Читать книгу Classified Baby - Jessica Andersen - Страница 6

Chapter Two

Ethan’s muscles worked automatically, stabilizing them against the side of the building and cradling Nicole’s unconscious body as the rescue personnel hauled them up, but his brain was jammed full. One part of him cataloged her injuries—she’d taken a hell of a whack to the head—while another, deeper part of him processed her announcement.

The last thing he’d expected—or wanted—to hear was that she was pregnant.

Then again, he’d never actually figured he’d see her again. The morning after their night together, he’d filed the memory in the tiny Pleasant Interludes section of his brain and walked away. Maybe he’d thought of her once or twice in the months since. And maybe he’d stuck his head into Hitchin’s a couple of times since. But a baby? God, no. They’d been careful. He’d used a condom, damn it.

But there was that whole ninety-nine-point-nine- percent-effective thing. Apparently, he’d stepped straight into that point-oh-one of oh, hell.

“We’ve got her,” a male voice said, breaking into Ethan’s thoughts. He was startled to realize they’d reached the place where a bank of broken windows had allowed him to climb down to the elevator. The rescue personnel almost hadn’t let him go, but he was the one with the rock-climbing equipment and the skills, and there hadn’t been time to wait for the real search-and-rescue team.

It was just dumb luck he’d had his gear in the office, dumb luck that’d he’d been able to save Nicole’s life.

Suited firefighters leaned through, reaching to grab her unconscious form and ease her to relative safety indoors.

“Careful,” Ethan said unnecessarily. “She’s—” Pregnant, he thought, but couldn’t say the word. “She banged her head pretty hard.”

It’d happened so fast he hadn’t been able to protect her from slamming into the building. She was breathing fine, but she was still unconscious. What had it been, two minutes? Five? Too long.

Jaw set, he climbed through, shucked off his harness and stowed his gear, then jogged to catch up with the group of paramedics who were carrying Nicole down the stairs, strapped to a backboard.

As the small group emerged into the early-afternoon sunlight, one of the paramedics glanced up at the smoke that continued to pour from the ruined PPS offices. “Looks like the building will hold, thank the Lord.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the others, but Ethan didn’t join in. Instead, he scanned the street, which was a scene of barely controlled chaos. Most of the evacuees and onlookers had been pushed back, away from the damaged office building, but dazed-looking people continued to stream from the stairwells. Nearby, several wickedly jagged cement chunks were embedded in a cracked section of sidewalk, surrounded by the glitter of reflective glass shards. Off to one side, a scattering of first aid supplies ringed a dark stain.

The explosion had taken victims outside the building as well as in, Ethan thought, feeling the acid burn of anger in his gut.

“Ethan!”

He turned at the sound of Robert’s voice, and saw PPS’s founder loping across the deserted street toward him. The men gripped each other’s forearms in greeting, the first friendly contact Ethan could remember between them. “How’s Evangeline?” he asked.

“She’ll need a few stitches, but is fine otherwise. She’s spitting mad. Wants to take a chunk out of the bomber.” The last was said with a touch of pride.

“I’ll ditto that.” Half his attention on the paramedics, who were busy transferring Nicole to a gurney, Ethan gestured to the stained sidewalk. “Pedestrian?”

Robert nodded, expression darkening. “Falling debris caught a mother and her two kids. Doesn’t look good for the little girl.”

“Damn.” Ethan scowled. It had been bad enough when the mastermind had started killing off TCM’s investors one by one. It had been worse when they’d murdered a PPS computer tech and then slapped Evangeline’s name on the list, but at the very least those targets had been logical. Now they’d escalated way beyond that to injuring innocent bystanders… like the mother and her children. Like Nicole, who’d come to tell him he was a father.

Ethan glanced over at her, seeing the beauty beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

Her face had popped into his head more often than he cared to admit in the weeks since he’d met her.

That night, a friend’s wedding—and the memories it’d brought—had chased him out of the reception and into a tourist-trap bar. He hadn’t noticed her at first, hadn’t had eyes for much other than the glass in front of him. He would’ve had to have been dead, though, to miss noticing when she leaned across him to snag a napkin, pressing against him just long enough to let him know she was looking to play.

He’d been struck first by her dark curls, then by her eyes, which were a strangely intense shade of blue, bordering on violet. Rimmed by dark lashes, they’d looked moments away from laughter all the time, even when she’d been serious. During those serious moments, she’d caught her full lower lip between her teeth, an action that’d left him hard and wanting.

