The Once And Future Father

Yes, here he was, and at the moment, he was all that Lucy had to cling to. It was probably his fault that she’d gone into labor in the first place. Maybe if he’d had a better way of telling her…

Water under the bridge, Dylan admonished himself. Speculation wasn’t going to change what was happening now. And that was what he had to deal with.

“I don’t think…I…have a choice.” Without consciously meaning to, she dug her fingernails into his flesh as he tried to disengage his hand from hers. Another contraction had seized her, holding her prisoner. Torturing her.

Freeing himself as gently as he could, he turned her face so that she was forced to look at him. He willed his strength into her.

“Breathe, Lucy, breathe. Small, shallow breaths. Concentrate on breathing.”

“I can’t.”

His voice was stern. “Yes, you can.”

It wasn’t encouragement as much as an order. That was what she needed right now, someone strong to help her find her way. He stowed away any stray feelings that might have still been lingering and galvanized his resolve.

Mechanically, Dylan lifted the hem of her dress and pushed it up to her waist, then as quickly as possible, he removed her underwear. He saw her body stiffen, not from his touch, but because the next contraction had begun on the perimeter of the one that was only now releasing her. She writhed in agony, holding her breath, as if that could somehow make it go away.

“Breathe, dammit!” he ordered. Catching her chin in his hands, he forced her to look at him again. “Like this.” His eyes holding hers, he took in a long breath and released it in short pants. “Okay?”

Anger, anchorless and sharp, raged through her. At him, at Ritchie, at the pain. But there was no outlet and she was not master of her soul right now. The pain saw to that.

Lucy did as she was told, holding on to Dylan’s order as if it were a lifeline, a single thing to focus that would lead her out of this ring of fire she found herself in. She had a life inside of her. A life that was struggling to be brought into this world, and she owed it to her child to help in any way she could.

And Dylan would help both of them. For this one thing, she could count on him.

Closing her eyes, listening to the sound of Dylan’s voice echoing in her head, she began to push.

She’d stopped breathing. His eyes darted back up to her face. It was contorted. Dylan realized that she was pushing. Damn it, where the hell were the paramedics? Why weren’t they here yet?

“Okay, you’re doing fine, just fine,” Dylan said. “I can see it, Lucy. I can see the top of the baby’s head.”

Dylan’s voice and the words he said barely registered inside the haze of pain surrounding her. And then they seemed to take on a breadth, a thickness of their own. The baby. Her baby. It was almost here. Hunching her shoulders forward, she fought off the waves of exhaustion that had come from the dark to encircle her and forced herself to push again. Harder this time. Longer. Until finally, too drained to continue, she fell back against the sofa cushion, gasping for air.

“Don’t stop now,” he ordered.

“Dylan, I’m so tired….”

“He can’t do it alone, and he wants to be here now.” Dylan moved behind Lucy, gathering together the decorative pillows she’d scattered around and shoving them under her shoulders to help prop her up. “Finally know what it means to want to be in two places at once,” she heard him mutter under his breath. She opened her eyes to look at him and saw him smiling encouragingly at her. Then he slid back to take up the position where he’d been.

“Okay, on the count of three, I want you to push again. Ready?”

“No.” The response was more of a sob than a word.

He raised his eyes to hers and the short, abrupt order on his lips softened in the face of the pain he saw. Damn, but she could still get to him like nothing and no one else ever had.

“Yes,” he told her softly, “you are. Okay now, one, two, three. Push!” He felt every fiber of his own body tightening in concentration as he gave her the order.

Lucy pushed. Pushed so hard she felt as if she had ejected every fiber of her body, turning it completely inside out. Pushed so hard she thought she was going to faint again as a border of blackness began leeching into the feverish red haze that was engulfing her.

The final push came with a whining scream.

Falling back, she barely had enough strength left to gulp in air. Lucy heard a small, piercing cry. Was that coming from her? Or somewhere else?

But her own lips were closed now and the tiny, reedy wail persisted. Her lashes felt damp as she forced her eyes open. She could barely focus on Dylan. He was holding something in his arms.

