginning to relax, she lay against the seat. Without warning, Kate’s teeth began to chatter. A shiver spiraled through her slender shoulders. Kate gasped as another contraction gripped her. She turned alternately red then white. “Do you know your OB’s number?” he asked calmly.
Still fighting the contraction gripping her, Kate pulled the cell phone out of her purse. “Dr. Amanda Gantor. Just punch one,” she panted.
Michael did as directed and was patched through. He explained what the situation was, then listened as he received instructions. “Right. Yes. We’ll be there as soon as we can.” He hung up as Kate’s contraction finally came to a halt.
“Let me guess,” she drawled, still panting from the strength of her last contraction. “Dr. Gantor wants me to go straight to the hospital.”
“Right. She’ll alert labor and delivery and the emergency room and meet you at the hospital.”
Kate nodded, letting him know she’d heard. “Good thing you’re driving.” She gasped, leaned forward and clasped her tummy as yet another contraction gripped her. She whimpered. “I don’t think I could drive and endure this kind of pain, too.”
“Do you have a labor coach?”
“My baby sister, Lindy. She’s a teaching assistant at UNC. She’s teaching a class right now.” Kate shifted in an effort to get more comfortable and found, as Michael had figured would be the case, that it was hopeless. “You met her at the shop.”
“Ah, yes, the one who said I was cu-u-u-te.”
“You heard that?” She slanted him an inquiring glance as she continued to shift restlessly.
Michael zoomed past a trailer park, a deserted country church and a farm. “I think she may have meant me to,” he confided, in an attempt to divert Kate’s attention from the pain. He smiled at her. “I had the feeling she would have liked nothing better than to set the two of us up.”
Kate nodded, humorously conceding this was so. “And that was before she knew who you were or what your connection to me was—is,” Kate groaned.
“You think this will up the stakes?” Michael paused at a four-way intersection, then seeing it was safe, continued on.
“As far as Lindy is concerned, heck, yes. She’s an incurable romantic.” Kate picked up her bottle of water, ripped off the plastic seal and cap and took a tiny drink.
