Tana’s phone vibrated against the nightstand as its screen lit up. The combination was enough to drag her awake.
She opened one eye. The phone screen was obnoxiously bright, because her bedroom was pitch-black. It hadn’t been when she’d lain down for a quick cat nap, exhausted from her cross-country car trip.
The vibrating stopped as the call went to her voice mail. Tana didn’t raise her head off the pillow as she groped for the phone to check the time.
“Crap.” She’d been asleep for five hours. Beneath the time, her phone screen listed one identical alert after another: Missed Call: Coach Nicholls.
Bob Nicholls was going to kill her. She’d promised to let him know the minute she arrived home, but she’d gotten to her apartment, walked straight to her bathroom—at thirty-seven weeks pregnant, she felt like she had to pee every thirty-seven minutes—and then she’d flopped onto her bed for just a quick minute, five hours ago.
She needed to call him, pronto. Driving home from the NCAA Championships in Indianapolis hadn’t been as easy as she’d assured everyone it would be. One thousand miles in a rental car had been uncomfortable at best, even broken up over two days, but she’d done it.
She’d had no choice.
The airlines that flew where she’d needed to go were the ones that wouldn’t let pregnant passengers fly after thirty-six weeks. Missing the men’s NCAA championships wasn’t optional for a coach who needed her one-year contract to be renewed. She’d flown to Indiana on Monday at thirty-six weeks. She’d had to rent a car to drive back to Texas on Sunday, at week thirty-seven.
She called her former coach. “I am so sorry.”
“The last time I talked to you, you were in Arkansas. I was seriously going to call the highway patrol to put out an APB on you. What happened?”
“I got home and fell asleep. I’m fine. Just tired.”
Actually, her ankles were swollen, for the first time in her entire pregnancy, from so many hours of sitting immobile. She hadn’t been able to work out for the two weeks before all this travel, either. Tana had flown to Georgia for the women’s championships the week before the men’s. Tomorrow, she’d get back in the pool and swim some laps. That would put everything to rights.
Not really. Getting back in the pool and then getting a renewed coaching contract—that would put everything to rights. She hadn’t heard anything from the athletics director yet. Her baby was coming, but her paychecks were ending.
“Well, you probably need the sleep,” Bob said. “Congratulations again on your showing at the NCAAs.”
“We didn’t bring home the trophy.” The trophy wasn’t everything, but it sure would have helped impress her boss. He was big on trophies. Football trophies, especially.
“Appelan set a new record. Masterson swimmers were up on that winners’ podium again and again. Don’t underestimate the impact of all those second-and third-place finishes. Your school colors are in practically every podium photo. You’ll have your pick of recruits next year.”
Tana could practically hear her parents: Silver and bronze don’t get soup commercials.
But Bob Nicholls wasn’t her parent. He was her mentor and, this year, her guardian angel. He’d been in the spectator’s gallery the day she’d fainted on the pool deck, unbeknownst to her. He maintained he’d come to see Shippers and Appelan compete, but Tana knew he’d come to watch her coach her team and run a three-college meet. As her parents had emphasized, he’d put his reputation on the line for her.
When she’d fainted, he’d apparently been frantic to get from the gallery to the deck level, but she’d been taken to the hospital within minutes. He’d followed, not as her former coach, but as the man who’d basically raised her from age sixteen to twenty. When he’d walked into the emergency room, she’d been so relieved to see a familiar face, she’d burst into tears.
In the months since the fainting incident, she and Coach Nicholls—Bob, now—had talked plenty. Tana had been right: he wanted her to coach future Olympians, not be one.
Unless you’re driven to compete again, Tana. If you are, I’ll bring you back to Colorado. You wouldn’t be the first Olympian to win a medal after having a baby. I know you’re tired of your parents comparing you to her, but Dara Torres—
I know, I know. DT had a baby between Olympics. Honestly, I’d rather coach.
