Millionaire M.D.

Three

Just as Winona lifted a fork to her mouth, she heard the baby’s thin cry. Somehow there’d been no time for lunch. Now it looked as if the odds weren’t too hot on sneaking some dinner, either. Not that she minded. Who needed food? Dropping the fork with a clatter, she charged toward the living room. “I’m coming, Angel! I’m coming!”

Well, shoot. It wasn’t quite that easy-as a woman or a temporary mom-to deliver on those optimistic words. Although it was only the distance of a fast gallop between the kitchen and the living room, reaching the baby was becoming more challenging by the hour.

She’d only called a couple of neighbors that afternoon, but it seemed that the news about the baby had spread and help had been pouring in nonstop. The whole neighborhood was kid-studded-which was one of the reasons she’d chosen to buy her house here-and almost everyone had some baby gear stored in their garages or back rooms. Buying anything would have been silly: Winona had no idea how long she would be allowed to keep the baby. But her neighbors’ loans had been extravagantly generous. She had to dodge a half-dozen car seats, a couple of high chairs, several playpens and walkers, backpacks, front packs, diaper bags, toys, enough blankets to warm a child in the Arctic, and heaps of baby clothes. Finally she reached the white wicker bassinet with the pink quilted lining.

Inside was the princess, who happened to be garbed in her fifth outfit of the day. Winona figured they surely wouldn’t go through quite so many clothes tomorrow. She was getting close to mastering disposable diapers.

“There, there. There, there…” She picked up the precious bundle, and started the crooning, patting and rocking movements that seemed to be the eternal song of mothers. But on the inside, panic started to ooze through her nerves.

“Are we hungry, sweetheart? Wet? Do you want the TV on? Off? More lights, less lights? More noise, less noise? Are you cold? Constipated-no, come to think of it, I’m positive that’s not a problem. Are you mad? Bored? Sick? Sad? Whatever it is, I’ll fix it, I swear. Just don’t cry. There, there. There, there, love…”

The panic was new. All day, she’d been in seventh heaven. Babies had been on her heart’s agenda for a long time, and no, of course Angel wasn’t hers and wasn’t likely to be for long. Winona was trying her best to be completely realistic about that. It was just…carrying the little one around had seemed as natural as breathing. There’d been a thousand things to do, starting with taking the baby to the hospital for a checkup, then carting her back to the station, talking to Wayne, then claiming some computer time, then calling some moms in the neighborhood before stopping at a store for supplies. The busier she was, the more the baby seemed to love it. But then they’d come home.

Alone.

And Angel had lived up to her name tag all day until, it sure seemed, the point when Winona realized she was alone with the baby. And knew nothing about child care. The baby had barely let out a peep all day, but now she seemed to be scaling up every few minutes. The darling either desperately missed her real mother, or Angel had suddenly figured out that she was stuck with a complete rookie.

The doorbell rang. Winona whipped around, thinking, please, God, not another car seat or another well-meant baby blanket. Hunger was starting to set in. Exhaustion.

A nightmare-strength panic.

Before she could reach the front door, the knob rattled and Justin poked his head in. Her pulse promptly soared ten feet. There was no stopping it. So typically, even after a long workday, he looked as revved as the satin-black Porsche in her drive. He stepped in like a vital burst of energy, his face wind-stung, his eyes snapping life, his grin teasing her before he’d even said a word. “Win? Are you there-well, I can see you’re there. And a little on the busy side, huh?”

“I never thought you meant it about coming over! Come in, come in!” She wished she’d had a chance to brush her hair and put on lipstick, but what was the difference? It was just Justin. And no matter how mercilessly he ended up teasing her, she was thrilled to see him. “What do you know about babies?” she called over the caterwauling.

“Nothing.”

Never mind. She didn’t care what he knew or didn’t know. She closed the door with him firmly on the inside. He was still another body. She wasn’t alone. “You’re a doctor, you have to know something-”

“Yeah, I’ve been trying to tell my patients that for a long time.” He peeled off his sheepskin jacket, took a step toward her living room and froze. “Holy cow. Did you have a cattle drive in here this afternoon?”

“Very funny. It’s just baby gear. Loans from the neighbors. Now listen, Justin, whether you know anything or not-you could hold her for a second, couldn’t you? I just need a minute. Time to get some dry diapers and fresh clothes and a bottle warmed up-”

“Okay.”

“It won’t take me long to do any of that stuff-”

“Okay.”

