Dr. Mommy

Three

Just as Nick had suspected, no one answered the phone at Social Services. Nor was there anyone available at any of the other half-dozen numbers he called in an effort to get someone out to the house, to take the baby off Claire’s hands. The holiday and the snow had sent every available body out to see to situations that were infinitely more pressing than an abandoned baby who was, at the moment, safe and warm, and in the care of both a government official and a medical doctor.

A disenchanted government official and a very anxious medical doctor, yeah, but still…

Nick settled the cordless phone back into its resting place on the kitchen counter and turned to Claire with a shrug. “Sorry,” he said. For some reason, though, he didn’t exactly feel sorry. There was just something about this situation that prevented him from becoming too overwrought. “But that was the last person I knew to call. Looks like it’s going to be tomorrow afternoon at the earliest before anybody can take Sleeping Beauty off your hands.”

They’d moved both baby and basket into the kitchen with them, and now the infant was slumbering peacefully in the middle of the expansive kitchen table—which Nick couldn’t help but notice was quite a bit larger than one person could possibly need. By the soft, pink light of a small, terra-cotta lamp that burned atop the—really big—refrigerator, Claire had made a pot of coffee. While he was on the phone, she had filled a mug for each of them, and now she was clutching hers with a brutal grip, as if it were her last handhold on reality.

As if reading his mind, she muttered “This can’t be happening. This has got to be a dream. No, a nightmare,” she hastily corrected herself. “I can’t believe I’m going to be stuck here with you and a baby until tomorrow afternoon.”

Nick told himself not to take her sentiment to heart, that she was speaking out of panic and fear and nothing more. But it stung to realize that Claire considered spending any amount of time with him and a baby a nightmare. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but it did sting.

“Yeah, well, look at it this way,” he told her, biting back the bitterness that began to pool in his belly again. “Maybe it won’t be until tomorrow afternoon.”

She arched her eyebrows hopefully. “No?”

He shook his head slowly. Then, gritting his teeth mildly, he told her, “No. The way things are going, it might very well be the day after.”

This time her eyebrows shot down in an angry V. “That’s not funny.”

He bit back a disgruntled chuckle. “Tell me about it. If you think I’m any happier to be stranded in close quarters with you than you are to be here with me, think again. I’m the one who got dumped, in case you’ve forgotten.” The one who never stopped loving you, he added to himself, none too happy about that realization, either.

Why deny it, though? he asked himself. It had been more than a decade since he’d asked Claire to marry him. More than a decade for him to put his feelings for her in the past and move on with his life. And in that length of time, he’d done neither. He still loved her. His love for her had been what prevented him from marrying anyone else. He couldn’t, in good conscience, join himself to another woman and devote his life to her, when what he felt for her would only be shade of the love he still harbored for Claire.

And, simply put, he would never love another woman. Not completely. Not the way he had loved Claire. Not as long as Claire still walked the earth, anyway.

He wasn’t so bitter that he blamed her for the unhappiness he felt these days. Sure, he’d wanted to be married with kids by now, and his life would never feel complete without a family of his own. But it was his choice to remain single and childless. His choice not to get involved with other women beyond a superficial, physical relationship. His choice to look down the road at the future and see nothing but a solitary existence. He certainly didn’t blame Claire for those things. But he didn’t exactly forgive her, either.

She sighed fitfully, bringing his thoughts back to the present. “Let’s not start this again,” she said quietly. “It’s pointless. It’ll just make this situation that much more difficult to weather. We’re not going to learn anything more than we already know about each other.”

“Pointless,” he echoed hollowly. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it,” he concurred further. “We have a whole history that was pretty much pointless, don’t we?”

“Nick…” she said, her voice tinted with an unmistakable warning.

He lifted both hands and held them palm out, in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay,” he relented. “I promise to be a good boy. Really, I do.”

Claire rolled her eyes, but refrained from comment. Instead, she turned her attention to her new infant centerpiece. “She sure seems to be sleeping a lot. Is that safe? I mean, I thought babies slept really badly.”

Nick shrugged, gazing in that direction himself. “Depends on the baby,” he said. “A lot of them are lousy sleepers. But some of them sleep like rocks. Besides, this one’s gotta be at least six or seven months old. By now she should be sleeping fairly well at night. And, hey,” he added softly, “tonight hasn’t exactly been conducive to good sleep for her, has it?”

Claire turned and eyed him suspiciously through lowered lids. Very coolly, she remarked, “You seem to know an awful lot about babies. Do you…have one or two of your own?”

