The Firefighter's Secret Baby

CHAPTER THREE

SAM SURFACED from the nightmare. She could hear Max’s voice. He was nearby. Separate from the fuzziness of her thoughts. What was Max doing in her bedroom? Why couldn’t she get her eyes to open?

Other voices were clamoring around her. Above her. Someone reported on her condition. Very official. Something pinched her arm, then her hand. There was talk about IVs and leads. Beyond it all, Sam could still hear her federal marshal.

Max sounded furious. But whatever was wrong, he would take care of it. And something was wrong. That was the one thing she was sure of. What had she done this time?

Max was shouting at someone….

Randy?

Why was she dreaming about the federal marshal in charge of her protection arguing with a long-ago voice she refused to let herself think about anymore?

Unless…

Sam’s belly cramped. Rain flooded over her. A storm raged around her, beyond her, beating against her face.

She hurt.

Everywhere.

“Ah!” she gasped, reality racing back.

The vehicle chasing her…The accident! Randy being there when he shouldn’t have been, his deep voice and the concern in his eyes and his warm touch. It was real. It was all real.

She’d told him to protect the baby. Their baby. She’d told him too much. She hadn’t told him enough. Now Max was there, and the two of them were arguing. What had she done?

She tried to fight the pain and the weight pressing down on her body.

Move!

Warn Randy!

“The APD is under my authority at this scene,” Max shouted. “You can’t keep me from interviewing her. And you wouldn’t want to if you knew what was at stake.”

“Then fill me in,” Randy demanded. “Otherwise, medical attention is all she’s receiving. The hell with your interview.

“Isolate her from all but essential personnel,” Max insisted.

An incredulous laugh followed.

“Okay,” he said. “Which of my team or the cops or the EMTs do you consider unessential?”

“I can have you restrained, Lieutenant, if that’s what it takes to—”

“Try it. You’re not isolating this victim from me, Marshal Dean. Not until I—”

“You got her out alive.” Max’s voice held an edge Sam had never heard before. Or maybe it was the buzzing in her ears that was growing louder, washing over every word until she had to strain to hear. “Job well done. Now get the hell out of the way and let me do mine. Before…”

“Before what?” Randy wanted to know. “What the hell is going on?”

“We need to transport her,” another voice said. Something gripped Sam’s arm. Tight. Tighter. “Her pressure’s bottoming out. If we don’t get her and the baby to the hospital…”

The pain and the fear and Sam’s need to tell Randy to listen to Max and get out before the danger got too close—it was all fading, along with the cramping in her belly that was her baby fighting for her life. The dream was there again, reaching for her.

The one where her daughter would be okay no matter what happened to Sam. Because Randy was there. He was smiling. Promising her he’d protect their child. Inside the dream, Sam could believe in promises and happily-ever-afters.

“My baby…” she finally managed to say out loud.

His touch stroked down her hair. She felt him lean closer. “You and the baby are going to be okay.”

“Protect our daughter, no matter what,” she whispered to him. She’d spent nine months telling herself she had to let the ridiculous fantasy of being with Randy go. Now, it felt as if he was the only thing standing between their child and the danger Sam had brought into their lives. “Never should have happened…All my fault. But you have to—”

“Everything’s fine, Robyn,” Max reassured her. He was closer, too. “We’re going to get you—”

“Robyn?” Randy asked.

“Robyn Nobles. That’s your victim’s name.” There was a silent pause. “Or is there something else you need to tell me?”

“I don’t need to tell you a damn thing!”

“Please stop,” she begged them both. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

She fumbled for Randy’s hand. She could barely feel it in her own.

Maybe it was the weakness stealing through her. Maybe it was having Randy there. But it finally felt safe. She could let the fear and the fight go. There was nothing else to do. There was only this moment. It had all come down to this. Even if she didn’t make it, there would be someone there for her daughter.

“Promise me.” She squeezed Randy’s hand. “Take care of our baby….”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, it’s too early to tell?” Randy had been badgering Atlanta Memorial’s top pediatric nurse for ten minutes.

He was being an ass, but his head was too full of pointless questions. He needed answers, and Kate Rhodes had been a family friend for years. As soon as she’d gotten wind that he’d ridden along with Sam’s ambulance and staked out the O.R. waiting room, she’d found him and stayed glued to his side, no matter how much he growled.

