About the Baby. Tracy Wolff
When she didn’t immediately answer, he ran an impatient hand through his hair. “Jeez, Kara, what do you want? Blood?”
He half expected her to jump down his throat again, but she must have found what she was looking for—if not in his words, then his face—because she suddenly relaxed. “No, but if you’re offering, some of your sweat should work nicely.”
“My sweat?” he asked, wondering if he looked as lost as he felt.
She turned and headed down the hall to her bedroom. “I’ve got a couple trunks filled with gear stored at the top of my closet. Can you get them down
for me?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He followed her through the house feeling a shock similar to the aftermath of a car crash. It wasn’t unusual for Kara to explode and then simmer down quickly, but this was fast even for her. Any second now, he expected to start feeling the symptoms of whiplash.
“The boxes are up there,” she said, pointing to the large walk-in closet at the end of her bathroom.
He followed her directions, feeling a little awkward being in this most private room of hers. Which was ridiculous. It wasn’t like he’d never been here before—he was the one who’d helped her move her furniture in, after all. The one who’d painted these walls their current shade of sky-blue. But that was different. That was before the room had turned into this sultan’s paradise with the luxurious turquoise quilt and silver throw pillows.
Before a red lace bra-and-panty set had been draped across the foot of her bed.
Before he’d kissed her.
Studiously avoiding looking at her bed—which was more difficult said than done because the thing was huge and dominated the entire room—he headed into her closet and reached for the first trunk. It was a lot heavier than he thought it would be.
“Hey,” he said as he carried it back into the bedroom. “How the hell did you get this thing up there to begin with?”
“Mike put them up for me. I haven’t needed them in a while.”
He stiffened at the mention of her last serious boyfriend—the one she’d almost married. He’d never liked Mike, had thought the guy was a pompous ass more concerned with his reputation in the field than he was in the actual work he did. Lucas had been thrilled when things didn’t work out. Mike was nowhere near good enough for her and the idea that she would now be taking over his team was just one more thing Lucas didn’t like about this trip.
Dropping the first load onto the floor, he went back into the closet and got the second trunk down. It was even heavier than the first. “What’s in here, anyway?”
“My on-location biosafety suits.”
Right. Of course. Because she was going to need the huge positive-pressure suit if she was heading into a situation where a disease like Ebola might have turned airborne. When she worked in the CDC labs, or any other well-equipped labs, they provided the suits for her. But who knew what she was heading into now.
His chest tightened and he walked to the window, staring blindly into the night. He knew her job was dangerous, knew she regularly dealt with things that could kill her. But she’d had every vaccination there was, so that when she went into the field after cholera or TB, there was little to no chance she would get it—especially with proper precautions.
But this, this was something totally different. There was no vaccine for Ebola and even if there had been, who knew what would happen with exposure to this strange new strain? Any tolerance built up to it would mean absolutely nothing.
A part of him was aware that Kara was still talking about something, but it was like she was far away. For the first time in his life, he wished he wasn’t a doctor. Wished he didn’t know exactly what it was she was heading into. Because knowing what could happen, thinking about it, had him paralyzed with fear.
“Don’t go.” The words came out before he knew he was going to say them, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence about something or other.
“Lucas.”
He spun around and stalked across the room toward her, feeling like a crazy man. Feeling like he was going to jump out of his skin any second.
“Please,” he begged, barely recognizing himself. “I have a bad feeling about this trip and I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you, Kara. Please don’t go.”
He grabbed on to her shoulders and pulled her into his arms so that her heart beat steadily against his. Then he buried his face in her hair and just breathed, inhaling the sweet strawberry-and-magnolia scent deep into his lungs. He was acting like a maniac—he knew he was—but he couldn’t seem to do anything to stop it. From the second he’d heard the word Ebola, his whole world had spun out of control.
“I’m going to be fine, Lucas.” She murmured the words against his neck because she couldn’t move. Couldn’t pull back. He was holding her too tightly but he couldn’t seem to ease up. “You know I’m careful.”
“There’s careful and then there’s insane, Kara. This is insane.”
“No. It’s my job.” She shoved against his chest but he wasn’t budging. At that moment, he thought he could hold her forever if she’d let him. “You think I don’t worry about you?” she asked. “Every day you go to work in the closest thing to a war zone that the U.S. has to offer. Less than a year ago you had a shooting in the lobby of your clinic and you ran straight into it.”
“That was different. My patients—”
“I know. Your patients were out there and there was no way you were going to leave them at the hands of some coked-up teenager with a gun. But those people in Eritrea, they’re my patients. If I can help them, Lucas, then I have to go.”
Kara struggled against him, managing to pull back just enough to lift her soft, delicate hands to his face. As she held him, she looked deeply into his eyes and said, “I need to go.”
He knew it, had known it all along. And still, “You’re my best friend. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t.”
“Promise me,” he told her, knowing he sounded desperate but not giving a damn. He was desperate. She meant more to him than he ever could have imagined.
“Lucas—”
“Promise me!”
“I promise.” She looked him straight in the eye, her green eyes shining with sincerity and compassion and something else he couldn’t quite define. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
He shuddered, nodded. Dropped his head so that his forehead rested against hers. Then closed his eyes and just breathed.
He didn’t know how long they stayed like that, locked in their own little world. Not long enough, because when she finally stepped back he was still not ready to let her go. Wrapping a hand around her long, slender neck, he pulled her face back to his and, for the second time that night, captured her lips with his own.
If he was going to have to let her go, going to have to spend the next weeks and months racked with
terror that she was going to die in Africa, he was not letting her leave without having something to hang on to. He’d broken off the kiss in the park when her phone rang, and he’d regretted it ever since. No matter what happened, no matter how it shifted things between them, he was going to have this kiss untainted by fear or sorrow or regret. They owed each other that much.
But he wasn’t counting on the way they both lit up the second their mouths touched. Like the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve all at the same time. It was as though her mouth had been made for his.
That was the first thought that ran through his mind as he deepened the kiss.
The second was that she