Hawk's Way: Callen & Zach (16 page)

“I’ll go start breakfast,” he said at last, conceding defeat.

She crossed to him and slid her arms around his neck and raised herself on tiptoe to find his mouth. Her lips were soft and pliant and tasted like nectar.

“What was that for?” he murmured against her lips.

“Just because.”

He read the understanding and approval in her eyes and felt…uncomfortable. He didn’t want her feelings about him to matter. Pretty soon he would be doing things just to please her. That sort of behavior led a man down the garden path to danger…to disaster…to love.

“I’ll join you in the kitchen in a few minutes, all right?” she said.

“Sure.”

Once Zach was gone, Rebecca heaved a huge sigh of…relief…despair…she wasn’t sure what.

He had actually done it. He had taken the picture of Cynthia off his dresser and put it away. So why didn’t she feel more hopeful about their future together?

It was the desperation she had seen in him, in his lovemaking, that had left her feeling so disconcerted. He must have loved Cynthia even more than she had thought to be so distraught at giving up the chance to look at her picture every day. If he still loved another woman that much seven years after her death, maybe he really wasn’t ever going to get over her. Maybe she had been a fool to marry him.

But she couldn’t give up now. They had the whole summer ahead of them to work and play together. She was willing to bet that a flesh-and-blood woman could beat the pants off a ghost any day of the week when it came to loving a man.

He’s mine now, Cynthia. Let him go.

Rebecca shuddered as a draft of cold air wafted across her face. She stopped and stood still as an eerie feeling rolled through her. She looked up and saw she was standing directly under an air-conditioning vent. That had to be the source of the draft. What a silly widgeon she was to imagine Cynthia haunting Zach’s bedroom.

She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the other woman was still around. Maybe it had been that picture sitting there all these months. Maybe now she could relax and forget about Cynthia Kenyon.

There’s no need for you to hang around here any longer, Cynthia. Zach belongs to me now.

The vertical blinds on the sliding glass door rippled.

Rebecca looked up at the air-conditioning vent and gauged the distance to the blinds. She pursed her lips and shook her head.

Naw. She didn’t believe in ghosts.

She glanced back one more time at the bare spot on the dresser where Cynthia’s picture had stood.

“It’s a start, Zach. It’s a darn good start.”

“I’
M SO GLAD YOU’RE HOME
, Z
ACH
,” Rebecca said. “Sam called, and your sister is in labor.”

Rebecca watched the quick grin come and go from her husband’s face. He was obviously happy for Callen and Sam, but also reminded by the imminent birth of the Longstreets’ third child that after six months of marriage his own wife remained barren.

“I’m sorry, Zach.”

“For what?”

“You know what.”

“These things take time.”

“Half of mine is gone.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” Zach yanked off his Stetson and shoved a hand through sweat-damp hair. “How is that new wrangler working out?”

Rebecca saw how neatly Zach had changed the subject and conceded that perhaps it was better not to discuss what couldn’t be changed with words.

“Campbell is wonderful. He doesn’t pretend the kids aren’t sick, and he’s careful to keep an eye out for any problems they might have.”

Campbell was a recovering alcoholic who hadn’t been able to find a job anywhere in the county to support his wife and six kids. No one trusted him, including Zach,
because he had fallen off the wagon so many times. Rebecca hadn’t been able to resist his request for a job.

“He’s sober now, Zach,” she had argued. “And when I think of all those hungry children…”

Zach had known he wasn’t going to win the debate, but he resisted giving in right away because he liked the methods Rebecca used to cajole him. It had been a pleasure at last to cave in to her entreaties for this latest lost soul.

“All right,” he conceded. “Campbell gets one chance. I see him drunk and he’s gone.”

So far, Campbell had stayed as sober as a Baptist preacher in a dry county.

“At least that’s working out,” Zach said.

“Yes.” Even if their marriage wasn’t.

Zach had kept his promise to work with the children, but he hadn’t let any of them get close again, not like Pete. He was courteous and helpful, a regular Boy Scout. But he dealt with the possibility of pain by closing himself off from feeling anything. It wasn’t the result she had hoped for when she had blackmailed him into working with her the rest of the summer. One more week, and Camp LittleHawk would be done for the season. She didn’t hold out much hope that Zach was going to change in the next seven days.

To make matters worse, she had failed to become pregnant. In most marriages, it would be ludicrous to worry that she wasn’t pregnant six months after the wedding. With the one-year deadline Zach had set, she was conscious that time was running out.

“I think I have to see a doctor, Zach. At least to give us both some peace of mind.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Rebecca shook her head. “We know the problem isn’t with you. After all, Cynthia was… You can certainly father a child,” she finished quickly. “There might be something wrong with me. Something that never showed up during my regular checkups.”

