Linda Goodnight - Jingle-Bell Baby

Life was fragile. His thoughts flashed to the tiny newborn baby. Real fragile.

“Where you been?” Gavin was saying. “Rowdy had to stay a long time.”

Dax looked up at the young ranch hand ambling lazily toward them, his usual crooked smile in place. Dax figured you could punch Rowdy Davis in the nose and he’d still grin. Sometimes the man’s smirky cheer was downright irritating.

“Everything all right, boss?” Rowdy asked, clearly curious. “You were kind of short and not-too-sweet on the telephone. Had us worried some.”

Short and not-too-sweet. Yep, that was him, all right. He’d simply told Rowdy to be at the house when the school bus delivered Gavin from kindergarten and stay there. Then, he’d hung up, too wrung out to explain that he was at the emergency room fifteen miles away with a strange woman whose baby he’d just delivered.

“Boys, do I have a story to tell. Let’s get in the house first. I could use a cold drink.” Since playing doctor on the side of the road, his appetite was gone but he still wanted a cold soda pop and that hot shower.

Gavin wiggled back from his embrace. “A story about Wild Bill and the buffaloes?”

“No, son,” Dax said. “Not that kind of story.”

He rose, lifting the five-year-old up with him. Gavin looped an arm over his dad’s shoulder and patted his opposite cheek. Dax felt that quivery feeling in the center of his chest. He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve Gavin, but he was grateful. Without the boy, he would have given up on life long ago. As it was, he clung to the edges of hope, fighting off his own dark tendencies in an effort to give the motherless boy a decent upbringing. It wasn’t easy. Gavin wasn’t easy. And at times Dax no more understood the boy than he could understand Chinese.

A frown cut a deep gash between Gavin’s black eyebrows. “It won’t be scary, will it?”

Times like these. The boy was scared of his own shadow. Since hearing a ghost story at a fall party he’d been especially nervous.

“No, Gavin, it’s not scary.” He tried, but failed, to keep the annoyance out of his tone. The boy was skittish as a deer. The teacher had had to peel him away from Dax’s side the first day of kindergarten. And Gavin had cried, an occurrence that both worried and embarrassed his father. A sissified kid wouldn’t survive in today’s mean world, but Dax didn’t know how to change his child’s disposition.

By now, they’d made the house and were inside. Dax tossed his hat at a heavy wooden end table, shrugged out of his jacket, and collapsed with an exaggerated heave onto a chair. The living room was enormous, compliments of his ex-wife who had insisted on a house big enough to entertain. Trouble was she’d done her entertaining while he was out working. He liked the house, though, liked the warm, golden-brown stone and wood fireplace and the wine-colored leather furniture.

He propped his boots on a squat ottoman. “You ever deliver a baby, Rowdy?”

Rowdy, who had ventured off to the kitchen, reappeared with a glass in hand. “What? Are you serious?”

Dax accepted the glass and gulped the icy drink in three long gulps. “Crazy afternoon. A young woman ran her car through my fence between here and Jake’s windmill. I stopped to see what the problem was and she was having a baby.”

Rowdy slithered into a chair, the grin forming a surprised O. “Man.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“Everything go okay? I mean, you delivered the baby and everything.” As the reality of what Dax had done sank in, Rowdy leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “Holy smoke, Dax. Are they all right? The mama and baby, I mean?”

“The baby was kind of blue and not moving at first. I thought she was gone.” Running a finger around the rim of the glass, he didn’t mention how scared he’d been. The telling sounded a lot calmer than the actual event. “Then I thought about how calves are born with a lot of mucous sometimes, so I wiped her nose and mouth off with Gavin’s bandana….” He patted the boy’s knee. Gavin curled up next to him, listening to every word. “Just as I was getting ready to turn her upside down and swat her bottom, she let out a howl.” Sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

“Man.” Rowdy said again, seemingly devoid of intelligent comment. Dax understood. He’d been speechless himself at the time. As soon as the baby had cried, he’d wrapped her in the old blanket and made sure the mama was all right. Then he’d jumped behind the wheel of the car, forced the little economy onto the road and sped like a NASCAR racer to the emergency room.

“Where is she, Daddy? Why didn’t you bring her home? I want to see her.”

“She and her mama are in the hospital in Saddleback.” He rattled the ice in his glass, shaking out a few more drops of cola.

Beneath a swatch of thick, dark hair a fretful frown puckered Gavin’s forehead. “Are they sick?”

“The doc’s going to check them over. But I think they’ll be okay.”

The child stuck his legs straight out from the couch and tapped the toes of his boots in a steady rhythm. “Noah’s mama had a baby. They got to bring it home and keep it. Now he gots two brothers. But a sister would be okay, too.”

Dax sighed. He and Gavin had this conversation every time one of the boy’s schoolmates welcomed a new sibling. How did he explain to a five-year-old that his daddy wasn’t the kind of man women wanted to have babies with?

“Is she from around here?” Rowdy’s question gave Dax an excuse not to answer the boy. “The woman. Anybody we know?”

“No. Not even a Texan.” He knew that for certain. Her buttery voice with its clipped syllables was upper-class Eastern, a Yankee. He’d stake his ranch on it. Even her clothes were different.

