Beauty And The Baby

His arm was around her, just in case her knees failed again. “Why do you have to be so damn stubborn?”

She flashed a grin at him. “Maybe that’s what keeps me going.”

He knew her well enough to know there was no winning. “At least let me drive you home.”

Lori shook her head. “I brought my car.”

“So?” Carson didn’t see the problem. “I’ll drive that.”

She cocked her head, looking at him. The man was a dear. “Then how will you get back?”

He bit back an oath. “Do you have to overthink everything?”

“Can’t help it.” Her eyes sparkled as she smiled more broadly at him. “Must be the company I keep.” She took a deep cleansing breath, then released it slowly, just as she’d demonstrated countless times in class. “There, all better. Really.” But as she tried to walk away, she found that he was still holding her. Still unwilling to allow her to leave on her own power.

She was standing less than an inch away from him. Feeling things she didn’t think that women in her condition were capable of feeling. At least not about men who weren’t responsible for getting them into this condition in the first place.

Chapter Two

L ori looked down at her brother-in-law’s hands. Strong, capable, and right now they were on either side of her arms, anchoring her in place. She raised her eyes to meet his.

“Um, Carson.”

“What?” Impatience laced with annoyance framed the single word.

She gave a slight tug. “I can’t go anywhere if you’re still holding on to me.”

By all rights, he knew he should drop his hands to his sides. She was a grown woman, more than capable of making her own decisions. He’d always believed in live and let live. At least on paper. But there were times when he felt she was being unnecessarily stubborn on principle.

“Maybe that’s the idea,” he told her.

“Eventually, one of us is going to have to go to the bathroom,” she deadpanned. She glanced at her belly before looking up at him again. “Because of my condition, my guess is that it’ll probably be me.” A glimmer of a smile began to play on her lips. “I’d rather not have to ask for permission.”

Carson felt a trace of embarrassment and wasn’t sure if it was for her or himself. In either case, Carson dropped his hands in exasperation. But not before issuing a warning.

“First sign of you fading, I’m taking you home, no matter what you say.” His eyes did almost as good a job as his hands at pinning her to the spot. “I’ll be watching you.”

“I never doubted it for a moment.” The smile on her lips widened, reaching up to her eyes. He tried not to notice and failed miserably. There was something about Lori’s eyes that always got to him. They had been the first thing he’d noticed about her when they’d met. The killer figure had been the second.

“What?” he finally bit off.

Surly on the outside, mushy on the inside, she thought fondly. “I just never envisioned my guardian angel would look like a football player, that’s all.”

Carson laughed shortly, his expression never changing. He’d been accused of being a lot of things in his time, but never an angel. Not even by his mother. Certainly not by his ex-wife.

“Got a hell of a long way to go before I’m anyone’s guardian angel.”

There was something in his eyes for a fleeting moment. Sadness? It was gone the next, but it succeeded in moving her. Carson didn’t like being touched. Because she was a toucher and firmly believed in the benefits of human contact, she patted his cheek anyway. The man had been there for her, awkward, but ready to help right from the start. She wasn’t about to forget that.

“Not nearly as far as you think, Carson.” She turned on her heel with more ease than he thought possible for a woman in her condition. “Gotta get back to work.”

But just as she stepped out the door, a dark-haired young woman swung open the door to the rear entrance and came rushing down the hall. In her haste, she narrowly avoided a collision with Lori.

Eyes the color of milk chocolate widened as the woman came to an abrupt halt less than an inch shy of impact. She sucked in her breath.

“Wow, sorry about that.” She patted Lori’s stomach. “Could have had an early delivery, huh?”

Carson’s arm had closed protectively around Lori, pulling her back just in time. He glared at the other woman. Good help was hard to find. It was even harder to get it to come in on time. “There wouldn’t have been any danger of that if you’d come in at ten the way you were supposed to, Rhonda.”

The woman, barely three years out of her own teens and in Carson’s opinion not yet fully entrenched in the adult world, gave him a high-wattage, apologetic grin. “Sorry, boss. Chuck decided to have a temper tantrum this morning.”

Carson’s frown deepened. His aide’s current flame reminded him a lot of Kurt. “Either tell your boyfriend to grow up, or get another boyfriend.”

His words rolled off her back like an inconsequential Southern California summer rain.

“Sorry,” she repeated. “You don’t pay me enough for that.”

