Читать книгу Father On The Brink - Elizabeth Bevarly - Страница 8

It was a blizzard of unprecedented proportions, even by northeastern standards. Cooper Dugan tried his damnedest to squint through the splashes of white that pelted his windshield, pressed his foot against the clutch and down-shifted into first. The cold March wind whipped easily through the plastic doors and windows of the four-wheel drive Jeep, chilling even more thoroughly his already frozen nose, seeping through his leather gloves to numb his fingers to the bone.

He fumbled for the thermos of coffee he’d been clutching between his knees for most of the ride and unscrewed the lid, then sipped carefully from the lip without bothering with the plastic cup. The liquid was hotter than he’d expected it to be, and he burned his tongue, dribbling a good portion of the dark brown brew down his chin and throat, under his wool muffler and into the neck of the sweatshirt he wore beneath his leather college baseball jacket. Uttering a vicious and colorful oath, he scrubbed a hand over the bottom half of his face and growled low.

“Hell of a way to spend a Saturday night,” he muttered to no one in particular.

He was supposed to have been off this weekend, he reminded himself mercilessly. He was supposed to have been out on a date, at this very minute, with that new nurse in cardiology—the big brunette with the heart-shaped fanny, and breasts that just begged a man to cushion his head upon them and rest for a while. He was supposed to be enjoying himself a little bit after having worked eighteen days straight without a break. Instead, he was playing Good Samaritan to the City of Brotherly Love, responding to a cry for help from the mayor, who wasn’t even paying Cooper for his time.

Hey, it wasn’t his fault the weather guys had overlooked and underestimated what had become the biggest and most crippling snowfall in Pennsylvania’s history, was it? It wasn’t his fault they’d all said, “No, don’t worry, it’s going to go way north of us.” It wasn’t his fault the snowplows hadn’t even had a chance to make it out of the city garage. And it wasn’t his fault—or his problem, for that matter—that a bunch of local citizens were having trouble getting the medical attention they required on a day-to-day basis.

Hey, he didn’t even live in Philadelphia. He was a Jersey boy, born and bred, the Pennsauken apartment he lived in now virtually a stone’s throw away from the house where he’d spent his childhood.

So what the hell was he doing out here freezing his butt off, battling a temperamental Jeep to keep it on the road, eating stale Twinkies, and spilling coffee down his shirt?

“No rest for the wicked, I guess,” he complained to himself. “Or for paramedics, either.”

He jotted down a mental note to himself: Hey, Coop, next time something like this happens, and the city across the Delaware River gets buried under snow, and some public official makes a public appeal to any citizen possessing a four-wheel drive vehicle and even the most rudimentary first-aid skills…the next time something like this happens, be in Barbados, okay?

“Cooper, honey, you still out there?”

The crackly voice buzzed over the radio he’d tossed onto the passenger seat earlier that evening, and, reluctant to take his eyes off of the road—what little he could see of it— Cooper groped around for a minute before finally finding it.

“Yeah, Patsy, I’m still with you,” he replied after squeezing the Talk button.

“Where you at?”

Cooper chuckled and tried to see some kind of vague landmark through the snow. Finally, he lifted the radio to his mouth again and said, “I have no idea.”

“Well, give me a rough estimate.”

Cooper sighed, slowed the Jeep to a crawl and noted a row of orangey-looking town houses edging the tree-lined street. “I think I’m in Chestnut Hill,” he told Patsy. “Looks like Chestnut Hill anyway, and that’s the way I was headed. Sorta. There are trees. Where else in downtown Philly am I going to see trees?”

He heard the dispatcher expel a sound of relief. “Sounds like Chestnut Hill to me. Okay, that’s great, Cooper. I’ve got another run for you.” A pause, then, “I can’t read Don’s handwriting very well, but it looks like you’ve got a kidney patient—a sixty-seven-year-old male—who couldn’t make dialysis this afternoon. You better get over there right quick.”

“Quick,” he mumbled to himself. “Yeah, right.”

He knew the dispatcher, like everyone else scrambling to work through this situation, had been pressed into duty when she had other things to do—like keeping herself and her family warm and safe. But Cooper’s patience was shrinking as his tension and need for sleep increased.

Already today, he’d ferried a four-year-old with a broken ankle to the hospital, cringing at the little guy’s pain-filled howling all the way. He’d resuscitated a major coronary after the eighty-year-old woman had tried to keep ahead of the snow in shoveling her driveway. He’d run a batch of prescriptions from a local pharmacy to four very needy people in utterly opposite corners of town. He’d even rushed a golden retriever to a veterinarian.

