“Oh.” Her hands shot to her belly. The baby. The man had delivered her little girl and brought them to the hospital. A mix of embarrassment and wonder filled her. She’d had her baby in a car with only a stranger to help. Mother would be mortified.
She shifted in the narrow hospital bed. Her body was sore and stiff, but not painfully so, a fact that surprised her. After the torture in the car she’d expected to be half-dead today.
She rolled to her side, eager to hold her new daughter.
The baby was gone.
A tremor rippled through her as the possibilities played through her head. The nurses had left the newborn here, at the bedside, in an Isolette. Jenna was positive.
Had the Carrington machine already discovered her whereabouts?
Fighting the stiff sheets, she sat upright, only to tumble sideways onto the pillow, light-headed and weak. Blood roared in her temples. She took deep breaths, waiting until the black dots dissipated.
For a long moment, she remained still, frustration in every breath. Had someone recognized her and called her family? Was her baby girl even now in the smothering bosom of the Carrington clan?
The heavy wooden door opened with a swish. Jenna braced to face her censuring mother, determined to stand strong for her baby.
When a nurse appeared, backside first, Jenna wilted against the pillow in relief.
“Everything looks great with your little princess,” the woman said, rolling the Isolette into the room. “Doctor checked her all out, gave her the requisite medications and said she was perfect.”
“I didn’t know where you’d taken her.” Her voice sounded breathless and scared.
The nurse, a young woman with a long, black ponytail, whose tag read Crystal Wolf, RN, gave her a sympathetic pat. “Sorry, hon, you were sleepin’ like a rock, so I didn’t want to disturb you. Not after what you went through. You ready for her? Or are you too tired? You look a little pale.”
Jenna held out her arms. Color would return now that she knew her mother wasn’t on the premises. “Yes, please let me hold her.”
“She’s a darling. So pretty with all that fine golden hair and her little turned-up nose.”
Jenna thought her daughter looked like an alien. A withered old lady alien. “Will her head always be pointed like this?”
With a shake of dangly white earrings, the nurse laughed. She reached over, flipped the soft pink blanket back and gently massaged the baby’s head with a cupped hand. “You do that every day and before you know it, the cone head will be gone.”
“Thank goodness.” Jenna gave a shaky laugh.
She’d read books and searched the Internet on the topic of parenting and felt competent to be a mother, but now that the moment was upon her, the idea of caring for another human being frightened her. She had no home, no job, and no one to help. For a person who’d never been allowed to do anything for herself, she had a great deal to learn—fast.
“Do you have a name for this little princess?”
A gentle smile lifted Jenna’s mouth. “Sophie. Sophie Joy because she is the greatest joy I’ve ever known.”
“Oh, hon, that’s beautiful.”
Sophie stretched, her tiny face screwing up in an adorable expression. Jenna’s whole body seized up with an overwhelming love, a love so powerful tears filled her eyes. This was why she’d run away. This precious bit of humanity deserved to love and be loved for the right reasons. She deserved to grow up free from fear and the hovering, controlling influences that had stymied Jenna’s life since birth.
Her family, particularly Elaine Von Gustin Carrington, would not control this baby’s life the way they’d controlled hers.
People who envied her opulent lifestyle had no idea what it was like to live in an ivory tower surrounded by hired bodyguards and nannies and private tutors. They had no idea the sadness of a child never allowed to play outside or with other children who were “not like us.” They’d never sat with their faces pressed against the window watching others play in the snow while wondering what it would be like to build a snowman with someone other than a hired nanny and a burly bodyguard.
The world considered her a spoiled rich princess, but they were wrong. Elaine Carrington’s elitism and her kidnapping paranoia had made her only daughter a lonely child, a prisoner of her family’s enormous wealth.
Which was exactly the reason Jenna wanted Sophie Joy to grow up in a normal home, in a normal town, doing normal things. She’d play with other children and go to a real school and maybe even join a soccer team if she wanted to. When she was a teenager, she’d hang out at the mall and have sleepovers and attend school dances with friends of her own choosing.