Then Bob had said the one thing she’d most wanted to hear: That’s because you’re a great coach. You’ve always thrown yourself wholeheartedly into what you’re great at. I’m so proud of you. We’re peers now, fellow swim coaches. It’s time you started calling me Bob.
Redemption.
No one at the international level bore her a grudge, although they did toward her ex-husband, according to Bob, for fraternizing with her. Her parents would realize she wasn’t the black sheep of the swimming world that they thought she was. Someday.
In the meantime, Bob was doubling as her mother hen. “You’re going on maternity leave now, I hope?”
“I only have office work this coming week. It won’t be demanding.” Her entire future rested on how well she wrote up her reports on the team’s performance and her plans for next year. “I don’t have a maternity leave. My contract ends on graduation day, May fifteenth, and I’m due April twenty-third, so unless they renew me…”
She’d be jobless with a three-week-old newborn. Homeless, too. She lived in the junior-faculty apartments on campus. She needed her job to be eligible to continue living there.
“They’d be crazy not to keep you. I’d hire you.”
“I’d work for you.” But she’d have to leave Texas. Leave Masterson. Turn her young swimmers over to some unknown replacement. Say goodbye to the friends she’d spent a year getting to know, friends like Ruby. Friends like… Caden.
If she left Masterson, she would never run into a blue-eyed fireman again. She looked for him every time she went to the grocery store, every time she went out to eat with friends. She wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, like she had when she’d been dressed as a witch. Their last two emotional encounters were not the impression she wanted him to have of her, but she never saw him.
If Caden Sterling had wanted to see her, he could have volunteered to work another swim meet. He had not. Their friendship had been too new to take so much stress, perhaps. She might as well move to Colorado.
“I may have to take you up on that,” she said.
“My budget wouldn’t let me pay you for more than a measly part-time.”
“Part-time pays more than no time.” She put just the right note of humor into her voice.
“Don’t worry. Masterson will renew you.”
“Sure. I’m fine.”
She’d survived the dreaded month of March. That was something. Tomorrow would be April first. Twenty-three days and counting until she had this baby. Twenty-three days to convince the university to extend her contract.
Tana hung up, then lay in the dark and worried about her future, until exhaustion pulled her under, and she dreamed about floating without a care in a tropical blue sea.
* * *
There it was, parked outside the diner: the swim-mobile.
The swim coach was here.
Caden put his pickup truck in reverse with a tired sigh. He’d just wanted to order a cup of coffee and a sandwich to go. He needed to get to the station a little early, because he was still in his civilian clothes. He kept a spare uniform in his locker for days like today. A meeting at his brother’s ranch with a rescue group had run long, so he didn’t have time to go to his house, get into uniform and make himself a dinner. The Streamliner Diner was on the way into Masterson from the Sterling ranch. Its food was almost as quick as a hamburger drive-thru, and less greasy.
But Tana was here, so he shouldn’t be.
Distance. A little distance was all he’d needed this spring to keep a healthy perspective on his relationship with Tana McKenna—or the lack of it. He thought he’d been doing well, too, but a couple of days ago, an April Fools’ Day prank had forced him to stop kidding himself.
Javier’s wife was expecting, for real. Javier had thought it would be a great prank to bring in a fake sonogram and announce it was triplets. Since triplets were usually born around thirty-five weeks, Javier had set a new due date that just so happened to be the exact date three of their coworkers were leaving for their annual hunting trip. Department policy gave paternity leave priority over vacations, so one of the guys would have to cancel his trip to fill in for Javier. The joke had been watching the three as each one hemmed and hawed and stalled, hoping one of the other two would step up and volunteer to take one for the team.
By the time Javier had said April Fools’, the coworkers had resorted to rock, paper, scissors, and Caden had calculated the due date for the director of aquatics at Masterson University. If she’d been twenty-six weeks at the swim meet in January, then she was due the last week of April, which meant she was probably around thirty-six weeks now, so if she’d been pregnant with triplets, they would have been born already, but she would have told him as he’d treated her on the pool deck if she was pregnant with multiples, plus she would have looked much bigger than she had, instead of having that cute little soccer-ball bump, and if Caden thought avoiding her all spring had made him forget about her, he was the fool on April first.
