bank’s, anyway.
She’d put a chunky down payment on it last year. She was twenty-eight, time to stop renting. Time to start making sure she had a place and security and in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and a good school system. Her bedroom was cobalt-blue and white, and, since decorating choices scared her, she’d just used the same colors in the bathroom. A second bedroom she used as a den, where she stashed her TV and computer-and anything she didn’t have time to put away. The third bedroom was the biggest, and stood starkly empty-Winona wasn’t admitting the room was intended for a baby, not to anyone, at least not yet. But it was.
The kitchen was a non-cook’s dream, practical, with lots of make-easy machines and tools, the counters and walls covered with warm peach tiles that led down into the living room. A cocoa couch viewed the backyard, bird feeders all over the place, lots of windows…
Either that or she was going out of her mind, which, of course, was always a possibility. But she unlatched the front door and yanked it open.
Her jaw surely dropped ten feet. Her ranch house was white adobe, with redbrick arches in the doorways. And there, in the doorway shadow, was a wicker laundry basket. The basket appeared to be stuffed with someone’s old, clean laundry, rags and sheets…but damned if that wasn’t where the crying sound emanated from.
The car keys slipped from her fingers and clattered to the cold steps. The apple slipped from her other hand and rolled down the drive, forgotten. She hunched down, quickly parting the folds and creases of fabric.
When she saw the baby, her heart stopped.
Abandoned. The baby had actually been abandoned.
“Ssh, ssh, it’s all right, don’t cry…” So carefully, so gingerly, she lifted out the little one. The morning was icy at the edges, the light still a predawn-gray. The baby was too swathed in torn-up blankets and rags to clearly make out its features or anything else.
“Ssh, ssh,” Winona kept crooning, but her heart was slamming, slamming. Feelings seeped through her nerves, through her heart from a thousand long-locked doors, bubbled up to the pain of naked air. She’d been abandoned as a child. She knew what an abandoned child felt like…and
A crinkle of paper slipped out of the basket. It only took Winona a few seconds to read the printed message.
Dear Winona Raye,
I have no way to take care of my Angel. You are the only one I could ask. Please love her.
Winona’s cop experience immediately registered several things-that there’d be no way to track the generic paper and ordinary print, that the writing was simple but not uneducated, and that somehow the mother of the baby knew her specifically-well enough to identify her name, and well enough to believe she was someone who would care for a baby.
Which, God knows, she would.
As swiftly as Winona read the note, she put it aside. There was no time for that now. The baby was wet beneath the blankets, the morning biting at the January-freezing temperatures. She scooped up the little one and hustled inside the warm house, rocking, crooning, whispering reassurances…all past the gulp in her throat that had to be bigger than the state of Texas.
God knew what she was going to do. But right now nothing mattered but the obvious. Taking care of the child. Making sure the little one was warm, dry, fed, healthy. Then Winona would try to figure out why anyone would have left the baby on her doorstep specifically…and all the other issues about what the child’s circumstances might be.
That fast, that instantaneously, Win felt a bond with the baby that wrapped around her heart tighter than a vise. The thing was, as little as she knew-she already knew too much.
She was already positive that the child was going to get thrown in the foster-care system, because that’s what happened when a child was deserted. Even if a parent immediately showed up, the court would still place the child in the care of Social Services-at least temporarily-because whatever motivated the parent to abandon the child could mean it wasn’t safe in their care. A change of heart wasn’t enough. An investigation needed to be conducted to establish what the child’s circumstances were.
Winona knew all those legal procedures-both from her job and from her life. And although she knew her feelings were irrational-and annoyingly emotional-it didn’t stop the instinct of bonding. The fierceness of caring. The instantaneous heart surge-even panic-to protect this baby better than she’d been protected. To save this baby the way she almost hadn’t been saved. To love this baby the way-to be honest-Winona never had been and never expected to be loved.
There were several coffee machines spread through Royal Memorial Hospital, but only one that counted. After he’d switched from trauma medicine to plastic surgery, Justin had generally tried to avoid the Emergency Room, but by ten that morning, he was desperate. Groggy-eyed, he pushed the coins into the machine, punched his choice of Straight Black, kicked the base-he knew this coffee machine intimately-and then waited.
He wasn’t standing there three minutes before he got a series of claps and thumps on his back. It was, “Hey, Dr. Webb, slumming down here?” and “Hi, Doc, we sure miss you” and “Dr. Webb, it’s nice to see you with us again.”
As soon as he could yank the steaming cup out of the machine, he gulped a sip. Burned all the way down. The taste was more familiar than his own heartbeat. Battery acid, more bitter than sludge, and liberally laced with caffeine.
Fantastic.
He inhaled another gulp, and then aimed straight ahead. Down the hall, through the double glass doors, was his Plastic Surgery/Burn Unit. The community believed that the wing had been anonymously donated, which was fine with Justin. What mattered to him was that in two short years, the unit had already developed the reputation for being the best in the state. He couldn’t ask for more. The equipment was the best and the technology the newest. The walls were ice-blue, the atmosphere sterile, serene, quiet. Perfect.
Nothing like the chaotic loony bin in the ER. Royal Memorial was a well-run small hospital, but a crisis stretched the capacity of its trauma unit-and the crash landing of the Asterland jet earlier that morning was still stressing the trauma team. Nobody’d had time to pick up towels and drapes. Staff jogged past in blood-and debris-stained coats. A kid squealed past him. A shrieking mom was trying to chase the kid. A nurse trailed both of them, looking harassed and taking mother-may-I giant steps. He heard babies’ cries, codes on the loudspeaker. Lights flashed; phones rang; carts wheeled and wheedled past. Somebody’d spilled a coffee; someone else had thrown up, so those stinks added to all the other messes and noises. Just being around it all made something clutch in his chest. Something cruel and sharp.
Justin loved his Plastic Surgery/Burn Unit. He made a difference in his Burn Unit, for God’s sake. He wanted nothing to do with trauma medicine anymore. Nothing.
He sucked down another gulp of sludge, and this time aimed down the hall and refused to look back…but he suddenly caught sight of the top of a curly-haired head coming out of a side room.
“Winona?” He wanted to shake himself. One look at her-that’s all it took-and his hormones line-danced the length of his nerves and sashayed back again. At least he promptly forgot his old hunger for the ER. “Win?”
Her head jerked up when she heard his voice. That was the first he noticed that she was carrying a baby-not that there was anything all that unusual about Winona being stuck with a kid in the Emergency Room. Her job often put her in the middle between a child and school or parents. But something about her expression alerted Justin that this was nothing like an average day for Win.
Her smile for him, though, was as natural and familiar as sunshine. “I figured you’d be in the thick of this,” she said wryly. “What a morning, huh? Were you out at the site of the crash landing?”
“Yeah, first thing. I’m not one of the doctors on call for something like that, but you know how fast news travels in Royal. I got a call, someone who’d heard there was a fire associated with the crash-so I hightailed it out there, too. I’ll tell you, it was a real chaotic scene. But any outsider was just in the way, so all I did was the obvious, help the trauma team get patients routed back here. Particularly those going into my Burn Unit.”
Her eyes promptly sobered. “I haven’t heard anything about how many serious injuries there were yet. Was it bad?”
