* * *
HOURS LATER, AFTER SIPPING champagne in the tub and making love on the round bed until they were both exhausted, they awoke and headed downstairs. Dawn was just sending shafts of light across the desert floor and through the streets of the now-quiet city. The neon lights, so brilliant the night before, were dimmed as Dallas drove toward the airport.
He parked the rental car in the lot near the terminal before they headed inside, ready to return to Ranger and fight for custody of J.D. Chandra was prepared for an uphill battle, but anything as precious as that baby was worth whatever it took. By sheer determination alone, she should be allowed to adopt the child she had saved.
As she walked down the concourse with Dallas at her side, her new role as his wife started to sink in. She felt suddenly secure and worked at convincing herself that she and Dallas would be given custody. No parents would love a child more.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Dallas slow near an airport shop, and she wondered if he was going to buy some souvenir of the trip.
“Goddamned son of a bitch!” he growled, stopping short and fishing in his pocket for change. He dropped several coins onto the counter.
Before the startled cashier could ring up the sale, Dallas grabbed a newspaper and snapped it open. There on page one, in grainy black and white, was a picture of J.D.
Baby Abandoned In Colorado Barn, the headline screamed, and in smaller letters, Mother Still Missing As Hundreds Hope To Adopt The Million Dollar Baby.
Chandra’s throat went dry. She curled her fingers over Dallas’s arms, seeking strength. “How—how did they get that picture?” she whispered, her eyes skimming the newsprint and her legs threatening to give way when the article revealed that the child was living with Sheriff Newell. “How did they get this information?”
“Ranger’s a small town,” Dallas replied, tight-lipped, a deep flush staining the back of his neck. Never had she seen him more furious. “Gossip runs rampant.”
For the first time, Chandra had to face the fact that the odds against them were insurmountable. They were just a couple—a recently married couple—who would stand in line with hundreds of other couples—every one of them as anxious to adopt the baby as she and Dallas were.
“Come on,” Dallas said, his voice sounding strangely faraway. “We’ve got a flight to catch.”
Her throat caught, and tears threatened her eyes. You’re just tired, she told herself, all of her earlier euphoria long gone.
“We haven’t lost yet,” Dallas reminded her, and he grabbed hold of her elbow and propelled her toward the boarding gate.
“You’re right,” she said, then shivered. Inside, she knew she was in for the fight of her life.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SO HERE THEY WERE at home—a married couple. They’d driven directly to the cabin and now, after showering and changing, they were preparing to go into town.
Chandra poured herself a cup of coffee and smiled as she poured another for Dallas. It would be easy, she thought, to get into a routine with him, to wake up every morning in his arms and to read the paper, drink coffee and work around the house and outbuildings.
He planned on moving first his clothes and then his furniture as soon as possible. They’d even talked of expanding the cabin, and Dallas wanted to talk to an architect about the remodeling. Things were moving swiftly, but for the first time in years, Chandra felt comfortable depending upon someone besides herself.
She heard him on the stairs, and glanced up to see his handsome face pulled into a frown as he buttoned his shirt.
“I could help you with that,” she offered, and he flashed her a slice of a grin.
“You’re on.”
When he reached the kitchen, she kissed his chest and slipped each button through its hole.
“If you keep this up, I’ll never get to work,” he said, his eyes lighting with a passionate flame.
“Uh-uh.” She finished the shirt and handed him his coffee cup. “Come on outside, I think we should talk.”
“About…?”
She braced herself. “Me and what happened in Tennessee.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Of course I do,” she said as he placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve got to start this marriage with a clean slate—no lies, no misunderstandings, no surprises.”
Together they walked outside and Chandra felt the morning sun against her back as they leaned over the rail of the fence and watched the horses picking at the dew-laden grass. Sam trotted behind them only to be distracted by a squirrel.
“What happened?” Dallas finally asked, and Chandra decided to unburden herself.
“Medicine was my life,” she admitted, thinking of all those grueling years in med school when she had not only worked for hours on end, but had to endure being the butt of too many jokes. Feeling Dallas’s eyes upon her, she forced the words about her past from her throat. “I went to school in Philadelphia, then took a position with a hospital in Collier, Tennessee.
“You know about the patient I lost, a seven-year-old boy. His name was Gordy. It…it was messy.” Her throat clogged momentarily, but she willed herself to go on, to get over the pain. “You saw the newspaper articles, but they didn’t explain exactly what happened. I was sued for malpractice by the parents, though they brought him in much too late. They thought he had the flu, and he just got worse and worse. By the time we rushed him to the hospital…well, he died of pneumonia within the hour. The parents blamed me.” She swallowed hard, looking not at Dallas but concentrating on a swallow as it flew about the barn roof. “There was an investigation, and I was cleared, but…well, I had other personal problems.”
“Your marriage.”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Everything seemed to unravel. So,” she finished, trying to force a lightness into her voice, “I ended up here, with a job as a white-water and mountain guide.”
“Don’t you miss it?” He touched her lightly on the arm, and her heart warmed at the familiarity they’d slipped into.
“What—medicine?”
“The healing.”
