He didn’t want it to happen.
He had no choice in the matter.
Just holding the newborn in his arms forced the feeling upon him. It was a deep sensation that began in the center of his chest—it was almost a pain, really, but not quite—and then spread out to his extremities until all of him was encompassed in the spiraling warmth that was being generated.
The widest pair of blue eyes looked up at him with wonder, placing him at the center of a universe that would only continue to grow. But for now, he was it. The beginning, the end and the middle.
This was the look he’d envisioned in his own child’s eyes. His and Lorna’s.
The heart that had been frozen over and immobilized within him began to stir. And defrost.
He didn’t want it to happen.
But it was happening anyway. J.T.’s mouth curved as he smiled down at the child.
It was too quiet, too still. Madeline wasn’t hearing anything. Was there something wrong with her baby? A newer, sharper panic began to overtake her.
“Is…it…all right?”
Her breath was beginning to return to her in small snatches, but there still wasn’t enough for her to be able to form a complete sentence, even a small one, without gasping. Her chest burned and every other part of her felt as if it was throbbing with pain, but the pain in her heart was the worst. Her baby had to be all right, it had to be.
J.T. was only vaguely aware of the sound of the woman’s voice or the question that she was asking him. His eyes stung and he was barely holding his own against the onslaught of feelings that were threatening to overwhelm him completely. He’d forgotten what this had felt like, to hold a new life in his arms. To feel the wonder.
“More than all right,” he told her softly. “He’s beautiful.”
He wouldn’t lie to her. She had no idea how she knew that, but she did. “He?”
J.T. looked up at Maddy, upbraiding himself for getting so distracted that he’d forgotten about the woman who still needed his help. He nodded even as he looked around for something to wrap the baby in. “You have a son.”
Maddy pressed her lips together, suddenly struggling with tears that sprang up out of nowhere. Johnny would have been so proud, if he’d known. But he hadn’t. He’d died before she had a chance to tell him that she was pregnant.
We have a son, Johnny. Congratulations.
It was dark within the back seat, with only moderate illumination coming in, thanks to the street lamp, but he still managed to see the tears standing still in Maddy’s eyes. Maybe it was because he could hear them in her voice.
Moving forward awkwardly, being careful not to jostle the baby pressed against his chest, he leaned over and presented the newborn to her. J.T. tucked her arm around the small body. Their eyes met for a moment and held just the way his and Lorna’s had, over the newborn they’d delivered.
J.T. dropped his.
“Careful, he’s slippery.”
She merely nodded, accepting the tiny weight into the crook of her arm, for the moment not trusting her voice to keep from breaking.
It was enough that her heart felt as if it was bursting at the seams.
“There’s a blanket in the trunk,” she finally managed to say.
Looking around the driver’s side of the car, he found the latch to the trunk and popped it. When he rounded the rear of the vehicle, he found the blanket in the trunk on top of a laundry basket, which appeared to be crammed full of sheets and towels. Laundry wouldn’t help him. He needed something with which to cut the umbilical cord, but at least he could clean the baby up a little before wrapping him in the blanket.
Tucking the blanket under his arm and taking a couple of towels out of the basket, J.T. returned to the back seat.
He set the blanket at her feet and draped one of the towels over the back of the passenger seat. “You always travel with clean laundry?”
“My washing machine broke Saturday.” Maddy said, smiling at her son. Everything always happened for a reason, wasn’t that what her mother was constantly insisting? “I did my laundry at my mother’s.” And if she hadn’t, or had taken the basket out when she was supposed to, she wouldn’t have had the blanket and towels available for the baby.
Very gently, he began cleaning off the baby. “Was that where you were coming from? Your mother’s house?”
Despite the pain she was in, Maddy watched, fascinated by how this powerful-looking man could be so gentle as he handled her son. She wondered how many children he had of his own.
She shook her head in response to his question. “No, it was a party. We just landed a huge redecorating account and felt like celebrating,” she explained, but even as she did, she realized that he probably didn’t know what she was talking about. She and her family ran Rossini Decor, a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old firm that still believed in doing things the old-fashioned way, with dignity, honor and honesty. Not to mention taste.
We. He interpreted the pronoun in his own way. “You and your husband?”
The word brought a fresh volley of tears to her, tears she refused to set free. This was supposed to be a happy time—why did she feel so terribly melancholy?
Struggling for control, Maddy raised her eyes to his. “No.”