He threw his truck into Park again and shut off the engine. It was April third, distance was a failed tactic and he was on a tight schedule. He just needed a sandwich to go. If Tana was in a booth with her back to the door, she’d never see him standing at the counter. He wouldn’t have to smile and wave and pretend he wasn’t dying to see how she was doing.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and crushed gravel under his boots with each step toward the stainless-steel doors. Tana fainted too easily. Some people just did, and it worried him. One glance, and he’d know if she looked healthy. He didn’t have to talk to her.
He saw her right away. She was in a booth, facing the door. She could have seen him if she’d looked up, but she was absorbed in a conversation with the two people sitting across from her. She was all smiles, animated as she spoke. She looked good. Radiant. Beautiful.
He sighed at himself. “Just healthy.”
The cashier tapped her pen on the counter. “I didn’t catch that, honey. You want the health plate? That’s a tomato stuffed with cottage cheese and dry toast. I’m an expert on what a growing boy like yourself needs. That ain’t it.” She winked at him suggestively. She was old enough to be his grandmother.
Who was he to judge what was inappropriate? He was practically drooling over someone else’s pregnant girlfriend. Tana’s hair was in a ponytail that bobbed a little with every enthusiastic gesture she made with her hands. She had a sporty kind of femininity, even pregnant.
He shouldn’t be noticing things like that. “Turkey and provolone to go, hot peppers, no onion, and the largest cup of coffee you can sell me.” He paid and stepped aside for the next person.
From this angle, he could see the two men she was talking to. They looked related, a father and son, but the son didn’t look old enough to be at Masterson yet. The father was talking, so Tana’s ponytail was still.
Her hand suddenly went to her side, a motion that he’d report as guarding in medical lingo, the human instinct to put a hand on some part that hurt.
He watched her face. She was still smiling as she listened, but it was taking her some effort. After a moment, she relaxed.
“How many creams do you want, sugar?” the cashier asked.
“None, thanks.”
Stop staring at Tana like a stalker.
He leaned against the bench by the door while he waited, but he didn’t sit. If he sat, he wouldn’t be able to see Tana.
I’m not staring at her. I’m glancing her way. Often.
She handed a booklet across the table to the teenager, a college catalog, or something similar in the university’s colors. She was a coach. It didn’t take much to figure out she was recruiting a prospective student.
It shouldn’t be hard. Her swim team had killed it at the national championships. It had been in the paper, way in the back of the sports section. Swimming didn’t get the attention of football or baseball. It ought to, though. As sports events went, the swim meet had been more exciting in person than he’d expected.
Then Tana had fainted, hitting the ground so hard, he’d been frightened for her and her pregnancy.
He glanced her way for the hundredth time. Something in her eyes told him she was concentrating on something going on internally, not on what was being said across the table. It couldn’t be too bad, though. She was able to keep her smile fixed in place.
Real contractions were more serious, at least the ones he’d responded to as a paramedic. Those women had called 911 when they were too far gone to drive themselves to the hospital, unable to speak during the contractions, soaked in sweat. A few had screamed in pain as his team had whisked them off to the hospital, racing against Mother Nature. Those women couldn’t have begun to sit in a booth at a diner and conduct any kind of student interview.
Tana wasn’t in labor.
The paramedic training made him do it, anyway: he opened the calendar on his phone. Accuracy mattered in medicine. He’d only estimated her due date before. He flipped back to January and the Saturday of the swim meet. Week twenty-six. He started counting.
Tana laughed. He glanced up from his phone. She wasn’t in pain, and he was a little too obsessed with her.
He finished counting, anyway, to today’s date. Week thirty-seven. Still early to go into labor. There were probably plenty of other things that caused women a minute of discomfort in the ninth month. Once, he’d watched Abigail push on one side of her own belly with both of her hands to make the baby move, because she’d said he was kicking her right in the bladder.
