It was clear he hadn’t taken the proper interest in his wife’s pregnancy. Maybe he’d grown up to be one of those men who only looked good. But oh, wow, did he ever look good.

“Here she is.” He flung open the back door of a still-running luxurious gray sedan. A blast of icy air emerged along with a piercing scream.

“Where have you been? I’m about to drop a baby all by myself onto a church parking lot from the back seat of a freaking car!”

Together Cecily and Will leaned into the car. Cecily was shoulder to shoulder with the muscles, hip to hip with the tight buns, smelling the scent of a deliciously clean, very hot man. He turned to her with a desperate glance. They were nose to nose, eye to eye, and Eros was shooting arrows like a madman, zigzags that shot down through the center of her body. Move over, Muffy, I’m the one who needs the back seat of this car.

She felt the heat rise to her face. It had been an inappropriate thought, and fortunately no more than a thought. Will was looking at Muffy now, oblivious to anything other than the crisis at hand.

“Muffy.” She could tell he was trying to be firm, but his voice wasn’t totally steady. “I said let’s go to the hospital, you said it was a false alarm, you said—”

Cecily whacked him on the elbow and, wonder of wonders, he got the message.

“Here’s the doctor,” he said, calm now and very gentle. “She’ll take care of you.”

Muffy raised herself up on one elbow and left off screaming long enough to puff a few times and then say, “You don’t look like a doctor. Have you ever delivered a baby?”

“Many,” Cecily said, taking a second out to put her hand on Muffy’s flailing one, trying to make a connection with the woman before they got to the hard part. It worked with cows and horses in distress. Maybe it worked with bitches. “Keep up your breathing while I prep.”

“Forget prep. Wash your hands and get on with it!” A long, pitiful wail emerged from a wide, carnivorous mouth as another contraction consumed her.

Cecily glanced at her big, chunky, utilitarian watch, starting to time the contractions. “Breathe, that’s right, breathe. Puff, puff, puff…” She dived into her bag, wincing at the sight of the huge syringes, the Veterinary Purposes Only medications and the oversized forceps, got out the antibacterial wash, poured it over her hands and slid them into sterile gloves, then slid a sterile apron over her sundress. “I’m doing a quick exam. Don’t push.” In spite of herself, she’d said it pretty sharply, because Muffy was pushing like mad.

“Are…you…insane?” Muffy’s words came out sporadically between puffs of breath. “If I don’t push, how the hell am I going to get this thing out of me?”

Cecily reflected on the advantages of delivering calves. No cow had ever mooed at her in that tone of voice. Nor had she ever delivered a calf with the bull running around in tight little circles, clutching a cell phone to his ear. Nor had she ever lusted after the bull, but that was another story. Soothing, that was what she had to be. Calm and soothing. “If everything’s fine, I’ll tell you to push. Just hold back for a minute, okay? You,” she said to the father-to-be, “hold her hand, help her with her breathing.”

“Yeah, sure, that will do a lot of good, him holding my hand, helping me with my breathing. He tried to smother me once. Tell him to go away. He’s making me dizzy.”

“What do you mean if everything’s fine?” That was Will, looking for something else to worry about.

“I want to be sure the head’s coming this way, not the hooves.”

“The what?” Muffy rose up on her elbows.

“A doctor joke,” Cecily said, still struggling for calm and soothing. “I meant the feet, of course.”

A loud shriek came from Muffy. A deep moan came from Will.

“The mother is often not herself during delivery,” Cecily murmured to Will. “Don’t take it personally.”

“She is herself,” Will said. “Muffy’s a hater. Just deliver the baby, okay?”

“Righto,” Cecily said, wondering if Will’s marriage might be destined to end in divorce. Probably not. Men gravitated to bitches, confident in their ability to tame them. The worst of her lust attack was over, dimmed by the harrowing excitement of the impending birth as well as awareness of the futility of lusting after Will.

A sigh rose from deep inside her anyway. Oh, well, if she’d found Will too late to have his baby, she could sure as heck deliver it.

