Caro Carson - Doctor, Soldier, Daddy

Jamie stopped lounging, too. With a firm thunk, he set his half-finished bottle of beer on the dry Texas ground by his chair. He wasn’t like his father. Sam would have a better man to raise him.

“I’m in the reserves for another six months. I could be recalled to active duty tonight.”

Now Quinn sat up abruptly. Jamie felt their tension as both men looked at him intently.

“It’s okay,” Jamie said quietly. “It’s highly unlikely the army will send me back in the next six months.”

Braden dropped his gaze to the crackling fire. “It’s not that we aren’t proud of you.”

“I know. I’m proud to have served, too. There are times I’ve considered volunteering to go back. There’s so much work left to be done there.” Work that he’d seen one brave woman undertake. Work to promote literacy in the population. Work to provide health care to the poorest of the poor. Work to end the slavelike conditions in which so many Afghani girls were raised.

Work that had ultimately killed that one brave woman, leaving Jamie to raise Sam alone.

“A nanny’s not good enough. I want a wife. If something should happen to me, Sam will still have a legal guardian. An American legal guardian.”

“He’s your son, Jamie. Do you think we’d let the state put him in an orphanage?”

“No.” Jamie was touched. Braden had said your son. He, at least, was getting used to the idea of Sam being a MacDowell, not just a baby brought home from a war-torn country. “But Mom’s getting a little old to start over again with an infant, and look at you. Both of you. A couple of bachelor doctors with insane working hours. Sam needs a full-time parent.”

“Then hire a lawyer and make the nanny his legal guardian.” Quinn was still seeing in black and white, apparently, but Jamie had already come up with that theory and ruled it out.

“It’s easier to get married. A wife’s custody is rarely questioned.”

There had been no way to legally marry Sam’s mother, not on the American base, nor in any Afghani court or mosque. In the end, after her death, that had meant no locals would claim Sam as their own, either. Jamie had been able to get Sam out of the country by mixing State Department regulations and medical necessity, but if the paperwork ever got scrutinized...

If. He wouldn’t worry about that now. And if If happened, Sam belonging to an American husband and wife would be beneficial, compared to Sam being the child of a bachelor soldier.

Yes, Sam needed a mother. An American mother. Simple.

“I’m fine with a marriage based on practicality,” he told his brothers. “I never planned on getting married for any other reason.”

“You’re sure about that?” Quinn asked.

Jamie sat back in his camp chair and picked up his beer. He brushed the sandy dirt off the bottom of the bottle. When he’d been in Afghanistan, he’d told himself the dry soil wasn’t so different from Texas. He’d even been able to squint at the landscape and imagine himself home, if home had a lot of barbed wire and sandbag bomb shelters.

“I’m sure,” Jamie said. “Doctors make lousy husbands—look at Dad. He had no time for Mom. No time for any of us. Without Mom, we wouldn’t have had a parent at all. My kid needs a mother.”

Braden studied the label on his own beer bottle for a moment. “You’re not being fair to Dad. We had those fishing trips.”

“Yeah, once a year we’d saddle up the horses and pack up the tents and come out here to spend, what? Four days? With a guy we barely knew.”

“Still, he tried.”

“Yeah, he would have made a fine uncle. Not my idea of a father. My son is going to have a real parent, someone there for him every day, not just for a camping trip now and then. If something happens to me, he’s going to have another parent to finish raising him. I’ll be damned if I’ll leave him alone in this world. I’m getting married, and that’s it.”

“Slow down, Jamie. What happens if you find this perfect mother, but then you fall in love with another woman, someone you want for something besides mothering? Are you going to divorce the mother of your child to marry the woman you’re crazy about? An affair won’t cut it. I don’t care what this ‘perfect mother’ agrees to, she’s not going to be a Mrs. MacDowell and willingly turn a blind eye to her husband having an affair.”

“I’m not going to cheat on my wife, even if we aren’t in that kind of a marriage.”

“You need to think this through. I’ve been in love, Jamie.” Braden rarely talked about it, but he’d been engaged once. “It can hit you like a lightning strike.”

Jamie stood up and pulled the keys to his truck out of his pocket. “It already did, Braden, it already did.”

“But, then—”

“She died. Her name was Amina. She was brilliant. Beautiful. An Afghani woman who translated for me on medical missions. She died during the birth and she left me a son.”

Jamie dumped the rest of his beer onto a struggling scrub plant, then chucked the bottle into the bed of his pickup truck. “Lightning won’t strike twice.”

The shocked silence wasn’t what Jamie had intended to cause. He clapped Quinn on the shoulder and used the side of his boot to push his still-full beer cooler toward his brother’s camp chair. “You finish these for me this weekend. Mom’s been watching Sam long enough. I’m gonna run.”

Jamie had been away from his son for nearly two hours, and that was too long.

Braden followed him to the pickup. “Jamie. You never told us about the mother of the baby. Sam is really your child, then? Your biological child?”

Damn it. Even his own brothers hadn’t believed Sam was his son. How would he convince the State Department? He needed to be married and have Sam legally adopted by his wife, in case they started asking.

“I’m not in the mood for a big-brother lecture, Braden.” He loved his oldest brother. Braden had filled more of a father role for him than their father had, but when it came to his own life, Jamie knew what he was doing. He’d come to the ranch today to let his brothers know what his plans were as a courtesy, not so they could tell him he was wrong to want to secure a second parent for Sam as quickly as possible.

“I’m not lecturing,” Braden said in a voice made for lecturing. “When do we meet this not-really-a-wife of yours?”

“I don’t know who she is yet.” Jamie opened the truck door and stepped up on the running board. “No woman I already know fits the bill.”

“No woman will. I can’t imagine who is going to want your son and not want you.”

Ah, the blind loyalty of family. Braden was certain women would fall all over his little brother. He didn’t know that most women gave up pursuing Jamie nowadays. His mourning for Amina showed somehow, he was sure.

His son was the only thing that brought a smile to his face now. As he thought of Sam, Jamie felt himself start to grin. “This isn’t about me finding a wife. This is about Sam finding a mother. That’s why I’m letting him choose her.”

Jamie closed the truck door. As he drove away from the old homestead, a new feeling settled over him. A certainty that he was on the right course. Contentment, almost. He’d loved Amina, and now he loved their son. Building his life around his son’s needs was the right thing to do.

He wondered whom Sam would fall in love with. He wondered whom his son would choose for him to marry.

Chapter Two

Kendry Harrison was a general dogsbody. It wasn’t the loveliest term, but it accurately summed up her career at West Central Hospital. She’d like to think that she was at least a gopher, but that would imply she worked for someone important who needed her to run errands. No such luck. She was just a general dogsbody, plugged into whatever entry-level job needed doing. Today, she was working in the pediatric ward.