Rebecca Winters: Undercover Baby

He swallowed hard. “Never.”

After a long silence she whispered, “I’m sorry. Please go on.”

His heart reacted like a runaway train. “I don’t know if this is a good idea. Why don’t we wait for the doctor?”

She shook her head. “Don’t do this to me. Finish telling me the truth. I have to hear it. I promise I won’t interrupt again.”

I’m damned whatever I do, aren’t I, sweetheart?

“We’re pretty sure you found him on the doorstep at your work this morning. He was lying in a grocery box. There was a note. The unwed mother who left the baby there knew you would discover him. When you saw that the baby was jaundiced, you immediately brought him to the hospital for care.

“On your way into the emergency room, you slipped and hit your head on the pavement. Some ambulance attendants found you sitting on the cement, holding him. That’s why they brought you inside. When you couldn’t remember anything, they looked in your purse, found your identification and called me.”

Her lustrous green eyes filled with tears. “Tyler’s really not my baby,” she murmured in agony.

What have I said, what have I done?

Go on, Rawlins. Finish it.

“No. An abandoned baby is a ward of the court. You called him Tyler because that was your grandfather’s name. It’s the name you had hoped to call our baby, the one you miscarried a few months ago.”

“I had a miscarriage?”

He nodded. “You’ve had three, the last one after you were four months along,” he said gently.

“Nol ” Her look of horror mixed with a hint of pleading tore him apart.

“You asked for the truth. I didn’t want to hurt you. God knows I didn’t.”

Tears gushed from her eyes, forming rivulets down her pale cheeks. Suddenly she was convulsed. Her despair was worse than anything he’d heard during the traumatic week following her last miscarriage when she’d cried nonstop for days.

“Darli—”

“Don’t call me that!” she broke in on him. “For the love of heaven. Just go away and leave me alone.”

Sick in a way he couldn’t describe, Cal left her bedside and headed out of the room for the nursing station. The nurse who’d settled Diana in was just coming down the hall.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Rawlins? You look ill.”

Cal groaned in response. He ran a shaky hand through his hair. Clearing his throat he said, “Diana figured out she didn’t give birth to the baby upstairs in the nursery, so she forced me to tell her the truth. Now she’s inconsolable and it’s my fault.” His voice shook. “My wife needs help!”

The nurse eyed him with compassion. “I know this is hard on you. While I call Dr. Harkness, why don’t you take a seat in the waiting room around the corner. I’ll find you as soon as I’ve talked to him:”

Cal nodded.

Like the shell-shocked victim of a bombing, he made his way to the lounge, trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened since his wife had left his bed earlier that morning.

“Cal?”

At the sound of a familiar female voice he turned in time to see Annabelle—one of their best friends, and a crack member of Roman’s PI team—come rushing toward him.

“Roman just told me what happened. I got here as soon as I could.”

Little as she was, her physical and emotional support was exactly what he needed right now. They reached for each other. The contact caused him to break down. In a rush of emotion everything spilled out, particularly his fears.

“Diana not only sees me as a stranger, Annie, she despises me. What if she never regains her memory? What if she has gone away from me forever?”

“Don’t think like that,” she urged him. “Roman told me the doctor said her condition was temporary.”

Cal grimaced. “But what if he’s wrong? I don’t know why, but I have this gut instinct she’s never going to remember me or our marriage.”

Annabelle’s arms tightened. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. But if—and I say that’s a huge if—the day should come that you discover her amnesia is permanent, then I know you’ll find a way to make her fall in love with you all over again.”

Her words seeped into his soul.

If Diana’s amnesia is permanent, I know you’ll find a way to make her fall in love with you all over again.

Haunted by such a daunting prospect, he shook his head. “If you had heard the enmity in her voice when she told me to get out of her room a few minutes ago, you wouldn’t be saying that to me now.”

Annabelle let go of him and lifted her head, giving him a direct stare. “It’s too soon to talk about the what-ifs, Cal. Give it a few days. She has withstood a severe head trauma. The pain must be pretty bad. Naturally she’s not herself. Whatever she says or does right now, don’t take it personally.”

“How can I not? The doctor says that if there are no complications, she can be released from the hospital tomorrow. What if she refuses to go home with me?”

“No one can answer that question yet. Let’s wait and see what he has to say about her condition the next time he examines her. As for you, you’re coming to our house tonight Rand told me to tell you that’s an order.”

“Thanks, Annie. I appreciate that, but I couldn’t go anywhere. I’m staying here in case she remembers something and needs me.”

“Then we’ll keep the vigil with you.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t ask. I’m offering. Don’t forget. My husband and I love Diana, too. Wait here while I go say hello to her. Maybe she’ll refuse to talk to me, maybe she won’t. But since you were honest with her about the baby, then there are no secrets and I won’t have to tiptoe around her. I think it’s important that she knows she has friends she can count on, even if we are strangers to her.”

“I agree. Thanks, Annie,” he whispered.

She raised up to kiss his cheek. “No thanks necessary. I won’t be long. In the meantime, sit down and drink this.” She put some change in the pop machine and handed him a cola. “You probably didn’t eat breakfast.”

“No.”

“Rand will be here shortly. I’ll ask him to bring food for all of us.”

Like Roman, Annabelle kept a level head under stress, providing temporary calm to Cal’s tortured thoughts. He found himself praying that her appearance might trigger the mechanism that propelled Diana back to the world the rest of them inhabited. But deep inside, a part of him still feared her condition was irreversible.

How was he going to live with that?

CHAPTER THREE

“DIANA? It’s Annabelle Dunbarton. I know you don’t know me from Adam, but before the accident we were best friends. May I come in for a minute?”

Diana was lying on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow where she’d been sobbing. At the sound of the stranger’s voice she felt relief that it wasn’t Cal Rawlins. Just minutes earlier Jane had promised to keep him away until after the doctor had come down to examine her again.

Dr. Harkness couldn’t arrive soon enough for her. She didn’t care if the baby wasn’t hers. She wanted to go up to the nursery and see him. In order to do that, she would need the doctor’s permission.

Slowly she raised up enough to notice a smallboned yet curvaceous woman with a beautiful face and stylish cap of short red curls standing in the doorway of her hospital room.

One of my best friends? Another unfamiliar face.

“Yes. Of course. Come all the way in.”

She wiped her eyes with the bedsheet and sat up while the other woman approached.

“I’ve been out in the lounge with Cal.”

“I—I don’t want to see him right now.”

“He told me. Don’t worry. He didn’t send me in here, and he certainly won’t do anything you don’t want him to do. He loves you too much to alienate you.”