Just Around the Corner

“Cassie’s in surgery, Randi had an away basketball game and I can’t get hold of Becca or Tory. I could call Martha Moore

or even Will, but to be honest with you, I haven’t told anyone except Cassie about my pregnancy yet—”

“I’m on my way over,” Matt said. She didn’t need to make excuses to him. He was responsible for her current situation. It was right that she call him.

As Matt checked out with his secretary, locked his office and hurried across campus, he couldn’t help offering up a small prayer that the baby would be okay.

He’d been plagued over the past few weeks by the need to take some kind of responsibility. This wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind.

THE BLEEDING WAS nothing to worry about. It had stopped by the time Phyllis and Matt reached Phoenix.

When her lab work came back, she was hospitalized overnight, anyway. She’d been throwing up so much she was dehydrated. As someone who wasn’t exactly uninformed about medical matters, Phyllis felt stupid for not seeing the signs or taking more precautions.

Embarrassed, lying in the bed with the IV drip hanging beside her, she wished she could slide under the covers when Matt knocked on her open door.

“You decent?”

If you called wearing a gown that had no back to it decent. “Yeah.” She pulled the covers up under her chin.

“Dr. Mac says you’ll only need to be here overnight. Luckily they caught things before they could get too serious.”

She nodded, feeling at a complete disadvantage as he sat, fully clothed, in the chair beside her bed.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d been having such a problem with morning sickness?”

Raising her bed with the fingertip control, Phyllis said, “Why would I? It’s a normal part of pregnancy.”

“It must’ve been pretty severe to require an IV drip.”

Phyllis couldn’t argue with him there. “I’m really sorry about this. You can head on back home. I’ll call Cassie tonight and she’ll make sure someone’s here in the morning to pick me up.”

“I’ve got nobody waiting for me at home,” he said, his hands steepled under his chin as he gazed at her.

For one crazy moment, Phyllis remembered how those hands had felt on her body….

“I figured I might as well keep you company tonight.”

She swallowed. “That’s not necessary.”

“Might be good for us to talk a little more,” he said, almost as though she hadn’t said a word. If it wasn’t for his slight frown, Phyllis would’ve thought he hadn’t heard her at all.

“It occurred to me that I don’t even know if you have any living family.”

She didn’t understand why that should matter to him. She’d repeatedly told him her pregnancy wasn’t his responsibility.

Phyllis wasn’t planning to get to know him any better than she already did.

He wasn’t father material. He’d said so himself.

“My parents are both gone,” she said. She’d meant to tell him to leave. “My father was fifty, my mom in her forties when they had me. I was an only child.”

He nodded, still watching her.

“You really don’t have to stay.”

“It’s the least I can do,” he said, his tone of voice warning her she wasn’t going to win this one. “I’ll get a room in the motel across the street and be back here in the morning. You said your first class doesn’t start till eleven. We should be able to make it home in plenty of time for you to shower and get to school.”

The doctor had said that if everything continued to look good, there was no reason Phyllis couldn’t be released after her eight-o’clock rounds.