Delay of Game (39 page)

Why was he helping me? He had to be just as worried as I was. Maybe even more. Sara was his little girl.

“Two,” I finally got out.

He ripped open two packets and emptied them into the cup. “Sara’s mom miscarried—before Sara was born. Twice, actually. We’d almost given up on the thought of having a baby because it was so hard when we lost one. You just feel helpless.”

This was worse than that. Because I
knew
something was wrong yesterday. I could feel it. She wouldn’t tell me about it, but I knew. She could have come in yesterday, gotten help. Maybe they could have done something to stop the miscarriage. Maybe—

“You’re beating yourself up with what-ifs and maybes,” Scotty grumbled, interrupting my thoughts. He finished fixing my coffee and handed it to me. “Don’t shake so hard you spill that,” he added in an offhand way. “What if she’d come in last night? What if she hadn’t been in that car wreck? You can’t keep doing that. That’s not going to help her, and it’s not going to help you.”

It was all I had, though, because she wouldn’t let me see her. She wouldn’t let me be with her. She wouldn’t let me hold her hand.

She wouldn’t let me in.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest with her last night when she asked me why I loved her. I might have been too real, and now she was pushing back at a time when she was at her most vulnerable, trying to push me away like she always did with men. I’d seen it happen enough times to know it was her pattern. I’d broken through more of her defenses than any of the rest of them had, and she was scared. And this was how she fought back.

“You know what she’s doing, right?” Scotty asked.

I looked up and met his eyes. They were just as blue as Sara’s, just as expressive. He stared hard, almost through me.

“She’s trying to push you away.”

That wasn’t news. I scoffed and turned to walk away, but he clapped a strong hand down on my shoulder.

“Hold on. Hear me out.”

I spun around again.

“She’s trying to push you away because she thinks you’ll go. She’s starting to care too much, and she’s scared because everyone in her life that she’s cared about as much as she cares about you—everyone except for me—has left her in the end. She’s sure you’re going to leave her, too, so she’s trying to beat you to the punch. She’s trying to force your hand, to make you fit the mold of what she expects you to be and push you into doing what everyone else has always done.”

“Well, she’s already won, then, hasn’t she? She won’t let me in. She won’t give me a chance.”

“She’s pretty stubborn, isn’t she?”

As stubborn as anyone I’d ever met. I’d just told her that was one of the things I loved about her. Usually, I did…when that very same stubbornness wasn’t driving me insane.

“She’s at her most stubborn when she’s most wrong.” Scotty poured a cup of decaf and took a sip, eyeing me over the cup. “That’s a trait she inherited from me, so I should know. You’re not, though. You’re at your most stubborn when you’re most right. Or at least that’s how it’s always seemed to me. Maybe it’s time to show her that she’s not the most stubborn of the pair of you. If you can’t figure out how to out-stubborn her, I’m not sure you’re the man I thought you were, and I don’t know if you deserve her.”

“WE PUT A
rush on that bloodwork,” the nurse told me as she prepared my gurney to be wheeled through the hospital. The ER doctor was sending me to OB for an ultrasound. He’d said there was a possibility that I was miscarrying, but the labs and the ultrasound should give them a better idea of what was going on in my body.

So much for the idea of it just being gas. But then again, I’d never known gas to cause spotting, and what I’d found this morning was more than just a little spotting—plus there was the crazy cramping, worse even than I normally had with my oh-so-favorite time of the month.

The nurse hooked the IV bag on a pole that was sticking up somewhere behind my head, raised the back of the bed so I was in more of a sitting position, and unlocked the wheels. “Want your friend to come with you? That’d be all right. They won’t allow more than one person to be with you, but she can come.”

She inclined her head to indicate Dana, who was standing next to me. She’d been standing there for almost an hour, never leaving my side despite all of my grumpy insisting that she should go. I’d never been anywhere that it took longer to get things done than a hospital emergency room. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to see the inside of one again for a long time. They made me crazy, all the sitting and waiting, and then rush, rush, rush to wait some more. None of it had fazed Dana, though. She’d just stood there and held my hand through it all. She hadn’t let go of it once since she’d come back into the exam room to stay with me, no matter how much of an ass I’d been.

I didn’t want anyone to be in there with me if the result was what I expected it to be, but I doubted I could go through something like this alone. I swallowed hard and nodded.

“All right then, off we go. You can just follow alongside her, honey,” she said to Dana. “But if we come to narrow doorways, let me move the gurney through and then you can catch up.”

“Got it,” Dana said.

We’d barely gotten out into the hall when my gurney came to a sudden stop. Cam was standing in the way. There was no room to move around him—he’d have to step to one side or the other—but he had his arms crossed over his chest and his feet planted shoulder-width apart, and he didn’t look like he had any intention of going anywhere until he was good and ready. He looked as immovable as a boulder.

“Mr. Johnson,” the nurse said sympathetically, “she’s already said she doesn’t want you present. I’m sorry, but you have to go back to the waiting room or I’ll have to call sec—”

“You don’t need to call security,” he interrupted. He was speaking to her, but he was looking at me. Piercing me, more like. His expression was full of every emotion in the book—fear, anger, desperation, worry, frustration. And love. Always love, damn him. “I’ll go and I won’t give you any more problems, but I want two minutes first, Sara.”

If I didn’t give him that, I had no doubt he would refuse to budge, and the nurse would have to call security to have him removed. Cam had proved over and over again that he would break the rules to do what he thought was right, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he would do the same thing right now.

“Fine,” I bit off. “Two minutes.”

The nurse gave me a nod, Dana squeezed my hand, and they both backed away when Cam came over to the side of my bed.

All he had to do was kiss my forehead and my tears started falling.