TMI, dear sister-in-law.
But there went Tana, off toward the ladies’ room, so her baby had probably been doing the same type of thing. Caden put away his phone as he watched her walking away. She was so much bigger than she’d been in January, it was stunning. How did women do it?
“Here you go, hon. Coffee, black, and a turkey-provolone. Have a good evening.”
Perfect. He could leave while Tana was in the bathroom. She’d never know he’d been creeping on her. He’d gotten what he wanted, reassurance that she was well. She was still the successful, confident woman she’d always been. Good for her. Really.
He picked up the white paper bag. “How about a slice of apple pie, too? If you’re not too busy.”
“You got the money, honey, I’ve got the time.”
Tana didn’t return until Caden had paid for the apple pie and a second paper bag had been brought to the register. She hesitated, halfway between the restroom and her booth, and put one hand on her side. When she got to her booth, hands were shaken, words exchanged. The father and son passed Caden on their way out. The kid was too young to shave, but he was as tall as Caden, and he had that same lanky build as the swimmers on the pool deck in January. Definitely, Tana was recruiting, still working, three weeks before her due date.
Heck, the nationals had just been last week, and they’d been held across the country. It seemed like a lot of traveling for a pregnant woman, but what did he know? When Abigail had gone into labor with little Abby, she’d gone out to the barn and fed her horses before she’d let Edward drive her to the hospital. His brother still hadn’t gotten over that.
Tana sat alone. Caden didn’t bother trying to talk himself out of it. He picked up his paper bags and walked over. “There you are.”
She did a double take and stared at him.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Hi. No. Go right ahead.”
He sat and pushed the father’s plate off to the side. “Long time, no see.” I stayed away as long as I could.
“Yes. It’s nice to see you again.”
“You, too.”
She seemed a little embarrassed to be talking to him, as she’d been at the pub over Thanksgiving. Sometimes former patients were that way when they saw him later. A broken arm never seemed to make anyone shy, but some other ailments might. Leaking amniotic fluid, for example—which she hadn’t been doing. Thank God, again. He’d been so damned scared for her. He doubted he’d been able to hide it the way an emergency provider should.
He knew why it had been so difficult to stay professional. It was because the patient had been her, someone he felt too much for.
She spun her water glass slowly. “Can I say something serious?”
“Shoot.”
“I apologize for my attitude at the swim meet.”
“What attitude?”
“After I fainted, I was so mad. I told you to stop asking me questions, when you were just trying to help. I yelled at you to ‘stop looking at me that way,’ out in the parking lot, do you remember?”
Caden didn’t know what he’d expected when he’d sat down, but it wasn’t this. “I remember, but you weren’t yelling.”
“I wasn’t?”
“Not even close.”
“I was so afraid I was going to cry. I couldn’t, not in front of my team and my staff, so I couldn’t let you give me any sympathy. It would make me feel weak when I was supposed to be leading a team. I hope you’ll forgive me, because we started off friends, you know, back at the CPR class, but I’ve been so…really, everything’s been so… I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I just didn’t want to cry in public.”
“Tana, are you crying now?”
She was. An actual tear spilled from the corner of her eye.
He felt terrible for her. “There’s nothing to cry about. You didn’t yell at me. We’re good, okay? Everything’s good.”
“Right when I’m trying to say that things don’t have to get so super-emotional every time we meet, I cry.” She wiped away the tear with one hand. “I cry at the drop of a hat now. It’s the weirdest thing.”
“You said a different pregnancy thing was weird at Thanksgiving.” He wanted to remind her of more friendly conversations. They’d laughed, before.
She laughed now. “Oh, the bra budget is astronomical at this point. Frankly, every single thing about pregnancy is weird.”
“Except the end result.”
“A baby is a good thing. It meant a lot to me when you said that.”