“Emma will be here soon,” she said. “I’m sure she headed over the second you called her. Once she’s here, I’ll find your victim and get more information. Her injuries looked surprisingly minor, considering what I’ve heard about the accident. But her pregnancy puts her at greater risk for complications—”

“I don’t need you to hold my hand until my big sister gets here. I need to know what’s going on. Go—”

“Not while you’re making the kind of scene that’s going to get you tossed off this floor.”

Kate dragged him to a chair. She was a tall woman, but Randy still towered over her. She got him to sit, regardless, then settled beside him. The room was silent around them. They were alone, at least for the moment. He was still soaking wet and filthy from the scene. And Kate was right—he was punch drunk, reeling from everything that had happened.

“Why are you so hung up on this victim?” she asked. “You’re usually thrilled to be the hero who walks off into the sunset. Not that anyone you’ve saved has ever complained. But it’s not like you to let the job get personal, Randy.”

No, no one complained. And no one ever got close enough to mess with the calm Randy had carved out for his life. That’s how he wanted his career. That’s how he wanted his relationships outside his family. Except for the chaos his brothers and sister supplied in a steady stream, Randy just wanted peace. A peace that had been unsettled for months by his bizarre attachment to a woman he barely knew. And now…

Don’t let him destroy our baby, too…

Your victim is a principal in one of my operations….

“Who is she?” Kate asked.

Randy managed a careless shrug. “A pregnant twentysomething who’s banged up and giving birth.”

“Yeah. I could have read that off the EMT’s report. But who’s she to you? Where are her people? It’s been hours since the accident. You’re the only one here waiting to see what happens.”

Randy nodded, even though he was certain Federal Marshal Max Dean was ruthlessly asserting his authority somewhere nearby. Which only added to Randy’s determination to get some answers. He had no reason to believe that Sam’s child was really his, or to feel responsible for their well-being. But there had been cold deliberation in Dean’s eyes. Randy couldn’t shake the unreasonable compulsion to protect Sam from the man and whatever had her so terrified.

Reason was how his world of fire and rescue worked. Except fear had taken control when he’d surprised his team and insisted on riding in Sam’s ambulance. Fear had kept him pacing at Atlanta Memorial ever since.

“I have no idea who she is,” he finally said. “But…I have to know she and her baby are okay.”

Kate nodded slowly.

“Martin said APD alerts have gone out, trying to find hits for her ID and description.” Kate’s hulking brother taught at the police academy, which gave him a lot of contacts in the Atlanta Police Department. “I suppose it’s possible no one knows she’s missing yet.”

“It’s also possible the ID we found in her purse is a dead end, and we’re not meant to find out where she and her baby belong.”

“Is that why you’re calling her Sam when her license says her name is Robyn?”

“Something like that.” Don’t tell anyone you know….

“You don’t think this was just another accident, do you?”

“Witnesses at the scene said someone hit a minivan, sending it skidding into her car. It sounds like the truck that caused the pileup had been dogging Sam for miles.”

“And how, exactly, do you know this Sam? Why don’t you want me using any other name but Robyn Nobles with the staff?”

Kate’s perfectly logical questions hung in the air, waiting for perfectly logical answers.

“Got a dollar?” Randy asked.

Kate fished into the pocket of her scrubs and handed a bill over. Randy headed for the hall and the dilapidated vending machine that had already denied him Yoo-hoo twice. Ignoring his friend, who walked at his side, Randy inserted the money into the machine.

Wrrr.

Grind.

It spat the bill back out at him.

“Damn it!” He pounded the side of the contraption with a clenched fist and inserted the dollar again.

“So, your plan is to make Herbie pay, “Kate said, “because you can’t smack around anyone else?”

“Herbie?” The bill flew back out of the slot and drifted to Randy’s feet. He growled and bent over to pick it up.

“This old wreck picks and chooses who it wants to bestow its bounty on. It’s not mercenary. Herbie always refunds your money if he’s not feeling the love. But he’s fickle. Reacts badly to stress. And from the looks of you, I kind of feel bad for whatever soda you get your hands on. You’ll crush it to oblivion when you’re done. You can understand why Herbie would feel protective.”

Randy stared at her. Never-ending overtime on the pediatric ward and dressing daily in cartoon scrubs had finally shredded her sanity. He wadded her dollar into a ball. Kate chuckled. He threw the money to the floor and stomped away.

He was furious. Deadly furious—at himself, not a tyrannical drink machine. He didn’t know anything about the woman his team had extracted. Not her mind. Her fears. Her secrets. All he knew was the instinct to keep her, now that he had her back. The memory of Sam’s contented sighs in that hotel room in Savannah had been messing with his head for months. Was that really all this was—him still being hung up on a one-night stand?

