Jodi O'Donnell - When Baby Was Born

For when he turned around, it was to those singularly captivating eyes staring at him as if he were the answer to a wish.

But hadn’t he been the one doing the wishing?

Without a doubt, the cold had done a number on his reason, Cade decided. He noticed the letter on the coverlet, where it must have slipped out of his hand. It had gotten crumpled, probably during his exertions getting his jeans on. He snatched it up and tossed it back onto the night table, making a mental note to be sure and read it as soon as he had a private moment. Best to get back to reality with no more delay.

“If you don’t mind my bein’ nosy, just what’re you doin’ in my bed?” Cade asked, embarrassment making him short.

She pushed herself halfway up on the headboard, the thick comforter mounding around her. “There wasn’t another one made up in the house,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Once more, sarcasm got the better of him. “Not much reason for a man livin’ out in the middle of the Texas Panhandle to keep a guest room ready on the off chance some strange woman’ll want to make herself at home.”

He immediately regretted his abruptness. Even with her face half in shadow, he marked the shock in her expression, as well as another emotion he couldn’t make out.

“You are Cade McGivern, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I am,” he said, wondering how she knew his name. Of course, one had only to look on the mailbox at the end of the lane, or on any number of papers and such lying around the house.

Yet she murmured on a breath of relief, “At least I’m in the right place.”

Her words sent up a flag of warning. Who was this woman? How did she get here? More important, why was she here?

Well, he was more than ready to end the mystery.

“You mind tellin’ me what’s going on here?” he asked, gesturing toward her and the bed.

She pushed herself the rest of the way upright with some difficulty, swinging her legs over the far side of the bed and rising. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

He took a hit of confusion when she turned and he saw what her position in the bed and the comforter had hidden from him: She was pregnant. Heavily so.

He must have stared, for her arms went protectively around the burden under her navy corduroy jumper.

“T-tell me how you know me,” she said, that unnamed emotion coloring her words and sending up another flag of warning.

“Ma’am, I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Cade said in dead earnestness.

“I…see.” She closed her eyes briefly, as if absorbing another shock. Her mouth trembled in fear.

That was the other emotion he’d spied a minute ago: fear. Again, the warning went off in his head, like an alarm, but at least now he understood what it was about.

For in the next moment an unmistakable shiver of pain crossed her delicate features.

“Oh no,” she moaned. Her hand shot out to grab the bedpost as she bent forward, clutching her belly.

Cade didn’t need a medical degree to know what was happening. In an instant he was around the foot of the bed to take her elbow. “It’s the baby, isn’t it?” he said. “That’s why you stopped here.”

“No!” She shook him off. “It’s not time yet! It’s too early!” She gasped for breath, then seemed to ask of someone besides him, “Why? I did everything I could! Everything I could think of—”

She doubled over. In one motion, he lifted her and laid her back on the bed.

To his dismay, she locked her arms around his neck to keep him from rising.

“P-please,” she panted, obviously still in pain. “Please…tell me the truth. Are you sure you don’t know me?”

Bending over her, Cade could only shake his head. “Why do you think I should?”

“Because,” she answered, her gaze searching his face desperately, “I’ve been sent to you, Cade McGivern.”

“Sent to me? But…why?”

She shifted slightly, and her belly brushed against his naked stomach. The scent of sandalwood rose up to meet his nose.

“It must be…for you to deliver my baby…and not why I’d thought.”

The warning in his ears suddenly sounded louder than ever, like the bong-bong-bonging of a thousand clocks striking midnight.

Because she was looking up at him, hitting him again with that blue gaze as deep as the ocean. And what he now saw in her eyes was aloneness—crushing and soul deep.

It reached out to him, grabbed hold of him and drew him in as nothing else on earth could.

“What did you think you’d been sent to me for?” Cade asked through a throat gone sandpaper-dry.

“To tell me who I am,” she whispered. “Because I don’t know.”

Cade climbed the stairs with a heavy tread, dreading what he had to tell the woman in his bedroom. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like for her, finding out she’d only a ham-fisted cowboy—and perfect stranger to her, to boot—to depend on as doctor, midwife and partner in the delivery of her baby.

But then, she was pretty much a perfect stranger to herself, apparently.

He sure as hell wished Virgil would get home. The old ranch hand would be useless so far as helping him with the actual delivery, but it’d be handy to have someone to sterilize whatever needed sterilizing and to keep the fresh linen coming.

But Virgil must have stopped for the night at the Old-field Ranch next over, rather than trying to ride the six miles back on horseback in a blinding blizzard. No one in the county knew West Texas terrain and weather better than Virg, but not even the most experienced cowboy looked to have any truck with Mother Nature when she got her back up.

Hopefully the hand was safe and warm at the Oldfields’, but Cade had learned that, more often than not, hope bought you more trouble than it was worth.

The proof of that was upstairs in his bedroom.