“Just stating a fact. I’ve got a niece and a nephew that are cuter than anybody has a right to be.”
It felt good to be with her, so much better than trying not to see her, not to talk to her. She was a nice person. He should have let their friendship develop instead of being so damned scared that he’d fall in love with her. He’d thought so during that first waltz, thought he could be friends with the original while he prayed for her clone to come into his life.
If it felt a little too good to see her, he didn’t dwell on it. He couldn’t stay long, just a few minutes before he had to head to the station. What harm could this little talk do to his heart?
She wiped away fresh tears. “See? Even laughing makes me cry. It’s weird, I’m telling you.” She barely finished you as she sucked in a sudden breath.
Caden knew pain when he saw it.
She looked at the saltshaker, or in the vicinity of the saltshaker. She looked a little unfocused. Her grip on her water glass was so tight, her knuckles were white.
He set his hand on her wrist, trying not to be too obvious about checking her pulse.
She released her breath. Blinked. Relaxed her grip.
“What was that about?” Caden asked.
“Are you taking my pulse?”
“Busted. Compulsive pulse-taking is kind of an occupational hazard. Are you having contractions?”
“No.” She seemed confident, but he’d seen what he’d seen.
“You sure about that?”
“I just saw the doctor on April first. He said these were Braxton-Hicks contractions. Practice contractions. The baby’s playing his little April Fools’ trick on me. Or she is.”
Caden relaxed a little. She’d seen her doctor two days ago about this. “He or she? You were serious when you said you didn’t want to find out the gender on the sonogram?”
She hissed in another breath. She grabbed his wrist instead of the water glass this time. This grip, he recognized. A woman who’d been screaming with every contraction had grabbed him like that once. He’d been so relieved to pull into the ER and hand her off to the hospital. He’d heard she hadn’t had the baby for another three hours after that. He couldn’t imagine anyone being in pain like that for three hours. Abigail said it had been twelve for her. How did women do it?
Tana relaxed her grip. “The doctor said Braxton-Hicks can come and go like this from now until my due date.”
She was supposed to go through this for three more weeks? That didn’t seem possible. “But you’re only at thirty-seven weeks.”
She looked at him sharply. “Yes. How do you know that?”
Busted. “Just doing a little math from January.”
“The baby might not come for two weeks after my due date. I might have a May baby. Five more weeks of this. Oh!” She sucked in another breath.
Caden let her cut off the pulse in his wrist as he casually looked at the watch on his other wrist. He knew what Braxton-Hicks contractions were. False alarms were a big part of emergency medicine. One caller had informed them after they arrived that she’d had a single contraction—an hour prior. They’d sent her to the hospital, anyway. He and his team were firemen, EMTs or paramedics, but they were not ob-gyns. If a woman thought she was in labor, he wasn’t going to tell her she wasn’t and then leave.
Caden wasn’t going to leave Tana, either. He’d be late to work, but he could stay a while longer. They had their own station rules, a pirate code among themselves, and one was that a firefighter could be late by up to an hour for his shift if something urgent came up, but he had to buy a six-pack for whichever firefighter on the outgoing shift got stuck working that extra hour. More than an hour, though, and Caden would not only be screwing over a teammate, he would also be required to give the chief a damned good reason for being a no-show. No-shows got fired.
“The doctor said they’re unpredictable. I had some this morning that were one right after another, but that stopped. So far, I think the longest I’ve gotten is maybe a twenty-minute break between them. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in—”
“Three days? You’ve been having contractions every twenty minutes for three days?” For the first time, Caden felt a frisson of fear. “You need to call your doctor’s office.”
“I was just there. April Fools’, remember? Oh!”
Caden looked at his watch. The contraction lasted less than thirty seconds, but still…
“There’s no such thing as a three-day-long April Fools’ joke. Call your doctor.”
She didn’t look too pleased with his advice. “I thought there was always a choice in medical care. The glucose stick, remember?”
“There’s also a right answer. Call your doctor. I’ll wait.”