“Don’t panic because she’s crying. She’s really a darling. I just have to figure out what’s wrong. That’s all there is to it. You figure out what’s wrong, you fix it, she quits-”

“Hey, Win. Could you try and believe it’s okay? I really did come over to help.”

It’s not that she didn’t believe Justin. It was just that his offer to help seemed so unlikely. The town may have labeled Justin a devil-may-care bachelor, but Winona had always known better than that. Something had happened to him in Bosnia, because he’d come back a different person-quieter, more closed in, and he’d left his once-loved trauma medicine specialty in favor of plastic surgery. But his reputation as a surgeon spanned the southwest. His participation with the Texas Cattleman’s Club was another unrecognized involvement. And she’d never forgotten meeting him back when she was twelve, on the first day she’d been fostered with the Gerards. To her, he’d been the best-looking teenage guy in the universe. Even that young, he’d had the sexiest eyes. The laziest drawl in Texas. A way of looking at a woman. And a way of picking up a little girl-and her bike-from the sidewalk, and somehow making her skinned pride feel better in spite of impossible odds.

Most of their relationship, though, he’d been an inescapable, nonstop tease. He’d shown up to check out the guy who’d taken her to the senior prom, had a conniption fit when she sunned in a bikini, regularly asked her to marry him as if he thought that was funny, taught her to drive stick shift, and damnation, held her head when she’d come home from a party after her first (and last) experience with rum-and-colas. Short and sweet, he’d been a friend in her life forever-when he wasn’t being insufferable. And it was forgetting that “insufferable” adjective that was tough for her.

“What do you mean, you came over to help?” she asked suspiciously.

“Just what I said.” He scooped the baby out of her arms. “Right now, though, we don’t have a prayer of talking over the sound of Ms. Bawler. Go. Do the bottle thing. And I’ll try and figure out the diapers if you’ll steer me toward the supplies.”

Her hand shot to her chest. A mere twenty-eight and she was almost having a heart attack. “You’re volunteering to change a diaper? Have you had these symptoms long? Are you suffering from fever? Brain tumor? A history of lunacy you never mentioned before?”

For those insults, he tousled her hair-as if it wasn’t already a royal mess-before walking off with the baby. The phone rang six times over the next hour, and two more neighbors stopped by bearing car seats and blankets. But somehow all the confusion and running wasn’t the same with Justin there. The terror factor had disappeared. Contrary to his claims of inexperience, he acted like a veteran with both diaper sticky tabs and burping. And Angel seemed to forget that she was ticked off at the world in general. At the first sound of his voice, she started blowing bubbles and drooling.

“Just like all the other women in town,” Winona muttered.

“Pardon?”

“I said the baby fell in love with you from the first instant you picked her up.”

“Yeah, I noticed she quit crying. You think she recognizes a good-looking guy, young as she is? Someone with class and taste and brilliance-hey!”

As hard as she’d tossed the couch pillow at his head, he just pushed it aside with a grin. By then it was around eight o’clock. Angel had not only been fed, burped and changed, but she’d settled down in the bassinet. Winona couldn’t quite remember when Justin had ordered her to sit on the cocoa couch and pushed a hot plate of food in her hands, but she finally seemed to have caught some dinner; she was slouched down like a lazy slug and one stockinged foot was keeping the bassinet-rocker in motion.

Justin-for the first and likely only time in the universe-was kneeling at her feet. She’d felt obligated to mention, several times, how much she approved of his kneeling position. “It’s really where all men belong. In a submissive position to their superiors-meaning we women, of course. Waiting on us. Obeying us. Working to please us-”

“If you don’t cut it out, I’m going to have to get up and tickle you. Then you’ll start laughing and screaming. Then you’ll risk waking the baby-”

“All right, all right. You’re so right. I don’t want to wake her up,” she agreed. Still, it was tough, not pushing his tease-buttons, when he looked so adorable. He was trying to bring one of the borrowed baby walkers back to life, which was why he was hunkered down on her peach carpet, surrounded by nuts and bolts and tools. She usually saw him flying around town in his Porsche, or looking like Mr. Drop-Dead-Handsome Doctor at some gathering. And maybe these were images that Justin chose to cultivate, but Winona had still had the feeling that finding a place where he could kick off his boots and just tinker wasn’t something Justin got to do often.

The TV was on in the background, but neither was watching the sitcom. They just wanted the chance to click up the volume if any further developments were reported on the Asterland plane emergency landing. Temporarily, though, they might as well have been on an island alone together-except for the sleeping baby.