Organization at the dispatch source, it seemed, was the biggest casualty of the blizzard so far.

He pressed the Talk button again. “Patsy,” he began as patiently as he could. “‘Right quick’ isn’t an option at the moment. At this point, with the snow coming down like it is, I’ll be lucky if I can get to the old guy by daybreak tomorrow.”

“Just get there,” she snapped back, obviously stretched as thin as Cooper was. She rattled off an address that he hoped like hell he would remember, because there was no way he was taking his hand off the steering wheel long enough to write anything down.

It took him nearly half an hour to reach the street that wound up being only a block from what had been his location when Patsy had assigned him the duty. After his sixth pass up the block in question, Cooper finally found the town house he was looking for. At least, he thought it was the one he was looking for. He parked in the middle of the street, unconcerned that anyone was going to hit or strip the vehicle. After all, only idiots like him were out on a night like this, right?

Automatically, he reached behind the passenger seat for the well-stocked first-aid kit he always carried with him. Then he pushed the Jeep door open, pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, tucked his body in as well as he could against the wind and snow, and jogged toward the house.

* * *

Katherine Winslow had been packing for a very long trip to Anywhere-But-Here when her water had broken. She’d gasped when she’d felt the warm rush of fluid slide down her legs and soak the pants of her maternity overalls, then had stared down at the clear liquid pooling around her feet with much dismay. It had been a troubling development, to say the least, coming as it did three weeks before her due date, in the middle of the worst blizzard in Pennsylvania history, and right on the heels of her discovery that her husband wasn’t who he claimed to be—including her husband.

There was nothing like having a man’s wife show up at your front door to tell you that you weren’t. The man’s wife, that is.

Now as Katherine lay curled up in a ball in the middle of the king-size bed she’d been sharing with a stranger for months, clutching her abdomen as spasms of pain rocked her, she had no idea what to do.

William would know, she thought. If he’d been home, instead of traveling on business—or, at least, on what he had told her was business—William would know exactly what to do. He’d be taking good care of her. Just as he’d been taking good care of her since the day she’d met him. Just like a husband was supposed to do for his wife.

Except that William wasn’t her husband, Katherine reminded herself, squeezing her eyes shut as another cramp rippled over her belly. He’d somehow neglected to mention that he was already married when he’d walked her down the aisle at Reverend Ryan’s Chapel O’Love in Las Vegas nearly a year ago.

One thing he was, though, was the father of her baby. A baby who, if Katherine had her way, would never, ever, meet up with the man who’d sired him. Unfortunately, it looked like William had other ideas.

But right now, that was the least of her problems. She’d been in labor for hours and was completely unprepared for whatever lay ahead. William had discouraged her from taking prenatal classes, telling her she’d have the best doctors and nurses attending her when her time came, and they’d be the ones who needed to know what to do, not her. And although she had done some reading, right now she could remember nothing of what the books had instructed her to do.

She should probably call someone, she thought, glancing toward the telephone that sat on the nightstand near her head. But what few friends she had in Philadelphia had been William’s before they’d been hers. So word of his son’s imminent birth would get back to him, wherever he was, and then the man who wasn’t her husband would come rushing to be by her side. Which was the last place she wanted to find him. Another pain sliced through her midsection, and she cried out, wondering what could possibly make this situation worse than it already was.

As if playing a very bad joke, the lights flickered above her, then went out completely.

Katherine rolled to her other side and wished she would wake up from what was becoming a truly terrible nightmare. Even in darkness, the beauty that surrounded her seemed to scoff at her. William had furnished their Chestnut Hill town house with the finest antiques and Oriental carpets money could buy. She had always been so grateful that her child would be born into wealth, that the tiny baby growing inside her would never have to know the hardship and poverty she had known growing up.

But there were many kinds of poverty, she now understood. And William suffered from the basest kind Emotional poverty. Moral poverty. Poverty of the soul.

He wasn’t her husband, she reminded herself again. Which was good, now that she thought about it. Because that would give her a little more leverage when he came to take her son away from her.

She cried out as a new kind of pain shook her, and for the first time, she became afraid—really afraid. Afraid that something was going to go wrong with the baby, afraid of being alone for the rest of her life, afraid that no matter how hard she tried, she’d already ruined things irreparably.

She splayed her hands open over her belly, the closest thing she could manage to an embrace of her unborn son. “I’m sorry,” she whispered as tears stung her eyes. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so, so sorry.”