From what he knew, Rhonda was allowing her boyfriend to crash on her sofa. Chuck was currently “in between jobs,” a place the man had been residing in from the time Carson had hired Rhonda. “Won’t have to if the next boyfriend could hang onto a job.”

The familiar words made him stop abruptly. He slanted a look at Lori, wondering if his exchange with Rhonda had scraped over any old wounds. He’d lectured Kurt about hanging on to a job more times than he could remember, especially after he’d married Lori. Kurt’s response had always been to laugh off his words, as if he thought his older brother was joking. Kurt had maintained that he was still looking for his niche. As far as Carson knew, Kurt never found it.

“So he could be an old grump like you, boss man? Don’t think so.” Rhonda winked broadly at Carson, shoving her hands into the back pockets of her worn jeans. “I’d love to stand around and talk like this, but some of us have work to do.” She waved to one of the young teens and hurried across the gym.

Carson turned his attention back to Lori. “There goes your excuse.”

Lori looked at him. “You’ve lost me.”

Interesting choice of words, he thought. And very appropriate.

“Just what I’m trying to do. At least for the rest of the afternoon. Rhonda can handle the kids.” He nodded in the direction of the front entrance. “Go home and take a nap before class tonight.”

It surprised her that he remembered her schedule, but then, she supposed it shouldn’t. Carson liked to keep tabs on everything. It felt confining to her at times, but he never realized it. She knew he meant no harm.

She pressed her lips together, debating. It wouldn’t hurt to grab a few minutes of her own, she thought. She’d been up half the night working on a new Web design project that had come in. When opportunity knocked, she couldn’t afford not to be home. “You’re not going to be satisfied until I go, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, you win.” She sighed, surrendering. “Always like to keep the boss happy.”

Carson crossed his arms before his rock-solid chest. “Right, and I’m the bluebird of happiness.”

Her eyes swept over him. He was still every inch the football player who’d made the winning touch-down in the last game he ever played. “I wouldn’t perch on any branches if I were you.”

He grumbled something not entirely under his breath. Laughing, Lori walked away, heading for the lockers on the other end of the first floor. She was very conscious of his watching her and tried very hard not to move from side to side the way she felt inclined to these days. Or to place a hand to the small of her back in order to ease the ache there. Pregnant women did that and Carson seemed to equate pregnancy with weakness. The more she fit his stereotype, the more determined he would be to try to convince her to stay home.

She wasn’t the stay-at-home type.

Lori made her way to the shadowy row of lockers where the kids stashed their backpacks, books and various paraphernalia while they used the facilities. Once out of eye range, she pressed her hand to the small of her back and massaged for a moment. For a peanut, this baby was giving her some backache.

After stretching, she went to her locker. Wanting to seem more like one of the teens, Lori had taken a locker to store her own belongings there. Usually, she only had her purse.

She paused in front of the upper locker, trying to remember her combination. It was nestled in overcrowded memory banks that retained every number that had any bearing on her life. She seemed to retain all manner of numbers, not just her own social security number, but her late husband’s as well. It was in there with her license plate and the phone numbers and birthdays of several dozen people who currently figured prominently in her life.

She smiled as the combination came to her. Turning the dial on the old lock three revolutions to the left, a muffled sound caught her attention. Lori stopped and listened.

The sound came again.

It was a sob, she was sure of it. The kind that was muted by hands being pressed helplessly over a mouth too distressed to seal away the noise.

Concerned, curious, Lori set the lock back against the metal door and moved around to the other side of the bank of battered lockers.

Huddled in the corner, her long tanned legs pulled in tightly against her chest, was one of the girls she’d missed seeing today. The young girl sounded as if her heart was breaking. Boy trouble?

“Angela?”

The girl only pulled herself in tighter. Someone else might have felt as if they were intruding and left. Lori’s mind had never worked that way. Anyone in pain needed to be soothed.

She took a few steps toward the girl. “Angela, what’s wrong?”

“Nothin’.” The girl jerked her head up, wiping away the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She tossed her head defiantly, looking away. Her silence told Lori that this was none of her business.

Lori chose not to hear.

For her, working at the center was a complete departure from life as she had known it. Here the word “deprived” didn’t mean not having the latest video game as soon as it came out. “Doing without” had serious connotations here that involved ill-fitting hand-me-down clothing and hunger pangs that had nothing to do with dieting. Here, life was painted in bleaker colors.

