Seeing Stars: A Loveswept Classic Romance (7 page)

It was beginning to look at lot like Christmas at Curtis and Linda’s. A boxwood wreath adorned with chinaberries and lemons hung on the front door. On either side, brass-and-glass carriage lanterns wore ribbons of red. A willow basket full of apples—symbolizing generosity and goodwill—had been left out on the wooden step.

Outside, their small saltbox home extended a warm holiday welcome to one and all; inside, it was as cold and silent as a tomb.

“Where’s their bedroom?” Nick demanded after a quick but thorough search of the basement and first floor proved futile.

“Upstairs.” Dovie’s stomach went weightless with alarm when she looked past the fragrant pine swags that looped their way up the banister. Why, oh, why, hadn’t she called them before she left to go fishing this morning?

Fear dampened her palms and dried her throat as she hurried toward the stairs. “Here, I’ll show you.”

“No!” Nick’s fingers curled around her arm, stopping her short of the first riser. He knew she was already torturing herself needlessly, and wanted to spare her as much as he could. “I’ll go.”

She rounded on him. “But—”

“But nothing!” The doctor within him, for a time
imprisoned in some dark part of his mind, was back in control. “You call Harley and tell him to bring my medical bag. He knows where I keep it. And tell him to alert Joe Rodgers … just in case we have to take them to Richmond.”

For a moment Dovie felt as if she might be sick. Then she swallowed, willing herself to take strength from Nick, to trust his decision, and finally she nodded. “What’s your telephone number?”

He gave it to her and then bounded up the stairs, using the greenery-decorated banister as his guide.

“Five steps down the hall, first door to your right!” she called up just as he reached the second-floor landing. Then she ran to the telephone and dialed his number with shaking fingers.

“Curtis?” Nick paused outside their closed door and laid his ear against the wood, listening. “Linda?”

When no one answered—had he really expected otherwise?—he found the doorknob and turned it. Flinching slightly because of the cold, he entered the eerily silent room.

Luckily the bed was only a few steps from the door. He leaned down to explore it and felt them curled spoon-fashion beneath the covers, as though trying to share their body heat.

Working rapidly now, Nick rolled Curtis onto his back, pressed two fingers just below his jaw, and made out a thready pulse. Then he moved to the
opposite side of their big four-poster bed and repeated the procedure on Linda, with the same results.

“They’re alive.” He answered Dovie’s unspoken question when he heard her hesitate in the doorway.

“Thank God,” she murmured. Her anxious gaze lit on the taut swell of Linda’s stomach. “What about the baby?”

Nick threw back the quilted bedspread along with a host of blankets, lifted the hem of Linda’s flannel nightgown, and pressed his fingers against the lower left quadrant of her protruding abdomen, feeling for the fetal heartbeat.

Watching … waiting … Dovie bit her bottom lip so hard, she drew blood.

Suddenly Linda’s stomach began arching and changing shape, as if her baby were waking from a long winter’s nap.

The instant she saw the infant move and realized what it meant, Dovie almost wept with relief. But this was neither the time nor the place for tears, so she stepped to the bed and asked with brisk intensity, “What do you want me to do?”

Nick palpated Linda’s distended abdomen with both hands, the shadow of a smile tingeing his lips when he located the baby’s head in the birth canal. If everything went as it should … Abruptly he pulled the hem of her nightgown down, snapped erect, and ordered, “Close the door and open the windows.”

“Right.” But the room seemed to spin as Dovie rushed to do his bidding.

The window closest to the bed slid up smoothly, but the latch on the storm was stuck.

She tried working it loose, becoming all thumbs and butterfingers in the process. Then she rested for a moment, her thoughts suddenly muddled, while thousands of tiny pinpoint lights exploded in front of her eyes and the world reeled around her.

Finally, sensing that time was of the essence, she mustered every ounce of strength left in her and tried the latch again.

It gave.

Dovie pushed up the thermal pane, then dropped to her knees. Cold air swirled in, clearing her head. The snow that had piled up against the storm window collapsed and fell onto the bedroom floor.

Not until Nick knelt beside her and drew in several drafts of the fresh, freezing air did she understand what an incredibly close call they’d just had.

“How do they heat this house?”

“Curtis converted from oil to gas a couple of years ago.” She looked at him quizzically. “Why?”

