Cherished Beginnings (20 page)

"All right, sweetheart," he said gently, cuddling her close, feeling her heart drumming against his chest. "Do you want to talk about it?"

A hesitation. Then she shook her head no. But her heart's pounding lessened.

He tipped her face toward his and saw great sadness there. He had seen it before, when she had been thinking about the man in California who hurt her so. Yet he was sure that tonight's sorrow had nothing to do with that former boyfriend of hers. This had to do with something else.

Wanting desperately to reassure her, hoping that she'd open up and tell him what was on her mind, he said against her hair, "I cupped a wild bird in my hand once. It felt like you do—tense, its little heart beating away against its feathers."

"What happened?" she said unsteadily.

"I opened my hand and it flew away."

"I don't want to fly away." Indeed, her heart had slowed and she felt less like flinging herself away into the darkness of the night.

He waited, but she didn't speak. His arms tightened around her. "I guess I insulted you by suggesting that you work as a labor coach," he said, treading carefully. He hoped she would talk to him, really talk to him about what was upsetting her. There were depths to Maura that he'd never fully understood and never would until she trusted him enough to talk about them.

When she remained silent, he said, "I thought you might not mind working in the birthing room for a while if it meant eventual backup for your patients closer to home."

Her patients. She should be thinking of them first, not herself. It would be traumatic to do labor coaching in a hospital, but Xan was right—she had her patients to consider.

She pulled away from Xan, keeping a tight hold on his hand. "I don't want to be just a labor coach," she said. "But I might consider it if it would benefit my patients in the end. What do you want me to do?"

They began to stroll back toward the house.

"Perhaps you could talk with Raymond Lyles. See what kind of arrangement he has in mind. After all, the birthing-room concept is new at Quinby."

They walked up the steps to the porch, and Xan opened the kitchen door for her. "I'll think about it, Xan," she said thoughtfully.

"That's good enough for now," he told her, relieved.

"Would you be my medical supervisor?" She riveted her eyes on him.

"Ah, Maura, the first time I ever saw you deliver a baby so artfully, I knew you had a gift for it. I have the utmost respect for your expertise. It—it's just hard for me to overcome the prejudice most obstetricians harbor against midwives."

"Does that mean yes or no?"

"I guess," he hedged, nonetheless smiling down at her, "that it means a definite maybe. Couldn't we discuss it more thoroughly after you've talked with Raymond?"

"I suppose so," she conceded, realizing that they were still skirting the issue but finding it unimportant to press it at this point.

He pulled her into his arms. "That makes two definite maybes," he said, smiling against her hair.

She smiled, too. "Now that we've got all that over with, I think we should eat our dinner."

"Guess what?" he said. He was facing the kitchen table; her back was to it. He could see it, but she couldn't.

"What?" she replied.

"We're too late."

She wheeled around and saw the cat sitting brazenly on the tablecloth washing her paws. Both of their plates had been licked clean.

"I didn't know cats ate spaghetti," she said. She went to the table and scooped the cat up, setting her carefully on the floor.

"Spaghetti is the one thing all pregnant cats crave," Xan said seriously. "Like pickles and ice cream, or strawberries in the wintertime for pregnant women."

"How do you..." and then she realized he was joking.

After they scrounged leftover ham from the refrigerator and had eaten hastily assembled sandwiches, Maura said with some embarrassment, "I'd invite you to sit with me in my parlor, but I've been so busy that I haven't bought any furniture yet."

"Still no furniture?" Xan stared at her in mock astonishment.

"We'll sit on the front porch," she said hastily.

They didn't, however, get that far. Xan's pager went off as they reached the door. One of his patients was about to deliver, and he had to rush to the hospital.

"Sorry," he said in exasperation. "It looks as though this means another evening is lost to us."

Her disappointment was monumental. "I'm glad you stopped by," she said, meaning it.

"Me, too," said Xan. He bent and kissed her lightly upon the lips, and her lips tingled where his had touched them. Her mind whirled dizzily with the knowledge that if Xan had stayed, she would more than likely have had to decide whether or not they would finally become intimate.

But now a decision was unnecessary. It had been taken out of her hands by fate or nature or whatever. Maura didn't know whether to be happy or sad, but if the truth were to be told, she felt more like crying than laughing. What did that mean?

Unaware of her ambivalence, he said, "I'll see you soon."

Maura slid her arms up around his neck, closing her eyes and resting her head for a moment on his shoulder. It felt solid. It felt good. Everything about him seemed right. She was only human, with very human desires and urges. So why couldn't she accept a sexual relationship with Xan? She wanted him. Oh, yes, she wanted him every bit as much as he wanted her. But there was something, some last bit of restraint that made her hold back.

* * *

Soon Xan solved the problem of their never having time to be together in a unique way. He kidnapped her. It wasn't a kidnapping in the usual sense of the word, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. He arrived at the McNeill Birth Center in midmorning, a morning bright as a promise.

In the front yard, Maura and Golden were picking up dead twigs and branches that the wind had blown out of the pecan trees. The stray cat, who apparently knew a good thing when she found it and had decided to stay, was pouncing playfully on anything that moved. Maura straightened when Xan's motorcycle charged into the driveway.

"Xan!" she said. "Aren't you supposed to be working today?"

"I'm entitled to vacation days now and then," he said, gunning his motor. He grinned at her, his teeth white against his tan. "Come out with me. We'll find you some furniture."

"I have work to do," she said.

"No, you don't," said Golden firmly. "This is Saturday, and you don't have any checkups scheduled, or exercise classes either. I'm on call all weekend in case somebody decides to be born. And I can pick up these branches by myself. You're officially off-duty as of now, Maura. Have a good time."