Then later, once the small talk was done and they were alone in the hotel room they’d rented because neither of them had been sober enough to drive home, she’d caught her bottom lip in her teeth again at the moment of her climax, prompting him to capture that lower lip with his own mouth and nibble it into submission.

Afterward, she’d looked at him with a hint of wonder in those violet eyes, a hint of shyness. All an act, he’d thought at first, designed to keep a bar conquest intrigued. But during the long hours of the night, small inconsistencies had added up in his carefully logical brain, leaving him wondering whether that night had been as out of character for her as it had been for him.

He’d resigned himself to never knowing for sure. Now, it seemed he’d been given a second chance to find out.

“Did you hear me?” Robert said, tone sharp.

“Sorry,” Ethan said without looking at his boss. “How about I meet you and Evangeline at the hospital?”

“You need a ride?”

“I’m all set.” He strode toward the ambulance they’d loaded Nicole into, only to stop and turn back when Robert called his name. “What?” he said, voice edgy with impatience and something more, something he didn’t want to analyze too closely.

Robert looked from Ethan to the ambulance and back. “Who is she?”

“She’s—” Ethan broke off, not sure what she was. She wasn’t a friend, wasn’t his lover, yet she’d come to tell him she was carrying his child. “She’s not a client,” he said shortly, and headed for the ambulance.

They’d figure out the rest once she woke up.

TERRIFIED, Nicole screamed and batted at the blurry shadows around her, fighting the feeling of weightlessness, of falling.

Then she was on the ground without hitting bottom, and something was pressing her down, trapping her arms and legs. She screamed again and fought the hold. “Let me go!”

A man’s voice said, “Nicole, you’re okay. You’re safe. Calm down and listen to me. You’re in the hospital, not the elevator. You’re okay.” The words were more rough than soothing, but they calmed her while sending up a strange shimmy inside.

She woke further, feeling warmth where his hands gripped her forearms. The voice and touch were familiar, but she couldn’t think of his name, couldn’t picture his face, and that brought a spurt of renewed panic, which took up residence alongside a pounding headache.

Opening her eyes, she squinted into the night-dim lights of a hospital room and saw a tall man wearing wrinkled khaki bush pants and a smudged white button-down missing a couple of buttons. His dark brown hair brushed over his forehead, streaked with highlights she imagined might be gold in better light. His eyes were dark brown and intelligent beneath heavy brows, his nose aquiline, his jaw chiseled. The whole effect was compelling and more than a little distant.

And it was a stranger’s face.

“Why am I in the hospital?” she demanded. “Who are you?”

Before he could answer, the hallway door swung open and a white-coated, dark-haired female doctor entered. Her expression softened when she looked at the bed. “It’s good to see you awake, Miss Benedict.”

Panic pounded through Nic as she pointed to the man. “I don’t know him.”

The doctor pursed her lips, leaned down and flashed a penlight in Nic’s eyes. “Follow this.” She kept up a background monologue as she ran through a quick exam. “I’m Dr. Eballa—that’s with an a and two l’s, please, not Ebola like the virus.” She paused and wrote something on a clipboard, then said, “Your vitals are good and everything checks out normal, but you’ve got a good-sized knot on the back of your head and you were out for quite a while.” She straightened away from the bed. “What’s your full name and what are your parents’ names?”

“Nicole Antoinette Benedict,” Nic said immediately. “My parents are Lyle and Mary Benedict. They live back in Maryland where I grew up.” The easy answers calmed some of the panic and she shifted and lifted a hand to the back of her head, wincing when she found a tender, raised bump the size of her palm. “What happened?”

“What is the last thing you remember?”

“I—” Nicole broke off, her stomach twisting when she realized that while she remembered lots of things, they weren’t in any sort of order. She could picture a greenhouse full of plants, but she wasn’t sure if it was a memory from last week or last year. Panic spiked through the pounding headache, and her voice trembled when she said, “I don’t know.”

The doctor touched her wrist, maybe in reassurance, maybe a quick check on her pulse. “That’s not uncommon after a concussion such as yours. Things should start to clear up over the next few hours or days, though you may never remember the actual attack.”

Nic’s blood iced in her veins. “I was attacked?”

“Not you personally,” the man said. “You were in an elevator when the building was bombed.”

“Bombed!” Something shivered just out of Nic’s mental reach, a flash of sunlight on a dark shape, there and then gone so quickly she wasn’t sure it had ever been. She closed her eyes for a second, scared and frustrated at the same time. “I don’t remember.” She glanced at him. “And I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. Are we…” She trailed off, not sure what she meant to ask.