“So…what’d your boss say about the Angel situation?” Justin asked her.

“Well, deserted and neglected kids generally come under my bailiwick, anyway, so Wayne didn’t have to give me permission to handle the problem. It was automatic. He did seem a little startled when I showed up at the station this afternoon with the baby in a front pack. But no one at the station right now has time to worry about anything but the plane crash. Everyone’s descended on Royal today, if not in person than through the wires-from state cops to feds, TV and press, the aviation safety folks, diplomats and state people-”

“I know.” Justin motioned toward the TV. In the hour they’d had the tube switched on, the local news had interrupted every few minutes to provide an update on the circus. “My Texas Cattleman’s group was especially involved with the citizens from both countries. We’ve offered to help, and I hope the authorities take us up on it. I realize that they have to sweep for evidence and prints and all first…but you can see how much this crisis is driving the town nuts. Everyone wants to know the same thing. What caused that emergency landing? Fine, if it was a mechanical failure, but could it have been terrorists or sabotage?”

“From what I’ve heard, that specific jet has an outstanding history for being one of the safest planes in the air. And she was deluxe to the nth degree, no expense spared for security or comfort. It’s pretty hard to swallow that it was just a plain old mechanical failure-at least if the problem was carelessness.” Winona pulled a couch pillow on to her lap, finding it hard to take her eyes off Justin. Last she knew, he’d long reached the multi-millionaire status…which made it all the more fun to watch him bumbling with a screwdriver.

“So what was the buzz at your station house? Your cops find any reason to think there was foul play connected to the emergency landing?”

“There was no evidence leading in that direction this afternoon…but really, it’s way too soon to say. They may have collected all the relevant evidence, but it will still take weeks of testing procedures before we have complete answers. The whole world knows how much tension there was between the two countries of Asterland and Obersbourg, though…and that Texas party was the first and only thing that brought those two countries together and talking in more than a decade. I really think you’re right, Justin. You and the Texas Cattleman’s Club guys should be brought in, both to question and get some advice, and I’ll be surprised if you don’t get that call.”

“I wasn’t as involved as some of the other members. But I still want to help, if there’s any chance. And I did know all of the people involved.” Justin righted the baby walker, pushed it around the carpet. Sighed. And then turned it upside down to work on it again. “Frightening. To think you could eat dinner with someone, shake their hand, make a joke and laugh with them…and that they could deliberately have had something to do with a near-fatal plane crash.”

“Or that someone could intend harm to so many good people.” She leaned forward to peer over the edge of the bassinet. She cared about the plane crash. She cared about her job. But at the moment-all day really-only one thing dominated her mind and heart.

“You’re not going to wake her up again, are you?”

Winona’s jaw dropped. “Are you out of your mind? I may have only been a mother for a day, but I learned that hours ago. Never wake up a sleeping baby. And if you do, I’ll have to kill you.”

His chuckle tickled her into a smile, but then he shot her a more serious look. “So, what’s the deal on your squirt there? What’s the legal process-what happens to her now?”

“Well, the first thing you already know. An abandoned baby starts out with a medical checkup, no matter how healthy the child appears to be. In this day of AIDS and drug use and all, there’s no placing a baby-even temporarily-without knowing the health picture. But that was a piece of cake. She couldn’t have gotten a cleaner bill of health.”

“Yeah, so you said this morning. So, then what?”

“Then, normally, she’d be turned over to Social Services, and they’d find a foster-care arrangement for her.” Winona’s arms tightened around the pillow. “The court will get more directly involved as soon as something more definitive is established about the parents. And that’s my job. Finding the parents. Especially the mom. I have to find out what their story is, and why the baby was abandoned.”

“And how do you go about doing that?”

It seemed odd that she’d never told Justin any details about her job before, but then, there’d never been a reason for this kind of thing to come up in conversation. “There are lots of ways for me to pick up clues. Now that I have the baby’s age pinned down-at least ballpark-I can start checking hospital records, see if I can get a lead into young women having babies at that time. Then I can check the papers, same reason. Check the 9ll calls, emergencies, abuse, deaths, anything called in around the time the child was abandoned, to see if there could be any obvious connection.”

“Uh-huh. What else?”

