Beauty and the Baby Read online

  Propping her up, Carson brought his face in close to hers from behind. “Can’t you do a C-section?” he prodded the doctor. This didn’t seem right, having someone suffer like this.

  “She doesn’t need a C-section,” Sheila assured him. She managed to do it without sounding patronizing. “She’s doing just fine, really.” Sheila smiled at Lori. “Aren’t you, Lori?”

  Lori felt as if she could hardly draw in enough air to sustain herself. It was leaving her lungs faster than it was coming in. She barely nodded in response to her doctor’s question.

  “Depends…on…your…definition…of…fine.”

  The look she gave Lori was nothing if not empathetic. Sheila had two children of her own and knew about the pain of childbirth from both sides of the delivery room. She took a deep breath, as if to brace herself for Lori’s ordeal. “Okay, ready?”

  Lori wanted to say no, she wasn’t ready, but suddenly there was this overwhelming urge to push again and she was swept away with it. She made a noise that passed for agreement.

  Behind her, she could feel Carson propping her up again. Offering up quick fragments of all the prayers she could think of, Lori closed her eyes and began to push again.

  She was a hell of a lot stronger than he was, Carson couldn’t help thinking. He would have been wiped out by the pain. “You can do this, Lori. C’mon, just a little more.”

  Lori realized that Carson had lowered his head and was uttering the words of encouragement into her ear. They echoed in her head as she bore down a second time, pushing so hard she thought she was going to pass out from the effort.

  And then she heard it, heard the tiny wail.

  Was that her? Was she making those noises?

  No, she realized, the sounds were coming from somewhere else. From her baby.

  Her baby.

  Lori’s eyes fluttered open again and it was like coming out of a deep, gut-wrenching trance.

  “Baby?” It took all the strength she had just to utter the single word.

  “Baby,” Sheila confirmed, pleased. “You have a lovely baby girl with ten fingers and ten toes.” She looked up at Lori, beaming.

  The nurse beside her took the infant and wrapped her up in a sparkling white blanket. The tiny wail ceased as her huge eyes seemed to sweep around the room, as if she was as amazed to be here as Lori was amazed to finally have her here.

  “Would you like to hold her?” Sheila’s question was addressed to Carson.

  He began to say no, that the joy of being the first to hold this new life belonged to Lori. But one look at the tiny being now nestled against the attending nurse’s maternal breast and he knew he was a goner. He fell hard and instantly in love.

  Carson looked to Lori for permission. She seemed to understand what he was silently asking her and she nodded her head.

  “Yes,” he murmured.

  The nurse transferred the infant to his arms. They closed protectively around the baby.

  The infant was so light, she felt like nothing. And like everything.

  Carson had no idea that it could happen so fast, that love could strike like lightning and fill every part of him with its mysterious glow. But it could and it did. It coated him completely, leaving nothing untouched, nothing unaltered.

  This tiny life form was deeply embedded in his heart.

  “She’s beautiful,” he told Lori. “But then,” he looked at her, “I guess that was a given.”

  Was that a compliment? Or was her head just fuzzy because of this ordeal? Lori wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like Carson to say something nice like that, but then, she wouldn’t have thought he’d carry her for blocks uphill to the hospital, either.

  And then she remembered. “Oh God, Carson, your car.”

  He’d completely forgotten about that. It had probably been towed away by now. It was going to take some doing to find where it had been taken. He was going to have to call someone to come and get him once he left the hospital. Details, just details. What mattered was that Lori and the baby were all right.

  “Good thing we didn’t take your car.”

  Very gently, he lay the infant in the crook of Lori’s arm. Stepping back, he looked at mother and daughter and thought that he’d never seen anything more beautiful, never seen Lori looking more radiant. Not even at her wedding to his brother.

  Something stirred deep within him, struggling to rise to the surface. Self-preservation instincts had him trying to keep it down, to push it back to where it could exist without causing any complications.

  Back to where it had existed all this time without seeing the light of day.

  “She has your eyes,” he told Lori.

