Father On The Brink

He nodded back. “Then I guess we have something in common.”

She was about to say something else when the pains flared up again, bursting out of nowhere with even more intensity than before. Katie cried out, crushing with what she was sure was bruising strength the hand that Cooper Dugan had offered her in comfort.

It was going to be a long night.

She didn’t realize she had spoken her thought aloud until Cooper nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah, it sure is.”

She watched as he reached behind himself for his jacket, plucked a two-way radio from one pocket, and spoke into it. “Patsy,” he said with a sigh, “this is Coop. Better take me off the dispatch list. I’m going to be, um, indisposed for a little while.”

Two (#ulink_f2e48f2e-a442-5757-94c8-4fb8c7274cab)

Eventually, night became morning. And by the time it did, the blizzard had tapered off into an almost magical-looking snowfall, the power in Katie’s house had come back on, and Cooper had helped to deliver a bouncing baby boy.

The knowledge of that startled him still.

In spite of the restoration of electricity, a fire continued to crackle happily in the fireplace, and the lights were dimmed low. He sat in his ancient blue jeans and Kmart special T-shirt on the floor of Katie’s big, expensive town house, amid more opulence and luxury than he’d imagined was possible. And he ignored it all to stare instead at a sleeping mother and child for whom he felt, at least partially, responsible.

He thought about the tradition that other cultures embraced, about how when a person saved another person’s life, he became responsible for whomever he’d rescued. He supposed the same must hold true when a person brought another person into the world to begin with. That was the only reason Cooper could conceive why he felt such a strong tie to the little guy tucked safely and snugly in his mother’s arms.

He studied the baby’s mother, too. For some reason, Cooper also felt responsible for Katie Brennan now. She lay on the floor with her upper back and head supported by a pile of pillows, naked amid a tangle of sheets. Purple crescents smudged her eyes, and her dark hair was shoved back from her forehead m a heap of wet snarls. He knew nothing about her other than her name and address. Yet he couldn’t quite chase away the sensation that he was bound to her irrevocably.

His gaze dropped to the ring encircling the fourth finger of her left hand. Studded with diamonds, it was the kind of wedding band a man gave to a woman he intended to keep forever. Certainly, it was a far cry from anything Cooper could ever hope to afford for a woman himself, regardless of how much he might love her. Katie Brennan was obviously a woman accustomed to a way of life vastly different from his own.

Not that it mattered, he told himself. The woman was married, after all, and tied to her husband with a bond far more significant and lasting than the one represented by the ring on her finger. She had a child. Her husband’s child. And nothing on earth could shatter a bond like that.

Cooper cupped a hand to the back of his neck and rubbed hard. Long night hadn’t begun to describe what he and Katie had just been through. And if he was this tired, he could only imagine how she must feel after a grueling session like that. She’d screamed, and he’d hollered, and they’d both sworn like drunken sailors. She’d pushed and shoved and heaved and cried. He’d cajoled and threatened and bribed and heartened. And sometime just before the sun began to stain the sky with pink and yellow, Andrew Cooper Brennan had been born.

It had been Katie’s idea—no, her demand—that her son carry Cooper’s first name for his middle one. Andrew, she said, had been her father’s name. And when Cooper had asked how her husband was going to feel about his son carrying a stranger’s name, Katie had smiled sadly through her exhaustion and told Cooper he was less of a stranger to her than her husband was. Before he’d had a chance to get her to clarify that, she’d drifted into a sound slumber, and he’d decided she must have been touched with a bit of postpartum delirium and hadn’t known what she was talking about.

Not for the first time since she’d fallen asleep, his gaze wandered up to the mantel, to the scattered collection of photographs. Katie with her arms circling a collie’s neck, both of them grinning from ear to ear. Katie smiling shyly from beneath the broad brim of a straw hat, a tranquil, turquoise sea behind her. Katie with her head bent to and partially obscured by a bouquet of yellow roses. Katie with a good-looking man Cooper assumed was her husband, the two of them standing beside a sleek black Jaguar, laughing as if they’d just played the biggest joke in the world on someone.

And another photograph that seemed oddly out of place, yet more suited to Katie than any of the others. It was a picture of her as a young teenager, standing on the steps of what looked like a sagging farmhouse, a man and woman situated like fence posts behind her, each one with a hand on her shoulder. The only one in the picture who was smiling was Katie. But even hers was a sad, almost wistful expression.

Cooper’s gaze fell to her sleeping so near him, and again he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was somehow responsible for her now. For her and her baby both. The realization was still flooding over him when Katie opened her eyes and smiled.

