Never Too Late (8 page)

“Will he be all right?”

“He’s pinking up great now. He’s tiny, probably no more than five pounds, but I think he’ll be just fine.”

For a few moments, Kate admired the elementally beautiful sight of a mother holding the tiny life she had brought into the world, then she got down to business cutting the cord and delivering the placenta.

Just as she was wrapping things up, voices and a flurry of activity in the hallway signaled the arrival of the paramedics—a good hour after they’d been called.

“I guess this is our patient?” A burly Navajo with a solid chest and two thick braids led the way with a stretcher.

“Yeah, but now you get two for the price of one,” Kate answered.

“Bonus.” He grinned at her and then at the new mother and her baby. His eyes widened when he saw the woman. “Mariah Begay? That you?”

“Charlie Yazzi! Last I heard you were in Phoenix.” Mariah’s eyes lit up despite her obvious exhaustion.

“No. I married a woman of the Bitter Water clan, born for the Salt Clan. My wife, her folks live here. She wanted to be close to them so we been back in Shiprock for a few years now.” His features sobered. “Heard about your pop. I guess you came back to the Rez for his funeral, yeah?”

Mariah nodded and held her baby just a little tighter.

“Mike with you?” the paramedic asked.

She shook her head, her chin wobbling a little, but didn’t speak as the other paramedic started checking vitals.

“He’s stationed in Iraq and is trying to swing leave right now,” Kate said quietly.

“You’re by yourself? Didn’t I hear you already had two little kids?”

Mariah gestured to the other room, then sudden panic flickered across her tired features. “Joey and Claudia! I can’t leave them here. What will I do with them while I’m at the hospital until my mom can come up from Naschitti?”

Kate started to offer to watch them but Charlie Yazzi cut her off. “They can stay at our place tonight. Marilyn and the kids will love the company. My house is just a block away and she can be here in five minutes to get them. Don’t even think about arguing. It’s the least we can do. Now let’s get you two to the hospital, where you belong.”

Forty-five minutes later, Kate shut the door after Charlie Yazzi’s wife had bundled up Claudia and Joey and taken them out into the night.

The room seemed unnaturally quiet after all the chaos of the evening. She turned back to find Hunter standing in the connecting doorway, his midnight eyes glittering.

“Wow. You sure know how to show a guy a good time.”

She laughed even as exhaustion seeped through her, so overwhelming she suddenly felt as if her bones had dissolved.

He moved toward her. “Seriously, you were incredible, Kate. Watching you in there was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. That baby would have died if you hadn’t been here, wouldn’t it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

“I would. I saw how blue he was and how worried you were. Then you were working on him and suddenly he was this crying little creature, flailing his arms around and looking normal.”

“No matter how many babies I deliver, it still hits me hard every time. Knowing I’m the very first one to welcome this new little person to the world is an indescribable feeling.”

“Wasn’t it Carl Sandburg who said a baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on?”

Her insides quivered at hearing such a tender sentiment from a man who had been forced to walk a hard, ugly road. She thought of the child he had thought was his, the tiny boy who had been murdered with Dru Ferrin, and grieved for him.

She gave him a watery smile. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

“You never ate your soup,” he said. “I could probably find a microwave somewhere in the hotel and heat it for you.”

She tried to assess her appetite and decided exhaustion trumped her hunger. “Thanks anyway, but I just want to sleep.”

She looked at the room where she had delivered the baby. The desk clerk had sent housekeeping in as soon as the paramedics had left for the hospital and there was no trace now of the miraculous event.

“I guess since Mariah and her kids won’t be using this room, we don’t need to double up after all. I’ll just use this one.”

Some unfathomable expression flickered in his eyes, something she feared might be relief, but he quickly veiled his expression. “Right.”

“I’ll just grab my things then and move them over here.”

“I’ll get it. Sit down for a moment.”

She ignored his order. If she sat down, she would probably fall instantly asleep.

Fatigue was a heavy weight around her shoulders. Little wonder at it, she thought. They had survived a tumultuous day, emotionally as well as physically. Nine hours on the road, a blizzard, and a frank-breech delivery. She had to hope the rest of their trip would proceed a little more smoothly or they might never make it to Florida.

He returned a moment later with her suitcase. “Here you go.” He set it on the folding chrome luggage rack in the small closet, then turned to go back to the adjoining room. She roused herself enough to stop him with a hand on his arm.

