Читать книгу His Lost and Found Family - Sarah M. Anderson - Страница 8

Two

“What’s wrong with her?”

Both the doctor and his research assistant looked at Jake with raised eyebrows. Okay, maybe that had been a little gruff—but seriously?

She was different. Or rather, she was the same as she’d once been—but not the same woman she’d been the last time he’d seen her. Skye hadn’t looked at him with that kind of adoration in a long time. And when was the last time she’d wanted sex? When was the last time she’d wanted him?

Jake had only taken one job in New York. And that had been two years ago. It’d been a small job, but it’d led to bigger and better things.

Two years ago. That’d been the last time things had been good between them. After Jake had started getting those bigger and better jobs, things had begun to fall apart.

“Skye had a traumatic brain injury,” the doctor explained. “I’m her surgeon. Dr. Lucas Wakefield,” he added, sticking out his hand.

Jake shook it. “But what does that mean?”

“It means that, as near as we can tell, Skye was driving into Royal when the tornado hit. We suspect her car was picked up and tossed around.”

“And?” Jake demanded. Julie’s eyebrows went up again, but Jake was past caring.

Skye had driven into a damn tornado. Why? That wasn’t like her. She was more careful than that. She knew how Texas weather could be. She would have taken shelter or gotten off the road or something.

“Think of it as a concussion—only the most extreme kind. We kept her under for a few months to allow her brain to heal and it took her some time to wake up after we cut back on the drugs we were using to induce the coma. Her memory is...compromised.”

“And what does that mean?” Jake demanded. What was it going to take to get a straight answer out of the man?

“She’s got what the layperson might call amnesia,” Dr. Wakefield explained. “She doesn’t seem to have the last two years, although her long-term memory is mostly intact. Anything that happened right before the accident is probably gone for good.”

For the second time that day, Jake had to lean on something to keep his legs underneath him. “Will she—will she get those two years back?” Would she remember how things had broken between them? Would she remember the fight? The divorce papers?

When he’d seen her just now, she hadn’t had her ring on. She hadn’t had her earrings in, either—the big diamond studs he’d bought her just as things had started to go south on them. He wondered where they were—lost in the storm or left behind on purpose?

“Hard to say. The brain is an amazing organ. For now, we recommend keeping any shocks to the system to a bare minimum. Obviously, she knows about your daughter.”

Grace. His daughter, Grace.

“But,” Dr. Wakefield went on as if Jake weren’t on the verge of collapse, “if there were...other surprises, I’d keep those close to the vest.”

“You want me to, what—lie to her?”

Julie said, “Not lie, no. Think of it as glossing over. She’s going to be confused for some time. Too much too soon would be a severe shock to her system. We don’t want her to have a setback.”

Jake shook his head, hoping to get the world to stop spinning. None of this was right. None of it.

Skye didn’t remember how they’d broken up. Why they’d broken up.

And he couldn’t tell her.

God, what a mess.

Julie handed him a packet. “She’ll have to do physical therapy to regain her muscle strength. This is a preliminary list of stretches and exercises you’ll need to help her with at home during her recovery to rebuild her strength to a point where PT will be helpful to her. In a week or two, you’ll need to bring her into the office so she can work with a therapist.”

He stared at the sheet. The top one had a photo of a woman in a spandex unitard laying on the floor and another woman in hospital scrubs stretching her leg so that it pointed straight up. “Me?”

“Are you two married?” Julie eyed him. Closely. “If so, you’re her next of kin. We had planned to release her to Lark Taylor, but if you’re here, you’ll be the one in charge of her care.”

“We are married,” he said, feeling the full impact of those words. He’d sworn vows to her, vows to be there for her in sickness and in health, until death parted them. She’d wanted to break those vows, but because she’d been in a coma and he’d been in a different hemisphere, they hadn’t managed to do that just yet.

Then something else dawned on him. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that I can’t take her back to Houston?”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” Dr. Wakefield said, giving Jake a suspicious look. “I’d like to continue to monitor her recovery. I have colleagues in Houston that I could refer you to, but I’d prefer to remain her primary. Consistency of care can’t be overestimated at this point.”

He was going to have to take care of her. He was going to have to look at her and know he’d lost her and not tell her that. He couldn’t tell her about the slow way the spark had died or how she’d had him served with papers.

Instead, he was going to have to take care of a woman who thought she still loved him because she couldn’t remember how she’d stopped loving him.

And to do that, he was going to have to stay in the pit that was Royal, Texas.

How could this get any worse?

* * *

Jake had broken the cardinal rule. No matter how bad things were, never, ever ask how they could possibly be worse.

Because a man never knew when a dog was going to try and break through the door to get to him.

