Rainbow house and he was surprised it was still standing. The idea of her there alone with a new baby, with no one to look after her, bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
It wasn’t even remotely his problem. He didn’t even know her, except as a memory of a scrawny girl with red braids and wide green eyes, a girl that everyone called weird. He’d done his job, gotten her and her baby to the hospital safely. There was no reason why he should care what she did or where she went.
Except that he did.
Before he could come up with a good reason why, Rico stuck his head into the cubicle. “We’re up. Another accident on 137.”
Sawyer looked at Maya. “I’ll see you later.”
She made herself smile. “Sure, and thanks again.”
Then he was gone. A sense of loss stabbed her and Maya felt silly for it. He’d only been doing his job. And now that it was over, she doubted, despite his parting words, that she’d ever see him again unless it was an accidental meeting in town.
She and Joey were a family now. There wasn’t going to be anyone else. And the sooner she accepted that, the better off they’d both be.
Chapter Two
A small noise woke Maya from a light doze and she stopped herself from groaning, wondering what the nurses wanted this time. In the past three days, she’d gotten used to being roused at odd hours to feed Joey, to answer more questions or to be poked, prodded, or tsked over because of her refusal to take any pain medication. Three hours of uninterrupted sleep had become a luxury. And she’d been tempted more than once to take the painkillers, especially the morning after the accident, when she’d awakened stiff as a hundred-year-old and with a thousand pains.
But no one should be here now. She’d been to the nursery less than an hour ago to feed Joey, and the doctor had already been by this morning to tell her she could go home tomorrow.
Forcing open her eyes, Maya found herself looking into a smiling face she’d hadn’t seen in years. Though the woman’s curves were more lush now and her dark hair shorter, her generous mouth and smiling eyes and a passion for brilliant orange and red hadn’t changed. “Valerie? Valerie Valdez? Is that really you?”
Valerie laughed and bent to give her a hug. “In the flesh, honey, although there’s more of it than you probably remember. And it’s Valerie Ortiz now,” she added, settling herself in a chair beside Maya’s bed.
“But how did you know I was here?” Maya asked as she struggled to sit up. Running a hand over her tangled hair, she tried to force her brain to start functioning. “I haven’t been able to reach my parents and I haven’t talked to anyone I know since I got back.” Except Sawyer. But she couldn’t imagine him looking up her old friends and asking them to visit her.
“You can’t have been gone so long that you don’t remember how fast news gets around here. Your baby’s day nurse is my sister-in-law. Rainbow isn’t exactly a common last name. Cat told me about your accident and your baby and asked if I knew you and so here I am. Oh, and I have this,” Valerie said and held out a crumpled and water-stained piece of bright yellow paper.
“I stopped by your parents’ house first to see if I could find them for you but instead of them I found this stuck to the door,” Valerie said with a look that said she was sorry to be the messenger. “It’s a little worse for the wear, but the gist of it is they’ve gone off to some rock in Sedona to commune with like souls. Sorry, I tried.”
“I know, and thanks. I’m not surprised. It’s just—” Maya stopped, then made herself smile. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just really glad you came. You don’t know how wonderful it is to see you.” After three days without seeing a familiar face or being able to share her joys and fears about Joey with anyone she knew, Maya felt close to tears seeing Valerie. She brushed quickly at her eyes, pretending to rub the sleep out of them.
“It’s okay, babies do that to you,” Valerie said, taking her hand and squeezing. “It’s good to see you, too, honey. You look a little banged up, but from what I hear, you’re lucky to be alive. You and your little boy.”
“Have you seen him?”
Valerie nodded. “He’s tiny and precious. But I hear he’s doing just fine. He’ll just need a little extra TLC for a while.”
“So the doctor keeps telling me.” Maya turned to look out the window into the bright sunlight, tears welling in her eyes. “He—he just looks so little and helpless right now. And they’re not going to let me take him home with me when I leave here. They still won’t tell me how long he’s got to stay, and I’m just so worried about him.”
“I know. But Lia Kerrigan is a good doctor,” Valerie said, echoing what Sawyer had told her. “Before you know it, your baby will be a boisterous, rowdy little boy and you’ll wonder how he ever could have been so small and quiet. Believe me, I know, between the twins and now the baby.”
“You have a baby?” Maya remembered Valerie had married her high school boyfriend shortly after graduation. The marriage had gone wrong almost from the start, and less than two years later Valerie had taken her twin daughters and left. “New husband, new baby—wow, has it been that long?”
Valerie laughed. “It’s been a few years since we were sixteen, dreaming up ways to cut algebra. I think my favorite was the time we took your dad’s motorcycle and skipped school for two days so we could go to that music festival in Taos.”
A flash of memories made Maya smile. “We were trouble, weren’t we?”
“And proud of it,” Valerie said. “Now I’m working to keep my kids in line. And not succeeding most days. If it weren’t for Paul, I’d be a crazy person by now. This time I got it right.” She hesitated, looking uncertainly at Maya before asking, “What about you?”
It was the closest Valerie would come to outright asking her what had brought her back to Luna Hermosa, unmarried, with a baby. And what could she say? She’d left shortly after high school graduation to find something her parents had never been able to give her—stability, commitment, someone willing to share responsibility. She thought she’d found those things in Evan, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I decided to come home to have my baby,” she said at last, not ready to rehash the last miserable year with her ex-fiancé. “Unfortunately that turned out to be a really bad idea.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. You’re here and you’re both okay. And I hear it was our finest resident knight in shining armor, Sawyer Morente, who came to your rescue. You remember Sawyer, don’t you?” Valerie prodded. “You know, Mr. Captain of Everything in high school, Air Force hero, the guy with the killer smile?”
“I remember him.” Maya suddenly felt warm and restless. The memories of the accident, of giving birth, of the moment she first held her son, were as clear as if they’d happened minutes, not days ago. And they evoked the same uncomfortable mix of emotions, somewhere between embarrassment at having to be rescued and to give birth in the back of an ambulance and an odd lingering sense of intimacy with the man who’d safely delivered Joey. Avoiding Valerie’s eyes, she fidgeted with the blanket, reached back to adjust her pillow. “I suppose everyone in town knows what happened by now.”
“Well, it hasn’t been in the newspaper yet,” Valerie said, then