“What was she doing out here on a remote county road all by herself? Visiting someone?”

“Can’t say.” Though he’d been asking himself the same question. “We didn’t exactly have a conversation.”

“No, I guess not.” Rowdy ran a thumb and forefinger along his chiseled jawline. “What did she look like? Is she pretty?”

Dax shot him a frown. His top ranch hand liked the ladies and had a new one on his arm every week. Women seemed to like him right back. Still, the question didn’t sit well with Dax.

“She was a scared kid.” Scared but tough and courageous. He couldn’t get that out of his head or the thought of the tiny, mewling baby that had been born in his hands.

“I’m sad for her, Daddy, if she’s scared. Can we go see her?”

“I told you she’s all right.” The words came out a little harsher than he’d intended. Gavin blanched and sat back against the couch.

Dax patted the boy’s knee, letting him know the sharp retort wasn’t aimed at him. Gavin was tenderhearted to his old man’s hard-hearted, plain and simple. But Dax refused to feel guilty about wanting the strange day to end here and now. He’d done his part to help the woman. He’d played the good Samaritan. She was receiving expert care and the hospital would contact her family. He had a ranch to run and a downed fence to fix. He’d heard the last of the mysterious young mother and her baby. And that’s the way he wanted it.

Jenna heard voices. She opened her eyes in a semidarkened room that smelled of antiseptic and oversteamed food. She faced a wall and a wide pair of windows covered by blinds. The morning sun sliced through, shedding strips of pale yellow across a white woven blanket. Memory flooded in with the sunlight.

The pain, the car, a tall, gruff-talking rancher with gentle hands.

“Oh.” Her hands shot to her belly. The baby. The man had delivered her little girl and brought them to the hospital. A mix of embarrassment and wonder filled her. She’d had her baby in a car with only a stranger to help. Mother would be mortified.

She shifted in the narrow hospital bed. Her body was sore and stiff, but not painfully so, a fact that surprised her. After the torture in the car she’d expected to be half-dead today.

She rolled to her side, eager to hold her new daughter.

The baby was gone.

A tremor rippled through her as the possibilities played through her head. The nurses had left the newborn here, at the bedside, in an Isolette. Jenna was positive.

Had the Carrington machine already discovered her whereabouts?

Fighting the stiff sheets, she sat upright, only to tumble sideways onto the pillow, light-headed and weak. Blood roared in her temples. She took deep breaths, waiting until the black dots dissipated.

For a long moment, she remained still, frustration in every breath. Had someone recognized her and called her family? Was her baby girl even now in the smothering bosom of the Carrington clan?

The heavy wooden door opened with a swish. Jenna braced to face her censuring mother, determined to stand strong for her baby.

When a nurse appeared, backside first, Jenna wilted against the pillow in relief.

“Everything looks great with your little princess,” the woman said, rolling the Isolette into the room. “Doctor checked her all out, gave her the requisite medications and said she was perfect.”

“I didn’t know where you’d taken her.” Her voice sounded breathless and scared.

The nurse, a young woman with a long, black ponytail, whose tag read Crystal Wolf, RN, gave her a sympathetic pat. “Sorry, hon, you were sleepin’ like a rock, so I didn’t want to disturb you. Not after what you went through. You ready for her? Or are you too tired? You look a little pale.”

Jenna held out her arms. Color would return now that she knew her mother wasn’t on the premises. “Yes, please let me hold her.”

“She’s a darling. So pretty with all that fine golden hair and her little turned-up nose.”

Jenna thought her daughter looked like an alien. A withered old lady alien. “Will her head always be pointed like this?”

With a shake of dangly white earrings, the nurse laughed. She reached over, flipped the soft pink blanket back and gently massaged the baby’s head with a cupped hand. “You do that every day and before you know it, the cone head will be gone.”

“Thank goodness.” Jenna gave a shaky laugh.

She’d read books and searched the Internet on the topic of parenting and felt competent to be a mother, but now that the moment was upon her, the idea of caring for another human being frightened her. She had no home, no job, and no one to help. For a person who’d never been allowed to do anything for herself, she had a great deal to learn—fast.

“Do you have a name for this little princess?”

A gentle smile lifted Jenna’s mouth. “Sophie. Sophie Joy because she is the greatest joy I’ve ever known.”

“Oh, hon, that’s beautiful.”

Sophie stretched, her tiny face screwing up in an adorable expression. Jenna’s whole body seized up with an overwhelming love, a love so powerful tears filled her eyes. This was why she’d run away. This precious bit of humanity deserved to love and be loved for the right reasons. She deserved to grow up free from fear and the hovering, controlling influences that had stymied Jenna’s life since birth.

Her family, particularly Elaine Von Gustin Carrington, would not control this baby’s life the way they’d controlled hers.

People who envied her opulent lifestyle had no idea what it was like to live in an ivory tower surrounded by hired bodyguards and nannies and private tutors. They had no idea the sadness of a child never allowed to play outside or with other children who were “not like us.” They’d never sat with their faces pressed against the window watching others play in the snow while wondering what it would be like to build a snowman with someone other than a hired nanny and a burly bodyguard.