Her baby.

She tried to wet her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, barely able to move it. “Is he…is he…all right?”

When Dylan didn’t answer, a sliver of panic wedged itself in her breast, going straight for her heart like a sharp dagger. With her last ounce of strength, she raised herself up on her elbows.

“Dylan?”

He couldn’t ever remember feeling like this before. Awed, overwhelmed with something very odd squeezing at his heart. And all because of the tiny life he held in his hands.

As if it had been stored on a delayed relay system, Lucy’s tone played itself back to him. He raised his eyes to hers. A hint of a smile tugged on his lips, as if afraid to intrude on a moment this sacred.

“He’s a she.” His mouth curved a little more. “Your son is a daughter—and she’s more than all right. She’s beautiful.”

Deprived of the warm shelter that had been hers only moments earlier, the infant began to squirm and cry. The thick thatch of black hair on her head was matted and plastered to her, and when she opened her eyes, they were the most incredible shade of blue Dylan had ever seen. He raised his eyes to look at Lucy.

“Are you able to hold her?”

“Try and stop me,” Lucy said. Her heart was still racing, fueled by what she’d just been through and the exhilaration she felt now, seeing her daughter in Dylan’s arms. Weak, she still managed to hold out her own arms to him.

Very gently, Dylan placed the tiny being against Lucy’s breast. The same bittersweet feeling flittered over him. He didn’t know what to make of it, what to call it, or how to store it. So he did the only thing he could, he locked it away in its entirety.

“She’s messy,” he murmured.

Exhausted as she was, Lucy could feel her heart constricting. She’d never known she could feel this much love at one time.

“She’ll clean up,” Lucy whispered. In awe of the tiny being she held, Lucy lightly passed her hand over the dark little head.

Watching, Dylan roused himself. It wasn’t over yet. He still needed to cut the umbilical cord. He hurried to the kitchen for a knife and was halfway back before he stopped. The knife needed to be sterilized.

But when he turned toward the stove, intending to hold the blade over one of the burner flames, he saw only electrical coils. There were no gas jets.

Damn. His hands bloodied, Dylan automatically felt in his pants pocket before he remembered. He didn’t smoke anymore. He no longer had a reason to carry matches.

Frustrated, he looked around the kitchen. He didn’t have time to go rifling through drawers and cabinets. “You have any matches?” he shouted.

“No, why?”

“Because I need to—”

Walking back into the living room, he stopped short when he saw a whiskey decanter on the small wet bar. He recognized it. He’d given Ritchie the decanter just before he’d left for good. It’d been to celebrate something, but he no longer remembered the occasion. The decanter was still half-full. Dylan snatched it up.

“Never mind, this’ll do.” He removed the top and poured some of the contents of the decanter over the blade, covering it liberally. Except for the baby breathing, there was no other sound in the room. He could feel Lucy’s eyes on him, watching. “I have to cut the cord.”

“I know.” She pressed the baby closer to her, though she knew it wouldn’t hurt the infant.

He looked so removed, so dispassionate as he severed the cord that connected her so literally to her baby. Had he felt the same way when he cut the cord that had existed between them? Had it taken just one swift motion and it was done?

Once she would have believed she’d meant more to him than that. Now she knew better.

“There.” The cord cut, Dylan sat back on his heels and looked at them.

The baby, still bloody, was nestled against Lucy. She had ceased crying and was dozing against her mother. It took everything he had not to touch the infant again, not to run the tip of his finger along the dewy skin.

The moment, soft and tender, hung between them. Echoes of the past threatened to overtake him. Rising to his feet, Dylan backed away.

He nodded toward where he remembered the linen closet was. “I should get something to wrap her up in.” He needed distance between them. Distance between the thoughts he was having.

The sound of someone knocking on the door penetrated. “I’ll get that.”

“Since you’re up,” she murmured weakly.

“Yeah.” He turned on his heel, hurrying to the front door. Dylan felt ashamed for feeling relieved at the reprieve. But there was far too much going on inside of him to deal with right now.

He made it to the door in less than five strides and pulled it open. The ambulance attendants had arrived. “Took you long enough.”