He couldn’t help noting that she glanced quickly down at his—ringless—left hand as she made the comment. Ooo, he thought. Touchy. Is that jealousy tinting Claire’s voice now? Well, well, well.

He shook his head. “No, I’m not married with kids. But I’ve got a lot of nieces and nephews. Angie had twins a month ago, bringing her own personal contribution to four, and—”

“You’re kidding!” Claire exclaimed happily. “Angie? Little Angie has four kids?”

Her smile was dazzling, her delight infectious, and Nick couldn’t help but smile, too. “Hey, ‘little Angie’ is twenty-eight years old,” he pointed out. “She’s been married for six years now.”

Claire shook her head in disbelief. “That’s so amazing,” she said. “I remember her tagging along after us when she was just a kid.”

“She always liked you a lot,” he told her. “She wouldn’t speak to me for months after we broke up. She was sure I did or said something to you that made you run off to Connecticut.”

“Nick…” Claire said again, again with clear warning.

“I’m not trying to rehash old business,” he told her honestly. “I’m just stating a fact is all. You can’t expect us to spend any amount of time together and not bring up some part of the past.” He covered the distance necessary to bring him within arm’s length of her. And with no small effort, he refrained from reaching out to touch her. “We were a big part of each other’s lives once upon a time, whether you like to admit that or not.”

Her lips parted fractionally in surprise at his charge. For a long moment, she only gazed up at his face, her cobalt eyes deep and compelling and filled with some emotion he was probably better off not trying to figure out. Claire’s eyes had always been his undoing, he recalled now, too late. So blue. So arresting. So damned expressive. She could never hide her feelings, because invariably her eyes had betrayed her. They’d always been her own undoing, too.

And right now her eyes were telling Nick that she was remembering those times even better than he remembered them himself. Every muscle and microbe, every sense and sensibility he possessed screamed at him to reach out to her. To take her in his arms and pull her close. To relive those moments of the past and create a few more for the future. Even after more than a decade of separation, even after the emotional wringing he’d suffered as a result of her abandonment, he still wanted Claire. With all his heart, with all his soul. Till death do them part.

Great, Nick. This is just great.

“It’s not that I don’t want to admit how important we used to be to each other,” she said, scattering his thoughts, but doing nothing to alleviate the jumble of his emotions. “On the contrary,” she added quietly, “maybe I remember that part of it better than you do.”

Nodding slowly, but unwilling to reveal just how much her statement shook him, he asked, “Then what is it? What’s wrong?”

She sighed again, opened her mouth to say something, then shut it without uttering a word. She only shook her head silently and spun around, but not before Nick caught the shimmer of tears in her eyes. Something twisted tight in his gut at the sight.

Yeah, those eyes, he thought again. They’d always been trouble. Looked like some things, at least, hadn’t changed a bit.

Claire couldn’t imagine what had come over her to make her act this way. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that she’d be responsible—at least in part—for an abandoned baby for another day, perhaps two. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that the person with whom she was sharing that responsibility was a man she’d once banished from her life, a man she’d never expected to see again, in anything other than passing. As if it wasn’t already bad enough that the two of them were traveling down a memory lane that was pockmarked with land mines that might go off at any second.

No, as if all that wasn’t already bad enough, she was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, way down deep inside, in a distant, lonely place she’d thought locked away forever, she was still in love with Nick Campisano. Even after all these years. Even after the emotional upheaval she’d somehow managed to survive upon their parting. Even after all that, she sensed that there was still a part of herself—a rather large part, evidently—that wanted Nick in her life. Substantially. Eternally.

Wonderful, Claire. You’ve just ascended to the next level of stupidity.

She spread one hand open over her eyes, pretending to swipe away fatigue, praying that Nick hadn’t noticed the presence of tears. Why on earth was she crying? she wondered. She was just exhausted, she tried to reassure herself. It was almost three o’clock in the morning, and she’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours straight. Even before that she’d been tired. She’d never been a good sleeper. The holiday season always made that worse. And the emotional stress of the last few hours had helped not at all.

Tired, she echoed to herself. Weary. Fatigued. That was why she was experiencing this strange wave of melancholy memory. It was nothing more than that. She couldn’t possibly still be in love with Nick after all this time. It made no sense.

Oh, really? a little voice inside her piped up. Then why have you never been able to make a commitment to another man? Why have you never found anyone who made you feel the way Nick made you feel? Why is he the yardstick by which you measure every potential mate?

