He threw off his hard hat and safety goggles. “Where are you?”
Silence.
“Adara!”
“In the apartment,” she groused. “And you’re not.”
“Where in the apartment?” he demanded, running up the emergency stairs two at a time to the service entrance. “Don’t scream if you hear someone in the kitchen. It’s me. Did you change the code?”
“What? How are you in the kitchen? I’m in the bed—” She sucked in a breath.
He stabbed the keypad and the light went green.
He shot through the door, into the kitchen, and strode to her room, ears pounding at the silence. Her bedroom looked like a crime scene with clothes tossed everywhere, nylons bunched on the floor, slippers strewn into the corner, but no Adara. He checked the bathroom.
“Where are you?” he demanded.
“Here,” she insisted in his ear. “By the bed.”
He’d been on both sides of her bed and rounded it again, but she wasn’t there. “Damn it, Adara.” He lowered the phone and shouted, “Where are you?”
“Here!” she screamed.
Her voice came from the other side of the penthouse. He ran through the living room to his room. Their room. A faint part of him wanted to read something significant into that, but when he entered, he didn’t see her there either.
Was she torturing him on purpose—?
Oh, hell. He spotted one white fist clinging to the rumpled blanket. Her dark head was bent against the far side of the mattress.
“Oh, babe,” he said, and threw his phone aside to come around to where she knelt, bare shoulders rising and falling with her panting breaths. She had a towel around her, but nothing else. Her hair was dripping wet.
“Okay, I’m here. You’re sure this is just labor?”
“I know what labor feels like, Gideon.”
“Okay, okay,” he soothed. “Can I get you onto the bed?” He was afraid to touch her. “Are you bleeding?”
“No, but my water broke. That’s why I had a shower.” She kept her forehead buried against the side of the mattress. “I’m not ready for this. It hurts. And I’m so scared the baby will die—”
“Shh, shh.” He stroked her cold shoulder with a shaky hand. “Have you felt the baby move?”
She nodded. “But anything could happen.”
“Nothing is going to happen. I’m right here.” He prayed to God he wasn’t lying to her about this. Shakily he picked up her phone and ended their call. “Have you called the ambulance? Karen?”
“No.” She swiped her eyes on her bare arm, and peeked over her elbow at him, gaze full of dark vulnerability and a frightened longing that put pressure on his lungs. “I just thought of you, that you said you’d be here with me. Where were you? How did you get here so fast?”
“Downstairs,” he answered, dialing Karen’s personal line from memory. In seconds he had briefed her and ended the call. “She’ll meet us at the hospital. An ambulance is on the way.”
“Oh, leave it to you to get everything done in one call.”
“Are you complaining?” He eased her to her feet and onto the bed, muscles twitching to draw her cold, damp skin against him to warm her up, but he drew the covers over her instead. Sitting beside her on the bed, he rested one hand on the side of her neck and stared into her eyes. “You know me. I won’t settle for anything less than the best.”
Her, he was not so subtly implying.
Her brow wrinkled and her mouth trembled. She looked away.
Now wasn’t the time to break through the walls she’d put up between them though. He reluctantly drew away and stood.
“Where are you going?” she asked with alarm.
“Have you packed a bag?”
“No, but... You’re coming with me, aren’t you?” she asked as he moved to find an empty overnight case. “To the hospital?”
“You couldn’t keep me away. Not even if you had me arrested.” She must have wanted to. Why hadn’t she? He glanced over and her hand was outstretched to him, urging him with convulsive clasps to return to her side. Her expression strained into silent agony.
He leaped toward her and grabbed her hand, letting her cling to him as he breathed with her through the contraction, keeping her from hyperventilating, staring into her eyes with as much confidence as he could possibly instill while hiding how much her pain distressed him. He hated seeing her suffer. This was going to kill him.
She released a huge breath and let go of his hand to throw her arm over her eyes. “I’m being a weakling about this. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” he growled. Her apology made him want to drop to his knees and beg her for forgiveness. He packed instead, throwing in one of his shirts as a nightgown, a pair of her stretchy sweats, her toothbrush and the moisturizer she always used. “Slippers, hairbrush, lip balm. What else?”
Adara watched him move economically through the space they’d shared, demonstrating how well he knew her as he unhesitatingly gathered all the things she used every day: vitamins, hair clips, even the lozenges she kept by the bed for if she had a cough in the night.
“I—” read about your mother, she wanted to say, but another pain ground up from the middle of her spine to wrap around her bulging middle. She gritted her teeth and he took her hand, reassuring her with a steady stare of unwavering confidence and command of the moment, silently willing her to accept and ride and wait for it to release her from its grip.
His focus allowed her to endure the pain without panic. As the contraction subsided, she fell back on the pillow again, breathing normally.
“Those are close,” he said, glancing at the clock.
“They started hours ago. I was in denial.”
She got a severe look for that, but he was distracted from rebuking her by the arrival of the paramedics. Minutes later, she was strapped to a gurney, her hand well secured in Gideon’s sure grasp as she was taken downstairs and loaded into the ambulance.
From there, nothing existed but the business of delivering a baby. As promised, Gideon stayed with her every second. And he was exactly the man she’d always known—the one who seemed to know what she wanted or needed the moment it occurred to her. When the lights began to irritate her, he had them lowered. When she was examined, he shooed extra people from the room, sensitive to her inherent modesty. He kept ice chips handy and gathered her sweaty hair off her neck and never flinched once, no matter how tightly she gripped his arm or how colorfully she swore and blamed him for the pain she was in.
“I can’t do it,” she sobbed at one point, so exhausted she wanted to die.
“Think of how much you hate me,” he cajoled.
She didn’t hate him. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. She loved him too much.
But she was angry with him. He’d hurt her so badly. It went beyond anything she had imagined she could endure. And then she’d found out why he’d lied and it made her hate herself. She was angry most about his leaving her. Living without him was a wasteland of numbness punctuated with spikes of remembered joy that froze and faded as soon as they were recalled. He’d left her in that agonizing state for weeks and...
Another pain built and she gathered all her fury and betrayal, letting it knot her muscles and feed her strength and then she pushed...
* * *
Gideon stood with his feet braced on the solid floor, but swayed as though a deck rocked beneath him. His son, swaddled into a tight roll by an efficient nurse, wore a disgruntled red face. He wouldn’t be satisfied with the soothing sway much longer, not when his tiny stomach was empty. He kept his eyes stubbornly shut, but let out an angry squawk and turned his head to root against the edge of the blanket.
Why that made Gideon want to laugh and cry at the same time, he didn’t know. Maybe because he was overtired. He hadn’t slept, his body felt as if he’d been thrown down a flight of stairs, his skin had the film of twenty-four hours without a shower and his own stomach was empty. This was like a hangover, but a crazy good one that left him unable to hold on to clear thoughts. And even though he had a sense he should be filled with regret, he was so elated it was criminal.
“I know, son,” he whispered against the infant’s unbelievably tender cheek. “But Mama is so tired. Can you hang on a little longer, till she wakes up?” He tried a different pattern of jiggling and offered a fingertip only to have it rejected with a thrust of the baby’s tongue.
The boy whimpered a little more loudly.
“I’m awake,” Adara said in the sweet, sleepy voice he’d been missing like a limb from his body.
Gideon turned from the rain beyond the window and found her lying on her side, her hand tucked under the side of her face as she watched him. The tender look in her eyes filled him with such unreasonable hope, he had to swallow back a choked sob. He consciously shook off the dream that tried to balloon in his head. Get real, he told himself, recalling why he was missing her so badly. His heart plummeted as though he’d taken a steel toe into it.