“Sometimes, but not often. I’m still a doctor,” she said. “It wouldn’t take much to get licensed here, but I guess I wasn’t ready to start practicing again.” She felt inexplicably close to tears, and he threw his coffee cup on the ground and took her into his arms.
“Losing a patient is hard, but it happens,” he whispered.
“Children shouldn’t die.”
Gently, he rotated her, forced her to look at him, and Chandra didn’t pull away from him as he kissed her lips. “No,” he agreed, “no child should ever die, but, unfortunately, it happens. We try our best, and sometimes it isn’t good enough.” He looked down into her eyes, his own shining in the morning sunlight.
“I couldn’t help feeling guilty, that if I would have gotten to him sooner, I could’ve saved his life.”
“How could you have known?”
She shook her head and sighed, resting her cheek against Dallas’s chest, feeling his warmth seep into her and hoping some of the old feelings of remorse would disappear. “I was married to Doug at the time, and he couldn’t understand why I took it so hard. I wanted out of medicine, at least for a while, and he…he objected. We were making good money. He was a plastic surgeon in Memphis, and he didn’t want our lifestyle to change. He told me that if I quit practicing that I would only be proving that I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor, that all of his friends in medical school, the ones who had predicted I couldn’t make it, would be proved right.”
“Wonderful guy,” Dallas remarked, his voice steely.
“We had our share of problems.”
Dallas kissed her crown. “He was wrong, you know. Wrong about you. My guess is that you were and still are a damned good doctor.”
“Have you ever lost a patient?”
“Too many.”
“A child?”
“There’ve been a few. And I know what you we
nt through. Each time, you can’t help feeling that somehow you should have performed a miracle and saved his life.”
Her throat knotted, and she couldn’t swallow. Tears, unwanted, burned behind her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered as he pulled her closer, holding her, murmuring into her hair, kissing her cheek. She wouldn’t cry! She wouldn’t! She’d spent too many years burying the pain and her past. “All those years of school, all those hours of studying, all those nights of no sleep, and I couldn’t save one little boy!” Slowly, she disentangled herself and swallowed the lump that seemed determined to lodge in her throat.
“It’s over,” Dallas promised. “You’ve got a new start. We’ve got a new start. So it’s time we took the first step and tried to adopt that baby together.”
Chandra smiled through her tears and took Dallas’s hand.
* * *
CAMERAS FLASHED, MICROPHONES were thrust in their faces and reporters, en masse, had collected around the Newells’ house.
“Is it true you’re married?” a woman with flaming red hair asked as Chandra tried to duck past the crowd.
“Yes.”
“And you met Dr. O’Rourke when you brought the baby in—is that right?” another female voice called.
“No comment,” Dallas growled.
“Oh, come on, Doctor, give us a break. Tell us a little about the baby. Where do you think he came from? Have you checked with any of the local clinics and found out if a woman in the third trimester never delivered?”
“No,” Dallas said.
“You have no idea where the mother is?”
“None.” He helped Chandra up the stairs of the Newells’ front porch as reporters fired questions nonstop. To keep the crowd at bay, a deputy was posted near the front door, but he let Chandra and Dallas pass, presumably on orders from the sheriff or his wife.
“Isn’t it a madhouse out there?” Lenore asked, her eyes shadowed with worry, her face grim.
“I guess it’s to be expected,” Chandra replied, anxious to see the baby.
“I suppose.” But Lenore’s face seemed more lined this morning, her lips pinched into a worried pucker. “I’ve taken in a lot of children in my day, but I’ve never seen the likes of this,” she admitted, parting the lace curtains and sighing at the group of reporters camped in her yard. “And I’ve quit answering the phone. Seems everyone in the state is interested in adopting little J.D.”
Chandra’s heart sank like a stone. Even though she held J.D. and gave him a bottle, she felt as if she were losing him, that the cord that had bound them so closely was being unraveled by unseen hands. As she held the bottle, she stared into his perfect little face. She didn’t kid herself. Sooner or later, if the media attention surrounding J.D. kept up at a fever pitch, other would-be mothers would be trying to see him and hold him. They would argue that Chandra, just because the child was discovered in her barn, had no more right to be with him than they did. It wouldn’t be long before the courts or the Social Services stepped in, and in the interest of fairness, she might not be allowed to see him.
“Has it been this way for long?” Dallas asked Lenore.
“Since before dawn. And the phone has been ringing since about six last night. Someone must’ve let it slip that the baby’s here because before that there was nothing. I was living a normal life. I don’t like this, I tell you.”
“Neither do I,” Dallas replied, and Chandra bit her lip to keep tears from spilling on the baby who would never be hers.
* * *
AS CHANDRA SETTLED into a comfortable life with Dallas, the interest in the baby didn’t decrease. While she was busy making closet space for Dallas’s things, helping him fill out change-of-address forms and planning the addition to the house, her name and picture appeared in newspapers as far away as Phoenix and Sante Fe. At first she was considered a small-time heroine, the woman who had discovered the baby and rushed him to the hospital. Over the next week, her life was opened up and dissected, and all the old headlines appeared.