Instead of answering the little voice, Claire commanded it in no uncertain terms to just shut up and leave her alone because it had no idea what it was yammering about, anyway.

Dragging her hand over her face one final time, Claire spun back around to face Nick. He looked as exhausted and dejected as she did. They both obviously needed sleep— and lots of it. She spared a glance for the solidly sleeping infant and told herself they should take advantage of this brief reprieve. No telling when the baby would awaken again, or how long it would be before she went to sleep after that. Even an hour or two of rest would help enormously.

“We should go to bed,” she said.

At the soft sound of disbelief Nick uttered, she closed her eyes. “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said flatly, turning to face him again. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he didn’t look quite as tired as he had before. No, in fact, he appeared quite capable of staying awake for hours, if offered the right kind of incentive.

“Hey, I don’t know jack,” he told her. “Why? What were you talking about? My, my, my, Claire. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Yeah, you wish it was in the gutter,” she shot back. But somehow she couldn’t quite quell the soft smile that threatened to bloom.

Nick smiled, too, though his own effort was considerably more predatory. “I remember a few occasions when we both had our minds there. It was a lot of fun. To put it mildly.”

Claire’s smile fell at his willingness to continue with what she considered a very dangerous topic. But she couldn’t battle the heat seeping through her at the memories—anything but mild—that exploded fast and furious in her brain. Fast and furious. That was how it had always been between them. As if they both feared they’d never get enough of each other. As if they’d somehow known their time together was limited, and they had to make the most of every second. As if they couldn’t bear to be apart. As if they needed to consume each other in order to survive.

We were both kids then, she tried to remind herself. It was nothing more than hormones.

That was all it had been to make them react to each other with the instant and complete intensity that they had, she told herself again. Hormones. Biology. Chemistry. And okay, anatomy, too. It was all very scientific, very natural. A chemical reaction, nothing more. A really, really hot chemical reaction, granted, but a reaction nonetheless. They were two mature adults now, fully capable of keeping that kind of response under control. No way would they burn for each other the way they once had.

She gazed at Nick again, feeling her maturity level drop as quickly as her temperature rose. Uh-oh.

“It’s over,” she told him, trying not to choke on the lie. “That’s all in the past. There’s nothing there between us now.”

He emitted another, louder, sound of disbelief in response to her statement. “Right,” he said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm. “Sure, Claire. Whatever you say. If it makes you feel better, then by all means, you go ahead and wallow in your little fantasy.”

“It’s not a fantasy,” she insisted. “It’s true.”

He eyed her levelly as he took a step toward her. “So you’ve put the past completely behind you. Is that what you’re telling me?”

She nodded and somehow managed to murmur, “Yes.”

He took another casual step forward. “Since opening that door a couple hours ago, you haven’t experienced a single stir of old emotion?”

This time she shook her head, but her voice was a little shaky as she told him, “No.”

Another, less casual, step forward. “Not even one little spark of heat?”

This time Claire didn’t trust her voice not to betray her, so she only shook her head again and remained silent.

Nick, however, continued to speak. And take yet another step toward her. “Not so much as a banked ember?”

This time Claire couldn’t even manage to shake her head. All she could do was watch Nick’s face, noting the flicker of heat and the play of light in his dark eyes as he drew nearer still.

“So then it’s just me,” he continued, his voice dropping to a dangerously low pitch. “It’s just me who’s been feeling this current of electricity jumping back and forth between us like a generator wound way too tight?”

She cleared her throat with some difficulty and forced herself to respond. Unfortunately, the only response that emerged was lame at best. “I, uh…I think you must be imagining things, Nick.”

One more step forward, and he stood immediately in front of her, with scarcely a breath of air separating them. She told herself she should be offended that he’d usurped her space the way he had, without asking her permission, without thought for how it might make her feel. It was just another reminder of why the two of them hadn’t worked out together the first time around.

As much as she had loved him, Nick had always overrun Claire. He hadn’t meant to do it, and it hadn’t been because he’d wanted more than she was willing to give. That’s just the way Nick was. Overwhelming. Larger than life. Too big, too happy, too outgoing, too gregarious, too loving, too…too…

Too too.

Claire had always felt overshadowed, overpowered. Not just by Nick, but by the entire Campisano clan. They’d all been just like him. Too affectionate, too kind, too nurturing. All of them had always been totally in tune with one another, as if they were all different parts of one big, beautifully purring machine. Where one lacked, the other supplied. Where one hurt, the other healed. Where one despaired, the other encouraged.

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