The two paramedics, both in their early twenties, exchanged glances. The blonder of the two pushed the gurney into the house. “Hey, we went through every red light from the station house to here.”

The other paramedic looked Dylan over. There was blood on his shirt and on one of his pants pockets. “What the hell happened to you, McMorrow?”

His adrenaline beginning to settle, he realized that he hadn’t given any details when he’d called for the ambulance, only saying he needed one. The attendants hadn’t known if they were coming to the site of a homicide or a heart attack.

He glanced down at his shirt. “I got this playing midwife. The lady couldn’t wait for you two to get here.”

Only a short distance away, Lucy heard him and something inside of her cringed. The lady. As if they didn’t know each other. As if they hadn’t held each other in their arms and made love until both of them could have sworn that the morning would come to find not a breath of life left between them.

Tears stung her eyes. She pressed her lips together, telling herself she was over him. What they had was in the past, long gone and buried. There was someone else who needed her now.

The younger of the two paramedics looked at Lucy as he lined up the cot beside the sofa. He gave her a warm smile.

“Looks like you did half our job for us, Detective.” The paramedic glanced at Dylan. “Nice work.”

Dylan made no comment, standing off to the side as the two paramedics quickly took vital signs from mother and daughter. It was only when Lucy’s eyes sought him out that he moved from the sidelines. He’d had every intention of leaving, but there was something in her eyes that had him changing his mind.

“I’ll follow you in the car.”

The paramedic closest to Dylan spared him a glance once they had secured mother and child on the gurney. “You might want to change that shirt first. Unless you want everyone to think you were in an accident.”

An accident.

It had been in an accident that he had allowed himself to feel something, to give way to a temporary lapse in judgment and actually believe that he could be like everyone else.

That he was free to love and feel like everyone else.

But he knew better.

“I’ll change later,” he muttered as he followed them out the front door.

Dylan pulled it shut behind him, making sure the lock was secure before he hurried to his car. It was only as he waited for the driver of the ambulance to start the vehicle that Dylan allowed himself to sag, resting his head against the steering wheel. It was the only outward sign of fatigue he allowed himself. And only for a moment. Anything more and his control could break.

He was too numb to think. He wouldn’t have let himself think if he could. It was better that way.

Or so he told himself.

Since he knew the ambulance’s destination, he actually made it to Harris Memorial’s emergency room parking lot a hairbreadth behind the vehicle. He was out of his car and at the ambulance’s back door just as the attendant was opening it. He helped the man lower the gurney, then took his position at its side as Lucy and her baby were guided through the electronic doors.

Dylan curbed the urge to take Lucy’s hand, curbed the urge to touch her. The less contact he had with her, the better. There’d already been far more than he’d bargained on.

Then what was he doing here, trotting beside the gurney if he had no intention of getting any closer than he had? he demanded silently. He was supposed to be on duty, taking his turn at maintaining surveillance, not halfway across town on the ground floor of Bedford’s most popular hospital.

What he was doing here, he told himself, was being a friend. To Ritchie if not to Lucy. And Ritchie’s sister had been through a great deal. She’d had both death and life flung at her within the space of less than half an hour. Even if there had been no history between him and Lucy, if ever he saw a woman who looked like she needed a friend, it was her. Process of elimination made him the closest one she had around.

“I have a doctor here,” he heard her saying weakly to the attendant walking just ahead of him beside the gurney. “Sheila Pollack.”

Dylan was vaguely familiar with the name. He’d heard several of the men at the precinct mention the woman, saying their wives and girlfriends swore by her. He grasped at the tidbit, needing something to do, to make himself useful. Anything to keep him from coming face-to-face with the past and have to deal with it.

“I can have her paged,” he told the paramedic. He turned to go to the registration desk.

“Don’t bother, we’ll call her office,” an amiable, matronly-looking nurse told Dylan as she came up to join the delegation around the gurney.

He fell back without a word, feeling useless.

“Don’t go,” Lucy called to him. “I want to talk to you. About Ritchie.”