“Thank you, Hunter. Not just for the suitcase. For everything. I was scared tonight.” She could admit it now. “I’ve never had to deliver a baby under these kind of conditions and it was a complicated delivery. I was doubting every decision I made. But then I looked at you and you were watching me with complete faith. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.”

His eyes darkened suddenly, the black of his pupil nearly consuming the blue as he met her gaze. “You’re welcome,” he said gruffly.

The atmosphere between them seemed to pop and sizzle and she couldn’t look away from the intensity of those glittering eyes. Against her will, her gaze shifted downward slightly and she found herself staring at his hard, unsmiling mouth.

She was still holding his arm, she realized. His skin was hot beneath her fingers and the muscle of his biceps was tight, hard as granite.

She swallowed, trying to summon the will to release his arm. Just as she started to move her fingers, her gaze met his again and she froze at the raw heat in his eyes.

She thought she made some kind of sound but it was swallowed when his mouth captured hers.

In an instant her exhaustion trickled away, leaving only a stunned and fiery heat. So long. She had wanted him to kiss her for so very long. To find herself in his arms seemed an impossible dream, something she had hardly dared hope for.

She had an odd, random memory of being six years old, moving from town to town with Brenda, never knowing where their next meal would come from. On the TV of some dingy motel room or other she had seen a commercial for a Cabbage Patch Kids doll and she had wanted one with every fiber of her little six-year-old heart.

Of course, she had known better than even to ask Brenda, but that hadn’t stopped her from hoping and praying.

That year at Christmastime Brenda had found herself between men—and jobs—so they had wound up living in a Miami homeless shelter. Some do-good organization had brought toys for all the children. Kate could still remember her instant of heart-stopping, stunned glee when she had opened her present to find exactly the kind of doll she’d dreamed of, the kind she’d never thought she would have.

Kissing Hunter Bradshaw was a million times better than getting the toy of her dreams.

He was big and solid and wonderful and she kissed him back with all the eager enthusiasm she had never been able to give another man.

Every single nerve cell in her body hummed with need and she wanted to wrap her arms around those hard muscles and hang on for the rest of her life.

His hunger was a slumbering beast that suddenly roared awake, wild and barbaric and urgently ravenous.

Mindless, heedless, he devoured Kate’s mouth with his tongue and his teeth, tasting and biting and sucking.

She tasted like vanilla sugar, like everything sweet he had ever craved. She was small and curvy and he wanted to wrap himself around her, inside her.

He gripped her soft hair with one hand to angle her mouth for his kiss and slid his other to the seat of her jeans, drawing her closer to his instant, fierce arousal.

Heaven.

This was better than any half-baked fantasy of making love on some sandy beach. This was real.
She
was real.

He wasn’t sure how long they stood in that connecting doorway, mouths and bodies tangled together. He lost track of time, of everything, until she made a soft sound low in her throat and he realized she was trembling.

What the hell was he doing?

A tiny, insidious voice of reason slithered through his ravenous hunger. He wrenched his mouth away, his heartbeat thundering in his ears.

Another few seconds and he would have ripped off her clothes and impaled her against the wall.

She was exhausted, so tired she could barely stand up, and he was taking advantage of that to ease his own lust. His hands fell away and he forced himself to step back a pace even as his body howled at the loss of physical contact he hadn’t even realized he had been so desperately craving.

Kate looked tousled and windblown, as if she’d just come from the blizzard outside. His fingers had played havoc with her hair, her cheeks were flushed, and her mouth was swollen from his kiss.

Finally he met her gaze and found her staring at him with an odd, unreadable expression in her blue eyes. He was afraid to look too closely, not sure he could bear seeing the same disgust there that he suddenly felt for himself.

Before his arrest, he had always considered himself immune to the world’s opinion of him. He had become a cop when his father and the rest of those in the Judge’s social circle had tried to discourage him, when some had openly disdained him for his career choice.

His father had pushed him and Taylor both hard to go into law. Hunter might have considered it if not for the constant pressure—which, predictably, made him contrary enough to run in the opposite direction.

When he had applied and been accepted to the police academy, the Judge had been furious at his stubbornness. Friends had called him crazy but Hunter hadn’t cared.

He had always prided himself in going his own way, impervious to what others thought of him.