She said the word with such finality, J.T. knew that he’d trespassed somewhere he wasn’t supposed to go.
Divorced? he wondered.
He looked down at her hand as he returned the freshly cleansed infant to her. She still had on a wedding ring. If she was divorced, it had happened recently. And not by choice, he guessed. Otherwise, the ring would have come off.
“I’d better get you to the hospital.” J.T. glanced back at his car, gauging the distance. He could always bring it closer, until the two cars were almost parallel, but he didn’t want to risk a transfer. But he couldn’t leave his car unattended at this time of night. Fenelli picked a fine time to come down with the flu, he thought. He turned back to her. “All right if I call that ambulance now?”
Maddy bit her lower lip. He was referring to how she’d almost snapped his head off earlier. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”
He didn’t want her apologies, and he didn’t want her to be getting any wrong ideas. “No call for you to sound anything at all. We’re supposed to serve and protect. Just doing my job.”
For one moment there, he sounded just like Johnny. Her arms tightened around the baby he would never see. “Yes, I know. My husband was a policeman.”
About to get out of the vehicle, J.T. stopped dead. “Was?”
Such a small word, such a huge meaning. Her heart felt heavy enough to sink down to her toes. “He died in the line of duty eight months ago.”
The number leaped out at him. That means she’d only been a month or less along when her husband had died. J.T. looked at the baby in her arms.
“Did he know?”
“No.”
And that would forever be one of her greatest sorrows, that she’d held the news back from her husband, planning to surprise him with the news on the long romantic weekend they had planned. Johnny had been so eager to have children.
Her voice was filled with sorrow, though she hardly said anything. The heart he was so convinced was incapable of feeling anything went out to her. “I’m sorry.”
Maddy exhaled slowly, trying to steady her breathing. “Yes, so am I.” As J.T. began to get out of the car, she suddenly called after him. “Don’t call the ambulance. Take me in yourself.”
He stood outside the passenger door, unconvinced. “I don’t think I should try to move you—”
“Why not? You’re strong, John Thomas,” she told him, then added, “and I’m stronger than I look,” hoping to convince him.
John Thomas. It felt odd having someone other than his mother call him that. As far back as he could remember, he’d always been J.T., even to Lorna.
He stood for a moment, thinking, then made up his mind. “Okay, I’ll bring the car closer.”
Maddy smiled to herself as she held her son close and waited.
The transfer from her car to his turned out to be easier than he’d anticipated. Maddy held her son against her and J.T. carried them both from her back seat to his. His fear of dropping her faded. Even with the double load, Maddy felt as if she weighed close to nothing. He’d carried commission reports that weighed more than she did.
The wind had picked up just before he placed her down on the back seat and he caught a whiff of a soft, tantalizing scent that swirled around him like perfumed magic.
J.T. told himself that he was hallucinating and blocked it out.
“I’ll have you there in a few minutes,” he promised, getting in behind the steering wheel.
Safe in the back seat, Maddy felt comfortably isolated from everything that was hurtful. “No hurry. I have everything I want right here,” she murmured, looking down at her baby.
J.T. looked into the rearview mirror, but she was busy with her son. She looked radiant. He felt something stirring within him, emotions that creaked and flexed stiffly like unused muscles.
J.T. turned the car toward the hospital and forced himself to ignore it. This wasn’t about him, this was about a private citizen he was taking to the hospital, nothing more.
“Anyone you want me to call for you?” he asked as he passed through an amber light just before it turned red. The freeway entrance was directly ahead. From where he was, he could see that the traffic was minimal.
“Just my mother.” The baby began to fuss and she started rocking him against her. “She’ll take care of everyone else. I think I should warn you that she’ll want to thank you in person.” If she knew her mother, Lorraine Rossini would insist on it. “They all will.”
He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror, but Maddy’s eyes were lowered as she sat looking adoringly at her son. “All?”
She laughed. He almost sounded wary. “I have a large family. A large, close-knit family.”
He wondered what that was like. He’d been an only child and both his parents were gone before he’d blown out the candles on his twenty-fifth birthday cake. His whole world had been Lorna.
“Must be nice,” he murmured, out of a lack of anything else to say.
“It is,” she assured him. And now she had one more to add to the family. Overcome, she pressed a kiss to the small, not quite downy head. “It is.”
He wouldn’t know about that, J.T. thought, and he supposed he never would. His hopes of having a family of his own had died that New Year’s Eve night with Lorna.