“Unless I’ve missed my guess, their furnace has a carbon-monoxide leak.”

“But the pilot light was on when we checked the basement.”

Nick stood, and Dovie followed suit. “A lit gas burner only means the furnace is operating; it has no bearing on the CO.”

She opened the rest of the windows without a hitch, and the room immediately felt like the inside of a meat locker. “CO?”

“The odorless, colorless, silent killer.” He scooped Linda up off the bed and carried her to an open window for some fresh air.

“I never even suspected it.” Dovie shivered, not entirely from the cold, when she sat down on the window seat and helped Nick lower Linda to her lap. Later she would remember with amazement how they had worked as a team. But the danger was still too recent. Still too real. “Law, we could have died—all of us!”

“That’s my fault.” He briefly relived another reaction, the one that had cost him his eyesight. Surprisingly enough, the memory wasn’t nearly as bitter now as it had been a couple of days ago. Before he’d met Dovie. Dear Lord, if anything had happened to her because of him … He crossed back to the bed, appalled at his own recklessness. “I didn’t stop to think that carbon monoxide can put the rescuers at risk too.”

Watching Nick heft her two-hundred-pound-plus brother with no more difficulty than he’d have picking up an infant, Dovie felt a surge of emotion that ultimately clouded her eyes. “When will they start coming around?”

“The sooner the better.” His thigh brushed hers when he sat down next to her and turned sideways so Curtis could get a lungful of life-giving air. The strength of his physical response to touching
Dovie really jolted him, and it was all he could do to check the urge that stiffened his jeans.

“Are you saying they still might …?” Fear made sailor’s knots in Dovie’s throat, and her voice faded to nothingness.

Nick reached over with his free hand and squeezed her shoulder, wishing he could absorb some of her pain. His heart thundered when he felt Dovie’s first soundless spasm, the sob that was not yet a sob. She was so alone … so vulnerable.

Deep in her own misery, Dovie rubbed her palms over Linda’s abdomen. As she did it she felt the muscles begin to tighten, starting at the sides and rippling upward. Suddenly she felt immensely relieved, then full of excitement.

“Look, Nick!” She took his hand and laid it at the base of her sister-in-law’s stomach, then placed her own on the opposite side.

Their fingertips touched, their hands forming a light cradle around Linda’s abdomen as, together, they shared the thrilling affirmation of life amidst the tragic possibility of death.

“She’s in labor, isn’t she?”

“The first stage of it, yes.”

“Did you hear that, Linda?” Dovie spoke excitedly into her sister-in-law’s ear. “The
doctor
says you’re in labor!”

Nick didn’t have the heart to correct her.

When a tiny foot—or was it a fist?—poked at the flat of her palm, she leaned over and shook her brother’s shoulder. “Your baby kicked me, Curtis!
Here”—she took his limp hand and held it in place—“feel for yourself!”

Linda shifted restlessly then, as though she recognized her husband’s touch, and Nick felt a little chill that had nothing to do with the cold air flailing through the bedroom when his burden, too, began to stir.

“Where the hell is Harley?” Rationally he knew it had only been about ten minutes since Dovie had called his houseman, but it seemed like hours.

Her gaze skimmed the empty road in front of the house, then swung to Nick. He held his head in an alert pose, his profile a bronze relief carving in the sepia light of winter. Until now, she’d been too preoccupied to notice that he’d removed his sunglasses. “He said he’d be here as soon as humanly possible.”

The unspoken question hovered between them: But would he be in time?

“High forceps.”

Dovie stood quietly in a secluded corner of the delivery room, every nerve, muscle, and sense strained to the limit as Dr. Rodgers prepared to take Linda’s baby. This was the moment of truth, what the battle in the bedroom and that hair-raising ride with Harley had been all about, and her eyes automatically sought Nick’s reassuring presence.

Like everyone else in the room, herself included,
he wore baggy surgical greens. A loosely-tied cap hid his thick black hair, while a gauzy white mask covered his crooked nose and mobile mouth. He stood to the right of Dr. Rodgers, his head cocked at that vigilant angle she’d come to associate exclusively with him. Dovie thought it must be a trick of the bright overhead lights that made him seem to shimmer and vibrate with new energy as the crisis neared conclusion. But something told her he was simply back in his element.