But then, that was what the center was for, painting rainbows over the shades of gray.

“Sorry, but I think it’s something.” Angela kept her face averted. “The tears were a dead giveaway.” Still nothing. “You know, for a pregnant woman, I can be very patient.” Lori planted herself in front of the teenager. “I’m not going away until you level with me and tell me why you’re sitting here by yourself, watering your knees.”

Normally, her banter could evoke a smile out of the girl. But not today.

This was worse than she thought. With effort, Lori lowered herself to the girl’s level. Her voice lost its teasing banter. “C’mon, Angela. Talk to me. Maybe I can help.”

Angela shook her head. Fresh tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Nobody can help me.” She sighed with a hopelessness that was far too old for her to be feeling. “Except maybe a doctor.”

In that moment, Lori understood. She knew what had reduced the fifteen-year-old to this kind of despair and tears.

Lori placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder. She was so thin, so small. And living a nightmare shared by so many.

“Are you in trouble, Angela?”

It was an old-fashioned term, Lori knew, but in its own way as appropriate today as it had been when it was first coined. Because a pregnant girl just barely in high school was most assuredly in trouble.

The sigh was bottomless. “Yeah, I’ll say.” She sniffled. Lori dug into her pocket and pulled out a tissue, offering it to her. Angela took it and dried the fresh tears. Her voice quavered as she spoke. “A hell of a lot of trouble.”

There were no indications that the girl was pregnant, but then, she hadn’t looked it herself until just recently, Lori thought. “How far along are you?”

“I don’t know.” Angela shrugged restlessly. She looked down at the tissue. It was shredding. “It’s been over two months, I think.”

“You need to see a doctor.”

Lori could see the beginning of a new thought entering the girl’s eyes. “Yeah, somebody who can make this go away.”

Lori shook her head. She didn’t want Angela thinking that she was cavalierly suggesting she have an abortion. Decisions like that couldn’t be made quickly.

“No. Somebody who can tell you what’s going on with your body.” She took the girl’s hands into her own, forming a bond. “You might not be pregnant, it might be something else.” Although, Lori thought, other possibilities could be equally as frightening to a fifteen-year-old as having a baby.

Thin, dark brown brows furrowed in confusion as Angela looked at her. “Like what?”

She didn’t know enough about medicine to hypothesize. “That’s what you need to find out. Do you have a doctor?”

Again the thin shoulders rose and fell, half vague, half defiant. “There’s this doctor on Figueroa Street. I hear she’s pretty decent.”

Lori thought of her own doctor, a woman she’d been going to and trusted since she’d gotten out of college. Dr. Sheila Pollack had become more like a friend than just a physician. Angela needed someone like that right now, a professional who could clear up the mysteries for her and keep her healthy. Someone who could make her feel at ease rather than afraid.

“All right, go to her.”

Angela frowned. “Word on the street is she don’t do no abortions.”

The girl’s mind was stuck in a groove that might not be the answer she needed, or would even want a few months down the line. “Don’t do anything hasty,” Lori counseled. “If you’re pregnant, talk to your mother.”

Angela looked at her as if she’d just suggested she cover herself with honey and walk into cave full of bears. “Yeah, right and have her kill me? No thanks.” There was disdain in the teen’s voice, as if she’d just lost all credibility in the young girl’s eyes.

When she moved to put her arm around the girl’s shoulders, Angela jerked away. Lori wasn’t put off. She tried again, more firmly this time. Angela needed to get a few barriers down. “She might surprise you.”

Angela blew out a mocking breath. “Only surprises my mother gives me are the boyfriends she brings home.” She shivered.

Had one of them put the moves on Angela? It wouldn’t have been the first time in history something like that had happened. Lori tread carefully, determined to do the right thing and not fail this girl she hadn’t known six months ago.

“If you want, I can talk to your mother for you.”

Angela buried her face in her hands. Lori sat beside her on the floor, stroking her hair. “What I want is not to be pregnant.”

“First find out if you are pregnant.”

Angela slowly raised her head and looked at her. “And then?”

“And then—” With effort, Lori raised herself to her feet, “—we’ll go from there. One step at a time. When I see you tomorrow, Angela, I want you to tell me you have an appointment with the doctor.”

