The Rescue Doc's Christmas Miracle

A minute—or even two now—wasn’t sufficient time for this. Why didn’t they make delayed response pregnancy tests so you could work up to it? It wouldn’t have to take that long for the testing, just some kind of delay on the display.

I feel I’ll be ready to look at this Thursday. Push the Thursday button. Then take that many days to come up with a plan for how not to freak out.

She couldn’t wait for Thursday. She also couldn’t look at the thing in a bathroom stall. Leaving aside questions about her emotional maturity, if she wanted to get in the pre-flight and maintenance checks before their shift started, she needed to go now.

She snatched the little wand and stuffed it into the thigh pocket on her flight suit, zipped that pocket closed, and barreled out of the stall to clean up and get upstairs.

The whole not-looking business was even dumber than her hike through a hurricane. She didn’t need to look, the answer had burned into her frontal lobe before she’d swiped her debit card at the pharmacy. Regular Rosie didn’t miss a single period, let alone two, for no reason. The test was a formality, therefore she was extra-stupid for not just looking at it.

Gabriel would’ve told her so too, only she’d been unable to tell him about any of this before now. He would’ve picked her up, and squeezed her like an orange until she tinkled on the damned wand.

The morning after that night, which she still found herself lingering over in quiet moments, he’d suggested the things they’d done never leave the motel room. It became the No-Tell Motel, minus all the sleazy connotations, because he’d declared it and she’d agreed. It was the sensible thing. Gabriel never suggested things that weren’t sensible, and sometimes he was the only reason she did things that were sensible. She’d seen the sense, despite not really wanting to see it.

When he’d opened the door to leave the room, she’d grabbed his head and kissed the breath out of both of them one last time so she could hold to that agreement. The hedonistic part of her, the part that loved life and experience, hated giving up that experience so quickly.

But? Sensible. She wasn’t in the market for a relationship, at least not a relationship relationship, even if she could’ve carried on a little longer. Tried out other rooms and, through trial and arduous study, gathered the data to support the hypothesis their night had borne: sex with Gabriel Jackson was as good as it got.

But so was working with him.

She really had no idea what friendship would be like with him, or anything else outside work and the unspeakable night because, despite her efforts, they hadn’t gotten to the cards and friendship-building conversations. They’d showered...vigorously. Then they’d made a mess of the bed even more vigorously. The wine had been drunk in between all that. There had been other pit-stops where they’d consumed cheese and sausage because stamina required fuel, but none of the business their mouths had gotten up to had been in the vicinity of talking.

Unless you counted that talk. The sexy smattering of words between lovers.

Just like that.

Don’t stop.

Oh, God...

Heaven help her, she was doing it again. Thinking about all that, which had caused all this. The consequences.

She took the stairs at a run, pounding up the ten flights separating her current floor and the helipad on the roof.

At the top, with blessedly buzzing lungs and legs, she checked her watch on her way to the chopper. Just over two minutes. She’d have to do better if she was going to make it up eighty-six floors at the Empire State Run-Up in the New Year. If she even could do the stair-climbing marathon while pregnant.

She climbed into the thing she’d been calling “Baby” for two years and worked through the checklist to go over gauges and start it up. Only when she’d finished did she sit back and reach into her thigh pocket to pull out the wand. Before giving herself a chance to think anything or to get worked up, she flipped it over and read the display.

Two lines.

Yep.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. A full look tracked Gabriel’s long stride eating up the distance between them.

“Dang it.” She stuffed the wand back into the pocket and zipped it as fast as she could.

Then the door opened and he gave her a look.

“What?”

“Why aren’t you starting it up already? Is there a problem?”

“What problem? There’s no problem,” she blurted, too fast and too loud, then gestured haplessly at nothing, trying to get back on course. “I’ve already done the checks. Why are you...?”

He never came up to the roof anymore unless they had a call.

“Did we get a call?” She looked at the radio and her stomach sank. Off. She hadn’t turned it on during her pre-flight checks.

He said nothing, just turned the radio on while she started the massive rotors spinning.

“Where are we going?” she asked, buckling in, and by the time he’d answered she was ready to lift off. That was part of why she went through the pre-flight checks—it was set up to go from nothing to flight in under a minute.

“Is everything all right?” he asked through the comm once they were in the air. It wasn’t concern she heard so much as that hint of frustration that appeared in his voice every time things didn’t happen when he expected.

To lie, or not to lie...

“Can’t complain.”

She really couldn’t, at least not right now. And complaining was something she tried to only do inside her head. Complaining about anything could still trigger her loved ones trying to rescue her, which she could appreciate on an intellectual level even if she couldn’t abide it anymore. Complaining about anything related to health? That might even bring her whole family out in full flailing fit mode, maybe even with questions about whether she was healthy enough to gestate a human life.

The shape of the test in her thigh pocket stood out, and she prayed Dr. Notices Everything didn’t notice until she was ready to share.

“You’re pale. Are you sick?”

* * *

Gabriel might not understand much about what went on inside Penny’s head but he understood her body unfortunately well, beyond just what his training had taught him about her physiological signs of distress.

Pale face and darkness under blue eyes so bright the blackness beneath them seemed blacker. Some kind of unsteadiness in her hands. The silent call radio. No music either during her pre-flight routine, and she always listened to music when on standby. Tight-lipped when normally talkative...

She squinted at him, then adjusted something amid the toggles and switches without answering him. Not right.

Despite the somewhat fumbling quality her hands had taken with switches, on the controls everything went smoothly. The flight was steady, a straight line, something he could appreciate since his life depended on it, but something was wrong. And if she stayed true to form, he was going to have to shake it out of her. Later. They were already in the air, so his chance to swap out a focused pilot had gone.

The two months since their...mistake...hadn’t been entirely easy months. The first couple of weeks had been the worst. Awkward enough that she’d barely looked him in the eye any particular day, which had been rougher than he’d have thought. But with a little willpower, and a pact of mutual amnesia, they’d worked through it and things had found a new normal, somewhat off-center from the way things had been before.

Like when they bumped into one another changing in the locker room. She’d been wearing the same kind of simple and somehow ungodly sexy cotton things, and when she’d looked at him, he’d seen his thoughts reflected back at him. The pink that had infused every inch of her pale flesh had backed it up.

Not embarrassed. Aroused. And unhappily so.

Awkward.

Now he changed in the men’s room and avoided the locker room unless he had to, or unless she’d gone home for the day. His initial plan had just been to keep everything as low-key and low-stress as he could so that she could forget. He knew he couldn’t forget, but he wasn’t as prone to impetuousness as she was—he could resist. When he found himself watching the way she tapped the end of her pen on her lower lip while filling out paperwork, he could shake himself out of it. Stop thinking about her mouth. Not give in to temptation. But that seemed harder for Penny to do, so he just tried to keep temptation from coming up.

It had worked at first when they’d started working together and just had to ignore a spark, and it had even worked briefly in the middle of the time since their night, but a couple of weeks ago things had started getting tense again. Made no sense, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Time was supposed to take care of things like this, but their agreement not to discuss it meant he couldn’t even act as he would’ve in the past. Ask her what was wrong. Offer her an ear for her troubles. Just suss out symptoms and determine whether her oddness was physical or emotional... No easy course of action.

If this was attached to the desire for another night, he couldn’t blame her, even if he would turn her down.

“How long?” he asked through the comm, since he already had one patient to focus on, righting his thoughts. If she wanted his help, she’d ask for it.