“Then…well, after that, I zoom straight for my at-risk kids. You know how it is in Royal. This is a wealthy community, so on the surface it’d seem we wouldn’t have that many kids in trouble. But I keep finding that the very rich and very poor have a lot in common. In both types of families, there are kids raising themselves. Alone a lot of hours. Parents moving near an edge with drugs or alcohol. Divorces, absentee adults. Any way you cut it, it’s the lonely kids who tend to sleep around-and look for trouble. So one of the things I always do is run a computer check for runaways.”

“And-?”

“And then I’ll check the truancy lists. The arrest lists. Then I’ll call the high schools and junior highs for girls with a high absentee record. Talk to the counselors about girls who were pregnant. I started some things in motion this afternoon, but it’d be pretty unusual to land answers overnight. It almost always takes some time.”

“Okay, Win…but what if you don’t manage to locate the mother after going through all that?”

She frowned, suddenly aware that she was clenching and unclenching her hands-and that Justin was watching her. “That’s not an issue. It’s early days yet. Believe me, I’ll find the mother. I’ve done it before.”

“But what if you don’t?” Justin righted the baby walker again, and this time, it seemed to push along without lurching like a drunken sailor. He set it aside, heaved to his feet and shook his legs as if to shake out the kinks-but his eyes never left her face.

“Well, then, there are other possibilities. A girl in trouble is the most logical choice for the mother. And frankly, I’m about as qualified as anyone in this county to find that kind of girl.” For some blasted reason, her fingers were trying to clench into fists again. She folded her arms across her chest, aggravated that she couldn’t seem to control the nervous movements. It wasn’t like her.

“I know you are, Win.” Justin’s voice was low, caring. “You know what it’s like for a kid to be abandoned. I was never surprised when you aimed to work with juveniles when you decided to be a cop. But you can’t possibly find the parents every time there’s a problem with a child.”

“Well, no, of course not. And as far as Angel…possibly her mother is a married mother with an abusive husband-or that kind of story-which means that she isn’t likely to show up on any record. In fact, someone like that can be almost impossible to trace. And another possibility…”

“What?”

“…another possibility is the kind of girl who’s kept a pregnancy hidden for nine months. It seems impossible, but we all know that it happens-you’ve heard those stories surface on the news every once in a while. This one, though, had to do more than just hide the pregnancy, because the baby’s already a couple months old. But the problem is the same. There has to be a record of something for us to be able to trace it. And if someone is absolutely determined to keep a pregnancy secret-and has some enablers somehow, someway-we really may never know who the mother is.”

“Okay. So we’ve covered most of the possible scenarios, good and bad. But in the meantime, what’s supposed to happen to our miniature princess here, while you’re going through all those record searches and waiting?”

Instinctively her hand shot to her stomach, as if to quell the sudden churning going on in her tummy. Normally she could eat red-hot chili, follow it up with an O.D.-size hot fudge sundae, and never have a digestive problem. But all day, she’d been thinking about what “was supposed to” happen to Angel next…and making herself sick every time she let those fears surface. “Well, the court usually places her in foster care, through Social Services. Like I already told you.”

“I know what you told me, Win,” Justin said gently. “That’s why I’m asking you for the details. So I can understand the situation better.”

Again she pressed hard on her stomach, then met his eyes. “Potentially, down the road, she’s adoptable. She’s a young baby, healthy, and though it’s not fair, her being blond and blue-eyed makes her extra desirable in the adoption market. But for that to happen, we have to find the parents-and find that they deliberately abandoned her, really don’t want her and will legally sign off. Or we could find that the parents are dead. But otherwise…”

“Yeah. It’s that ‘otherwise’ that happened to you, wasn’t it?” Justin had been standing, but now he plunked down on the couch next to her. His gaze prowled her face with the quiet, determined intent of a hunter. “You were in the foster-care system from the time you were six, right? But there was something about how you couldn’t be adopted. I remember the families and neighbors talking when the Gerards brought you home. I just don’t remember the details.”

“There weren’t a lot of details. It was pretty cut-and-dried.” She glared at him, not in anger, but in self-defense. At twenty-eight years old, it was about damn time she quit letting this past-history crap bother her. “I wasn’t adoptable because my mother was alive and could have come back for me at any time. So I was basically stuck in the foster-care system until I was eighteen.”

“You never mentioned your mom before. Or anything about what you remember from when you were real little.”