The girl nodded, scrambled up to her feet and wiped away the last of the telltale streaks from her face. She looked at her for a long moment. And then, slowly, just the barest of smiles emerged. “You know, you’re pretty pushy for a pregnant woman.”

“You’re not the first one to tell me that.” Lori slipped her arm around the girl’s shoulder and gave her a quick hug.

She couldn’t get Angela’s face out of her mind. All through her instructions at the Lamaze class, Lori kept visualizing Angela in her mind’s eye. She could almost see her here at Blair, taking classes to prepare for the monumental change that lay ahead of her.

The classes weren’t enough, Lori thought. Not for her and certainly not for a fifteen-year-old.

The classes Lori gave with such authority taught woman how to give birth, but not what to do after that. Not really, not if she was being honest with herself. There was more to being a parent than knowing how to give a sponge bath to a newborn and that you should support their heads above all else. So much more.

Lori walked down the long, brightly lit corridor of the first floor of one of Blair Memorial’s annex buildings. She’d waited until the last couple had left before locking up. The building felt lonely to her despite the bright lights. Seeing Angela huddled in a corner like that today had brought out all her own insecurities and fears. She had no mother to cower before, but there wasn’t a mother to turn to for guidance, either.

She missed her mother, Lori thought not for the first time as she unlocked the door of her 1995 Honda Civic. Missed her something awful. For once, she lowered her defenses and allowed the sadness to come.

With a sigh, she started up her car. Leukemia had robbed her of her mother more than a dozen years ago. A heart attack had claimed her father just as she was in the middle of college. By twenty, she was all alone and struggling to make the best of it. And then Kurt had entered her life and she felt as if the sun had finally come out in her world.

Now here she was, eight years later, struggling all over again. The upbeat, feisty manner that the rest of the world saw was not always a hundred percent authentic. There were times which she really ached to have someone in her corner.

She had someone in her corner, Lori reminded herself as she turned down the hospital’s winding path. She had Carson.

Leaving the hospital grounds, she fleetingly debated stopping by the old-fashioned Ice Cream Parlor where she and the other three single mothers had so often gone after classes, eager to temporarily drown their problems in creamy confections sinfully overloaded with whipped cream and empty, sumptuous calories.

It wasn’t nearly as much fun alone.

Lori drove by the establishment. It was still open and doing a brisk business. The tables beside the bay windows were all filled. She wavered only for a moment before she pressed down on the gas pedal. The Ice Cream Parlor became a reflection in her rearview mirror.

She couldn’t help wondering what the other women were doing tonight and if they still found motherhood as exciting as they had in the beginning.

Would she? Or was her only certainty these days the fact that she found the prospect of giving birth and motherhood scary as hell?

She came to a stop at a red light. Her hands felt slippery on the steering wheel.

Opening night jitters, she told herself.

Her due date was breathing down her neck and although part of her felt as if she had been pregnant since the beginning of time, another part of her did not want to race to the finish line, did not want the awesome weight of being responsible for the welfare of someone else other than herself.

“I know what you’re going through, Angela,” she whispered into the darkness as she eased onto the gas pedal again.

Right now, Angela probably felt isolated and alone. Maybe if she gave the girl a call, to see how she was doing and if she’d called to make an appointment with the doctor, Angela wouldn’t feel so alone.

The next moment, the thought was shot down in flames. She didn’t have Angela’s number. On top of that, she wasn’t even sure where the girl lived or what her mother’s name was, so surfing through the Internet’s numerous helpful sites wouldn’t be productive.

The number, she realized, was probably on Carson’s computer.

Lori made a U-turn at the end of the next block and pointed her vehicle back toward the center.

By car, St. Augustine’s Teen Center was only fifteen minutes away from Bedford and home, but it might as well have resided in a completely different world. Here, the streets were narrow rather than wide, and the neighborhoods had not grown old gracefully. The windows of the buildings seemed to be staring out hopelessly at cars as they drove by. The street lights cast shadows rather than illumination. It made Lori sad just to be here.

This was the kind of neighborhood Kurt and Carson had grown up in, she thought. The kind they had both tried to leave behind.

Except that Carson had come back. By choice.

Lori saw St. Augustine’s Teen Center up ahead. Lights came from the rear of the building where Carson kept his office. She glanced at her watch. It was past eight.

What was Carson still doing here?

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