Mentally bracing himself, he entered the room to find the woman walking its length, back and forth, chin against her chest and one hand on her back, the other flattened on her belly.

She glanced up when he came in the room, relief chasing the fear out of her eyes. But not the desolate aloneness that had a way of pulling him in, despite himself.

That feeling of trouble on the hoof struck him once again.

“I got through to Doc Barclay back in Sagebrush,” he said a little more curtly than he meant to. He’d had a moment to put on a shirt. It made him feel a little less vulnerable, at least physically.

“Doc Barclay?”

“He’s the G.P. in these parts.” Cade decided he may as well give it to her straight. “He said there’s no way with this storm blowin’ full force that he can get here to deliver your baby. We’re lucky we’ve still got phone service.”

“And d-driving—” she pressed her fingers to her mouth for a moment, then tried again “—Driving to the doctor?”

“To be frank, you’d have to be related to yourself to be so simpleminded as to go out in this weather. It’s a total whiteout out there. Even in my dually four-by-four, we’d like as not end up goin’ off the road and get stuck in a ditch.”

“I see.” She bit her lip in a way that very nearly distracted him from the emergency at hand. “I guess I’m lucky to have found you.”

It was a narrow opening, to be sure, but he jumped on it. “Yeah, let’s talk about that a minute, if you don’t mind.”

He jammed his fingers into his front jeans pockets, knowing he was being contentious bringing the subject up when the woman was about to give birth, but he had the right to at least a couple of questions before then. “I didn’t see a car outside when I rode in, but that’s probably because it’s half-buried under a drift of snow. You said you don’t know who you are,” he said leadingly, “but what do you know, like how or when or why you came here?”

Her stance turned wary, her arm around her swollen belly protective, which did nothing to improve his confidence in her truthfulness. “I must’ve gotten here…oh, I guess two or three hours ago—by car.”

“Did you stop here at the ranch ’cause it was the first place you came to when you realized the weather was getting ugly?” he tried again.

“But I told you,” she answered. “I thought I was coming to you.”

Cade steeled himself against the appeal in those blue eyes. “Look, you said that before, but I’m obviously not making the connection. How on earth could you know you were comin’ to me?”

“I had a…a note in my coat pocket with your name and address on it,” she said, glancing around. “I must have left it downstairs.”

“A note?” Was it just him or was this whole situation becoming less believable by the second?

“Yes. It said ‘Sara—”’

“Wait a minute,” Cade interrupted. “So now you do know your name? You said before you didn’t remember.”

“I don’t remember.” She looked at him pleadingly. “All I know is that I have a note to a Sara, sending her into your care.”

Nope, it wasn’t just him, Cade thought. This was definitely the strangest situation he’d ever been in, bar none. “Well, if you don’t mind my askin’, who sent you?”

“The note didn’t say.”

He had to ask. “Y’think it could’ve been your husband?”

At the question, they both glanced at her left hand. She wore no ring, and Cade didn’t like the ensuing relief he felt. Didn’t like that he was being drawn yet further into a situation that had all the earmarks of trouble.

In fact, her next words only notched up his suspicions.

“Cade, please, I know it’s difficult to understand,” she said rather urgently, taking a step toward him. “Heaven knows I don’t. But all the way here I thought, if I could just make it to you, everything would make sense. I thought you might be…oh, I don’t know—that you might be my husband, or at least someone who knew me. Cared for me…”

Her shoulders slumped in discouragement. “But you don’t. You don’t know me at all.”

Her voice cracked, and she half turned from him, one palm still pressed to her belly, the other over her mouth, as if she sought to hold back her tears along with the birth of her child.

She was apparently successful, for she went on fiercely, her fingers closed in a fist, “I have to believe I had the right instinct in coming here.”

“The right instinct,” Cade doggedly pointed out, “would have been to stop fifteen miles back in Sagebrush where there’s a doctor with some skill at handling these sorts of situations.”

She pivoted back toward him. “I know for sure I didn’t pass through any place named Sagebrush,” she contradicted. “Besides, you’re a cattle rancher, right?”

“What the hell does my being a cattleman have to do with your giving birth?”

“You’ve probably delivered hundreds of calves, that’s what,” she said, her voice rising with panic. “You know how labor progresses and how—”

“They’re calves!” Cade broke in, his own voice sounding close to panicked, even to his own ears. “Deliverin’ a baby would be completely different!”

The room echoed with his doomsday words.

“In any case, no matter how I got here or why I was sent to you,” Sara said with just the whisper of a quaver in her voice that sent self-disgust slicing through him like a knife, “you’re all I’ve got right now, Cade.”

Abruptly, her face contorted with pain, and she sagged forward, hands spread on her stomach. Cade was by her side in a single stride, supporting her under her elbow as the contraction intensified, her fingers gripping his forearm, before it finally ebbed.