STORM: A Standalone Romance (24 page)

“Ms. Martinez.”

I nodded, more out of habit that anything else. The doctor smiled as he approached me, his hand outstretched.

“Dr. Bishop.”

“Nice to meet you.”

The doctor glanced at Nicolas and did something of a double take. But he caught himself and his voice was quite neutral when he said, “I’m guessing you’re the father.”

“I am.” Nicolas held out his hand. “Nicolas Costa.”

The doctor nodded. He’d clearly known that.

The introductions out of the way, the doctor settled on a stool in front of a computer monitor that hung on a retractable arm against the wall.

“It’ll be a few weeks before we get your chart from your last doctor, so I’ll have to ask a lot of questions,” Dr. Bishop said as he typed away at the keyboard. “You’re fifteen weeks, correct?”

“A day short of sixteen weeks,” I said.

He nodded. “And you haven’t had any issues in this pregnancy? No bleeding, cramps, swelling, excessive nausea, or vomiting?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Good. And are you feeling any movements yet?”

“No.”

Dr. Bishop looked up, his eyes moving from my face to Nicolas’. “That’s perfectly normal,” he said. “Most first time mothers don’t feel any definitive movement until about eighteen weeks. I’ve even had a few who didn’t feel anything until twenty weeks.”

Nicolas let out a breath near my ear. I glanced back at him, surprised by the tension I could see in his jaw. What did he have to be worried about? I was the one carrying the baby in my belly.

“Any morning sickness?”

“No. Just a little nausea when I smell things like coffee or cigarette smoke.”

“Also normal.” The doctor laughed a little. “A great deterrent for my patients who don’t see a reason to avoid caffeine or cigarettes.”

“You have patients who smoke during pregnancy?” Nicolas asked, his tone incredulous.

“Oh, yeah. Some women figure if their mothers did it when they were pregnant with them, there’s no reason for them not to do it with their kids. What they don’t understand is that the damage is sometimes undetectable, but there’s damage just the same.”

The doctor was quiet for a moment as he looked through his computer chart. Then he frowned, clicking on something several times before he glanced at me.

“Is there a family history of diabetes in your family?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know of.”

“I see here that you only listed medical history for your mother’s side of the family.”

My face warmed a little. “I don’t know anything about my father or his family.”

“That’s fine,” the doctor said, rolling his little stool over to the examination table and touching my hand lightly. “But it also leaves something of a black hole in your medical history.”

“She had a whole workup before she got pregnant,” Nicolas said. “They didn’t find anything on that.”

Dr. Bishop nodded. “I see that in her chart. You were with Dr. Beattie?”

“Yes. My wife’s infertility doctor. However, we decided to go a different direction for the actual pregnancy and delivery.”

Dr. Bishop nodded again, clearly one of those men who hated to disagree with anything anyone had to say.

“Not a problem,” he said. “The workup actually helps. But the problem is, your wife’s urine tested positive for sugar this afternoon.”

“I’m not—” I started to say, but Nicolas cut in.

“Is that bad?”

“Well, sugar usually doesn’t spill into the urine until it is over 180. Normal is under 140. So it is a bit of a concern. I’d like to send her to our lab to have some more testing done. If it’s what’s called gestational diabetes, we can get it under control fairly easily.” He patted my hand again. “Nothing to worry about.”

He picked up a device that looked kind of like a short, fat microphone and gestured for me to lie back.

“Why don’t we listen to that baby’s heartbeat?”

Nicolas scooted over and pressed his hand to my shoulder, helping me lower myself against the cheap, flat pillow at the head of the bed.  Then, he watched as the doctor pushed aside the oversized t-shirt I was wearing. My belly was exposed, sticking up like a four-square ball, my belly button stretched and flattened like someone was pulling at it from multiple different directions. The doctor squeezed a little lubricant on my belly toward the top and pressed the tip of his probe against it.

After a second, the room filled with these screeching, annoying sounds, like feedback from a microphone. But then a quick, steady thump could be heard.
Thump-thump-thump
. I smiled recognizing the confident heartbeat of the baby. Nicolas gasped, his hand seeking mine and squeezing as our fingers became intertwined.

“That’s amazing,” he whispered.

