Father On The Brink

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

ELIZABETH BEVARLY

is an honors graduate of the University of Louisville and achieved her dream of writing full-time before she even turned thirty! At heart she is also an avid voyager who once helped navigate a friend’s thirty-five-foot sailboat across the Bermuda Triangle. “I really love to travel,” says this self-avowed beach bum. “To me, it’s the best education a person can give to herself.” Her dream is to one day have her own sailboat, a beautifully renovated older model forty-two footer, and to enjoy the freedom and tranquillity seafaring can bring. Elizabeth likes to think she has a lot in common with the characters she creates, people who know love and life go hand in hand. And she’s getting some firsthand experience with maternity, as well—she and her husband recently welcomed their firstborn baby, a son.

For Teresa Hill/Sally Tyler Hayes

and

Barbara Samuel/Ruth Wind

Thanks for being there when I needed you.

And with thanks to my

New Jersey and Pennsylvania connections:

Gin. April and Hannah

and

Judy and Sharyn.

Much obliged, you guys.

One (#ulink_2d9b1857-5f27-5b49-a501-36b2592173a9)

It was a blizzard of unprecedented proportions, even by northeastern standards. Cooper Dugan tried his damnedest to squint through the splashes of white that pelted his windshield, pressed his foot against the clutch and down-shifted into first. The cold March wind whipped easily through the plastic doors and windows of the four-wheel drive Jeep, chilling even more thoroughly his already frozen nose, seeping through his leather gloves to numb his fingers to the bone.

He fumbled for the thermos of coffee he’d been clutching between his knees for most of the ride and unscrewed the lid, then sipped carefully from the lip without bothering with the plastic cup. The liquid was hotter than he’d expected it to be, and he burned his tongue, dribbling a good portion of the dark brown brew down his chin and throat, under his wool muffler and into the neck of the sweatshirt he wore beneath his leather college baseball jacket. Uttering a vicious and colorful oath, he scrubbed a hand over the bottom half of his face and growled low.

“Hell of a way to spend a Saturday night,” he muttered to no one in particular.

He was supposed to have been off this weekend, he reminded himself mercilessly. He was supposed to have been out on a date, at this very minute, with that new nurse in cardiology—the big brunette with the heart-shaped fanny, and breasts that just begged a man to cushion his head upon them and rest for a while. He was supposed to be enjoying himself a little bit after having worked eighteen days straight without a break. Instead, he was playing Good Samaritan to the City of Brotherly Love, responding to a cry for help from the mayor, who wasn’t even paying Cooper for his time.

Hey, it wasn’t his fault the weather guys had overlooked and underestimated what had become the biggest and most crippling snowfall in Pennsylvania’s history, was it? It wasn’t his fault they’d all said, “No, don’t worry, it’s going to go way north of us.” It wasn’t his fault the snowplows hadn’t even had a chance to make it out of the city garage. And it wasn’t his fault—or his problem, for that matter—that a bunch of local citizens were having trouble getting the medical attention they required on a day-to-day basis.

Hey, he didn’t even live in Philadelphia. He was a Jersey boy, born and bred, the Pennsauken apartment he lived in now virtually a stone’s throw away from the house where he’d spent his childhood.

So what the hell was he doing out here freezing his butt off, battling a temperamental Jeep to keep it on the road, eating stale Twinkies, and spilling coffee down his shirt?

“No rest for the wicked, I guess,” he complained to himself. “Or for paramedics, either.”

He jotted down a mental note to himself: Hey, Coop, next time something like this happens, and the city across the Delaware River gets buried under snow, and some publicofficial makes a public appeal to any citizen possessing a four-wheel drive vehicle and even the most rudimentary first-aid skills…the next time something like this happens, be in Barbados, okay?

“Cooper, honey, you still out there?”

The crackly voice buzzed over the radio he’d tossed onto the passenger seat earlier that evening, and, reluctant to take his eyes off of the road—what little he could see of it— Cooper groped around for a minute before finally finding it.

“Yeah, Patsy, I’m still with you,” he replied after squeezing the Talk button.

“Where you at?”

Cooper chuckled and tried to see some kind of vague landmark through the snow. Finally, he lifted the radio to his mouth again and said, “I have no idea.”

“Well, give me a rough estimate.”

Cooper sighed, slowed the Jeep to a crawl and noted a row of orangey-looking town houses edging the tree-lined street. “I think I’m in Chestnut Hill,” he told Patsy. “Looks like Chestnut Hill anyway, and that’s the way I was headed. Sorta. There are trees. Where else in downtown Philly am I going to see trees?”