He might be a shallow sonovabitch when it came to relationships, but him losing it was about more than not being with another woman since St. Patrick’s Day. Seeing Sam again had stirred up more than a physical itch he needed to scratch. He was terrified for her and her unborn baby. It had been a lifetime since any emotion had gotten this close.

The elevator by the soda machine dinged. Randy’s sister emerged.

“Hey, Em,” Kate said.

Emma stepped onto the floor, stalled beside Herbie and pulled a wrinkled bill from her purse. She fed the machine, scooped up the can that was agreeably provided, collected her change and marched down the hall toward them. Her expression was worried, but her determined stride said I’ve got this covered.

Classic Emma.

She’d had everything covered for as far back as Randy would let his memory go. She reached his side and held out the can.

“You must be needing a chocolate fix something awful by now,” she said.

Kate hugged her, then she and her pink scrubs with yellow ducks floating all over them were heading down the hall.

“I’ll let you know when there’s an update on our patients,” she said over her shoulder.

“Patients?” Emma asked while Randy sat in one of the lounge’s chairs and snapped open his drink. She joined him. “You said you knew a woman in the accident. That you might need Rick’s help with information about her. Was there someone else in her car?”

Randy downed half the Yoo-hoo and let its coolness take the edge off the drive to go hand-to-hand with Herbie.

“There’s a baby.” He tunneled his free hand through his hair. “The victim is pregnant. Very pregnant. It’s only a matter of hours pregnant. No one’s saying anything about either of their conditions yet.”

“And?” Emma had on her lawyer’s face. The one that revealed nothing about what she was feeling, while she listened to absolutely everything that was being said.

“And it sounds like Sam and the baby were in trouble a long time before the MVA,” he added. The kind of trouble that Emma’s APD detective husband could look into.

“And?” Emma asked again.

“And I owe it to her to—”

“Owe it to her?” Emma slipped her hand into his, like she had when he was a little boy and their world had fallen apart. “Randy, this woman. How do you—”

“We…met, on my trip down to Savannah in March.”

Emma watched him drain the last of his drink. When he still didn’t say anything else, she headed back to the vending machine and beguiled another can out of the beast. She returned to Randy’s side, her eyes narrowing.

Her mind had always been able to sift through facts faster than should be legal.

“So, you met this woman the weekend you and Chris and Charlie and some of the guys headed south to blow off steam,” she said. “Only you came back more uptight than ever. You’ve been impossible to deal with since, the few times any of us have seen you off the job. All because of some hook-up you haven’t wanted to talk about. And now she’s here…and she’s very pregnant?”

“Yeah.” Randy took the fresh Yoo-hoo. He handed over his empty can, which he didn’t remember crushing. The thing was little more than a ball of aluminum now. “That weekend…It was strange. We were both looking for something easy and fun. It shouldn’t have meant anything more. Except it did, somehow. Being with her was…different. There was a connection. At least, I thought there was. But when I woke up the next morning, Sam had bolted. I figured I’d never see her again and tried to tell myself it was a good thing.”

“And now that you have seen her again?”

Randy curled both hands around his drink.

“She’s in trouble, Em. I’m sure of it. Nothing she was saying at the scene made any sense. I think she may have been in trouble when I met her in March, too. Maybe that’s what stuck with me all this time—what I couldn’t let go of.”

“You do have a weakness for saving people.” Emma nudged his shoulder with hers, only half kidding. “My little brother, the hero.”

Her biggest worry for him—for Randy and both his brothers—was how much of themselves they buried in their jobs. For Randy and Charlie and Chris, navigating relationships was the impossible thing—not walking into blazing infernos for a living. So far, Em had been the only one who’d been able to carve out a life with someone.

“If Sam wanted my help,” Randy reasoned out loud, “she wouldn’t have run that morning.”

“I don’t know about that. I almost torched what I had with Rick, before I learned how to stop shoving him away.”

“That was different.”

Emma had always been different.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “I wasn’t pregnant with Rick’s baby when he gave me the space to realize I couldn’t live without him. If I’d been carrying his child, he wouldn’t have let me out of his sight, whether I wanted to be saved or not.”

“I don’t know what this woman wants. I don’t have the first clue what’s going on.”

It wasn’t an admission anyone who knew Randy was used to hearing. His sister’s eyebrows disappeared beneath her honey-colored bangs. But she didn’t push. Her silence was an open invitation to trust her with more, whenever he was ready.