  Lori raised hers from her baby’s solemn face to his. “And your expression.”

  “She’s young. You’ll teach her.”

  Lori smiled, feeling very content and very, very tired. She looked at him meaningfully. “Yes,” she said softly, “I will.”

  Chapter Eight

  They descended upon her en masse, just as they had when they had first gotten together. The ladies of The Mom Squad walked into her single care unit, bearing gifts, good wishes and chatter, all of which Lori welcomed with both arms.

  The women were all slender now, living testimony that there was life after pregnancy and delivery. Though she’d espoused the theory time and again for the benefit of the mothers-to-be who populated her Lamaze classes, Lori was genuinely relieved to see it in practice so close at hand. That meant that there was hope for her, too.

  Each of the three women hugged her in turn, smelling heavenly and ushering in sunshine.

  “Boy,” Joanna Prescott, a teacher herself, teased as she stepped back, “leave it to the teacher to be the only one to follow rules and have her baby the prescribed way.” She raised a brow. “In a hospital.”

  Their resident reporter, Sherry Campbell, was more than willing to join in the good-natured razzing. “Not like me, in a cabin almost a hundred miles from a certified hospital.”

  “Or me,” Special Agent Chris “C.J.” Jones reminded them, “on the floor of the FBI task office dedicated to tracking down the Sleeping Beauty serial killer.”

  As far as she was concerned, Joanna felt she had the others beat by a mile. “Oh, and the lawn in front of my burning house was better?”

  “Stop.” Lori held her hands up to hold back the competitive comparisons. “You’re all making me feel deadly dull.”

  Sherry looked at her in mock surprise. They were all privy to the particulars of the infant’s arrival. She, like the other two women, had also met Carson O’Neill the night he’d had to pick Lori up from class because her car was in the shop.

  “Oh, I don’t know, having a man, who clearly looks like a Greek god, carry you in his arms for five blocks to get to that hospital isn’t exactly shabby, you know.”

  Lori didn’t want the women to get the wrong idea. Without looking, they had all managed to find the kind of life partners that most women only dreamed about. But that hadn’t happened to her. Carson would probably have been horrified to learn he was cast in that kind of role. “He’s my brother-in-law.”

  C.J. pinned her with a knowing look. “He’s a fox,” she pointed out.

  Lori shook her head. Incurable romantics, all of them. Including the FBI Special Agent, who should have known better. “You’re making something out of nothing.”

  But C.J. wasn’t about to back off. Not when she knew she was right. She’d seen the way Carson had looked at Lori when the latter had been busy answering a question for a straggler. It wasn’t the kind of look a brother-in-law directed at his brother’s widow. Not unless there was an strong undercurrent of feelings involved.

  “I think you’re making nothing out of something,” C.J. contradicted. As Lori opened her mouth to protest, C.J. added, “Don’t forget, it’s my job to look beneath the surface. From what I’ve witnessed, I’d say that the man has definite feelings for you.”

  Lori sighed. The woman was incorrigible. “Of
course he has feelings for me. I’m his late brother’s wife and we always got along.” She shrugged vaguely. “As far as I know, I’m the only one he’s ever talked to about his ex-wife.”

  Triumphant, C.J. exchanged looks with the other women. “Aha.”

  She wasn’t about to let her thoughts drift that way, no matter how tempting that route might be. “No ‘aha,’” Lori told her, “just ‘uh-huh.’”

  Sherry piled the newly opened gifts that they’d brought together and placed them on the side shelf for Lori. “Sweetie, you pushed out a baby. I really hope you didn’t push out your common sense along with her, too.”

  Lori dug in. “I’ve always had more than enough to spare.”

  Sherry’s eyes dance. “See that you do,” she advised meaningfully. “Nothing worse than slamming the door shut when opportunity comes knocking.”

  “Opportunity?” Joanna teased. “Is that what you call it now?”

  Sherry laughed. “I call it anything it wants to be called. All I know is that if I hadn’t gone after that story about Sinjin, I wouldn’t have wound up giving birth in his cabin with him acting as a midwife. And, I wouldn’t be looking down the right side of a wedding date now.”