Xan rested the motorcycle on its kickstand. "We'll take your minivan," he said, appropriating the burlap bag into which Maura had been tossing broken branches. He slung the bag toward Golden with a wink. Then he grasped Maura firmly by the hand and led her to the car.

"I can't do this!" protested Maura, smoothing at her hair. "I'm not ready to go anywhere. I'm wearing old clothes. Let me go, Xan!"

"No," he said firmly, opening the passenger door and boosting her up with hands around her waist. "We're not going any place fancy. But you do need furniture, and I need you. So it's best for us to fulfill our needs together, wouldn't you say?" He grinned at her again, this time mischievously, before he ran around and got in the driver's side. The keys were in the ignition.

In a few moments they were zinging along the Shuffletown highway, and she was laughing over at him in disbelief. "All right, Xan Copeland, where are we going?" She couldn't be angry with him, not when he was grinning at her like that. The day suddenly seemed to be infused with a new happiness, and Maura realized all at once that there was no place she would rather be at that moment than at Xan's side, no matter where he was taking her.

"We're going right here," he said, steering the car into a muddy parking lot beside an unpainted cinder-block building. "It doesn't look like much, but the fellow does upholstery work and sometimes he has a bargain or two sitting around. Now, if I'm not mistaken, you need a couch, right?"

Maura nodded agreement, and inside Xan routed the proprietor from the back room and found out that the man had two couches for sale, both left for re-upholstering and both unclaimed by the owners.

"Which one do you like?" asked Xan.

One was red tweed and ghastly, the other covered in cocoa velvet and gorgeous. Xan spread his long length out on the velvet one, to Maura's great embarrassment, and pronounced it comfortable. In minutes he and the proprietor had loaded it into the back of the minivan.

"Was that so bad? Now you and Kathleen will have a place to sit when you have your sisterly chats," Xan said when they were back on the highway.

"So you've been talking to Kathleen?"

"Kathleen has been talking to me," he said.

"Betraying sisterly confidences, no doubt," Maura said wryly.

"Not at all. Unless telling me to hurry up and go shopping with you or she would take you shopping herself qualifies as a sisterly confidence."

"It probably doesn't," said Maura, relieved. "She knows I hate shopping. Where are we going now?"

"To a nice little lady who deals in antiques and refinishes furniture on the side. She may have some occasional tables you'll like."

Maura laughed. "When did you plan this? You've really thought all of it out."

"I have been planning this for a long time, my dear. Do you suppose I like to think of your living in a house that isn't really a home? You should be surrounded by your own meaningful possessions."

"Oh, I don't want a lot of possessions," she told him seriously. "But I do like to have beauty around me, something pretty."

Fans of a smile wrinkled the edges of his eyes, and he looked at her fondly. "So do I, Maura. And you're it."

With Xan's guidance, she found two small tables for her living room, one inlaid walnut and the other solid cherry, and an original framed watercolor for her upstairs hall. By late afternoon, when they'd collected a vanload of furniture and related items, Xan suggested that they not push their luck with Maura's minivan, which had chugged gamely along for hours.

"I think we should call it quits," he said, "because I'm hungry. Aren't you?"

"Slightly," she said, and at that precise moment her stomach rumbled and betrayed her hunger.

He coaxed the minivan southward along U.S. 17 and down an obscure byway to the Shrimpboat, a tiny restaurant miles down the coast and overlooking a dock in a sheltered cove where shrimp trawlers moored. It was a local restaurant, unknown to all but the people who lived in that tiny coastal town and a privileged few others.

They feasted on jumbo boiled shrimp that had just been caught that morning, and Xan peeled the first shrimp for her and put it into her mouth, a sensory pleasure to be sure. And then he explained how to make perfect cocktail sauce—"use fresh grated horseradish and just the right amount of bottled chili sauce—the secret is all in the proportions—and then add three drops of fresh lemon juice"—and he promised to make his own cocktail sauce for her the next time she came to his house for dinner if she'd never, ever give away the secret.

He was charming, absolutely charming, and she wondered why it had taken her so long to slip out from under that invisible nun's habit she'd worn as a shield for so long after she'd arrived here. But she had done it—she'd finally opened herself to her new life and all its possibilities. And she had done it with Xan's help.

They spoke of many things that she'd never discussed with anyone before. Talking with a man, a doctor, was so different from talking with her fellow sisters at the convent or with Kathleen. She found the subtle shifts in nuance exciting, and the intellectual stimulation was heartening. He smiled warmly at her and listened as though she was the most important person in the world. She was flattered by his attention and wistful that she'd never been able to talk to any other man as she was able to talk with him.

As she watched the boats slipping one by one into the cove, heavy with the day's catch of shrimp and gilded by the afternoon sunlight, with Xan sitting across from her so animated and so solicitous of her own happiness, she thought her heart would burst with the knowledge that she had denied now for much too long. She looked at him, helpless to control her feelings, and she marveled that in such a short time he had become someone with whom she felt so at peace, so natural, so at one. And it seemed that she could no longer silence herself.

Maura couldn't recall afterward what he had been saying at that moment, although she would never forget the deep green of his eyes, or the way his lips curved upward into a half smile as he spoke, or the oddly incongruous bump in the middle of his nose.

"I never meant to fall in love!" she blurted, interrupting him in midsentence.

Xan didn't speak for a long moment, just delved into the depths of her eyes with his, the love in his eyes warm and genuine and unfaltering. Then he smiled and reached across the red-checkered tablecloth to cover her hand reassuringly with his own. "I'm afraid, my darling, that it's too late to do anything about it," he said with utter sincerity, and he tenderly lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it gently on the palm.