After his arrest, it had been a bitter lesson to discover he
did
care what the world thought of him. He cared deeply. He had hated knowing people deemed him the kind of monster capable of killing two women, of taking the life of an unborn baby.

He suddenly discovered that this woman’s opinion of him mattered far more than the rest of the world.

He didn’t want her to think he was some kind of monster, some kind of rampaging beast. But he had certainly behaved like one.

She continued staring at him, her eyes huge and solemn, and he knew he had to say something.

“Kate, I—”
I’m sorry
would have been a lie he couldn’t quite bring himself to utter and any other words seemed to lodge in his throat.

After a long moment, she let out a breath. “We have a long day tomorrow.” Her fingers curled around the doorknob between their rooms. “We’d both better get some rest.”

He could think of a million things to say but he couldn’t seem to work any of them past the lump of self-disgust in his throat.

“Right. You’re right,” he finally said. “Good night, then.”

She all but pushed him through the door and closed it with a decisive click behind him.

He closed his own connecting door, then stood on the other side for a long time, hungry and aching and ashamed of the beast he had let prison turn him into.

Chapter 7

“H
e’s beautiful, Mariah. Absolutely gorgeous.”

Kate smiled down at the little blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. Big dark eyes studied her solemnly from underneath a tiny blue knit cap. The boy had dusky, delicate features and a little cupid bow of a mouth. He smelled wonderful, of baby lotion and milk and brand-new life, an irresistible smell that made her want to sink her face into his softness and just inhale for a few hours.

He yawned suddenly and flailed one curled fist out of the bunting toward his mouth like a little kitten ready to lick a paw and Kate tumbled completely into love, as she had with every single infant she’d ever helped deliver.

She had toyed with obstetrics as her specialty because she loved moments like this so much, knowing she had a small but important part in helping these little ones arrive safely.

In the end she decided she liked the idea of family medicine more, the variety of treating a grandmother’s arthritis one moment and a five-year-old with tonsillitis the next, of being the first line of defense in the fight to keep her patients healthy.

Holding this little one was definitely enough to make her reconsider, though.

Propped in the hospital bed and looking radiantly maternal, Mariah smiled. “He has Michael’s eyes and my nose. Not a bad combination.”

“Have you heard from your husband today?”

“Yes!” Mariah beamed. “He’s coming home! He called me this morning, right after he was granted leave for two weeks. He probably won’t make it for my father’s funeral tomorrow but he’ll be here by the end of the week. He’s hoping he can swing being transferred back to the States in the next month or so.”

“I’m so happy for you.” Kate smiled, stroking the soft skin of the baby’s cheek. She laughed when he rooted toward her finger. “What name did you decide on?”

“Franklin James Begay, after my father. We’ll call him Jamie. It seemed right.”

“It’s a good strong name for a healthy little baby.”

“He wouldn’t be here if not for you. I don’t know how to thank you for what you did.”

Mariah’s gaze landed on Hunter standing silently in the doorway and her smile widened to include him. “Both of you. I hate even thinking about what I would have done if I had been alone. If you hadn’t given up one of your rooms for us, I could have gone into labor on the road somewhere in the middle of the blizzard with only the children to help me. Jamie wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

“I’m glad things worked out the way they did,” Hunter said quietly.

Kate risked a look under her lashes at him. Instead of looking at Mariah, he was watching her hold the baby, his expression unreadable again.

She would give anything to know what thoughts were spinning around in that head of his. Probably reconsidering this whole damsel in distress rescue thing. Wishing he were back in his mountain hideaway, away from emergency deliveries and fretting infants and twenty-six-year-old virgins with mortifying crushes.

To keep from blushing and embarrassing herself further, she held the baby out to him. “Here. You were part of this whole thing, Hunter. You should hold him.”

Alarm flickered in the stormy dark blue of his eyes. “No, really. That’s okay.”

“Come on.”

She didn’t give him much of a choice, just transferred the tiny bundle into his arms. For a moment Hunter held tiny baby with awkward reluctance, like a ball player about to bobble a catch.

After just a moment, he tightened his hold. His hands looked huge around that tiny bundle, square-tipped and strong, and the sight plucked funny little strings inside her

He relaxed by degrees, until finally the nervousness gave way to a baffled kind of wonder.