She shrugged, but she could feel an old, aching sense of haunting from the inside out. “My parents’ story was older than time. They were two young kids, hot in love-too hot to keep a lid on their hormones. When my mom got pregnant, they both dropped out of school. Two sixteen-year-old idiots with no money and no job skills-undoubtedly thinking they could live on sex and love. The fun part didn’t last long. My dad died, some kind of car accident. I have no memory of him at all. But I was with my mom until I was six.”

“And that’s when she took off.”

She shifted restlessly, not meaning to move closer to Justin. She just never liked talking about feelings or the past. “I keep thinking one of these days I could find her. I still run a search every once in a while. But the point is, back then, she couldn’t handle me. I certainly didn’t realize it then-but I do now. She was in trouble in every way a woman can be in trouble. Alone, broke, a small child to take care of, thinking a little drug here and a little alcohol there would take the edge off the worry, no skills, getting more desperate with every loser she took up with.”

Justin fell silent for a moment. “Win…why didn’t you ever mention any of this before?”

“Because there’s nothing to say. I work with girls like her every day-girls in trouble because they’ve gotten over their heads, made one mistake and watched the rest of their lives fall down like a stack of dominos. The only thing my mom ever really did wrong was fall in love-or should I say, fall in lust-too young. Cripes, Justin, you know all this-”

He shook his head. “No, actually, I didn’t. I remember my mom talking to my dad. I knew you’d been abandoned when you were a kid. And that your mom had left you with a note, that she’d be back for you as soon as she wasn’t so broke, something like that. And I remember the Gerards being furious-”

That made her blink. “The Gerards were furious? About what?”

He lifted a hand. “I was seventeen, Win. I wasn’t listening that much to neighborhood stories. But there was some story about when Sissy Gerard first saw you…I don’t know what foster family you were with, but it was at a county fair, something like that. Something about the way the family treated you that infuriated her. She came home, told Paget that he was hiring a lawyer and they were getting you away from those people and bringing you home-and that it was going to be your last home until you were grown.”

“I didn’t know that. I didn’t remember any of it, either,” Winona admitted. “I just remember the Gerards. Sissy and Paget’s faces in this sterile Social Services office. She just wrapped her arms around me as if she’d known me forever. God. They are such good people.”

“Yeah, they are.” Justin scratched his chin, his eyes suddenly lightening up. “And you were a pistol and a half back then. Clawed anybody who was nice to you. Spit at all the boys. Fought on the playground-”

She had to grin. “Hey, you dog, whose side are you on?”

“Yours. Always yours.” His tone turned so quiet that she had to quit chuckling and suddenly looked at him. Really looked. But he was already talking again. “So this baby is going into foster care? In fact, pretty immediately?”

“No.” The single syllable was out before she could stop it. “What’s this No? Isn’t that what you pretty much told me happens to an abandoned child?”

“The baby has to go somewhere-a place that’s honored by Social Services and the court-until something is determined about her parents. Whether they’re around and fit, or whatever. And that place is usually foster care. But if the foster-care system is crowded-and right now it’s disastrously crowded-then someone else can be assigned temporary guardianship, if they fit the criteria.”

“Win.”

“What?”

His voice wasn’t a whisper, but melted butter couldn’t have been softer. “You don’t want to give her up, do you?”

“I don’t want her going in foster care. Lost in the foster-care system, like I was.” Her own voice came out fierce and sharp. She couldn’t seem to help it. “I fell for her the minute I laid eyes on her. I admit it. And I admit that’s stupid. A good cop never gets emotionally involved. But whoever left her on my doorstep, Justin, must have known me somehow. It’s hard to pretend that doesn’t matter. It does, to me. I just want to know that if she goes back to her parents, they’re in a position to take good care of her. And until then…”

“You want to keep her.”

“I don’t want her in foster care,” she repeated. A thousand memories were in her head. She didn’t have the words for any of them. She only knew that they added up to one thing. She didn’t want-she refused to think about-this baby living the childhood she had, flip-flopped between homes and people who neither wanted her nor had room or time for her. But damnation. Somehow, totally unlike her, she could suddenly feel so much emotion welling that her eyes were actually stinging. It was ridiculous. She never lost control like that-not with Justin, never with Justin.

Obviously she had to find an immediate way to lighten things up. She forced a grin-her infamous snappy grin-and cocked an eyebrow at him. Considering all the times he’d joked about marrying her, this should be a guaranteed way to get a laugh out of him. “Normally, the court wouldn’t consider a single working woman to be a good bet for that temporary guardianship business. You wouldn’t like to marry me, would you? It would really up my chances.”