“You haven’t heard it before?” Dr. Bishop asked, a little frown crossing his face. He moved the probe some more, and the heartbeat came back, louder than before. And a little faster, too, if my sense of rhythm was anything like it was in high school. Dr. Bishop caught my eye and asked, “Have you had a sonogram, Ms. Martinez?”

“Just once, when I was eight weeks. They said everything looked fine.”

Dr. Bishop looked as though he wanted to ask another question, but he stopped mid-grunt. He stood and went to the door. A moment later he was back, wiping the lubricant from my belly.

“I’m going to have the nurse bring in the sonogram machine so that we can take a closer look at what’s going on in there.”

“Is something wrong?” Nicolas asked, quickly letting go of my hand.

“I don’t think so. I just want to have a look.”

But doctors don’t just take a look on a whim. He’d heard something within the heartbeat. And now my heart was pounding, jumping almost as fast as the baby’s. What if something was wrong? What if the baby had some sort of defect or something? Had I done something? Did I not eat enough fruits and vegetables? Should I have avoided tea, too? Was it the fast food tacos that I craved so much my first trimester?

As these thoughts whirled through my mind over and over, the nurse brought in the sonogram machine. It seemed to take an hour for them to figure out all the cords and get it up and running. And then Dr. Bishop was squeezing more lubricant on my belly and pressing a new probe to my bump.

I couldn’t really see what was showing on the computer monitor, but Nicolas was leaning over me like I was as inconsequential as a stack of books, staring at everything the doctor was doing. Then, Dr. Bishop turned the monitor so that we could both see it clearly.

“This is the baby’s head,” he said, pointing at a rounded object in the center of the screen. “And here are the arms, the legs.” As he said it, I could suddenly see it, the perfectly shaped human being living in my stomach. The baby moved as he talked, jerking its tiny arms as though it had the hiccups or something. It made tears well in my eyes as the sight of this perfect creature suddenly made everything so incredibly real.

“And now,” the doctor said, moving the probe lower on my belly, “here is another head, another set of limbs.”

“Did the baby move?” Nicolas asked.

Dr. Bishop smiled as the baby did something like a flip just under the probe, turning so that what we were now looking at must have been its back because I could see the spine as clear as day.

“There’re two babies,” I said.

“What?”

Nicolas looked down at me, his eyes wide with wonder.

“That’s right, Mr. Costa,” Dr. Bishop said. “You’re having twins. This sort of thing often happens with infertility treatments.”

I never thought I’d ever see Nicolas Costa speechless. But he was. Absolutely, mouth-hanging-open speechless.

I laughed.

Did I say I don’t mind needles? I lied.

I lay in a hospital bed, my belly itching like I had poison ivy, an IV in my arm, and a plate of half-eaten meatloaf on a rollaway tray beside me. The nurse peeked her head in through the door and shook her head.

“You have to eat the whole thing or you’ll have a low blood sugar and we’ll have to infuse you with glucose again.” She smiled almost apologetic. “You want to get that IV out of your arm, don’t you?”

“I do. I just don’t get this insulin thing.”

“I know. It’s complicated.” She came to the bed and sat beside me. “My brother’s diabetic. I never thought about it until I went to nursing school. And then I was dumbfounded by how my parents kept his blood sugars under control back then when doctors knew even less about diabetes than they know now.”

She stood and picked up the tray. “Why don’t I go see if I can find you an apple or something instead, huh? Might go down easier.”

“Thanks,” I said as I watched her walk out of the room.

Dr. Bishop sent me to have more blood tests after discovering the second baby hiding in my womb, and the tests came back the next morning showing that my blood sugar was way too high. So he put me into the hospital right away and I’d been here for nearly a week, trying to find an insulin regiment that worked with my body. I was highly reactive to insulin, he had told me, so even a tad too much made my sugars go too low and they had to intervene. He wouldn’t let me out of the hospital until I could go two days with a low. So far, the longest we had gone was four hours.

The only good thing about being in the hospital was that I hadn’t seen Nicolas in two days. He didn’t want to visit too often. He was afraid it would attract the paparazzi. However, I suspected that wasn’t the real reason. I saw the discomfort on his face every time he walked into the room. He didn’t like hospitals.

I wondered how he was going to survive forty-eight hours of labor—which is how long it took my mom to give birth to me. She reminded me every time I did something I shouldn’t have in high school.