“It’ll have to wait until we get you cleaned up, honey,” the nurse told her. “My, but that is one beautiful baby. You do nice work.” She glanced at Dylan. “Is this the baby’s daddy?”

Lucy forced herself not to look in Dylan’s direction. “No.”

Dylan tried to grab at the excuse the nurse had inadvertently given him. It was a legitimate way out of this uncomfortable situation. And he did have to get to the stakeout.

But Lucy’s eyes were imploring him to stay. The excuse died on his lips before he had a chance to say it. There was no way around it. They had unfinished business to tend to.

“I’ll wait in the hall until you’re ready,” he called after her.

She raised her voice. They were almost around a corner. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

Her voice lingered after she disappeared from view. “I’ll hold you to that.”

His lips curved before he could think better of it. “I know.”

Chapter 3

Dylan straightened up slowly. His back had begun to ache, and it felt as if it was taking on the shape of the hospital wall he’d been leaning against. He’d been waiting out in the maternity ward corridor far longer than he figured he should have.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to go.

He’d put in another call to dispatch the moment Lucy’s gurney had disappeared behind closed doors. This time he’d had them patch him through to Dave Watley, the man he’d been partnered with off and on over the years. The message was short, terse. He was going to be late. Watley had been surprised, but he’d hung up before the man could ask why.

Even as he’d rung off, Dylan had fought his own silent battle over the wisdom of hanging around outside Lucy’s hospital room.

He had a job to do and it wasn’t here.

Still, he hadn’t given Lucy any sort of accounting about her brother. In his defense, there’d been next to no time. But that didn’t change the fact that he owed it to her.

Frustrated, he shoved his hands into his pockets, purposely avoiding looking in the general direction of the nursery. He didn’t need that sort of distraction right now.

And Lucy didn’t need to listen to the grisly details about her brother’s death right now, he thought. She certainly wasn’t in any shape to answer questions. Though part of him wanted to get this all over with and put everything behind him so he could start fresh again, he knew it’d be better for both the department and Lucy if he came back later, when she was up to it.

Or maybe not at all. Maybe if someone else handled this, it’d be for the best all around.

“Excuse me?”

Having made up his mind, Dylan had turned toward the elevators and his escape route. The low voice, aimed in his direction, momentarily put his plans on hold. Dylan looked over his shoulder to see a refined, tall blonde comfortably attired in a white lab coat that partially covered a blue sundress. She was looking straight at him. “Are you Detective McMorrow?”

“Yes?”

The verification was tendered slowly, cautiously, telling Sheila Pollack that this man was more accustomed to receiving bad news than good. And that, police detective or not, the tall, rangy man before her was a private person. Not a bit like her Slade.

With a smile meant to put him at his ease, she offered him her hand.

“Hi, I’m Sheila Pollack, Lucy’s doctor. She told me you delivered the baby.” She smiled and offered Dylan her hand.

He shook her hand mechanically, surprised at the firmness of the woman’s grip. “The baby more or less delivered herself. I was just there to catch her.”

“That’s not the way Lucy tells it.” Her smile grew sunnier. “Nice job.”

Dylan shrugged, accepting the compliment the way he accepted any compliment that came his way, offhandedly and with little attention. It was criticism that helped a man grow, not empty words. His father had beaten that one into him until he’d been able to defend himself.

He looked over the doctor’s head toward the room where they had taken Lucy and her baby. “How she’s doing?”

“Mother and daughter are fine, no small thanks to you. Right now, they’re both asleep. I think the ordeal exhausted them.” She studied him for a moment. “Lucky for Lucy that you were there.”

“Yeah, lucky,” he muttered more to himself than to the statuesque woman. She was looking at him as if she could read his mind. Annoyed with himself, he dismissed the thought as ridiculous. “Well, I’m on duty, Doctor. I’d better go.”

Sheila nodded. She had other patients on the floor to look in on. And a roomful waiting for her back at her office. But because each of her patients was more than simply just that to her, she paused where she was for one more second.

“Want me to tell Lucy anything when she wakes up?” When he made no reply, she asked, “Will you be back to see her?”

