Married by Accident Page 4

  Annie was right about that. Not five minutes later, after the young woman had weathered another grueling contraction, Cole came striding in. Five minutes more, and he had a doctor leading Annie to an examining room. Melinda went with her, still holding her hand, as Cole stayed behind to deal with paperwork and try to contact one of the OB-GYNs from the clinic where Annie had received her prenatal care.

  The doctor who examined Annie declared she was seven centimeters dilated and “very nicely” effaced. “You are a healthy young woman in active labor,” he said.

  “That means my baby will be here soon?”

  He smiled down at her. “Yes. That is exactly what it means. We’re going to put you in a labor room for a while. We will check on you often. When the time comes, we’ll move you for delivery.”

  Annie held up her hand, the one that still gripped Melinda’s. “Can Melinda come with me? I need a friend at a time like this, you know?”

  The doctor shared his smile with Melinda, who stood on the other side of Annie. “Yes, of course. Your friend may stay in the labor room with you.”

  The labor room, on the second floor, had three beds in it, each with its own privacy curtain. A bouquet of plastic flowers sat on a table in the center of one wall. A door on the same wall as the row of beds led to a half bath.

  A nurse gave Annie a hospital gown, advised her to make herself comfortable, then left them. Melinda and Annie went into the small bathroom, where Annie undressed and Melinda helped her clean up a little. Then Annie got into the gown and Melinda tied the little ribbons at the back.

  They returned to the labor room, where Melinda folded Annie’s wet clothes and put them in a plastic drawstring bag, which the nurse had provided. Since the other beds were empty, they didn’t bother with the curtain. And Annie didn’t feel like lying down all the time anyway.

  “I want to walk around. The pressure feels better when I’m standin’ up.”

  So the two of them walked up and down the length of the room, pausing and breathing in unison when the contractions came. When Annie tired of walking, she climbed onto the bed to rest. Melinda would arrange her pillows for her, then take her hand again and stand very close.

  “Oh, just look at me,” Annie said, as Melinda was propping the pillows to ease her aching back. “In this ugly green thing, with my rear end showin’ every time I turn around, grunting and groaning. I do feel like a heifer, I surely do.”

  “Well, you don’t look like one, not at all.”

  “I guess that’s somethin’.”

  Melinda gave the pillow a final nudge and took Annie’s hand again. “Having a baby isn’t easy. And you are doing a fabulous job.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  “I just...I still keep worryin’, you know? The baby’s not due for three weeks yet—did I tell you that?”

  “You did.”

  “I just hope nothing’s wrong.”

  “Don’t worry. I know a little about this process myself. And—”

  “You do? You have kids?”

  Melinda wondered what to say next Annie needed encouragement, not to hear how another woman hadn’t made it to term. She settled on the simple, if incomplete, truth. “No, I don’t have any children. But I...well, let’s just say I’ve studied the subject a little. If you’re thirty-seven weeks along, the baby should be ready enough to be born.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “It’s going fine, Annie. You heard what the doctor said.”

  “You’re right. I know you’re right.” Annie blew out her flushed cheeks with a gusty breath. “I am so grateful you stayed. I don’t...really have any friends in L.A.”

  Melinda gave her hand a good squeeze. “I’m here, for as long as you need me.” She said the words with no hesitation, finding that she meant them with all her heart. “And you’ve got Cole. He’s a terrific man.”

  Annie’s sweet, flushed face seemed to light from within as she smiled. “Yeah. He is. Not every girl gets a big brother so wonderful.” Melinda must have looked somewhat surprised, because Annie actually giggled. “I knew it. I can see by your face. You thought Cole was my...” Her voice trailed off as she glanced down at their joined hands and at the gold band that circled her ring finger. “This isn’t Cole’s ring. It’s Jimmy’s. We got married two months ago, a week after I turned eighteen.”

  The charming giggle had faded, as if it had never been. And Annie’s eyes—so much like Cole’s eyes, Melinda realized now—were infinitely sad. “We were having such trouble, Jimmy and me. As soon as we knew about the baby, he started workin’ double shifts at that job he had, so we could afford to pay for everything. I worked, too. I had a pretty good waitress job. But then I got too big and the boss let me go. Having a baby isn’t cheap, you know?”