Jake stood on the front porch of a nondescript house in a nice part of town. He was pretty sure this was the address Keaton had given him. On the other side of the door, the dog was howling and scratching like a crazed beast. Jake debated getting back in the car. If the dog got out, Jake would prefer to have a layer of metal between the two of them.

Seconds ticked by more slowly than molasses in January. His fingers started twitching toward the doorbell to ring it again. They knew he was coming, right?

The dog still going nuts, Jake was just about to start pounding on the door when he heard the lock being turned. “Nicki!” Keaton shouted. “Knock it off! Back up!”

The barking ceased almost immediately, then the door cracked open and the first thing Jake heard was the wailing of a baby. An unhappy baby.

“About time,” Keaton grumbled, opening the door and standing aside. “You woke her up. Next time, just knock. That doesn’t seem to set Nicki off nearly as badly as the doorbell does.”

“Sorry.” And truthfully—with all that screaming? Jake actually was sorry.

Keaton got the door closed behind him. Jake’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim lighting. The blinds were down and in addition to the screaming he heard the sounds of...classical music?

“This way,” Keaton said, stepping around Jake. “Watch out for Nicki.”

Jake eyed the dog that was now sitting next to the door. The dog’s hackles were up and it was growling, but at least it hadn’t attacked. “Nice doggie,” Jake said as he stepped around the animal. Man, he hoped that thing was well trained. “Good girl.”

“Yeah, we just got her a few weeks ago. Australian shepherd. Nicki goes with me out to the ranch—I’m training her to keep tabs on the cattle. She’s really good at it.” As Keaton spoke, he walked confidently though the house. He led Jake—and Nicki—past large framed landscapes of Texas in all the seasons—bluebells in one, the bright summer sky in another. They walked past shelves that seemed to overflow with books, all of which looked uniformly well-read. This was not the pristine, almost sterile kind of house that Skye had grown up in. This was a home that seemed lived in. But it didn’t seem particularly feminine.

“This your place?” he asked, trying to keep his tone casual.

“It’s Lark’s. We’re building a place of our own.” Keaton didn’t offer any more details.

Jake had a lot of questions from that one statement, but before he could figure out how to ask them, they entered a room that had probably once been a tidy great room. Except now there were baby blankets draped everywhere, mats with mirrored things attached spread over the floor and more stuffed animals than Jake could count. There were bookshelves in here, too, but the books had been cleared off the lower ones and bins full of toys and things that Jake didn’t recognize now filled the space. Plus, there was an absolutely huge television along one wall that seemed out of place in the worst sort of way.

In the middle of it all, on a couch that was piled high with cloths and diapers, sat Skye’s sister, Lark, with a small, squalling baby in her arms. Lark was wearing medical scrubs. Maybe she was a nurse?

At the sight of them, Lark got a mean look about her—a look Jake recognized from days long gone. It was a look he’d seen more often on Vera Taylor’s face than on Skye’s, but the hatred was unmistakable.

“Babe,” Keaton said, crouching down in front of her. He rubbed his hands over her thighs. “You remember Jake, my—my brother?”

“No,” Lark said. But it didn’t sound as if she was answering Keaton’s question.

“Lark,” Jake said, trying to be polite about it.

The baby cried even more. Jake wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but it was. This morning, he hadn’t been a father. Now he was faced with a wailing infant.

Skye wasn’t supposed to have any shocks to her system. He wished someone had given the same orders for him because he wasn’t sure how much more he could take.

“Where have you been?” Lark snapped. Her eyes filled with tears, and Jake noticed the dark circles underneath.

“Babe...” Keaton said, touching her face. It was a tender gesture.

Jake wasn’t sure what part of this scene made the least amount of sense. Keaton had always said Lark Taylor was a stuck-up bookworm who thought she was better than everyone else—and Jake had never argued that point much. Lark hadn’t liked Jake. The feeling had been mutual.

“I was in Bahrain. I came back for Skye and for our daughter.” The words were coming easier now. But he stared at the little baby still crying in Lark’s arms and the room began to feel smaller.

“Oh,” Lark said. “So glad to see that you’ve decided to acknowledge her. Where have you been since she was born? Do you even know how old she is? Do you know anything about her?”

Before Jake could reply, Keaton spoke. “Lark,” he said in a soft voice, trying to draw her attention back to him. “We talked about this.”

“But you know him, Keaton. You know he’s going to take Grace and disappear. Just like he always does.”

Yeah, that stung. “I promise, I’m not going to walk off with that baby.”

“Because you keep your promises, right?” Lark shot back at him. The baby was really letting loose now. “I wouldn’t trust you farther than I can throw you.”