  “That’s you, not me,” Lori pointed out, then added, “Thank you all for your good thoughts, but you’re letting your imaginations run away with you. Carson is just a very good man, that’s all.”

  “Well you know what they say,” C.J. told her. “A good man is hard to find and the three of us have just about cornered the market. Carson may be the last of his breed left. I say go for it.”

  Lori wasn’t about to let any latent hopes for any sort of meaningful relationship be nurtured by these women. If Carson occupied a special place in her heart, it was just because he was kind and good and had been there for her when she needed him most. To think anything else was just asking for trouble. She’d had enough of that already.

  Lori shifted in her head. “So tell me what’s been going on in your lives since we last got together.”

  It was all the lead-in the others needed.

  “I’ve brought a visitor to see you.”

  Lori had just begun to drift off. After the Mom Squad had left, she’d spent the latter part of her morning getting thoroughly acquainted with her brand-new daughter. The nurse had taken the baby away not ten minutes ago, leaving her to take a short nap before lunch arrived.

  Carson’s voice emerged out of the dream that had begun to form and registered in the back of her mind.

  He wasn’t in her dream, he was here. In her room. Lori struggled against the curtain of sleep that was surrounding her and forced herself to pry open her eyes.

  When she did, she saw Carson walking into the room. He wasn’t alone. He’d brought his daughter Sandy with him. At six foot two, Carson towered over the five-year-old who was holding tightly onto his hand.

  Lori pressed the top arrow on her guard rail. The back of her bed began to rise slowly until she was sitting up so she could look at her niece. “Hi.”

  With her thick, straight black hair and electric blue eyes, Sandy O’Neill was a small female version of her father. The little girl smiled shyly at her. Huge, kissable dimples appeared in each cheek.

  “Hi,” she echoed.

  This really was a surprise, Lori thought. She hadn’t seen Carson’s daughter since Christmas. Jaclyn had given him exactly one day to spend with the little girl. Or, more precisely, six hours. He’d made the most of it. The three of them had shared the time together.

  Warm, sweet and quick to laugh, Sandy was everything her mother wasn’t. “Have you seen the baby yet?” Lori asked her.

  Sandy moved her head from side to side, the tips of her straight bob moving back and forth against her cheeks. Her eyes never broke contact with hers. “No. Daddy wanted to come here first.”

  “We thought you might want to come with us,” Carson explained.

  The man continued to be an endless font of surprises. “That was very thoughtful of you.”

  Carson snorted. “Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he told her gruffly. “I wasn’t sure if I could pick the kid out of the crowd, that’s all.”

  That was a crock and they both knew it. Why was being recognized as a good man so hard for him to accept? “The nurses can always help steer you in the right direction, you know.”

  “Yeah, well…” Shrugging, he let his voice trail off. He released Sandy’s hand, nodding at her instead. “You need help getting up?”

  Lori reached for the robe that was stretched out on the end of her bed. Her smile was warm, grateful. “A strong arm to lean on might be nice. By the way, who’s taking over my place at the center?”

  He doubted that anyone could take Lori’s place. She gave a great deal of herself to the kids. A lot more than he was paying her for. “For now, Rhonda’s pulling double shift.”

  Lori thought of the younger woman. “She must be loving that.”

  “Actually, it’s not too bad,” he told her. “She just had another big fight with that worthless jerk she’s hooked up. They broke up and she has a lot of extra time on her hands. So this is working out.”

  “Every cloud has a silver lining,” Lori murmured, pushing her arms through the sleeves of the robe.

  “So you keep trying to tell me,” he muttered. The tone of his voice told her that he was no closer to believing that than he’d ever been.

  Lori paused to look at him. “Only because it’s true.” Throwing off the light blanket, she slowly swung her legs down, trying not to allow the pain in her lower half impede her. She scooted to the edge of the bed. “Sandy, can you get my slippers for me?”