  Melinda nodded. Annie went on, “Jimmy, he kept on workin’. He worked so hard. But even with all those extra hours, he didn’t make all that much. And then, about three weeks ago, his boss said he wouldn’t be needin’ him anymore. Just like that. Poor Jimmy. He walks into work and finds out he doesn’t have a job. It was all...too much for him. He just couldn’t deal with it. The baby coming. And me...like this, needin’ him to take care of me when he didn’t know how he was gonna take care of himself. He just...took off. Two weeks ago.”

  Melinda swallowed back the sympathetic tears that had suddenly decided to burn the back of her throat. She knew all too well how it felt when love failed to be everything a woman hoped it might.

  A tiny sigh escaped Annie. “The good thing, though, is that Cole came. Just yesterday. I opened the door and there he was. He wasn’t so happy when he saw my big stomach. But I guess I can live with his disappointment in me, because I truly don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t been here.”

  Annie moaned again, as another contraction had its way with her. When it was over, she said, “I know you just settled me down here. But can we—?”

  “Walk? You know we can.”

  Melinda helped her off the bed and they resumed their slow pacing, up and down the space at the foot of the beds.

  “I guess I’ve messed up my life good,” Annie said as they trudged slowly back and forth. “I’ve let Cole down. And my poor dad.” She smiled—a melancholy smile, with a heart full of longing in it. “I love my dad. But he never could understand about Jimmy. Jimmy comes from a bad family. Those no-account Logans. That’s what folks call them, where I come from. But it’s not Jimmy’s fault that his parents were drinkers. Or that nobody ever kept an eye on him, nobody showed him the benefits of going to school. Of course he got in trouble a lot. What else was there for him but trouble, you know? What else did he know? Until me. Until I was sixteen and he danced with me at the Harvest Ball and when he took me in his arms, we both knew what we’d found. Oh, but, Melinda...in the end, I guess I went and brought him as much trouble as everything else in his life.”

  Annie went on in a soft, forlorn voice, confiding that her dad would never forgive her for running off with Jimmy Logan at the age of seventeen, right at the start of her Senior year. And Melinda listened, said, “Oh?” and “Yes,” and “I know what you mean, Annie,” whenever Annie seemed to require a sympathetic word.

  And Melinda did know what Annie meant. Wasn’t she herself a total disappointment to her parents?

  Annie might be eighteen and short of funds, fresh from somewhere in America’s heartland, while Melinda was a decade older and had spent most of her privileged life in Manhattan, raised by parents who always had money to spare. But she and this young, naive girl had more than one thing in common.

  Like Annie, Melinda knew what it meant to fail to live up to a parent’s expectations. In her whole life, she’d never quite managed to gamer her father’s approval—or her mother’s, for that matter. And like Annie, she had given her heart to a man who hadn’t stuck by her when she’d needed him most. Annie knew, Annie understood, the sleepless nights and worry-filled days a woman endured when she carri
ed a baby inside her and faced the daunting prospect of raising that child on her own.

  It struck Melinda again, nearly stealing her breath: if she only hadn’t miscarried, she might be in labor herself right now. Their babies might have been born on the very same day.

  Annie was still confiding her secrets. “Cole’s come all the way here, for the second time, to try to get me to come home.”

  “For the second time?”

  Annie nodded. They reached the narrow window, turned and walked back, between the ends of the beds and the table with the plastic flowers on it, toward the door to the hall. “Cole came after me about nine months ago, when I first ran off. I wouldn’t leave then. Because of Jimmy. Because Jimmy wouldn’t go back to Bluebonnet. That’s in Texas, in the Hill Country, which is right smack dab in the middle of the state. Bluebonnet is a little dinky town and it’s my home. And Melinda, I...I don’t care what Jimmy did. I don’t care that he’s left me. I still love him so. I will always be his.”