And Randy did trust her. There was nothing his family wouldn’t do for him. Whatever secret Sam was keeping, even if the danger she’d been rambling about was real, Randy’s brothers and sister would be his safety net.

“She said someone was after her,” he admitted. “That whoever it was would be back, and she and the baby were in danger. I don’t know how much of it is true, or even if the child is mine. But she was terrified. Then a federal marshal showed up on the scene….”

Emma nodded. Her lawyer’s face was back, but she was holding Randy’s hand again.

“And you need to know what about Sam’s situation is real,” she said. “So you’ll know where you stand once she’s stable enough for you to ask about the rest.”

The rest.

Sam and the baby and what the hell they meant to Randy…

“I need Rick’s help, Em. Your husband’s a bulldog. He knows exactly how to bend the rules without breaking anything important. He’s served as APD liaison on task forces with God knows how many federal agencies. He has to have a few favors to call in. I need to know everything he can dig up on this woman, her federal handler and whoever she’s running from.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“EXCUSES ARE USELESS TO ME.”

Luca Gianfranco smoothed a hand down the tie that, along with his private Gulfstream jet, was ruinously expensive but worth every dime he’d spent. In his world, money was power. It intimidated the people he needed kept in place, and wooed the ones he wanted closer.

Know who you can trust, and deal firmly with the ones you can’t.

It had been the wisest advice Luca’s father had ever given him.

“I guarantee she couldn’t have survived that accident,” the head of Luca’s southeastern operations insisted over their cell link.

“Really? Because it occurs to me that a guarantee would have been you watching her take her last breath.”

“Fire and rescue was there in under ten minutes. We couldn’t have—”

“You chose to make a public spectacle out of your responsibility, then you didn’t finish the job. Almost as if you didn’t want the same outcome I do, and you didn’t want me to have another chance once you failed.”

“I did what you asked,” said the voice of a man Luca had been sure could be trusted. It wasn’t the first time he’d been wrong about family. “You wanted the world to know you aren’t weak. No matter what you have to do. No one who hears about how you took Sam out will doubt—”

“But I haven’t taken her out. She was rushed to the hospital. She’s been in emergency surgery for hours.” Luca took a deep breath, resisting the wave of familiarity that came with thinking of her as Sam. She was a loose end. A challenge to his control that would be his death warrant if he didn’t eliminate her.

There was a long pause.

Something crashed on the other side of the line.

“She’s alive?” the gruff voice said.

“I’m assured she’s in bad shape, but alive. That’s all the details I can get. My source won’t risk attracting suspicion by asking too many questions. But that’s a risk I’m confident you’d be happy to take, to make up for your failure.”

“But even if I can get someone to—”

“Get your ass over there. I want a detailed report before morning. Then I’ll tell you exactly what I want done to end this. The trial’s less than a month away. My Vancouver associates are nervous. I’m on my way to reassure them that I’ve isolated the leak, that there’s no way I’ll be indicted, and that their investment is secure. You either take care of this for me, or you become part of the collateral damage you caused.”

Luca slapped his phone shut. The flight attendant bringing him cappuccino flinched as she set the cup down. He caught her hand before she could draw away.

“Share some of this with me?” It wasn’t a request.

She sat. Her smile was beautiful, if not completely genuine. She didn’t resist as Luca’s fingers threaded through hers. He lifted the cup of steaming coffee with his free hand, offering it to her as if it were a precious jewel. Hesitating, she took a sip and licked foam from her upper lip.

Sam had once craved private time with him. She’d needed companionship and a sense of belonging so badly. She’d been his shadow, until she betrayed him.

Luca’s hand tightened around the attendant’s, becoming a crushing vise. A squeak of pain escaped as he leaned forward, staring into her blue eyes. The same color as Sam’s.

“No one leaves my family,” he whispered to the attendant.

His mind raced with his plans to expand his West Coast operations into Vancouver. Everything was riding on him neutralizing this ridiculous grand jury mess. His fist clenched tighter. A bone snapped in the petite blonde’s hand. She cried out. The thrill of it swamped the rush of unfamiliar anxiety that had momentarily taken hold.

“No one challenges me,” he explained, his voice gentle. “Understand?”

The flight attendant nodded frantically, her eyes glazing. Pain. Fear. It was the same broken expression that had been on Sam’s face the night she’d run from him and their world. He wanted to see fear in her eyes again, just once more before she died. Fear of him, while he took away the life she had no right to live without his permission.