“Good morning,” she said softly, obviously no better rested for her sleep than she had been when she’d closed her eyes two hours ago.

Cooper smiled back. His voice was scarcely a whisper as he replied, “Good morning to you, too.”

She looked down at the baby in her arms, who awoke and whimpered a bit before snuggling into her breast. He rooted around, and Katie chuckled, trying to get him properly positioned. Only after a number of trials and errors did the baby finally affix himself onto her nipple and begin a greedy suckle.

“I’m going to have to find someone who knows more about this breastfeeding business than I do,” she said when she met Cooper’s gaze again. “I don’t think either Andrew or I have a clue how to go about it.”

For the first time, Cooper noted that her speech carried just the hint of a southern accent of some kind. Obviously, she wasn’t from the tristate area originally.

He shrugged off her concern. “There will be someone at the hospital who can help you out. Or they can at least give you a referral.”

Her smile faltered. “Hospital?”

He raised his arms over his head and arched his back into a stretch. “Sure,” he said absently when he’d completed it. “Now that the snow’s letting up, the plows ought to be able to get through. And seeing as how so many wealthy taxpayers live right here in Chestnut Hill, your neighborhood will probably be one of the first to get plowed.” He hoped none of the edge he felt when he uttered the last of his comments found its way into his voice.

“But—” She hesitated, leaving her objection unuttered.

“But what?” he asked. “Aren’t you anxious to get to the hospital to make sure everything’s okay with you and the baby?”

She shook her head. “I know everything’s okay.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

Cooper nodded, but found it more than a little strange that she would be so reluctant to get to a medical facility. “Yeah, well, it might not be a bad idea to have the two of you checked out anyway. Just to be sure. I called the hospital a little while ago, and they’re sending an ambulance ASAP. Of course, with all that snow out there, ASAP isn’t going to be as fast as it usually would.”

If possible, her face became even paler than it already was. “You did what?”

“I called the hospital. An ambulance should be here in a couple of hours to collect you and little Andrew. It’s standard procedure. What’s the problem?”

Katie shook her head and wondered what she was going to do now. The problem was that going to the hospital necessitated registering Andrew’s birth and lots of questions about his father. She knew she was legally obligated to inform the state of a new arrival. Even if in doing so, she was providing an already well-armed monster with just the right weapon to take her baby away from her forever. Once William’s name was on Andrew’s birth certificate, his stable of overpaid, amoral attorneys would have everything they needed—in writing—to ensure that Katie never saw her son again.

“I can’t go to the hospital,” she said.

Cooper arched his brows in surprise. “Why not?”

“I just…I can’t, Cooper. You have to call them back and tell them you made a mistake.”

He gaped at her. “A mistake? Excuse me? What do you want me to do, call and say, ‘Hi, this is Coop again. You know that baby I told you I delivered? Well, I was wrong. It was actually a pepperoni pizza that I delivered. Sorry about the mix-up.’”

She made a face at him. “No, of course not. But it’s very important that Andrew and I not go to the hospital.”

“Why?”

“We just can’t,” she snapped.

“Well, that’s too bad,” he snapped back. “Because you’re both going to the hospital. And I intend to escort you every step of the way, just to make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle.”

Katie opened her mouth to object again, then decided it would be fruitless to do so. She’d learned at some point during the night—when she kept insisting that she had changed her mind, and that she had decided she was not going to have this baby, no matter how much Cooper begged or threatened, and that was final—that the man simply wouldn’t take no for an answer.

She glanced down at Andrew, who pulled hungrily at her breast. He was fat and pink and squirmy, and it hit Katie with the force of an aircraft carrier that she was entirely responsible for him. It was up to her to make sure no harm ever came to her son. It was up to her to be certain that he had the very best of everything she could offer him. It was up to her to see that he was safe and happy and free to live a good life. It was up to her to ensure that William Winslow never got his hands on his son.

Therefore, she had to be certain that she and Andrew were as physically fit as possible before they went into hiding.

Her gaze locked with Cooper’s again. “All right. We’ll go to the hospital.”

He expelled a dubious sound of relief. “Well, thank you very much.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

It occurred to Katie then that she was sitting in the middle of her living room completely naked with a man she scarcely knew. A man who had helped to bring her son into the world. A man who still carried smudges of her blood and her son’s afterbirth on his T-shirt and jeans. The full realization and understanding of the intimacy she had shared with this stranger struck her, and she tugged the bed sheet up around her shoulders a little more.