She didn’t have time or the equipment to do an episiotomy. But Muffy was fully dilated and the baby was crowning, Cecily noted with great relief. “Now you can push,” she told Muffy. “That’s right, push, push, almost there. Come on, you’re a trooper, you can do it—”

Simultaneously Muffy screamed at the top of her lungs and the baby came into the world with a healthy cry. “It’s a girl!” Cecily said, swiftly clamping and cutting the umbilical cord, hoping the navel would equal the bridesmaid’s in beauty and symmetry. And as the sound of sirens drowned out Muffy’s shuddering sobs of relief, Cecily added, “A beautiful little girl and a fire truck, a police car…no, three police cars and—oh, wonderful—here at last are the EMTs, just when we need them least.”

Cecily examined the baby while the paramedics gently lifted Muffy onto a stretcher and carried her toward the ambulance, ignoring the blistering she was giving them for taking so long to get there. Then Cecily handed over the child, explaining the conditions of the delivery as well as giving them a verbal checklist of what she had and hadn’t done. At long last, the ambulance doors closed and blessed silence prevailed.

Alone in the parking lot, Cecily pulled off her gloves and apron, then wiped her forehead. She hadn’t seen Will leave with Muffy, but he must have. A tear of regret dripped down her face and landed on the toe of one satin shoe, matching the splash of antiseptic on the other. Then she caught sight of another pair of shoes.

Loafers—Gucci. No socks. Her gaze traveled upward…on Will, who lay slumped against a tire.

She’d always heard this happened—new mother did fine and new father fainted—but she’d thought it was an amusing contemporary myth. Apparently not. She crouched down beside him. “Will. Will!” She grabbed his hands and began to massage his wrists with her thumbs, then took his pulse.

“What happened?” He sounded groggy, but he was apparently alive.

“The baby came.”

“Oh. Good.”

Cecily stifled an exasperated sound. “It’s a girl.”

“Mmm.”

She raised her voice. “Mother and child are doing fine.”

“I wish I were.”

She’d had it. “Look,” she said, thinking how wonderful it was not to need a verbal bedside manner in veterinary medicine, “your relationship with Muffy is none of my business, but this is one of those times you have to rise above your differences and support her. A woman who’s just given birth feels very vulnerable. She needs you now.” Cecily stood up. “So get your ass in gear. We’re going to the hospital to see her, and I mean right this second.”

She glared at him.

He stared at her.

“I’ll drive,” she said with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Last thing in the world I would have expected you to be, but it seems you’re a fainter.”

He didn’t look the least bit guilty about his disinterest, just puzzled. Still staring at her, he went around the car—Cecily noticed the distinctive Audi emblem—got in on the passenger side and maneuvered the seat so far back she couldn’t see his face out of the corner of her eye.

But she could feel his eyes on her and allowed herself one sidelong glance at him as she adjusted the rearview mirror. God, he was sexy. Everything about him said male, male, male. His mouth was full and enticing. His eyes were hot. Suddenly feeling overwhelmed, she pushed the key into the ignition.

He settled his sunglasses into place, hiding whatever message his eyes might have been sending, so she could let herself imagine that his gaze was an approving one, could feel it wash over her like warm honey.

Honey, but no crumpet. One look at Will and she’d fallen for him again. This time she was drippily, stickily in lust with a married man.

WILL SETTLED INTO THE LEATHER upholstery of his new car, wondering what the hell was going on. Cecily had miraculously dropped into his life again after many, many years, and all she seemed able to think about was his and Muffy’s relationship.

Maybe Sally had told her about Muffy. He’d never mentioned her at the stables, and for good reason. When they were growing up, he and Muffy had gotten along about as well as a Maine coon cat and a Yorkshire terrier, he being the terrier. It was one of the reasons their parents had sent him to Exeter. They’d thought it was time to get Will out from under her thumb.

It had worked, too. They were doing much better as adults. They hadn’t sunk to physical violence since they were twenty-seven or so, although Muffy had been telling the truth when she’d said he’d tried to smother her once. When they were kindergarten age, he’d put a plastic bag over her head and attempted to tie it around her throat while she was sleeping. He’d done it because she’d sneered at him and said he’d never be popular in the neighborhood because he was about as exciting as phonics. He’d felt like killing her.

Not really. A thinking man, even at that early age, he’d poked holes in the bag before he shoved it over her head. He’d just wanted to send the message, Make fun of me again and you’re toast.