Okay, that stung more. Jake nervously eyed the baby—his daughter—and fought the urge to cover his ears. Unfamiliar panic began to build in his chest. “I don’t know where you think I’m going to go with an infant, not when Skye’s doctor insists she needs to stay local. Despite what you assume about me and Skye, I do not disappear. I had a job in Bahrain, but it’s over now. I’m going to take care of my family.”

Keaton and Lark exchanged a look. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the baby. She was small and bald and an interesting shade of red—although he hoped that was from all the screaming and not her natural color. “How old is she?”

“Three months.” Lark began rocking and patting the baby on the back. She wasn’t looking at Jake, but that was okay. At least she was telling him what he needed to know. “She was eleven weeks premature—that’s their best guess. She was in the NICU for two months. And since Skye was still under when Grace was ready to leave the hospital, she was turned over to her next of kin.” She looked at Keaton. The anger she’d directed at Jake was gone from her eyes; now he saw something else there. “That’s us.”

Jake recognized the emotion. Lark looked at Keaton the way Skye used to look at him. It’d been a while, though.

He sat in a nearby recliner and dropped his head into his hands, trying to keep his emotions in check. When had Skye stopped looking at him like that? And why hadn’t he noticed when she did?

“Since she was so early,” Lark went on, “she’s got a bunch of health risks that full-term babies don’t have to worry about. She shouldn’t be outside in this weather and she shouldn’t be around strangers. If she got sick, she could wind up back in the hospital. Or worse. She’s a full-time job right now.”

Jake knew that shaking his head wasn’t going to help a damn thing but he did it anyway. He had jobs waiting now—Bahrain had been very good for him. He couldn’t take an infant with health risks out of the country. Hell, he couldn’t even take Skye to Houston.

Trapped. He was trapped in this town.

“Keaton said he told you about the blood tests,” Lark said into the silence.

“He did.”

“He said you didn’t know about Grace.”

“I thought...” He didn’t know what to do. His entire world—everything he thought he knew—had been turned inside out in the space of about four hours.

He didn’t trust his brother and he didn’t trust the Taylors—with the exception of Skye.

He thought that his brother would never trust a Taylor either. Yet here Jake sat, in Lark Taylor’s house, watching her and Keaton cuddle and soothe a fussy baby. Together.

“What did you think?” For the first time since Jake had walked into this house, he heard the attitude in Keaton’s voice.

He didn’t want to tell them this. But his back was against a wall—a wall covered in four-inch spikes. As much as he hated it, he needed both Lark and Keaton right now. He had a bunch of questions and they had the closest thing to answers.

“Skye and I...” He absolutely could not tell them about the divorce papers. “I had that big job in Bahrain coming up. It was a yearlong contract and she decided she didn’t want to spend that much time in a foreign country. Bahrain may be richer than sin, but it’s not exactly a progressive state.”

All of that was true enough. She hadn’t wanted to go to Bahrain and she hadn’t wanted to stay home alone. She’d wanted him to stay with her. And he’d picked the job over her. That had been the proverbial straw that had broken the camel’s back.

“Is that it?” Keaton said with a snort.

“Yes.” And since Skye might never remember the fight, there was no one to contradict Jake’s lie.

Lark looked victorious, but strangely, it didn’t make her seem any happier. “Were you married? Skye said you were but she didn’t have her ring on and who knows, with that memory of hers.” She looked at Jake’s hand.

Jake spun the plain gold band around his finger. It’d been the only ring they’d been able to afford when they slipped off into the night together four years ago.

“Yes. We got married three days after we left.”

Silence followed this statement. He and Skye had driven to Houston and found a preacher who would marry them. He’d been wearing his old boots and a pair of jeans, but Skye had been in a simple white skirt and a bright blue top. She’d been so beautiful that day...

“So what are you going to do now?” Keaton finally asked. “Because Lark is right. We’re not going to stand aside and let you disappear off into the night with this baby. We’re not going to let you do anything that would put her at risk.”

Jake gritted his teeth. He had no choice but to stay here. He looked at the baby girl. She was still crying—but at least now the decibel level wouldn’t shatter glass. Jake tried to smile at the baby, but the terror the tiny baby—his daughter, for crying out loud!—was sparking in his chest was making breathing difficult.

He’d never held a baby before. He didn’t have the first idea how to do any of the basics—bottles and diapers and everything else. He and Skye had wanted to wait.

That wasn’t true. Skye had wanted a baby from the very beginning. But Jake had looked at the reality of being a young couple barely scraping by and he’d convinced her that they needed to wait until their financial situation was more secure.

That was another thing she’d thrown back in his face during the fight, another ultimatum she’d issued. Have a baby or it’s over.

He’d said after the Bahrain job. He was going to make a fortune in Bahrain. Another year, and they’d be set.