She couldn’t see very well from where she stood, but she didn’t dare voice a complaint. A high-forceps delivery was an exceedingly difficult and dangerous operation, indicated now because the baby was too far into the birth canal for a cesarean section. Dr. Rodgers had been adamantly opposed to her presence during the procedure. Only after Nick intervened on her behalf, citing her experience as midwife for her mother, had the reluctant physician relented.

Linda lay draped and anesthetized on the delivery table, her eyes closed peacefully and her chest rising and falling to the rhythm of the ventilator. She’d been told the truth when she’d asked, that Curtis was alive but too weak to be with her, and Dovie could only pray that her sister-in-law somehow sensed that she wasn’t totally alone in her time of travail.

“Blood pressure,” Dr. Rodgers demanded.

“One-thirty over eighty,” the nurse-anesthetist answered.

Thinking that sounded a little high, Dovie looked at Nick. He seemed to realize she was worried and nodded reassuringly.

“Forceps,” Dr. Rodgers ordered.

“Forceps,” the scrub nurse repeated before placing it in his gloved palm with a firm snap.

If she lived to be a hundred, Dovie would never forget the almost palpable tension that gripped the room when Dr. Rodgers went after Linda’s baby. She trained her gaze on Nick, reading in his body language what she couldn’t see.

When sweat beaded on his brow, perspiration rolled in rivulets down her stomach and thighs. If he listened to the fetal monitor overly long, her pulse did a three-minute mile. And when he leaned over and reached out, her heart flew into her throat.

“It’s a boy,” Dr. Rodgers announced.

Nick straightened up, laid the blue-gray baby on his mother’s belly, and gently massaged him. “Start the oxygen and get his blood gases.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Dovie could hardly breathe as she watched her new little nephew. His head was covered with wet, downy black hair, almost like a fledgling bird. When Nick rubbed his back, he opened his mouth and gave a mew. Before her eyes, he began to bleach and pinken. Ribs tiny as a sparrow’s sprang outward—she could see their whiteness through the skin.

Suddenly he screwed up his face and screamed,
shaking a fist wildly at the great surgical light. That cry carried the wattage of chain lightning, burning away the tension and bringing thanks to the hearts and lips of all who heard.

Dr. Rodgers looked up from between Linda’s swaddled knees, admiration and relief evident in his eyes. “It’s good to know you’ve still got that magic touch, Dr. Monroe.”

It might have been Dovie’s imagination, but did Nick nod in
her
direction? “That remains to be seen, Dr. Rodgers.”

The coffee in the doctors’ lounge was the consistency of crankcase oil, but it could have been smoothly blended whiskey, for all that Nick had noticed. He crumpled his empty Styrofoam cup, dropped it in the wastebasket, and headed for the door. “Catch you later, Joe.”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Joe Rodgers grabbed his stethoscope and hurried into the hospital corridor after him. “I’m going that way, too, so we might as well walk together.”

“Oh?”

“She went to tell her brother about the baby.”

Nick nodded and turned in the direction of the Intensive Care Unit, where Dovie was.

“Fine figure of a woman.”

“And a damned nice one, too.”

“It’s about time.”

Nick chuckled softly. “If that’s a polite comment
on all my one-night stands after the accident, I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Polite, hell!” Joe laughed out loud. “For a while we had a running bet around here on which you’d need first—a Wassermann test or a rabies shot.”

Nick grimaced in self-disgust. “Hell, don’t remind me.”

“Perfectly natural reaction, punishing yourself like that after such a significant loss.”

“Thanks, Sigmund,” Nick said dryly.

“You’re
v
elcome,” Joe replied, deadpan.

They both laughed.

“So … how’d you meet her?”

“Trout fishing.” Remembering how he’d pulled Dovie out of the river, Nick smiled. But Joe’s next remark brought him up short.

“Still trying to drown your sorrows, huh?”

“It sure beats making brooms,” he retorted bitterly.

“How does it compare to the thrill of holding that new life in your hands this afternoon?”

Nick clenched his teeth. “It doesn’t, and you damn well know it.”

“Or the satisfaction of hearing that woman say thank you when you diagnosed her diabetes simply by smelling the fruity aroma on her breath several years back?”