“I love you,” he said gruffly. “That’s not going to change, and you’re not going to run me off. I told you up front that I was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. That I intended to pursue you and that I wasn’t going to walk out of your life. I told you I wouldn’t make it easy on you if you tried to shove me out. Do you remember all of that?”

I blinked, but that only made more tears fall. I remembered it all too well. He’d said all of that and more the night he’d first made love to me. He brushed away some of the wetness on my cheek with the pad of his thumb, rendering me speechless. I nodded.

“None of that has changed. None of it
will
change. I understand that you’re scared, and you’re trying to push me away, but I’m not going anywhere. You need to get that through your thick skull. I’m not going anywhere.” He bent down and brushed his lips over mine for the briefest of moments, just long enough to make me shiver, before backing away.

He was right. I was scared. I was scared to let myself love him. No one but Daddy ever came through for me, so it was easier to not get too close because, no matter how much he promised me he wasn’t going anywhere, I didn’t think I could believe that. Life had proven him wrong. I was scared that I was losing this baby, and that would probably be the end of
us
, whatever we were. Yeah, I was fucking terrified.

“I love you,” he said one more time, walking backward down the hall.

I hated how much I was crying. I hated that my vulnerability was on full display around him and that I couldn’t seem to keep it in check. I finally got a handle on my tears and found my voice again, just in time to call out, “You might be in luck. You might be off the hook,” just before he disappeared around the corner.

“Maybe it’s just me,” the nurse said when she and Dana returned, “but he doesn’t seem like a man who wants to be let off the hook.”

Dana took my hand, but she was frowning. “It’s not just you.”

I started crying again, dozens of hot, fat tears spilling down my cheeks at a rapid clip. “God, why am I such a bitch?” I’d just said something awful to him, with the intention of hurting him. So he’d break things off before I loved him any deeper than I already did, because I didn’t think I could handle it if it happened later. I didn’t think I would survive it if I fell any more in love with him and then he realized he didn’t want me as much as he seemed to think he did right now.

“The crazy thing,” Dana said, “is he loves you anyway.”

And he still hadn’t given up on his crazy idea of
pursuing
me. Maybe he really wasn’t going to walk away.

But it hurt too much to let myself hope that could be the case.

“WE’RE GOING TO
admit you so we can monitor you overnight,” the doctor said. “We’ll run the blood work this evening, in the middle of the night, and again in the morning to see if your HCG levels are changing at all.”

I nodded, but I was numb all over. They hadn’t found a heartbeat when they’d done the ultrasound. The technician had even used a long wand that went up my hoo-ha, saying it would be more accurate and she’d be more likely to find the heartbeat that way. But…nothing.

She’d tried to reassure me that it didn’t mean anything, that I was still early in my pregnancy and there could be lots of reasons why she couldn’t find a heartbeat, but I just… I knew. When the doctor delivered the results of my blood-work after that, it only further confirmed what I already believed.

I was miscarrying.

“There’s nothing you can do?” Dana asked. “To stop it, I mean?”

“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said. “We can help make her more comfortable, and we can offer counseling to help with the loss, but there are any number of reasons why a woman’s body might reject a pregnancy. That doesn’t mean you won’t ever be able to have a baby,” he added, turning back to me. “Most women who suffer a miscarriage go on to have perfectly healthy babies afterwards.”

Yeah, a chance. A very slim chance, it sounded like, based on everything they’d told me so far. My HCG level—some sort of hormonal indicator of pregnancy—was lower than it had been when I’d first gone to visit my OB-GYN, and they said it should have been essentially doubling every few days.

The doctor closed up my chart and tucked it under one arm. “Do you have any more questions for me right now?”

I shook my head.

“They’re getting a room ready for you. It shouldn’t be much longer. You can bring more of your family back here with you while you wait, if you want.” He left the exam room before I could blink, probably heading off to see some other patient. The ER had been hopping today.

Dana pulled a chair over closer to me, since they were done poking and prodding me for a while. “You want me to go get your dad? Or Cam?”

I didn’t want anyone else to be here. I was having a hard enough time keeping it together with just Dana around. If anyone else came in, I was going to completely lose it. “Not right now.”

“Will you be all right for a little while if I go fill them in? Lots of people out there are worried about you, you know.”

“Yeah, go on.” If she left for a little bit, I could fall apart and then put myself back together again before she returned. Or at least I could try to.

She squeezed my hand before she got up.

As soon as the curtain drifted closed behind her, I curled into a fetal position and let my tears fly. I made so much noise with my sobbing that the nurse came in to check on me, thinking I must be in pain. And I was, but it wasn’t the sort of pain she could give me some drugs for. Morphine wouldn’t touch this. She brought me a box of tissues and left them on my bed, and then she left again.

I’d almost gotten the worst of it out of my system when an orderly came in a little bit later.

“Your room’s all ready,” he said. “I’ll take you up and get you settled in. Should we wait for anyone to come back before we go?”

I was about to tell him Dana should be back any minute now, but there wasn’t any need to wait. She walked back into the exam room…with Daddy beside her. At least she hadn’t brought Cam. Still, I scowled at her so she’d know I wasn’t happy about it.

“Oh, excellent timing,” the orderly said. “We were just about to head up to her room. You can both come with us.”

Dana picked up the bag with my clothes and my purse, and off we all went. Before long, the orderly had gotten me settled into my room and the nurse on the floor had poked her head into the room to introduce herself. I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted the doctors and nurses, and the rest of the hospital staff to leave me be. I wanted Daddy to go home. I wanted Cam to take his family and go back to his house. If Dana was going to insist on staying, I wanted her to sit in the chair farthest away from me and watch TV or read a book or do anything but try to get me to talk.