Franklin James Begay tolerated the manhandling for a few precious moments and Kate cherished up the image of big, tough ex-cop and ex-con Hunter Bradshaw staring into tiny, solemn eyes. Soon hunger won out, though, and the baby let out a couple of squawks and started flailing those little fists around.

One side of Hunter’s mouth lifted and he handed him back to his mother with alacrity. “He’s got good lungs anyway.”

Mariah smiled. “I have a feeling things won’t be quiet at our house, with three kids demanding my attention every moment.”

“You, ah, had better feed him,” Hunter said. “Kate, we should probably go soon. We’ve got a long drive.”

“Right.” Kate rose obediently, though she didn’t want this visit to end—not necessarily because she loved holding new life, though she did, but more because she dreaded climbing into that SUV again and enduring hours of tension.

All morning, the ghost of the kiss they shared the night before seemed to seethe and stir around them as they checked out of their hotel and shared a quick breakfast at the cafe down the street, the same place where Hunter had picked up her uneaten dinner.

She saw his muscles flex as he loaded her suitcase into the Jeep and remembered the hard strength of those arms around her. She watched him take a bite of his ham and cheese omelette and remembered how those teeth had nipped at her lip.

She tried to be surreptitious about it but she couldn’t seem to help noticing little details like that about him while Hunter would barely even
look
at her all morning. When he did, his eyes were always remote, veiled, and she felt as if she were talking to the mast-shaped mountain that gave Shiprock its name.

She wasn’t sure she could endure two or three more days of this before they reached Miami.

What was the big deal anyway? They were two adults, both unattached. If they wanted to share a passionate, toe-curling kiss at the end of a crazy, stressful day, it certainly wasn’t the end of the world.

He seemed to think it was, though. Though the kiss followed them around like a ghost, neither of them mentioned it until they left Shiprock heading across the eastern border of the reservation toward Farmington and the hospital.

“It won’t happen again,” Hunter suddenly said out of the blue after they had been on the road for ten minutes or so.

Though she knew exactly what he was talking about, she pretended ignorance. “What won’t?”

His face looked carved from granite, harsh and austere. “I don’t make a habit of accosting women in hotel rooms. I don’t want you to be on your guard all the time around me, afraid I’m going to suddenly grab you.”

Maybe I
want
you to grab me,
she thought, but couldn’t quite find the courage to say the words.

Hunter had stared out the windshield, his jaw tight and his mouth firm. “It was a momentary lapse in judgment, one I swear to you won’t happen again. That said, I understand if you’re uncomfortable now. I can arrange a flight home for you when we reach Albuquerque.”

She didn’t want to admit how tempting she found his suggestion. Now that she had something concrete to focus on instead of just vague awareness—like how fragile and feminine she had felt in his arms and how he kissed her like his life depended on it—this trip was bound to be hell.

Still, she couldn’t give up. She wouldn’t, if only to prove to herself that she was made of stronger stuff.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she had snapped. “I’m going with you to find Brenda. Did you really think a little thing like a kiss between friends would send me running home?”

His only answer had been to draw those lips even tighter and turn his attention back to the road.

Oh, she couldn’t
wait
to get back into that SUV for more of the same. Kate pushed away the depression settling on her shoulders and smiled at Mariah now. “Hunter is right. We should be on our way. But we have to keep in touch.”

From her purse, she pulled out a business card. On the back she had added all her contact information—her home phone, cell, snail mail and e-mail addresses.

She handed the card to Mariah. “I’m going to want pictures of little Franklin James. He was my first—and hopefully only—hotel birth and I want to keep tabs on him.”

“I’ll contact you after I get back to Utah,” Mariah promised.

“Good.”

Kate hugged her, baby and all, and received more effusive thanks and even a few tears. To her secret delight, when Kate stood up, Mariah held her arms out to embrace Hunter too. Hunter complied a little stiffly but Mariah didn’t seem to notice.

They said their goodbyes and a few moments later they walked out of the hospital into the thin December sunshine.

The storm’s fury had blown itself out in the early-morning hours and Kate had awakened in the strange hotel room to the sound of snow plows and life returning to normal. Already, the sunshine had started to melt the thin layer remaining on the road and storm seemed as much a memory as that kiss.

He held the door open for her, as she had come to realize was an ingrained habit. She slid inside, trying hard to ignore the tremble of her insides at the scent of soap and expensive aftershave that clung to him.