Cooper pounded the door with his closed fist for the third time, cursing Patsy with every other breath for giving him the wrong address. He punched the doorbell over and over and over, listening in helpless frustration. He was lifting his hand for one final knock when the radio in his pocket buzzed and crackled, and Patsy’s voice came over the line.

“Cooper?”

He withdrew the two-way with a snarl and lifted it to his lips. “Yeah?”

“Um, sorry, hon, but I think I sent you on a wild goose chase.”

He let every four-letter word he knew—and some more that he made up on the spot—parade across the front of his brain before he responded quietly, “What?”

“Uh, yeah. That dialysis note was from this afternoon. The guy’s been in and is safely back home now. I’m sorry. You don’t need to be where you are.”

Cooper was about to agree with her, was about to tell Patsy that where he actually needed to be was lying in the arms of a willing woman who cradled a big snifter of very expensive, very warm, brandy beneath his lips, when he heard an almost unearthly feminine scream erupt on the other side of the door he’d been about to pound off its hinges.

Immediately, he dropped his hand to the knob and twisted hard. But it wouldn’t budge. Another scream raged at him from inside, and without thinking, Cooper lifted his metal first-aid kit and brought it crashing down on the knob. Over and over again, he repeated the action, until he’d bashed what had been an elegant collection of brass curlicues and engravings into a twisted metal mess. Finally, the entire fixture failed, and he shoved his shoulder against the door, hard.

Inside, the house was dark. Only the reflection of a street lamp on the other side of the street colliding with the quickly falling snow prevented the foyer from being completely black. He heard someone gasping for breath somewhere beyond his vision, and assumed it to be the woman who had screamed. Cautiously, he took a few steps forward.

“Hello?” he called out. “Who’s there? Are you all right?”

His only reply was a stifled, disembodied groan.

“Hel-looo?” he tried again. “It’s okay. Don’t be scared. I’m a paramedic. I can help you.”

At first, he thought the woman had stopped breathing, so silent did the room become. His heartbeat quickened, rushing blood to warm the parts of his body he’d begun to fear had frozen. He pushed the hood of his sweatshirt back off his head, then raked his fingers through his snow-dampened, overly long, pale blond hair. He held his own breath, waiting for something, some indication that he wasn’t too late to remedy whatever had gone wrong in this house.

Finally, a tiny, feminine voice called from the other side of the room, “H-h-help me?”

Cooper took a few more strides in the direction from which the question had come. “Yeah, I can help you. Just tell me where you are.”

“H-help. Please.”

He opened his first-aid kit and pulled out a flashlight, switching it on to throw a wide ray of white light all around the room. The hazy halo finally settled on a woman in the corner. A woman whose dark hair was soaking wet with perspiration in spite of the chill in the house, and whose huge, gray eyes were terrified. A woman who was clutching a belly distended in the very late stages of pregnancy.

“Oh, no,” Cooper muttered. “No, no, no. Not this. Anything but this.”

The woman lifted her hand to him. “Help,” she whispered, her voice sounding thin and weak and exhausted. “Please…my baby. Help my baby.”

He threw his head back to stare into the darkness above him. Great. This was just great. Of all the damned, stupid, crazy luck, he had to wind up with a home birth. Because there was no way he was going to try to get this lady to the hospital. The only thing worse than a home delivery was a back seat of a Jeep in a blizzard delivery.

He sighed his resignation to the situation, set his flashlight and first-aid kit on a nearby coffee table and looked at the woman in the corner again.

“Are you here all alone?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Husband’s…out of town.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face, a singularly troubled gesture. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to get you to the hospital in time. Looks like we’re going to have to deliver that baby right here. Is that okay with you?”

She nodded weakly, but said nothing.

Cooper felt the chill winter wind sweep past him from behind and went back to close the front door. He spied a fireplace upon his return, noting gratefully that it was already laid for a fire and needed only the flick of a match to provide some much needed warmth. There was a box of matches on the mantel, settled amid a half dozen framed photographs of the woman who was crumpled into a ball in the corner of the room. He ignored the pictures, scratched a couple of matches on the side of the box and tossed them into the kindling. Within moments, the flames began to flicker upward into the wood, bathing the room in a faint yellow glow, warming his face and hands.

He turned back to the woman. “Okay. That’ll get us started. We’ll have to deliver the baby down here, since I assume there’s no heat anywhere else in the house. We’re going to need some clean sheets, some water…I think I have everything else we’ll need in my kit. So, where do you keep all that stuff, and where can I wash up?”