As she fumbled, Dr. Eballa stepped away from the bed and adjusted the lights higher. The man turned and scowled in the doctor’s direction.

Instantly, his image was overlain by another in her mind’s eye. It was the same face but a different setting—a bar, crowded, noisy and dark. He’d turned and scowled at her, but his brown eyes had warmed with reluctant interest when she’d said something clever—she didn’t remember what it had been, but no matter. She remembered him stretching out a hand, remembered the warmth and the faint electric buzz when they shook and he’d said, “I’m—”

“Ethan!” she said aloud in the hospital room, making him jump.

A flash of relief glinted in his eyes, tainted with something more complicated. “You remember.”

“I remember meeting you in a bar, and…” She trailed off as other memories reconnected. The bar hookup. The hotel room. Hot sex. A plus sign on the home pregnancy test when she’d been praying for a minus. “Oh,” she said, then more forcefully, “Oh! Oh, no. I have to talk to you. In private.”

He turned away, as though he didn’t want her to read his eyes when he said, “You already told me about the baby.”

“Oh.” She swallowed hard and tried to fight through the headache and a growing swell of nausea. “I don’t remember that.” What did I say? she wanted to ask. What did you say?

“What is the last thing you do remember?” he demanded, and she had a feeling there was more to the question than him judging the extent of her partial amnesia.

“I remember getting up this morning.” She glanced at him. “Is it Tuesday?” When he nodded, she felt a small measure of relief. “Then I remember getting up this morning. I read the paper and made a few calls for a project I’m working on.” Pitifully unsuccessful calls, she remembered. “Then I drove into the city to see you. I can picture myself parking somewhere and walking into a big building, but I’m not sure if that’s a memory or a logical guess.”

“You don’t remember being in a glass-walled elevator?” he persisted.

She shook her head, then winced and pressed her fingers to her temples when the headache spiked.

“You’re hurting.” He stepped away from the bed. “I’ll come back later.”

“No.” The terror had subsided somewhat with the piecemeal return of her memory. In its place was a sense of urgency. Despite what had happened at the office building, she’d set out that morning with a purpose. Now, she looked at Dr. Eballa and saw compassion in the other woman’s eyes. “Can we have a few minutes alone?”

The doctor hesitated a beat, then nodded. “You’re lucid, and it’s not unexpected for you to have blocked out the actual trauma. You may never remember that chunk of time, but everything else seems okay. I’ll take a walk. When you and Mr. Moore are finished, I’ll come back and run a few more tests, just to be on the safe side.”

When she was gone, Nic stared at her legs beneath the pale blue hospital blanket. “In case you were wondering, there’s no chance the baby could be anyone else’s.”

He nodded, though she didn’t know if that meant he believed her, or if that was what he’d expected her to say. Which just underscored how much she didn’t know about the father of her unborn child. She’d picked him up in a bar, for heaven’s sake, and though she’d like to think she wouldn’t have been attracted to a jerk, her track record said otherwise.

“Do you…” She faltered, but pushed through the awkwardness with a faint thread of optimism. “What do you think about being a father?”

“Being a sperm donor doesn’t make a man a father,” he said, voice nearly inflectionless, but he paced the length of the room, body language giving voice to the upset within.

When he stopped at the window and worked the mechanism to open the blinds and look out at the night, she thought she saw something sad in the reflection of his eyes, something that defused her quick anger and left the hurt behind.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “It’s not about you, or about what we did. It’s…” He turned toward her and spread his hands away from his long, lean body. “Let’s just say the world is better off if I’m in it by myself.”

A flare of disappointment warned Nic that no matter how many times she’d told herself not to think foolish thoughts, some piece of her had been hoping for the happy nuclear family she’d always dreamed of. But she forced her voice level when she said, “I didn’t come looking for a marriage proposal. Lucky for us, society has evolved past shotgun weddings.”

Though she had a feeling her professor father’s reaction wouldn’t be particularly evolved when he found out his first—and possibly only—grandchild would be born outside of wedlock.

Ethan repeated, “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I wish…” She trailed off, not sure what exactly she wished. If she hadn’t gone into Hitchin’s that night, damned caution and hiked up onto a bar stool beside the hottest guy in the joint, she would’ve missed out on some pretty fabulous sex. And yes, she would’ve missed out on the life growing inside her. An unplanned life, perhaps, but one she already cherished.

“I’m okay with it, really,” she said, not sure whether she was saying it for his benefit or her own. “I’ve always planned on having kids. Even thought I’d found the right guy once.”