The story of little Gordy Shore and his death was revived, and her marriage to Doug Pendleton, subsequent divorce and change of name and lifestyle in Colorado were hashed and rehashed in the newspapers and on the local news. She’d given two interviews, but quit when the questions became, as they always did, much too personal.
It was known that she was trying to adopt the baby, along with hundreds of other applicants, and it had even been speculated that her marriage to Dallas, at first a seeming fairy-tale romance of two people who meet via an abandoned infant then fall in love, was a fraud, a ploy for custody.
“I don’t know what I expected,” she admitted to Dallas, upon reading a rather scorching article in the Denver Free Spirit. “But it wasn’t this.”
Dallas, who had been polishing the toes of his shoes, rested one foot on the seat of a chair and leaned across the table to stare more closely at her. “Giving up so soon, Mrs. O’Rourke? And here I thought you liked a battle.”
“Not when the stakes are so high,” she admitted, her stomach in knots. She hazarded a quick glance at him. “And I’m not giving up. Not yet.”
“Not as long as there’s an ounce of breath in your body, I’d wager,” he said, winking at her.
She rolled her eyes, but giggled. The past few days had been as wonderful as they had been gut wrenching. Though she was worried about adopting J.D., her life with Dallas was complicated, but interesting, and their lovemaking was passionate. She couldn’t resist him when he kissed her, and she felt a desperation in their lovemaking, as if they each knew that soon it would be over. If they weren’t awarded custody of J.D., they would have no reason to stay together. That thought, too, was depressing. Because each day she was with him, she loved him a little more.
Sam whined to go out, and she slung the strap of her canvas purse over her shoulder. “I guess I’d better get to work,” she said. “And I’ll talk to my attorney today, see what he’s come up with.”
“I’ll walk you,” Dallas offered, holding open the door for her as Sam streaked across the yard. The morning was cool, the sky, usually clear, dark with clouds. Even through her jacket, Chandra shivered.
She reached for the handle of the door of her Suburban, but Dallas caught her hand.
“What’s up, Doctor?” she asked, turning to face him and seeing his gaze was as sober as the threatening sky.
“I think I’ve gone about this marriage thing ass-backward,” Dallas admitted.
“We both have.”
“Right. But I decided that we need to set things right. So, I hope this is a start.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small silver ring, obviously old, with a single diamond surrounded by smaller sapphires.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered as he slipped it over her finger, and the ring, a size or two too big, lolled below her knuckle.
“It was my grandmother’s. Harrison’s mother. I don’t remember much about her—except that she was kind and loving, and the one person in the world who would always stand up for me.” He cleared his throat suddenly, and Chandra’s heart twisted with pain for the man who had once been such a lonely boy. “She died when I was about eight and she left me this—” he motioned to the ring “—and a little money for college and medical school.”
Chandra, her throat thick, her eyes heavy with tears of happiness, touched the ring with the fingers of her other hand.
“You can have it sized,” he said. “Or if you’d prefer something new—”
“Oh, no! It’s…it’s perfect! Thank you!” Moved, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed his throat, drawing in deep breaths filled with his special scent. “We’re going to make this work, Doctor,” she whispered into his ear. “I just know it!”
Opening the door of the Suburban, she saw the ring wink in the little morning light that permeated the clouds. She wondered vaguely if Jennifer had worn this very ring, and a little jab of jealousy cut through her. But she ignored the pain; Jennifer was history. C
handra, now, was Mrs. Dallas O’Rourke.
She pushed all negative thoughts aside as she drove into town and stopped at Roy Arnette’s office. The lawyer was waiting for her, his glasses perched on the end of his nose, his mouth tiny and pinched. “Have you talked to the Newells today?” he asked as she sat down.
“It’s only nine in the morning.”
Roy sighed. “Then you don’t know.”
“Know what?” she asked, but she read the trouble in his eyes, and her throat seemed to close in on itself.
“There’s a woman. Her name is Gayla Vanwyk. She claims to be the baby’s mother.”
“But she couldn’t be—” Chandra whispered, her world spinning wildly, her heart freezing.
“Maybe not. But the police are interested in her.”
“But where did she come from? How did she get here? She could be some kook, for crying out loud, someone who read about J.D. in one of these—” She thumped her hand on a newspaper lying open on Roy’s desk. “She could just be after publicity or want a child or God only knows what else!”
“Look, Chandra, I’m only telling you what I know, which is that the police are interested in her enough to have some blood work done on her.”
“Oh, God—”
“If she’s the natural mother…”
Tears jammed her throat, and Chandra blinked hard. “If she is, why did she leave him?” she demanded, outraged.
“If she’s the natural mother, this complicates things,” Roy said. “She’ll have rights.”
“She gave those up when she left him!”
“Maybe not, Chandra,” he said as gently as possible, and Chandra felt as if her entire world were crumbling.
Dallas! She needed to talk to Dallas. He’d know what to do. “I won’t lose him, Roy, I won’t!” she cried, though a horrible blackness was seeping into her soul. Again she saw how small her chances of becoming J.D.’s mother actually were. Sobs choked her throat, but she didn’t let them erupt. “I want to see her,” she said with dead calm.