He heard the dispatcher expel a sound of relief. “Sounds like Chestnut Hill to me. Okay, that’s great, Cooper. I’ve got another run for you.” A pause, then, “I can’t read Don’s handwriting very well, but it looks like you’ve got a kidney patient—a sixty-seven-year-old male—who couldn’t make dialysis this afternoon. You better get over there right quick.”

“Quick,” he mumbled to himself. “Yeah, right.”

He knew the dispatcher, like everyone else scrambling to work through this situation, had been pressed into duty when she had other things to do—like keeping herself and her family warm and safe. But Cooper’s patience was shrinking as his tension and need for sleep increased.

Already today, he’d ferried a four-year-old with a broken ankle to the hospital, cringing at the little guy’s pain-filled howling all the way. He’d resuscitated a major coronary after the eighty-year-old woman had tried to keep ahead of the snow in shoveling her driveway. He’d run a batch of prescriptions from a local pharmacy to four very needy people in utterly opposite corners of town. He’d even rushed a golden retriever to a veterinarian.

Organization at the dispatch source, it seemed, was the biggest casualty of the blizzard so far.

He pressed the Talk button again. “Patsy,” he began as patiently as he could. “‘Right quick’ isn’t an option at the moment. At this point, with the snow coming down like it is, I’ll be lucky if I can get to the old guy by daybreak tomorrow.”

“Just get there,” she snapped back, obviously stretched as thin as Cooper was. She rattled off an address that he hoped like hell he would remember, because there was no way he was taking his hand off the steering wheel long enough to write anything down.

It took him nearly half an hour to reach the street that wound up being only a block from what had been his location when Patsy had assigned him the duty. After his sixth pass up the block in question, Cooper finally found the town house he was looking for. At least, he thought it was the one he was looking for. He parked in the middle of the street, unconcerned that anyone was going to hit or strip the vehicle. After all, only idiots like him were out on a night like this, right?

Automatically, he reached behind the passenger seat for the well-stocked first-aid kit he always carried with him. Then he pushed the Jeep door open, pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, tucked his body in as well as he could against the wind and snow, and jogged toward the house.

* * *

Katherine Winslow had been packing for a very long trip to Anywhere-But-Here when her water had broken. She’d gasped when she’d felt the warm rush of fluid slide down her legs and soak the pants of her maternity overalls, then had stared down at the clear liquid pooling around her feet with much dismay. It had been a troubling development, to say the least, coming as it did three weeks before her due date, in the middle of the worst blizzard in Pennsylvania history, and right on the heels of her discovery that her husband wasn’t who he claimed to be—including her husband.

There was nothing like having a man’s wife show up at your front door to tell you that you weren’t. The man’s wife, that is.

Now as Katherine lay curled up in a ball in the middle of the king-size bed she’d been sharing with a stranger for months, clutching her abdomen as spasms of pain rocked her, she had no idea what to do.

William would know, she thought. If he’d been home, instead of traveling on business—or, at least, on what he had told her was business—William would know exactly what to do. He’d be taking good care of her. Just as he’d been taking good care of her since the day she’d met him. Just like a husband was supposed to do for his wife.

Except that William wasn’t her husband, Katherine reminded herself, squeezing her eyes shut as another cramp rippled over her belly. He’d somehow neglected to mention that he was already married when he’d walked her down the aisle at Reverend Ryan’s Chapel O’Love in Las Vegas nearly a year ago.

One thing he was, though, was the father of her baby. A baby who, if Katherine had her way, would never, ever, meet up with the man who’d sired him. Unfortunately, it looked like William had other ideas.

But right now, that was the least of her problems. She’d been in labor for hours and was completely unprepared for whatever lay ahead. William had discouraged her from taking prenatal classes, telling her she’d have the best doctors and nurses attending her when her time came, and they’d be the ones who needed to know what to do, not her. And although she had done some reading, right now she could remember nothing of what the books had instructed her to do.

She should probably call someone, she thought, glancing toward the telephone that sat on the nightstand near her head. But what few friends she had in Philadelphia had been William’s before they’d been hers. So word of his son’s imminent birth would get back to him, wherever he was, and then the man who wasn’t her husband would come rushing to be by her side. Which was the last place she wanted to find him. Another pain sliced through her midsection, and she cried out, wondering what could possibly make this situation worse than it already was.

As if playing a very bad joke, the lights flickered above her, then went out completely.

Katherine rolled to her other side and wished she would wake up from what was becoming a truly terrible nightmare. Even in darkness, the beauty that surrounded her seemed to scoff at her. William had furnished their Chestnut Hill town house with the finest antiques and Oriental carpets money could buy. She had always been so grateful that her child would be born into wealth, that the tiny baby growing inside her would never have to know the hardship and poverty she had known growing up.