I lay back and closed my eyes, the low volume on the television like white noise from one of those fancy machines Kelly always insisted were the only way she could sleep in almost any time zone. I missed Kelly. She called a few days ago, but I told her to stay away. I really didn’t want her to meet Nicolas. I could just imagine the things she would say to him in an effort to help me. But it wouldn’t help. It would only make things worse.

I must have drifted off to sleep because the next thing I knew, that kind nurse was standing at my side, injecting glucose into my IV line.

“Fifty-two,” she said.

I groaned. I was never getting out of this hospital.

The nurse patted my shoulder sympathetically. “They bumped the numbers down another unit. I think they might have it this time.”

And she was right. Two days later, I was pulling on the jeans I’d worn into the hospital only to discover they were too tight around my middle. I pulled my t-shirt down and it, too, was shorter than it had been before. I stuck my head out the bathroom door and caught the kindly nurse just as she was leaving with the debris from the IV she’d just taken from my arm.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a rubber band, or something, would you?”

She glanced at my belly and managed not to laugh out loud. “I’ll go look at the nurse’s desk.”

“You need new clothes,” Nicolas said from his perch against the wall by the door.

“Thank you for reminding me.”

He studied me for a second. “There’s a maternity shop on Rodeo Drive. We can swing by there on the way home.”

“Sure,” I said. “I can afford…wait, I don’t think I can afford to walk through the doors at a shop like that.”

“Who said you were paying?”

“I don’t want anything from you, Nicolas.”

“Yeah, well, that’s my kid—kids—in there. I can’t have you walking around with your belly hanging out, or wearing cheap clothes that might contain some sort of chemical that could hurt the babies.”

I glared at him, ready to say something that wasn’t very lady-like, but the nurse came back then with a rubber band. She even helped me fasten my jeans with it, tugging them closed enough so that I wasn’t exposing myself when Nicolas led the way outside ten minutes later.

When we drove down Rodeo Drive, I had flashes of every romantic movie I’d ever seen. And when we walked into the maternity shop and a sales girl looked down her nose at me, I had a very vivid image of Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman.
The only difference was, my Richard Gere was standing next to me.

“How can we help you, Mr. Costa?” one of the sales girls asked.

“We need a complete wardrobe, including lingerie and formal attire. Do you think you can handle that?”

The woman bit back a smile. “Of course.”

And suddenly I was a princess, pushed into a soft chair and plied with tea and cookies and everything I could ever want. Models who were much taller, much thinner, and definitely not pregnant, paraded into the room in a variety of clothes, talking about things I would never understand—like cut and seams and the different fabrics—until my head was spinning and I was just saying okay to make them stop. Nicolas stood at a distance, watching. He did that a lot, watching me and the people around me from a distance, like he was directing the action around him instead of participating in it. I would have preferred him to sit by my side and offer his opinion on my choices, but that wasn’t Nicolas.

When they brought out the lingerie, I blushed and decided I’d had enough.

“I’m tired,” I said, standing and nearly toppling the low table that held the tea cups they kept refilling. “Could we just…”

Nicolas was immediately at my side. “Of course.”

He guided me to the door, then turned to speak to one of his bodyguards. The man disappeared inside as we got into yet another SUV—this one a white Cadillac—and merged into the late evening traffic.

“Are you hungry?”

I nodded. “But I’d have to take a shot, and I’m not sure about doing that in public.”

“Then we’ll pick something up and go back to the house.” He glanced out the window—actually looking up from his smartphone—and said, “It’s a nice night. We could eat on the back veranda.”

“That actually sounds nice. I feel like I’ve been cooped up inside for too long.”

Nicolas looked at me, actually holding my gaze for a full minute before his eyes slid down to my growing belly.

“How do you feel?”

“Tired.”

He reached over to touch my belly, but he stopped himself just before he made contact. “Have you felt them move yet? You’re almost eighteen weeks.”

“Not yet.”

He nodded, a dark look crossing his face. Did he think I was lying to him? Or was there something else?

He was such an enigma that it drove me nuts. I wanted to reach over there, grab his face, and make him tell me everything that was going on in that head of his. But I didn’t. I stared out the window and watched the scenery as we sped across the city, headed back to his house.

I was actually looking forward to being there. I guess it was true that almost any place could feel like home if you were lonely enough.

And I was definitely lonely enough.