Belle barked a quick greeting then settled back in her crate as Hunter climbed in then drove out of the parking lot and headed southeast, toward Albuquerque and the interstate.

“You looked good holding little Franklin,” she said once they left Farmington behind and headed across the raw, stark beauty of the snow-covered high desert. “A bit more practice and you’ll be a natural, just in time for any little ones Wyatt and Taylor might have. Or one of your own, I guess.”

If she hadn’t been watching, she might have missed the tiny flex of a muscle in his jaw. Was that grief in his eyes?

Suddenly she again remembered the child that had died along with Dru Ferrin, the child Hunter had believed was his.

“I’m sorry, Hunter.” She wished she could slide right into the upholstery and disappear. “I wasn’t thinking at all. I made you hold that baby, completely forgetting that it was probably painful for you after the child you lost.”

His fingers stiffened around the steering wheel. “Most people would say I didn’t really lose anything. The baby wasn’t born yet and he wasn’t even mine.”

“I would never say that. I know what you lost.”

He looked surprised by her words. “This is horrible to say but I think I grieved more for that baby than I did for Dru, even after I found out I wasn’t his father. DNA tests weren’t important to me. He was my son, in every way that mattered.”

“Of course he was.” Kate curled her hands in her lap from reaching out to him in comfort at his blunt confession. Given the tension between them, she didn’t think he would welcome her touch right now.

She wondered if he was remembering, as she was, those months before the murders. To his sister’s surprise, Hunter had been ecstatic about the baby. He had read baby books and gone with Dru to Lamaze class and showed off ultra-sound pictures to anyone within reach. She could still remember trying to smile woodenly and look excited for him.

She knew he had begged Dru to marry him when she told him she was pregnant and that she had continued to refuse, right up to her murder.

Kate had watched Hunter become more thrilled about the birth of the child—and increasingly frustrated with Dru’s refusal to marry him—and she had wanted to grab the woman and shake her until her teeth rattled out for the careless, callous way she treated him.

“You would have been a wonderful father,” she murmured.

“Maybe then. Not anymore.” As soon as he said the words, he looked as if he regretted them.

“Why not?”

He gazed out at the desert. “I’m a different man than I was then. Harder. Less forgiving. Doing time on Death Row has a way of taking away all the good and leaving a man with nothing. I’m not a good bet for a father anymore. Or anything else.”

His last words were pitched so low she had to strain to hear them over the humming of the tires on asphalt. Was that some kind of warning? she wondered.

If so, she was afraid it was coming far too late to do her any good.

Without the weather to slow them down, they made good time once they passed through Albuquerque. Traffic was relatively light and they didn’t hit any delays.

All night as he had stared at the textured ceiling of the motel room berating himself for losing his head and giving into the heat, Hunter worried things between them would be tense and uncomfortable for the rest of this journey.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Though he couldn’t stop remembering their kiss and the hot and urgent hunger that still gnawed at him, with every mile he drove more of the thick tension seemed to seep away.

He wasn’t sure he would ever feel completely comfortable around her, not with this constant attraction simmering beneath his skin. But he could at least try to be polite.

Prison might have distilled his psyche down to the bare elements of raw survival but he wasn’t a wild animal in a cage anymore. It was time he started acting like a civilized human being again.

Between Albuquerque and Amarillo, she seemed content to listen to the radio—country music stations, mostly—and read her brother’s book. They made only one stop to gas up and exercise Belle.

She offered to drive again when they finished their pit stop but he was wary about relinquishing the wheel. The last time she drove, he had spent the time in the middle of a hot, erotic dream that had most likely contributed to his boorish behavior later in the evening.

When they were back on the highway, Kate picked up her book again but she seemed restless. He was aware of every move and knew when her attention wandered. Though the book was still open on her lap, she spent more time looking out the window, her expression pensive.

What forces had shaped her into the woman she had become? He wondered. Strong and gutsy, brave enough to delivery a baby under relatively primitive conditions yet nervous about confronting her painful past.

He wanted to know about her, he realized. The information would be helpful for finding the woman she had always believed to be her mother. It might also help him understand the woman Kate had become.

“How old were you when this Brenda Golightly turned you over to the system?”

She looked as startled by his question as if he’d suddenly pulled over and started eating road kill. “Where did that come from?”