  Annie stopped then, and stared into the middle distance, yearning and hopelessness clouding her pretty eyes. “But now, since Jimmy’s run off from me, I do wish I could just go home, at least. But I can’t. Because of my dad. He isn’t well. He had a stroke a while back. Cole tells me it’s not my fault, but I know Dad wouldn’t have had that stroke if not for me, runnin’ off like I did, and only bein’ seventeen then. And for me to come home now, with a baby and no husband—that would finish him off for sure.”

  Melinda said gently, “Maybe your father would surprise you. Maybe he would understand.” She spoke with more authority than she felt. Her own parents hadn’t understood at all when she told them she was going to have her baby anyway, whether Christopher Blayne, who already had a grown son and a daughter, wanted to be a father again or not.

  Annie was sighing and shaking her head. Then she gasped. Another contraction. She gripped Melinda’s hand tighter, crunching the bones. Melinda breathed with her as the pain ran its course.

  “Maybe I’ll try lyin’ down some more,” Annie said when that one passed.

  They went to the bed. Melinda helped her up and fussed with the pillows again. A nurse came in carrying a small plastic bucket filled with ice chips. “Sometimes a little ice feels so soothing,” she said. Then she examined Melinda, announced that it would be some time yet, and left

  Cole appeared a moment later. Melinda was perched on the bed beside Annie, trying to feed her some ice chips and still hold onto her hand. The sight of him, so tall and strong, so capable and kind, caused a rising feeling inside her—a feeling so lovely, she almost wished it could lead somewhere. She almost wished she could be as naive as Annie, could see a man and know she loved him and follow him anywhere—to the sun-kissed and dangerous streets of L.A., to some small town in Texas—anywhere her love wanted her to go.

  “The doctor from your clinic will be here soon,” he told Annie. Then he came and stood across from Melinda. Annie held out her free hand and he took it.

  Hours passed. Hours when Annie alternately paced and sat propped among the pillows, sucking on ice chips, as her labor progressed. To Melinda, it seemed as if the world contained only the four of them—Annie, Cole, Melinda and Annie’s baby—living through Annie’s labor, now and then joined briefly by a nurse or Annie’s doctor.

  Sometimes they would talk a little, between Annie’s increasingly powerful and frequent contractions.

  Melinda learned why Cole had been so calm when Annie’s water broke. He was a large-animal veterinarian, a man who had attended quite a few births already—of calves, foals and lambs, even a llama or two.

  “But never of your own niece or nephew,” Annie reminded him.

  “That’s true,” he agreed in that deep, steady voice of his. “And never have I seen a mother as pretty as you, Annie girl.” He shared a loving look with his sister, then raised those kind eyes to meet Melinda’s, across the bed. “Thanks for staying.”

  “I’m...glad to be here.”

  And she was. So very glad. And so grateful. She wouldn’t even consider leaving now. Nothing existed but the feel of Annie’s hand in hers, the sense that she was part of something powerful and important. That she was helping. That she was needed.

  The appalling and humiliating incident at Evelyn Erikson’s horrible, pretentious mansion seemed a hundred years ago. Five hundred. A thousand. And what had happened there didn’t matter at all.

  This mattered. Sometimes it seemed to Melinda that she could almost hear the heart of Annie’s unborn baby, beating fast and hard as the little one struggled to find its way into the world.

  Her own baby’s heart had stopped all too soon. But this baby... This baby would live. This baby had to live. Melinda just knew that. Live to breathe, to cry, to laugh. To feel the warm, abiding comfort of a mother’s loving arms.

  During those timeless hours, whenever Melinda glanced across the bed and Annie’s distended belly, she met Cole’s light hazel eyes. Sometimes he smiled at her, sometimes he just looked back, steady as a rock, so sure. So true.

  At last, the time came to move Annie to the delivery room. Annie begged to have both Cole and Melinda come with her. But the nurses said they would only allow one labor coach in delivery. So Cole went, and Melinda waited in the small lounge down the hall.