Muffy hadn’t seen it that way.

When they were seven, their parents had taken them on a short car trip to the mountains of the Big Bend—a trial run, their mother had called it, to test whether or not the family could survive a major trip west the following year to see the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Park. Will still hadn’t seen the Grand Canyon or Yosemite.

Years later, they’d made a pact to get through the holidays at their parents’ house by not speaking to each other at all. Marrying Gator had softened Muffy some—at least toward Will, now that she had Gator to pick on—but they still didn’t get together socially or as a family except under duress.

It was a miracle he didn’t hate women.

He’d been a prince, a virtual prince, to pick her up in Waco and drive her to Dallas when Gator had to fly up to Fort Worth earlier in the week for a sports-equipment trade show. A less princely man would have chosen slow death by torture over being in a confined space with Muffy for a couple of hours.

He was doing it for Sally. Sally was their cousin and they’d lived through every second of her disastrous first marriage. Sure, she’d been a wild thing, a seriously dedicated playgirl, until she’d met Gus, fallen madly in love and sworn to change her ways. But she had a good heart. Which reminded Will that he had a family responsibility to make sure Gus was a man who would give Sally the happiness she deserved. And Will had reasons to feel concerned.

About the time Sally met Gus, he’d been looking for a new tax man and Sally had recommended Will. As was customary at his accounting firm, Helpern and Ridley in Houston, since Will did the taxes for Gus’s security business, he also filed Gus’s personal returns. In March, looking at the numbers Gus had sent him, Will saw some discrepancies in Gus’s reported income and his lifestyle. Will had put many hours of his own time into tracking down what Gus might have left out of his documentation and hadn’t come up with a thing. Since Gus had done him the honor of asking him to be a groomsman, Will felt guilty as all hell accepting, knowing he’d be doing his best to pump Gus and his friends for information. But tax was his profession, damn it, and he had a professional obligation to make sure a tax return was honest and accurate before he signed his name to it.

He couldn’t let Sally marry somebody engaged in something shady. He had twenty-four hours to satisfy himself about those discrepancies or he’d have to stop the wedding.

With no time to waste, Cecily was a distraction he didn’t need. She was the girl from his past he’d never forgotten, the girl who wouldn’t let him kiss her, a girl who still, after all these years had passed, didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in him. Seeing her wouldn’t have come as such a shock if he’d bothered to read the itinerary of events Sally and Gus had sent him. He might have prepared for it, thought up a few cool moves, a sophisticated line.

Sheltered behind his sunglasses, he gazed at her, at her straight little nose, her perfect skin, but pale now, no tan. No makeup, either. With the sun shining through her lashes, he could see they were long and light and slanted down instead of curling up. Her mouth was wide, a mouth made to smile, although she hadn’t smiled much in the few minutes since she’d sprung so unexpectedly back into his life.

She still had the thick blond hair he remembered, a little darker now, more the color of honey. When she used to come down from Boston to work at the stables, it had been in a neat bob. Now it was long and sloppily tied at the nape of her neck, as if all she wanted was to get it out of the way. At the stables, her jodhpurs had been perfect, her shirts impeccable. She’d looked like the girls who attended the private schools near Exeter. But today she was wearing a shapeless flowered sundress. He liked the look. It was natural, unlike the look of most women who wandered in and out of his life these days. Cecily’s dress left him wondering about the curves beneath it, let his imagination loose, and his imagination didn’t fit the profile of an accountant’s.

One thing hadn’t changed. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they’d always been, that monitor-screen blue of a midday sky. From the first moment she’d handed him the reins of a horse, pinning him with those eyes, she’d appealed to him in some way he couldn’t quite get a handle on. And she still did. So why the hell couldn’t he get her to feel the same way about him?

Muffy, Muffy, Muffy. All she seemed to be able to think about. He had nothing to feel guilty about where Muffy was concerned. He’d been wallowing in his own self-righteousness until Cecily, who’d apparently become a doctor, had decided that delivering his niece, a simple act of professional mercy, gave her the right to tell him he still hadn’t done enough for Muffy.

In fact, he hadn’t. Not quite. “Which hospital are they taking her to?” he asked.