Katherine stared back at the huge apparition that had come out of nowhere, feeling anything but relieved. In the weak ray of the flashlight, with the scant flicker of flames in the fireplace illuminating him with an odd play of light and shadow, the only impression she had of him was that he was big, broad and blond. His voice, nch and masculine and anything but comforting, told her he was none too thrilled to be acting as midwife. But he’d said he was a paramedic. That meant he had to know something about childbirth, right? Certainly more than she knew herself.

The pain in her midsection seemed to have abated some after pelting her repeatedly with one severe spasm after another, and she took advantage of the opportunity to inhale a few deep, calming breaths. When she trusted her voice to remain steady, she gave the man the information he’d requested, then pointed toward the kitchen and told him he could wash up in there. Immediately, he disappeared into the direction she’d indicated, and Katherine slumped back against the wall. She had changed into a nightgown after her water had broken, but the fluid continued to leak from her in a steady flow. Now the white cotton fabric was cold and damp She wanted to be near the fire.

She was struggling to stand when the man returned and saw her intentions, so he helped her to her feet and led her to the sofa. Again she was struck by his size and solidity. She told herself if she were smart, she’d be afraid of him. But Katherine had never been any too intelligent where men were concerned, as evidenced by her current predicament. And for some reason, in spite of his size and demeanor and the fact that he was a complete stranger, this man didn’t frighten her at all.

“Where did you come from?” she managed to ask him as he settled her on the sofa. “How did you know I was here?” She couldn’t quite stop herself from asking further, “Did…did William send you?”

The man had turned his back to her and was busying himself with what looked like a very substantial first-aid kit. “Who’s William?” he asked, though his mind didn’t seem to be on the question.

“My…my husband. Did he…are you here because of him?”

The man shook his head, but still seemed to be preoccupied with making the proper preparations for bringing her son into the world. “Nope,” he said. “It’s just sheer, dumb luck that linked us up, lady. Sheer, dumb luck.”

She was about to ask him to elaborate on that, but a faint pain rippled up inside her again, and she squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her teeth together in an effort to ease the ache a bit.

“How long has the power been out?” the man asked her when he spun back around to look at her.

She dropped her hand to her belly, rubbing at another, less intense, contraction. “I don’t know. It was still daylight when my water broke—about four, four-thirty maybe. What time is it now?”

The man turned his wristwatch toward the dim glow of the flashlight. “Just past nine. You’ve been in labor for five hours?”

Katherine thought for a moment. The pains hadn’t really started until some time after her water broke, but for the life of her, she couldn’t quite remember now how long. “I don’t know,” she said again.

The man dropped to his haunches before her, bringing his face level with hers. She was able to tell a little bit more about him when he was up close this way, the growing light from the fire illuminating one side of his face, but not much more. At least one good cheekbone, she noted. And at least one vivid green eye. And a pair of lips, one half of which anyway, that were full and beautiful and still managed to be very, very masculine.

He started to extend his hand toward hers, then seemed to think better of it, and wove his fingers together on one knee. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

She opened her mouth to tell him the truth, then realized the truth was in fact a lie. She wasn’t Katherine Winslow. There was no Katherine Winslow. William had made her that with his farce of a wedding. Without him, she had no idea who she would be now. So she told the man, “I’m Katie Brennan.” It was what she had been called in her other life, a million years ago. And it seemed to suit her now.

“Katie Brennan,” the man repeated.

He smiled, and for the first time in what seemed a very long time, Katie felt a warming sense of relief seep into her. This time when he reached out for her, he carried through, taking her hand in his.

“Nice to meet you, Katie,” he said. “I’m Cooper. Cooper Dugan. And, like I said, I’m a paramedic. But I’ll be honest with you. I’ve never delivered a baby before. I mean, I know what to do—pretty much—but I’ve never actually…” His voice trailed off when he seemed to detect her growing sense of misgiving. “Is this your first?” he asked quietly.

She nodded, her sudden conviction about feeling safe faltering a little with his announcement.

He nodded back. “Then I guess we have something in common.”

She was about to say something else when the pains flared up again, bursting out of nowhere with even more intensity than before. Katie cried out, crushing with what she was sure was bruising strength the hand that Cooper Dugan had offered her in comfort.

It was going to be a long night.

She didn’t realize she had spoken her thought aloud until Cooper nodded in agreement and said, “Yeah, it sure is.”

She watched as he reached behind himself for his jacket, plucked a two-way radio from one pocket, and spoke into it. “Patsy,” he said with a sigh, “this is Coop. Better take me off the dispatch list. I’m going to be, um, indisposed for a little while.”