Zach closed his eyes. How could he admit to Rebecca that the problem might very well be with him? How could he explain that the child Cynthia carried might not have been his? There was no sense putting her through a bunch of tests if he was the one at fault. But maybe the problem was hers. Maybe it was better to let her be tested first, to make sure of her fertility before he questioned his own.

“All right,” he said at last.

He watched Rebecca’s shoulders sag as she conceded the necessity for tests. His stomach rolled. He couldn’t make her go through that sort of thing by herself. Not when the problem might be his.

“We’ll both go,” he said.

“What?”

“I said we’ll both go.”

“But you—”

“Cynthia said the child was mine. There’s some question whether it actually was.”

She stared at him, her eyes filled with shocked disbelief. “How…”

“The day she died, I caught her in bed with another man.”

“But…”

“So we’ll both go see the doctor.”

Rebecca didn’t dare ask the thousand and one questions buzzing around inside her head. The look on Zach’s face precluded questions.

“Maybe we’ll have a chance to talk to a doctor while we’re at the hospital waiting for Callen to deliver,” Zach said.

“All right.”

Rebecca couldn’t quit staring at Zach during the drive to the hospital. He had fooled everybody! His parents, Cynthia’s parents, his siblings, even she had believed he had been mourning Cynthia’s death all these years. But would a man mourn the death of a woman who had been unfaithful to him? Would he mourn the death of a woman carrying a child he wasn’t even sure was his?

If he hadn’t loved Cynthia, what was it that had alienated him from love all these years?

Rebecca worried her lower lip with her teeth as she reasoned it out. He must have been hurt, humiliated even, by his fiancée’s infidelity. No man would be likely to confess the truth.

So why had he kept Cynthia’s picture where he could see it every day?

To remind him…of her betrayal.

Rebecca leaned back against the pickup seat and closed her eyes. She felt like a fool. All this time she had thought Zach was still in love with Cynthia, when he had actually been nursing his hate. Cynthia had torn out his heart and left a deep, vacant hole behind. Zach would never love again, because he had been burned too badly the first time. He would shut her out forever, the way he had shut Pete out when the boy got too close, because he couldn’t take the chance that he would be hurt again.

Zach saw the tear slip down Rebecca’s cheek and reached out to catch it. As his fingertips brushed her cheek,
she leaned into his palm. “I know it must be hard on you to see Callen at a time like this. Especially when you haven’t been able…when we… But she expects us to be there. She wouldn’t understand why it’s painful for us…”

“Oh, Zach, you wonderful, foolish man…”

“I suppose we don’t have to go, but—”

She scooted across the seat and wrapped her arm around his waist. His arm slid naturally around her shoulders.

“It’s fine,” she said. “We’ll go.”

“Are you sure, kid?”

“I’m sure.”

Rebecca tried not to breathe too deeply when they entered the hospital, but it was impossible to ignore the smell of disinfectant that permeated the place. In all the time she had worked at Children’s Hospital she had never gotten used to it. The astringent smell evoked memories of children she had worked with who had gone home whole and healthy. And children who had not.

She followed a uniformed nurse with her eyes as the woman moved briskly down the narrow green—why were hospitals always beige or green?—corridor.

“Bring back memories?” Zach asked.

She smiled at his perceptiveness. “A few.”

“Sorry you quit?”

She shook her head. “I like what I’m doing now a lot better.”

“I suppose it beats seeing them sick in bed.” Zach precluded her retort by grasping her hand and dragging her onto a crowded elevator. She glared at him, but forbore to argue in front of other people.

Zach held on to Rebecca’s hand as a way of allaying his own nervousness. He wanted a child so bad he could
taste it. He wanted to see the new baby…and he didn’t. He wanted to be happy for his sister and brother-in-law, and yet he was so sick with jealousy that he felt a burning in the pit of his stomach.

It was every bit as painful as he had expected it would be to see the joy in Callen’s and Sam’s eyes at the birth of their son and know he had no child of his own on the way. It was every bit as difficult as he had known it would be to have the baby thrust into his arms and to feel the softness of its skin, to examine its minute fingernails and lush baby lashes and know the child belonged to someone else.

Worst of all was seeing the look of wonder on Rebecca’s face as she held the baby close, to see her flush of embarrassment when the newborn rooted instinctively for her breast as she touched its cheek with her fingertip, and to see the longing in her eyes as she watched Callen nursing her son.

Rebecca looked up suddenly, and their eyes locked. A wealth of words was spoken, though none were said aloud.

I hope this will be us someday soon.

Oh, Zach, how I would love to have your child.

It’ll happen. We just have to keep trying.

What if there’s something wrong with me?

There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll see.

What if it doesn’t happen right away?

We have six months. That’s plenty of time.

I love you, Zach. I’ve always loved you.