“Glen Oaks Care Center. Have you heard of it?”

“Sure,” he said, already dialing Gator’s cell, where he left a terse message, then dialed the number for Gator’s plane. As he listened to the phone ring, he observed that while the doctor looked capable at the wheel—strong armed and steady—they still hadn’t made it out of the church parking lot. “It’s a small, private—Hey,” he said when Gator answered, “she’s at GOCC. Okay. Okay. O-kay, I’ll do it. Yeah, see you.”

“We need cigars,” he told Cecily. “We’ll stop on the way.”

She did another one of those little whooshy sounds, like the one she’d done when he’d still been trying to get the blood running back to his head. “Do you happen to know where GOCC is?” she said, sounding like patience sitting on a pressure cooker.

“Yes.”

“Would you consider sharing it with me?”

Uh-oh, a little steam was starting to show. She’d found the parking lot exit at last, and sat there poised, waiting for him to answer.

He saw a way to put off visiting Muffy indefinitely. “Left,” he instructed her and punched the number two on his phone to direct his next call to his parents.

“Now what?” Cecily had reached an intersection.

“Take the LBJ.”

“Okay.” The car didn’t move. “Where is it?”

“Take a right and follow the signs. I need to make these calls.” When his mother answered, he said “Hi. You have a granddaughter.” Interrupting the shrieks of excitement, the string of questions, he said, “Details later. She’s at GOCC. Right. See you there.”

Now he’d done everything anyone could have expected. Gator was about to take off from Meacham Field in Fort Worth. He’d be at Love Field in Dallas in the time it took a small plane to go straight up, then straight down. The proud Murchison grandparents, who lived in Highland Park, would beat Gator to the hospital. Muffy would soon be surrounded by people who actually liked her.

What he wanted to do now was renew his acquaintance with Cecily. What she wanted to do was take him straight to the hospital to see Muffy. Why was she so determined to make him visit the twin sister who, from the second he’d entered the world, had made his life a living hell?

CECILY HAD TO ADMIT THAT SHE was a little disappointed in the kind of man Will had apparently grown up to be. And she didn’t mean a married man. If he had to be a married man, she wanted him to be a good married man. It was upsetting that he’d seemed so reluctant to follow his wife and baby to the hospital. Maybe he’d been in shock, because now, making his phone calls to family or friends, he sounded pleased and excited.

Driving Will’s luxurious car made her intensely nervous. She was out of her element. Three years in the country and she’d already forgotten that in a city, even a parking lot could be hard to negotiate without a map. In Vermont, even the freeway was a gentle, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing experience. The LBJ, she feared, would be a jungle.

Seeing the first sign pointing toward it, she went into panic mode. She’d never had a sense of direction, and she’d lost her freeway fighting skills. Those two things combined with the inappropriate feelings she had toward the man she was driving were a foolproof recipe for disaster. Still, getting Will to the hospital was a job she had to do, and she always did her job.

Uh-oh, she had to make a choice—head north and east or south and west. “Will,” she said, “which direction do I go on the LBJ? Tell me quick, because northeast is the left lane and southwest is the right lane, and I don’t know how the hell I’m going to change lanes.”

Will sat back, folded his arms over his chest and said, “You’re fine where you are.”

What a relief. The traffic swarmed around her, cars cutting in front of her, sliding in behind her, but all she had to do was cling to her spot in this lane. It led her up the entrance ramp. She’d arrived. She was on the freeway. Standing still.

“Lots of traffic,” she said.

“It’s always like this,” Will said.

“But we need to hurry!” She raised her hand to slam the heel onto the horn in the center of the steering wheel.

He grabbed her wrist. “Honking won’t help.”

The touch of his fingertips sent her into total meltdown. Will had turned her on to a degree she couldn’t ignore. It was her own fault that she’d let it happen. If she’d only read on after she’d sighted Will’s name, if she’d only noticed that a Muffy Murchison was also in the wedding party, she would have assumed the worst and accepted it with spartan stoicism. But she hadn’t read on, and one look at him had her drooling on his shoes. Now she had to redirect her raging lust.

This frivolous trip to Dallas for Sally’s wedding had become a landmark in her life. She’d buried herself so completely in her work that she’d forgotten the realities of life. She needed sex just as any normal woman did.

