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.
But there were many kinds of poverty, she now understood. And William suffered from the basest kind Emotional poverty. Moral poverty. Poverty of the soul.
He wasn’t her husband, she reminded herself again. Which was good, now that she thought about it. Because that would give her a little more leverage when he came to take her son away from her.
She cried out as a new kind of pain shook her, and for the first time, she became afraid—really afraid. Afraid that something was going to go wrong with the baby, afraid of being alone for the rest of her life, afraid that no matter how hard she tried, she’d already ruined things irreparably.
She splayed her hands open over her belly, the closest thing she could manage to an embrace of her unborn son. “I’m sorry,” she whispered as tears stung her eyes. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so, so sorry.”
Cooper pounded the door with his closed fist for the third time, cursing Patsy with every other breath for giving him the wrong address. He punched the doorbell over and over and over, listening in helpless frustration. He was lifting his hand for one final knock when the radio in his pocket buzzed and crackled, and Patsy’s voice came over the line.
“Cooper?”
He withdrew the two-way with a snarl and lifted it to his lips. “Yeah?”
“Um, sorry, hon, but I think I sent you on a wild goose chase.”
He let every four-letter word he knew—and some more that he made up on the spot—parade across the front of his brain before he responded quietly, “What?”
“Uh, yeah. That dialysis note was from this afternoon. The guy’s been in and is safely back home now. I’m sorry. You don’t need to be where you are.”
Cooper was about to agree with her, was about to tell Patsy that where he actually needed to be was lying in the arms of a willing woman who cradled a big snifter of very expensive, very warm, brandy beneath his lips, when he heard an almost unearthly feminine scream erupt on the other side of the door he’d been about to pound off its hinges.
Immediately, he dropped his hand to the knob and twisted hard. But it wouldn’t budge. Another scream raged at him from inside, and without thinking, Cooper lifted his metal first-aid kit and brought it crashing down on the knob. Over and over again, he repeated the action, until he’d bashed what had been an elegant collection of brass curlicues and engravings into a twisted metal mess. Finally, the entire fixture failed, and he shoved his shoulder against the door, hard.
Inside, the house was dark. Only the reflection of a street lamp on the other side of the street colliding with the quickly falling snow prevented the foyer from being completely black. He heard someone gasping for breath somewhere beyond his vision, and assumed it to be the woman who had screamed. Cautiously, he took a few steps forward.
“Hello?” he called out. “Who’s there? Are you all right?”
His only reply was a stifled, disembodied groan.
“Hel-looo?” he tried again. “It’s okay. Don’t be scared. I’m a paramedic. I can help you.”
At first, he thought the woman had stopped breathing, so silent did the room become. His heartbeat quickened, rushing blood to warm the parts of his body he’d begun to fear had frozen. He pushed the hood of his sweatshirt back off his head, then raked his fingers through his snow-dampened, overly long, pale blond hair. He held his own breath, waiting for something, some indication that he wasn’t too late to remedy whatever had gone wrong in this house.
Finally, a tiny, feminine voice called from the other side of the room, “H-h-help me?”
Cooper took a few more strides in the direction from which the question had come. “Yeah, I can help you. Just tell me where you are.”
“H-help. Please.”
He opened his first-aid kit and pulled out a flashlight, switching it on to throw a wide ray of white light all around the room. The hazy halo finally settled on a woman in the corner. A woman whose dark hair was soaking wet with perspiration in spite of the chill in the house, and whose huge, gray eyes were terrified. A woman who was clutching a belly distended in the very late stages of pregnancy.
“Oh, no,” Cooper muttered. “No, no, no. Not this. Anything but this.”
The woman lifted her hand to him. “Help,” she whispered, her voice sounding thin and weak and exhausted. “Please…my baby. Help my baby.”
He threw his head back to stare into the darkness above him. Great. This was just great. Of all the damned, stupid, crazy luck, he had to wind up with a home birth. Because there was no way he was going to try to get this lady to the hospital. The only thing worse than a home delivery was a back seat of a Jeep in a blizzard