“Skye is going to be released to my care, maybe tomorrow.”

“Are you going to be able to take care of her?”

Jake would have normally taken umbrage at his brother’s attitude, but right now? Yeah, it was a danged good question.

“I don’t know.”

Near silence descended upon the room. “We could keep her,” Lark finally said, looking at the baby.

“What?”

“We could keep Grace—just until Skye gets settled. Keaton and I know her schedule. We know how to take care of her. She shouldn’t be out in this weather, anyway, not until she’s stronger. That way, you can focus on getting Skye back into shape. You can bring Skye over here to visit the baby, but she won’t have to get up in the middle of the night.”

Could he do that? This was his daughter. A daughter he’d only known about for...five hours, but still—his flesh and blood.

He didn’t want to be a monster about this. This wasn’t him abandoning the baby. This was him getting Skye to the point where she could take over, right?

Plus, if he left Grace here, that would prove that he wasn’t going to skip town again. “Would that be okay? I don’t want to impose, but the sooner we can get Skye back to full strength, the better.”

Lark sighed as she looked at Grace. “Keaton and I already have it all worked out and, really, she’s an angel.”

“I’ll need to get a house of my own. The whole point of you keeping the baby here is to give Skye room to recover at her own pace.” To put it less tactfully, he didn’t want to sleep under the same roof as Keaton and Lark—even if they were being really good to Grace.

“You’re actually going to stay?” Keaton sounded doubtful.

Jake let the comment slide. “Skye’s doctors are here and I’m not going to do a damn thing that might set her back. I know you don’t believe this, but I didn’t know about the tornado until this morning. Hell, I don’t even know if Mom and Dad came through all right.” If he’d known...

“Mom and Dad are okay,” Keaton said in a quiet voice. “Some property damage. The ranch house is being rebuilt, but they were in Florida and Alabama, checking out some retirement properties, so they weren’t in the line of the storm. We’ve had them over a few times.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Strangely, he was. He’d spent the last four years pointedly not caring about what his family was doing. They’d wanted him to put the family above Skye. Nothing was more important to him than Skye.

“They adore Grace,” Lark said in a way that made it pretty clear that this absolved most of their sins in her eyes.

“And they’ve come to see that Lark is nothing like her parents,” Keaton went on. “I think they’re realizing that not all Taylors are lying, cheating dogs.”

Bitterness rose up in the back of Jake’s throat. Oh, sure—now his parents were going to open their arms and welcome a Taylor into the family. But not for Jake and Skye when he had needed them to.

“What about your parents?” he asked Lark.

She dropped her eyes. “They’re...okay. Fine.”

“Whit Daltry’s got some houses for rent in Pine Valley,” Keaton said, changing the subject. “I think a couple of them are furnished—not too far from here. I’ll call him.”

“Thanks. That’d be great.” He was not buying a house. He was not staying in Royal long. Just long enough to get Skye back on her feet and figure out where they stood.

Just then, the baby made a little hiccup-sigh noise that pulled at his heartstrings.

Lark shifted Grace off of her shoulder. Keaton picked the baby up so smoothly that Jake was jealous. “Grace, honey—this is your daddy,” Keaton said as he rubbed her on her back. Then, to Jake, he added, “You ready?”

Not really—but Jake wasn’t going to admit that to Keaton. He tried to cradle his arms in the right way. Then Keaton laid the baby out in them.

The world seemed to tilt off its axis as Jake looked down into his daughter’s eyes. They were a pale blue—just like her mother’s. Up close now, he could see that Grace had wispy hairs on her head that were so white and fine they were almost see-through.

She didn’t start bawling, which he took as a good sign. Instead, she waved her tiny hands around, so of course he had to offer her one of his fingers. When she latched on to it, he felt lost and yet not lost at the same time.

He was responsible for this little girl from this moment until the day he drew his last breath. The weight of it hit him so hard that, if he hadn’t already been sitting, his knees would have buckled.

This was his daughter. He and Skye had created this little person.

God, he wished she were here with him. That they could have done this together. That things between them had been different. That he’d been different.

But he couldn’t change the past, not when his present—and his future—was gripping his little finger with surprising strength.

“Hi, Grace,” he whispered. He shook his hand a little, raising her fist with his pinkie finger. “It’s so good to meet you.”

The baby smiled, which made Jake feel ten feet tall. “Hey, she’s smiling at—”

Then a horrible noise—and an even more horrible smell—cut him off.

Keaton began to laugh. The dog whined and put its paws over its nose.

“Sorry,” Lark said, rising quickly. “She’s about due for another bottle, too.”

“Time for your first lesson—diapers,” Keaton said as he clapped Jake on the back. “Welcome to fatherhood.”