Well, Mack was right about one thing. Jared had sold out, all right. He’d handed his ex-partner the keys to the kingdom, along with the woman who would be queen. Had Meredith really expected Jared to stay and fight?
No, Meredith should be happy now. Happy that she’d secured her future and that she’d be a society doll at last.
She should be happy, but after their parting words yesterday, Jared wondered if the woman he’d had a five-year relationship with would ever be truly happy.
“Mack gives me the things you never could,” she’d told Jared the night months ago she revealed she was in love with his partner instead of him. “He gives me security and love. We have a good future. He’s ready to make a commitment to me.”
Hadn’t Jared offered her all of that? Maybe not in words, but in deeds, at least? Obviously, he hadn’t made it plain to Meredith that he had her best intentions at heart, that he was committed to her.
“I can’t do this, Jared,” she told him, her blue eyes tearing up. “You can’t expect me to put our lives on hold, our wedding on hold, while you play nursemaid to your sick grandfather.” Then she’d pouted. “Mr. Murdock has plenty of money to hire nurses around-the-clock. Why do you feel you have to be there with him most of the time?”
“Because the man raised me,” Jared said, his voice hissing with pain and disbelief. “He’s given me his life, Meredith. Now it’s time for me to return the favor.”
But Meredith didn’t understand the connection, the concept of that kind of devotion. She thought Jared was being oversolicitous, overprotective of his aging grandfather. She also saw Jared’s wanting to wait as an excuse not to get married.
In his soul, Jared knew Meredith had been right. Mack could make her happy. Would make her happy. While Jared had mostly made her miserable.
“I’ve waited so many years, Jared. I’m tired of waiting.”
Stalking up the muddy dirt lane, Jared reached the little cedar-walled cabin. It looked quaint and idyllic, sitting there in the night, its slanted, shingled roof covered with pine needles, its little porch settled under the eaves with a soft smile of welcome. Two high-backed rocking chairs graced the small porch, one sitting on each side of the wide screened doorway. A stack of firewood lay underneath one of the wide, paned windows on one side, while on the other side, an old rickety swing rocked gently in the freezing wind.
Jared stepped up onto the porch, following the glare of the single light that had brought him here, then touched a knuckle to the wooden door behind the screen. Even if this wasn’t his cabin, maybe someone in there could direct him to it. Or at least invite him in out of the cold.
She was so cold. Alisha shivered on the small bed, her body weary as she stretched a hand toward the stack of blankets she’d dropped on the chair in the corner. Just as she reached out longingly to the soft warmth of a handmade quilt, an intense pain coursed up her spine, causing her to suck in her breath and cry out. She couldn’t reach the quilt. She needed it, needed the warmth she knew it could bring.
Alisha got up, bent over double, shivering and sweating at the same time now, but determined to get to her favorite quilt. The contractions were only three minutes apart. She could feel her lower body pushing and changing, could feel her baby dropping. Her mind was playing tricks on her now. She thought she heard a tapping at her door.
At first fear gripped her, every bit as intense and dangerous as the pain knifing through her stomach and legs. But then the fear was quickly replaced by hope. Someone had come to help her!
“Who is it?” she said, but the words were a weak whisper.
Did it matter who was at her door? Or was she just imagining that tapping noise? Was this her punishment then, to go mad while giving childbirth? To never know the sweet baby she’d dreamed about? To die alone here on this mountain, away from the city she’d once loved, away from her family and friends, without ever holding her little child in her arms?
“I won’t let that happen,” she said as she once again tried to reach for the flowered quilt. “I won’t—”
The pain became too much for her weary, frightened body. Alisha grasped air, just missing the stack of blankets and quilts in the padded rocker by the bed. Grasped and gasped, just as the knock at her door became louder. Then she felt her body falling, falling toward the hard, cold wood of the planked floor, felt the waves of pain ripping her apart as she tried to touch the fringed fibers of her mother’s quilt. The effort was too much. Her fingers brushed against the comfort she needed as her body turned treacherous and tried to break in two. Alisha accepted and gave in to the pain as she screamed out, a soft sorrow covering her as she fell into darkness.
Jared heard a scream coming from inside the cabin. Shocked into action, he hammered hard on the door. “Hello, is everything all right in there? Hello?”
He leaned in, listening. Then he heard another sound that brought a racing warning to his heart. A moan.
Someone was hurt.
Without thinking, he dropped his soaked duffel bag onto the porch and rammed his body full force against the sturdy door. He heard the splintering of wood as he fell through the door, his shoulder bruised and throbbing, then rolled over on the floor, his body briefly touching on a braided circular rug centered before the dying embers of the fireplace. He felt a gush of welcoming warmth before he jumped up and shouted out again.
“Hello? Where are you?”
“In…here.”
The reply was feminine and weak. Wondering if someone had broken in and left a victim, Jared rushed around the big, long room, noting in his confusion that the place was tidy and clean, with no signs of a struggle.
But that scream of pain still gripped at his system, so he forgot the formal tour as he raced toward the room down the hallway, just past a small bathroom.
The room with the single lamplight.
Jared stopped in the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the muted light as he took in the bedroom. A small iron-framed bed, with the sheets and covers tossed back. A pile of blankets and quilts on a chair. A long, battered dresser lined with trinkets and books. A cross on the pine-paneled wall.
“You’re safe now,” he said into the still room. “You can come out.”
“Down…here.”
Jared moved around the bed toward the chair in the corner, his gaze taking in the dark shadows.
And then he saw her.
A woman with long red hair, lying in a heap on the floor, her hand reaching up toward the rocking chair.
Bending down, Jared pulled her head around. “Are you all right?”
She tried to open her eyes, tried to speak, but in the next instant she gritted her teeth in pain and clutched a hand toward her stomach.
Her rounded, very pregnant stomach.
“What—”
“Help me, please,” she whispered through pale lips, her eyes wide with fear and pain. “Help me, mister. I’m…having a baby.”
