Countdown To Baby

“So when do you think we’ll know?” he asked unexpectedly. “Whether we’ve hit a home run, I mean.”

She took a couple of beats to shift mental gears. Keeping her gaze focused on that calming horizon, she said, “I assume you mean whether we’ve been successful in making a baby.”

“Yeah. When should we know?”

“A couple of weeks, I suppose. Some of the new tests give results very early.”

“So we could have an answer before I have to leave town?”

Now he had brought up two serious subjects practically in the same breath. She turned to face him. “Possibly. Of course, there’s a very good chance that it will be negative. The odds against conceiving so quickly are fairly high.”

He made a show of flexing his biceps. A light breeze ruffled his hair, making him look young and fit and so appealing her mouth went dry. “Don’t forget who you’re dealing with—Mr. Macho. When I’m faced with a challenge, I conquer it. I go about it the same way I play Monopoly. I play to win—no mercy, no acceptance of defeat.”

Trust Geoff to compare making a baby to playing a board game. And to make light of a topic that was so important to her that she wasn’t even allowing herself to think about it this weekend.

She desperately wanted that test result to be positive. Of course she did. Once that goal had been achieved she could get back to her own life, and Geoff to his. No more juggling her work schedule and her evenings with him. No more awkward explanations about what they were doing together. No more grand romantic gestures. No more lazy days of swimming, laughing and eating beneath the stars.

And if she kept thinking along those lines, she was in danger of bursting into tears right here in front of Geoff.

“I suppose we’d better head back to the house so we can start dinner,” she said.

He caught her arm when she would have started in that direction and pulled her against his chest. “I think dinner’s going to be a little late this evening,” he murmured against her mouth.

She wrapped her arms around his neck. “Is it now? And what if I’m hungry?”

“I certainly hope you’re hungry,” he said with a wicked grin. “I know I am.”

Not even for a moment did she think he was talking about food. Raising her lips to his, she let herself enjoy the novelty of making out with a good-looking man on a shady mountain hillside.

She could go back to being sensible and practical Cecilia later, she promised herself. She would allow herself just one more night in fantasyland. And then it was back to the real world.

The real world was sometimes an incredibly hectic place. A week and a half after Cecilia and Geoff returned from the weekend house, she found herself in the middle of chaos at the clinic. Three women in labor at one time—somewhat unusual even in the middle of the Merlyn County baby boom. A full waiting room, including a few women who’d brought their unruly children with them. A woman who was probably going to be transferred through the connecting glass hallway to the hospital for a cesarean section, since her labor was not progressing well.

The entire staff was operating at a full run. Cecilia passed Mari, Vanessa, Milla, and Kyle during one full-out dash down the long hallway, and everyone looked as harried as she was beginning to feel. She didn’t know what was going on between Milla and Kyle, but the tension between those two lately was becoming almost palpable. Whether it was smoldering attraction or growing antagonism, she couldn’t say, but there was definitely something building.

Crystal Hendrix, the nurse whose personal problems were beginning to interfere noticeably with her work, looked more edgy than usual, her eyes shadowed, her hands unsteady. Cecilia couldn’t help wondering if the planets were in some sort of weird misalignment or something.

Was everyone going through personal crises at the same time? Maybe that would explain her own totally atypical behavior of the past couple of weeks.

To make the situation even more tense, Detective Collins was back, lurking around like a gray-eyed predator watching for signs of weakness. He seemed determined to pester Mari with a few dozen new questions about the black market drug trade, but Mari simply didn’t have time to deal with him.

Cecilia nearly collided with the detective herself as she rushed from an examining room to check on the status of a client who was in the transition stage of labor. Murmuring a barely civil apology, she sidestepped around him. She knew the man had an important job to do, but couldn’t he understand that this was a terribly inconvenient time?

She thought longingly of her weekend vacation with Geoff, which now seemed so very far in the past. She’d been so busy since their return that her time with him had been all too brief. Even last weekend had been filled with professional meetings for both of them, two deliveries that had called her back to the clinic at inconvenient times, and other obligations that had seemed to have little purpose except to keep them apart.

She should get used to that, of course, since he would be leaving town

before much longer, but she already found herself missing him. At least they had made the most of the time they’d had to spend together.

Forcing thoughts of Geoff to the back of her mind, she concentrated fiercely on the tasks at hand.

She was looking for Mari, for consultation about a new patient, when she overheard a snippet of heated conversation between the doctor and the detective. She had followed Mari to her small, cluttered office, where the door was always open to anyone who needed her. But Cecilia wasn’t the only one who had been looking for Mari, apparently. Bryce Collins was already there.

Posed in a tense face-to-face confrontation, they didn’t see Cecilia when she stepped into the doorway. She ducked quickly back into the hall just as Mari said, “Damn it, Bryce, can’t you see how busy we are? I don’t have time for this.”

“Make time,” he snapped back, his voice so hard that Cecilia instinctively flinched.

“How many times do I have to tell you that I know nothing about black-market drug suppliers?”