Dylan thought it an odd question. For all she knew, he’d just been someone passing by at the right time, or the wrong time, depending on whose view you took. But, then, he amended, maybe Lucy had told her that they’d known each other once.

For the sake of brevity and to prevent any possibility of further discussion, he said, “Yeah, sure,” and quickly walked away.

Sheila spared herself a moment to watch him go, aware that she had just been brushed off. Instinct told her that there was a great deal more going on here than was evident at first.

Turning away, she smiled to herself. He’d be back. Whether he realized it or not, he’d be back. She was willing to lay odds on it.

Detective Dave Watley glanced up from the video camera he was adjusting. It was perched on a tripod, its powerful telephoto lens aimed at the entrance of the restaurant five stories below and across the street. “What the hell kept you?” he asked Dylan when his partner entered the apartment.

Pulling up a folding chair to the partially curtained window with one hand, Dylan placed the paper tray with its two cups of coffee on the unsteady card table. Besides a beaten-up sofa that had been abandoned by the last tenant who lived in the apartment, the card table and two chairs represented the only furniture in the studio apartment. Watley had brought the table. He needed someplace to put the puzzles he was so fond of working on.

“I was detained.” Dylan pried his own cup from the holder, leaving the one he’d picked up for Watley where it was.

Watley looked at him with good-natured disgust. “No kidding, Sherlock. I kind of figured that part out for myself. Detained how?”

As far as Watley knew, his rather closed-mouth partner had no personal life to speak of, no relatives he ever mentioned, and certainly no woman in his life. The man lived and breathed the job, which made him a good man to have watching your back, but not exactly the best to share a long stakeout with. And this one had all the signs of being a long one, even though it was just in its third day.

Because nothing else came to him and he knew that Watley wasn’t the kind to back off once he started asking, Dylan gave him an abbreviated version of what had happened. “A woman went into labor.”

Watley stopped fooling with the camera. “And you took her to the hospital?” he asked.

Dylan scanned the street below. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening at the Den of Thieves. This was the restaurant’s busiest hour, but there was no one entering or leaving who aroused his suspicions. So far, none of the usual players in what was reported to be a money-laundering scheme were evident.

“It was too late for that.” He took off the lid from his cup and dropped it on the table.

“So you did what?” Picking up the discarded lid, Watley dropped it into the empty box he’d converted into a wastebasket. “Helped her deliver?” he prompted.

“Yeah.”

With his wife a brief six weeks away from delivery, Watley was facing his first time up as a new father. Thoughts of the restaurant they were staking out were forgotten. “So, what did it feel like? Holding that newborn in your hands? You did hold it, right?”

“Yes, I held her.”

“Well, what was it like?”

“Messy.”

Usually a very easygoing man, Watley threw his hands up in exasperation. “Dammit, McMorrow, you’ve got a heart made out of stone, you know that? There you were, with the miracle of life happening right in front of you and you’re thinking of cleanup detail.”

“Somebody has to.” Dylan paused, taking a long sip of the coffee that was already getting cold. His thoughts kept returning to the event. He’d felt like a bystander and a participant all at the same time. “It was kind of strange,” he finally added.

Watley’s interest was instantly piqued. “Strange?”

“Like it wasn’t real.” Dylan looked at his partner. “Except that it was.”

“Right.” Watley slanted him a glance, then grinned. “That’s probably the most eloquent I remember ever hearing you get.”

Dylan didn’t feel like being eloquent. He didn’t feel like being anything but the cop he was being paid to be. It was too complicated any other way. Dylan nodded toward the building across the street. “Anything going on in there?”

Clearly bored, Watley shook his head. He took the lid off the puzzle he’d brought with relish. “Nothing more than usual. I’m beginning to think this is just a wild-goose chase. Haven’t seen any of the big boys go in or out yet. Maybe the tip was bogus. God only knows where that accountant disappeared to.” The operation had begun in earnest on the word of one Owen Michelson, the restaurant’s accountant. But neither he nor the information he’d promised had turned up at a rendezvous he’d arranged last week.