  As she sat, glancing too often from her watch to the big institutional clock on the wall, thumbing through tattered copies of Woman’s Day and Ladies Home Journal, Melinda’s real life crowded in on her just a bit. Her car still waited, wrecked on an L.A. street corner. She would have to do something soon about having it towed. And she was supposed to have been back at Forever Eve by three o’clock at least, with her load of rejected lingerie and her excuses for her failure with Evelyn Erikson.

  She should probably at least give Rudy a call. He wouldn’t be at the shop this late, but she had the number of his cell phone. The short row of phone kiosks reproached her, in a nook not fifteen feet away.

  But no, she simply couldn’t deal with Rudy right now. He would just have to wait till tomorrow to get his merchandise back—along with the bad news.

  It was after midnight when Cole came to find her. She looked up from her magazine and he was striding her way.

  She stood, dropping the magazine on the little table at her side. His eyes seemed to have shadows in them, and his face looked so serious.

  She thought, Something’s happened. Oh God, something went wrong...

  And then Cole’s fine mouth tipped upward just slightly at the corners. “It’s a boy,” he said. “Strong and healthy. Six pounds, one ounce.”

  “And Annie...?”

  “She came through just fine.”

  Chapter Four

  It took another hour for the hospital staff to get Annie and the baby settled into a room. Then at last, they let Cole and Melinda in to see them.

  Annie sat against the pillows. Someone had thought to brush her hair and pull it back in a low ponytail. Still, it looked lank and without luster, as if the job of giving birth had stolen all its shine. Dark smudges marred the tender skin beneath her eyes. And yet Melinda thought she had never seen anyone half so beautiful as little Annie Logan propped up in her hospital bed with her new baby in her arms.

  Annie looked down at her child and then up, to share a tender smile with the brother who’d come all the way from Texas just when she needed him most.

  “You feelin’ all right, Annie girl?”

  “I’m tired and I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. But I am feelin’ just fine.” She turned her gaze to Melinda. “I did it,” she whispered, both awestruck and proud.

  “Oh, yes,” said Melinda. “You most certainly did.”

  “Come on over here and see him.”

  Melinda didn’t have to be told twice. She moved around, to the far side, between Annie and the drawn curtain that separated Annie’s bed from the other bed in the room.

  Annie raised her cradling arms a little, holding the baby up. Melinda saw that
tiny, Yoda-like face, the squinty eyes and sweet, squashed nose. He yawned, his tiny puckered rosebud of a mouth stretching wide. And then he sighed.

  “I did good, didn’t I?” .

  “Oh, Annie. You did fabulous.”

  Annie lifted the baby higher. “Here. Hold him.”

  Melinda’s heart felt too big for her chest “Are you sure...?”

  “You bet I am.”

  Melinda bent a little closer to the bed. Her arms seemed to form a cradle without any conscious command from her mind.

  “Careful. There we go...” Annie passed the tiny bundle and Melinda received him. It seemed to her a ritual as old as time and life and love itself—two sets of arms, cradling, a baby passed between.

  Melinda could feel such tender warmth, through the soft receiving blanket. And oh, he was so light. A woman could carry him anywhere and never grow tired.

  “He’s just incredible,” she whispered, bringing him closer, against her breasts, lowering her head a little so the sweet milky scent of him could come to her clearly. The tiny red face turned, rooting. Melinda felt the tightening, the yearning to give what a mother gives, what she might be giving now, if only—

  “I’m naming him James, after his father,” Annie announced. Melinda looked up from the precious bundle in her arms and saw the quick, defiant glance that Annie threw at Cole.

  Cole’s face had gone hard. Melinda knew his thoughts as if he’d spoken them aloud. He didn’t want Annie’s baby to have the name of the man who had deserted her.

  Melinda willed him to look her way. It might have been coincidence, or it might have been something more, but his eyes did find her. She said, “It’s a fine name.”

  His face seemed to harden even more. Melinda just went on looking at him, refusing to give in, to glance away and leave him to his stubbornness. Finally he was the one who blinked. She watched the hardness go out of him, saw the kindness and gentleness return.

  “All right.” He let out a resigned breath. “James, then. If that’s really what you want.”