And she needed it now. She’d find somebody else to spend a hot, steamy twenty-four hours with, and Will could help her do it.

She’d delivered Will’s baby. Now he, by golly, could deliver her into the arms of an unmarried man.

WILL WAS AFRAID HE’D MISSED his calling. He should have been a military strategist. While Cecily was hardly the enemy, his diversionary tactics had gotten her onto the LBJ going in the wrong direction, and the freeway was packed. Now that they were on it, they’d be here a while.

Which suited Will just fine because he’d be sitting beside Cecily, charming the pants off her, he hoped. It had been a long time since anybody had called him dull. In fact, from the time he’d left home for Exeter, he’d been amazed at the number of girls—now women—who wanted to go out with him. In those years away from Muffy he’d discovered he could be himself, not Muffy’s stuffy twin brother, Will.

Cecily didn’t know he’d ever been Muffy’s stuffy brother. So why, when he’d tried to kiss her, had she run like a bunny out into a violent electrical storm?

It hadn’t boosted his ego any. He’d eventually gotten over the ego part, so why hadn’t he completely gotten over Cecily?

“We should be looking for the Glen Oaks exit.” Which was actually where they’d gotten on the freeway. A full loop of Dallas in heavy traffic ought to give him time to have her eating out of his hand. Figuring it was time to set the scene for intimate conversation, he punched up a CD, turned the surround sound down low and searched for a conversation starter. “So, you came back for the wedding.” Brilliant, Will, just brilliant.

“Under duress.” The fine line of cheekbone and jaw tightened.

“You and Sally were friends somewhere along the way? I mean, obviously you were.”

“When we were too young to know better.”

“So, you lived in Dallas and then you moved away?” It was as if cracking a crab getting anything out of her. But that explained why he didn’t know her. By junior high their group had been pretty tight, a clique that grew out of sharing a neighborhood, school and country club. Some of them didn’t even like each other, but those things and family ties—their parents’ friendships or business relationships—bound them together. Sally and Muffy, for example, were always at each other’s throats, and yet Sally had asked Muffy to be her matron of honor.

To his surprise, Cecily suddenly got chatty. “My father’s a professor of economics. I was born here while he was at SMU. We’ve moved numerous times. He’s at New York University now. But my mother keeps up with Elaine Shipley. We lived next door to the Shipleys in Dallas. I don’t know why Sally asked me to be maid of honor. Will, this traffic is impossible,” she wailed. “We’ll never make it to the hospital.”

“Muffy’ll understand. She knows what the freeway is like.” Get back to you and me. Cecily had fallen silent. It was up to him again. “This is going to be a really big wedding.” That was a good one. “As far as I can tell, everybody in Dallas will be there.”

“That’s what my mother told me,” Cecily said. “Except she said ‘the most important people in Dallas.’”

“Yep, everybody from the mayor to the Dallas Grand Opera director. Oh, and Congressman Galloway and both senators. You keep up with local politics?”

“No.”

So there was no point in pursuing that tack any further. Will cleared his throat. “Where’s your practice?”

It was a simple question, but it seemed to jar her a little. “Blue Hill, Vermont.”

“Why Vermont?”

This time she hesitated even longer. Maybe it was just because the traffic had started to move. “It’s where the big bucks are in my field.”

“Yeah, you have to think about things like that.” In spite of himself, he was getting interested. “You have a specialty?”

“I’m in general medicine, but…but I’ve gotten pretty good at high-risk deliveries.”

“No kidding? What a coincidence for you to be right there in Sally’s wedding party just when Muffy needed you.” He considered what she’d said. “I’m surprised, though. I would have thought the big bucks would be in New York, Chicago—a big city full of career women who don’t have kids until they’re getting close to forty.”

“Yes, but Vermont’s such a beautiful place,” she said, “and the pace is slower. No place is perfect, of course.”

“What’s the downside?”

“It gets lonely sometimes.” The traffic really was moving now, not quickly but steadily, and she seemed to be concentrating on it.

“You have your patients.” He gazed at her, increasingly curious about how she lived her life.

<1 2 3 >

На страницу:

Перейти

2 из 3