“Jonah,” he said, surprising her.

She nodded, remembering that she’d mentioned her ex in passing during their brief bar flirtation. “Good memory. But that—obviously—didn’t work out.”

Ethan looked over his shoulder at her. “Was that why you were at Hitchin’s that night? Because of him?”

“No,” she said quickly, then stopped herself and went with the truth. “Or, not really. It was my thirty-fourth birthday that day. I had all these plans with my friends from the school.” She glanced at him. “Did I tell you I’m a teacher?” When he shook his head, she said, “Science. Donner High School. Anyway, we were supposed to have a girls’ day out—a few hours at the spa, a movie, that sort of thing. Simple fun. But I got up that morning, looked in the mirror, and all I saw was someone I never expected to be. Thirty-four, unmarried, no kids.”

She shook her head. “That much I could’ve dealt with. I’d been dealing just fine. But then I checked my messages and found out that Toulouse Inc. was backing out of funding this biofuel project I’ve been working on with some of my students. We’ve built this great greenhouse.” She sketched the building with her hands. “Corn. Wheat. Soybeans. Easily renewable resources. And we’ve got a converter we designed…” She trailed off, aware that he was staring. “And I’m babbling. You don’t care about any of this. Sorry.”

Jonah had always hated when she’d interjected her “little project” into dinner-party conversation, even though it had been his idea that she leave grad school for the more family-friendly schedule of teaching high school. The way she figured it, if Jonah hadn’t cared about the biofuel project, then Ethan certainly wouldn’t.

“Sorry,” she said again when he just stared at her. She felt a hot flush climb her cheeks. “That’s not what you’re here to talk about, is it? You want to settle things, make sure I’m okay. Well, I am.” She took a deep breath to quell the taint of nausea at the back of her throat. “I didn’t go looking for you because I wanted a proposal, or money or anything like that. I’m fully prepared to have this baby and raise it on my own. Heck, I’m looking forward to it. If I’m lucky, I’ll meet a man and fall in love with him, and the three of us can make a family, make more babies, have the white picket fence, the Labrador and the whole nine yards.” She paused, then continued, “But that doesn’t change the fact that this baby is half yours, so I needed to tell you about him or her. What you do with the information is pretty much up to you.”

She was babbling again, she realized. Or maybe she was speaking normally and it just felt like babbling because Ethan was so reserved, so remote.

Still standing by the window, silhouetted against the darkness, he inclined his head in a brief nod. “Thanks for telling me. And I’m sorry you got caught up in what happened back at PPS. I just need… I need to take a walk.” He glanced from her to the door and back. “Don’t go anywhere until I get back.”

“Where am I going to go?” she said, but he was already gone, the door swinging shut at his back, leaving her alone in silence broken by the faint hum of fluorescent lights and ventilation, the sense of movement and activity just beyond the door.

Nic sat for a second, not sure how she felt other than sore everywhere, and unbelievably tired.

Well, that was over. She wasn’t sure if she was more relieved or disappointed. She felt hollow, drained of just about everything. Her headache had even subsided, leaving her vaguely restless.

She glanced down, making sure she wasn’t hooked to any machines before she sat up in the hospital bed. When that earned her only a long, lazy spin of the room and a thump of the headache, she decided to try using the bathroom. If she could make it there and back under her own steam, she was doing okay. Maybe even okay enough to go home.

Suddenly, she couldn’t think of anything more appealing than her four-room apartment with the soft Navajo blanket on the bed.

“Bathroom first,” she said aloud. Suiting action to word, she threw back the blankets and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet were numb and her whole body felt disconnected, as though her head was floating along under its own power as she made it across the room, nearly to the bathroom door.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw a dark shadow through the window of the hallway door. The shadow paused, then pushed through.

Nic turned, expecting a lecture from Dr. Eballa. “I was just—” She broke off because it wasn’t her doctor. It was an unshaven, heavyset man wearing a white lab coat over a T-shirt, jeans and heavy boots.

He grabbed her before she could react, and covered her mouth with his hand.

Panic spurted as Nic screamed against his palm. She struggled, kicking him with her bare feet and scratching at him with her fingernails. He didn’t react, just held on as she felt a prick in her upper arm, then a fiery sizzle in her veins that quickly faded to cool numbness.

Aware of her surroundings but unable to stay upright, she slumped to the floor and hit hard. He pushed through the door for a moment, then returned, pulling a gurney behind him. He grabbed her around the waist, heaved her up onto the gurney and covered her most of the way with the blanket from her bed.

Then he wheeled her out of the room.