LITMIR.BIZ

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dreams were all sweet, dark, peaceful. She remembered nothing until she heard the sound of a nurse’s cheerful voice, and opened her eyes to a room full of sunshine. “Are we awake, Mrs. Crandall? I’m bringing your beautiful daughter. There you go, honey… I have on your chart that you want to nurse, so I’m going to help you get set up. Can we sit up?”

      She pushed herself to a sitting position, listening to the nurse, taking in the pale-blue walls of the private room, the fresh sun pouring in the window, the washed-clean sky of a new day. All those sensory perceptions, though, came from a distance.

      Once the bundle was placed in her arms, there was only her and her daughter.

      OhGodOhGodOhGod. The pain and fear had all been real, but mattered no more now than spit in a wind.

      The feel of her daughter was magic. Reverently she touched the pink cheek, the kiss-me-shaped little mouth, then slowly—so carefully!—unwrapped the blanket. She counted ten fingers, ten toes, one nose, no teeth. Without question, her daughter was the first truly perfect thing in the entire world. Love rolled over Kasey in waves, fierce, hot, compelling, bigger than any avalanche and tidal wave put together.

      “She’s all right? Really all right? I remember the doctor sounding worried in the delivery room. I was scared something was going wrong—”

      The nurse glanced at the chart at the bottom of the bed, then quickly turned away. “She sure looks like a healthy little princess to me.” Efficiently the nurse adjusted Kasey’s nightgown, and finally coaxed Kasey to quit examining the baby long enough to see mom and daughter hooked up. “I’m going to give you two a few private minutes, but I’ll check on you in a bit, okay?”

      Kasey nodded vaguely. The nurse was nice—but not part of her world. Not then. She stroked and cuddled her miracle as the little one learned to nurse.

      She and Graham had bickered about baby names for months. Boys’ names had been tough enough, but girls had seemed impossible. Cut and dried, Graham wanted Therese Elizabeth Judith if the child was a girl. Kasey thought that sounded like a garbled mouthful…now, though, she found a solution to the problem in an instant. Graham could have whatever name he wanted on the birth certificate.

      But her name was Tess.

      Kasey knew. From the first touch, the first smell and texture and look…the name simply fit her. And it was hard to stop cherishing and marveling. The little one had blue eyes—unseeing but beautiful. Her skin had the translucence of pearl. The head was pretty darn bald, but there was a hint of rusty-blond fuzz. Little. Oh, she was so little.

      Kasey thought, I’d do anything for you. And was amazed at the compelling swamp of instincts. How come no one had told her how fierce the emotion was? That mom-love was this powerful, this extraordinarily huge?

      “Oh, Graham,” she murmured as she caressed the little one’s head. “Wait until you see how precious, how priceless your daughter is. She’s worth anything. Everything. All…”

      Kasey stopped talking on a sudden swallow. She looked up.

      Darn it—where was Graham?

      Jake pulled his eight-year-old Honda Civic into the driveway on Holiday, touched the horn to announce his arrival, and then walked around and climbed into the passenger seat.

      He saw the living room curtain stir, so Danny heard the car—but that was no guarantee his son would emerge from the house in the next millennium. Rolling down the window—it was hot enough to fry sweat—he reached in the back seat for his battered briefcase. Sweet, summery flowers scented the late afternoon, but the humidity was so thick it was near choking.

      He glanced at the windows of his ex-wife’s house again, then determinedly opened his work. The top three folders were labeled with the names of suburban Detroit hospitals— Beauregard, St. Francis and Randolph. All three hospitals had a history of superior care until recently, when they’d had a sudden rash of lawsuits, all related to rare medical problems affecting newborns.

      Traditionally even the word newborn invoked a panic flight response in Jake—yeah, he’d had one. He still remembered the night Danny had been born fifteen years ago—and his keeling over on his nose. So babies weren’t normally his favorite subject.

      But he’d accidentally come across one of these mysterious lawsuits when he’d been researching a separate story for the newspaper, and then couldn’t shake his curiosity. Every question led to another dropped ash—a lit ash—and no one else seemed aware there was an incendiary pile of embers in the forest.

      In itself, the increase in lawsuits didn’t necessarily mean beans, because everybody sued for everything today. People especially freaked when something happened to a baby—what parent didn’t suffer a rage of pain when their kid didn’t come out normal? Although Jake was no longer a practicing lawyer, he knew the system. Knew how lawsuits worked.

      He’d already told himself not to get so stirred up. What looked like a Teton could still end up an anthill. But it smelled wrong, this sudden burst of lawsuits—and this sudden burst of serious health problems for babies, especially when the affected hospitals had longstanding excellent reputations.

      Momentarily a woman’s face pounced in his mind. Kasey. Graham Crandall’s wife. Crandall was one of those starched-spine controlling types—a silver-tongued snob, Jake had always thought, the kind of guy who’d give you the shirt off his back—as long as you gave him a medal for doing it. There was no trouble between them, no bad history. Jake didn’t care about him one way or another, even back in the years when he’d hung with the Grosse Pointe crowd.

      But it had been a shock to meet Crandall’s wife. Coming out of the hospital that night, he’d only seen a woman in labor—she was crying. Who wouldn’t? About to give birth to a watermelon? Yet her face kept popping in his mind. The short, rusty-blond hair. The freckled nose and sunburned cheeks.

      She wasn’t elegant or beautiful or anything like the women Jake associated with Crandall. Instead, there was a radiance about her, a glow from the inside, a natural joyful spirit. The wide mouth was built for laughter; her eyes were bluer than sky.

      Pretty ridiculous, to remember all those details of a woman he didn’t know from Adam—and a woman who was married, besides. Jake figured he must have had that lightning-pull toward her for the obvious reason. It had momentarily scared him, to realize she was going into that hospital to have a baby—the same hospital where he’d been researching the lawsuits.

      Now, though, he sighed impatiently and turned back to his papers. Kasey was none of his business. Hell, even these lawsuits weren’t. For two years, he’d tried his best to just put one foot in front of the other, pay his bills, make it through each day, be grateful that the half-assed weekly paper had been willing to give him a job. Even the research on these hospitals he was doing on the q.t., his own time.

      Jake had done an outstanding job of screwing up his life. Now he was trying to run from trouble at Olympic speed. He figured there was a limit to how many mistakes a guy could make before any hope of self-respect was obliterated for good.

      The instant he heard the front door slam, he looked up, and immediately hurled his briefcase into the back seat. Quick as a blink, he forgot all about lawsuits and strangers’ babies. His focus lasered on the boy hiking toward the car. Just looking at Danny made him feel a sharp ache in his gut.

      At fifteen, Danny had the look of the high school stud. The thick dark hair and broody dark eyes drew the girls—always had, always would. The broad shoulders and no-butt and long muscular legs added to the kid’s good looks. The cutoffs hanging so low they hinted at what he was most proud of, the cocky posture, the I-own-the-world bad-boy swagger…oh yeah, the girls went for him.

      Jake should know. He’d looked just like the kid at fifteen. But there were differences.

      Last week Danny’s hair had been straggly and shoulder-length; this week it had colored streaks. The kid’s scowl was as old as a bad habit and his eyes were angry—all the time angry, it seemed. The swagger wasn’t assumed for the sake of impressing the girls,

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