  The little girl looked eager to be of use. With a solemn face, she crouched down on the floor and elaborately peered under the bed. With a small cry of triumph, she gathered up the slippers and held them against her chest as she stood up again.

  “These?”

  Lori smiled warmly at her. “Absolutely. But I’m, going to need them on the floor, honey.”

  “I’ll take it from here, Sandy.” Taking the slippers from his daughter’s hands, Carson placed them on the floor in front of Lori. “Here,” he offered, holding out his hand, “just hold onto me.”

  “Can’t Aunt Lori stand up?” Sandy asked, concern pinching her small face.

  In response, Lori smiled at the little girl’s concern. “I’m just a little wobbly, honey, that’s all.”

  Lori curled her fingers around the hand Carson held out to her. Holding on tightly, she stood up, sliding her feet into the slippers. It wasn’t her first time on her feet. Since the delivery, the nurse had been by twice to chase her out of bed and to help her take a short, painful walk down the hall and back to her room. But her legs still felt rubbery and weak.

  She was holding on to Carson more than she would have liked. “You might regret this offer,” she warned him.

  “Let me worry about that.” Carson tucked her arm through his, pressing it against his side to anchor her. “We’ll take it slow,” he promised.

  She looked at him for a long moment. “Yes, I know.” Her tone was as pregnant as she had been a short while ago.

  Carson pretended not to notice. It was easier that way than dealing with the thoughts that kept crowding his head, or the feelings that kept crowding his soul. He looked at her. “Ready?”

  She took a deep breath, catching her lower lip between her teeth before saying, “As I’ll ever be.”

  Sandy watched her with wide eyes that were so much like her father’s. “What’s the matter, Aunt Lori? Are you sick?”

  Lori was hanging onto his arm, slightly hunched. “Aunt Lori’s got a big hurt,” Carson explained tactfully.

  “Does it hurt to have a baby?”

  “Sandy,” Carson warned. He’d told his daughter about the baby being in “Aunt Lori’s tummy” because he believed in being as straightforward as possible with her. But he didn’t want her asking any probing questions.

  “Just a l
ittle, honey,” Lori lied. She saw Carson looking at her with dubious surprise. “Well, I don’t want to scare her,” she whispered.

  He merely nodded, the corners of his mouth curving slightly.

  They had passed the nursery on the way from the elevators. Even at her tender age, Sandy had already demonstrated to Carson that she possessed complete recall. He envisioned a future without limits for his little girl. Dancing ahead of them on her toes, Sandy led the way to the nursery.

  She made Lori think of a little fairy princess. Right now, Lori was envious of Sandy’s light-footedness. “It was nice of you to bring her,” she told Carson.

  He took no credit. “I told her about the baby. She wanted to come.”

  There was more to it than that. He’d told her that his ex-wife was not congenial when it came to visitation rights. “How did you manage to spring her?”

  He cut down his stride considerably for Lori’s sake. He could feel her digging her fingers into his arm. “Wasn’t hard. Jaclyn and her husband left for Hawaii day before yesterday. Sandy was left with the housekeeper.”

  Who undoubtedly had orders not to let the child see her father, Lori thought. “So you charmed the pants off her.”

  His laugh was dry, short. “You’ve got me confused with Kurt. He was the one who could charm articles of clothing off women.” A talent that had gotten his brother in trouble more than once. “Besides, Adele is almost sixty,” he said referring to the housekeeper. “Her pants are very firmly in place.”

  “I think you underestimate yourself, Carson. You might not have a golden tongue, but that doesn’t make you any less charming or attractive.” Pausing, she cocked her head as she regarded his profile. “Joanna Prescott thinks you’re a hunk.”

  Carson frowned at the assessment. “Joanna Prescott should have the prescription to her glasses checked,” he suggested.

  “She doesn’t wear glasses.”

  “Maybe she should start.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, you do look pretty good in the right light.”

  When they were growing up, Kurt had always been the good-looking one. His role had been to be the dependable one. To hear anyone refer to him any other way always raised his suspicions. Carson eyed her now. “You want me to leave you stranded here?”