Zach felt the constriction in his chest, a sort of breathlessness caused by what he saw in Rebecca’s eyes. She had never spoken of love, not once in all the months they had been married, except to deny it. She had not even said she cared, except for that one lapse
when she had called him “darling” and “sweetheart.” Only, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined the words, because he had needed to hear them so badly at the time.

Could he be mistaken about what he saw in her eyes now? Did he want her to love him? Is that why he had projected an emotion where it did not exist?

Of course, she was always touching him. But he figured that was just a habit of hers. She also touched the children often, and the horses and the dog and the barnyard cats. He was no different. Rebecca was a sensual person. If wasn’t her fault he reacted the way he did to her friendly pats and affable strokes and inadvertent brushing against him.

He reached out for Rebecca’s hand again and, when he had it firmly in his own, said, “We have to be going now.”

“Stay a little longer,” his sister urged.

“We’ve got another group of kids, the last campers of the summer, coming tomorrow,” Rebecca said by way of explanation for their early departure.

“I should be home in a couple of days. Promise you’ll come visit then,” Callen urged.

“We will,” Zach promised.

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Zach said, crossing his heart and holding up three Boy Scout fingers.

He had a death grip on Rebecca’s hand and practically dragged her from the room. He wasn’t even sure where he was going until he found himself in front of a doctor’s door on the first floor in the administration wing of the hospital.

Dr. Elmo Bently. Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Zach stopped and turned to stare at Rebecca.

“We don’t have to do this now, Zach.”

“I think we do.”

He knocked and when the doctor called out, he opened the door and pulled her inside.

“What brings you two here?” Dr. Bently asked.

“We want to be tested.”

The doctor raised a brow. “Something wrong? One of you sick?”

“For fertility.” Zach felt the heat stealing up his throat, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He pulled Rebecca closer to his side.

The doctor frowned. “Either of you have any reason to suspect you’re infertile?”

“Only that my wife hasn’t gotten pregnant. And it isn’t for want of trying,” Zach managed to say.

The doctor chuckled. “Both of you sit down and get comfortable. I think we need to have a little talk.”

The doctor asked a series of questions and listened as they answered.

“I’ll do some preliminary tests if you insist,” he said. “But it seems a bit early to suggest there’s a problem with conception. The only possible problem I see is that you may be having intercourse too frequently. The body needs time to recoup, so there may be fewer sperm during subsequent ejaculations. You could try having sex every other day, instead of every day, and see if that helps.”

Rebecca wriggled in her seat at such plain speaking. But it was the first encouraging thing she had heard the doctor say. She looked sideways at Zach to see what he thought of this advice.

“All right, Doc, we’ll cut back on frequency. But I still want us to be tested. When can we arrange to do that?”

“You can leave a sperm sample now, and I can see your wife in a couple of days.”

Zach plainly hadn’t anticipated anything happening quite so soon, but he quickly recovered. “The sooner, the better.”

Rebecca waited in the hall while a nurse took Zach to another area of the hospital. When it took longer than she expected for Zach to return, she wandered down the hall toward a modern computer information center that listed the location of all the wards. One stood out among the others.

Pediatrics.

She took the elevator to the second floor and, when she stepped off, turned away from the nurse’s station as though she knew where she was going. In fact, Rebecca knew exactly what she was looking for. Several doors down the hall, she found it.

It wasn’t a large room, probably because it wasn’t a large hospital. There were eight beds, and each one held a sick child. She hesitated only a moment before stepping inside.

Her eyes were drawn to a girl about five years old. She wore a cast on her right arm and another on her right leg, which was attached to a pulley that kept it elevated. Her face was crisscrossed with tiny scabs that suggested she had probably gone through a car windshield. She was awake, but merely stared at the ceiling.

“Hello,” Rebecca said.

The little girl turned big, curious brown eyes on her, but she didn’t speak.

“My name is Rebecca. What’s yours?”

“Jewel.”

“May I sit down, Jewel?”

The little girl nodded.

“How are you feeling?”

“Are you a doctor?”

Rebecca smiled and shook her head. “No, just a visitor.”

The girl sighed in relief. “Good. Because I’m tired of doctors.”

“Seen too many of them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you could go anywhere in the world this afternoon, where would you go?” Rebecca asked.

“Home.”

Rebecca felt the sting in her nose that preceded tears and blinked quickly to keep them back. She had expected an answer like “Disneyland.” How long had this child been here, anyway?

“How long have you been in the hospital, Jewel?”

“A long time.”

“I’ll bet your mommy and daddy come and visit you a lot.”

“My mommy and daddy are dead.”

Rebecca brushed a stray curl of plain, Mississippi-mud-brown hair from the girl’s forehead while she tried to swallow back the huge lump in her throat. “That’s too bad, Jewel.”