Father On The Brink

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?”