The Mummy Miracle

“I know. I’m not knocking it, believe me.” She felt so self-conscious in his presence, so aware of the strong length of his body. Nine months and more since those three explosive nights of lovemaking, but to her they felt like yesterday. The way their bodies seemed to fit together so perfectly. The smell of him, warm and fresh and male. The words he’d whispered to her in the dark, naked and blunt and charged with sensual heat. Did he ever think about it?

Lisa helped her to sit down and took away the frame, while Elin handed her an ice-cold glass of tropical juice. The deck was dappled with sun and shade, and there was a breeze. It was a perfect day. Dev pulled up an Adirondack chair to sit beside her. He leaned against the wooden seat-back, casually stretched his arms. But his mood wasn’t as casual as he wanted her to think. His gaze seemed intently focused behind those concealing sunglasses, and she didn’t know if his sitting so close was significant.

Were they dating?

Could she ask?

Um, excuse me, Dev, I was in a coma for nearly eight months, and rehab since. Can you just catch me up on the current status of our relationship?

A thought struck her. That Not Ready comment of Lisa’s a few minutes ago …

Not Ready to hear that Dev had moved on to someone else?

But she didn’t have time to examine the cold pit that opened deep in her stomach at this idea. There shouldn’t be a pit! He’d been up front with her nine months ago. “I have nothing to offer, Jodie,” he’d said. “I’m only here until Dad is ready to go back to work. My career is in New York, it’s pretty full-on, no room for commitment, and I’m not looking for it. I really like being with you, but if you’re interested in something long-term, it’s not with me.”

How did a woman respond to something like that? She knew Dev had said it out of innate honesty and goodness of heart. He wasn’t the kind of man who promised what he couldn’t deliver, or tricked a woman into bed with sweet-talking lies. He called it how he saw it, and when he laid his cards on the table, he laid them straight.

Nine months ago he’d been all about the short term, about saying goodbye when it was over, with a big grin, warm wishes and no regrets for either of them, yet now he was sitting beside her, searching her face, examining the set of her shoulders as if he cared that she might not be coping.

Which she wasn’t, fully.

Everything was happening too fast. Dev stood up to greet Lisa’s husband. Mom and Dad came out from the kitchen, Dad in full male barbecue armor, with plastic apron and an impressive weaponry of implements. The front doorbell rang and Elin went to answer it.

And sister number three—Maddy—and her husband, John, were here, having at last managed to negotiate the trip from their car. They’d come around the side of the house and climbed the steps to the deck carrying two bulging diaper bags, some kind of squishy portable baby gym and a baby in a carrier.

Their baby. Their little girl. Tiny. Just a few weeks old. Jodie hadn’t even known Maddy was pregnant. She’d only been told about baby Lucy after she was born—another questionable instance of Not Ready—and hadn’t seen her yet, because Maddy and John lived in Cincinnati, two hours from Leighville, the Palmer family’s Southern Ohio hometown.

“Oh, she’s asleep!” Mom crooned. “Oh, what an angel! She already looks so much bigger than she did two weeks ago.”

“Can we put her somewhere quiet?” Maddy asked.

But it was too late. The baby began to waken, stretching her little body in the cramped space of the car carrier and letting out a keening cry.

“Oh, she needs a feed,” Maddy said. “Where shall I go?”

“Not here,” Dad said. He was a traditional man, with a passion for woodworking and gadgetry. In his world, feeding and diaper changes didn’t belong in the same space as a barbecue.

“You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was just to get here, all the gear we had to bring. John, can you set up some pillows for me in …? Oh, where!”

“My room,” Jodie said quickly. “There’s a heap of pillows, and fresh flowers, and a rocking chair.”

“Oops, I’m going to have to change her first….” But John had already gone to ready the room. Maddy held Lucy with the baby’s legs awkwardly dangling and her little face screwed up as she screamed, and looked around for the diaper bag. “She’s in a mess. Oh, I’m not good at any of this yet! Where’s the monitor? We’ll need it if she naps. I have no idea if she will. And when she cries like this … First baby at thirty-six, people do say it’s harder.”

“Here, don’t worry, it’s fine.” Of all people, it was Dev who stepped forward and took the crying baby. He cradled her against his shoulder and commenced a kind of rocking sway and a rhythmic soothing sound. “Shh-sh, shh-sh, it’s okay, Mommy’s coming in a minute, shh-sh, shh-sh.” Jodie felt a strange, unwanted tingling in her breasts and a familiar yearning in her heart. Why did he do this to her when she tried so hard to stay sensible? How could he possibly look so confident and so good, holding a poop-stained baby? Why was he still in Ohio, and not back in New York?

She had a vivid flashback, suddenly, to the first night they’d made love. Bed on the first date. You weren’t supposed to do that, if you were a female with a warm heart, but of course it hadn’t felt like the first date. She’d known Dev since she was sixteen, and she’d responded to him with half a lifetime of pent-up feeling—to his hands so right on her body, to his voice so familiar in her ear.

“Thank you, Dev!” Maddy unzipped the diaper bag and rummaged around inside. She didn’t seem surprised that Devlin had taken control, but Jodie was.

Not about the control, but about the thing he was in control of. If you were talking legal contracts or high finance or building plans, team sports, political wrangling, then, yes, Devlin Browne could take control in a heartbeat. Would always take control. But when it was a baby?

What did he know about babies?

He doesn’t even want kids.

The thought came out of nowhere, one of the memories from before the accident that her brain threw out apparently at random. “Did I have amnesia?” Jodie had asked at one point.

“Not like in the movies,” they—her doctors and therapists—had said. “But of course there are some gaps. Many of them you’ll eventually fill in. Some you never will.”

“Like the accident itself?”

“Yes, it’s quite probable you’ll never remember that.”

But she remembered that Dev didn’t want kids.

How did she remember that?

She searched her mind, watching him as he gently bounced the baby on his shoulder. He wore jeans and a gray polo shirt with black trim, filling the clothing with a body honed by running and wilderness sports. The fabric of the jeans pulled tightly across his thighs, and the sleeve-band of the polo shirt was tight, too. There was some impressive muscle mass there, and Jodie’s fingers remembered it, even while she was trying to remember the other thing—the thing about him not wanting kids.

If he didn’t want kids, how could he school all that male strength into the tender touch and soft rhythm needed to soothe a newborn baby? When Maddy was ready, he handed Lucy over to her, and casually warned, “Watch the wet patch on her back.”

But he didn’t want any of his own …

Okay, it was over dinner, she remembered. They’d been out together—and slept together, heaven help her—three times since his temporary return to Leighville. As far as Jodie’s family were concerned, she and Dev had only been dipping their toes in the waters of the great big dating lake.

To her, though, it immediately felt deeper. She’d had a major crush on him at sixteen when he’d briefly dated one of her good friends before he—Dev—had left for college in Chicago a couple of months later. Turned out the crush had never really gone away.

She couldn’t track back to how the subject of kids had come up that night. Maybe something to do with his restless lifestyle. He was based in New York these days, but his work in international law took him all over the world—three months in London, a summer in Prague. He’d only come home for a couple of months last fall to take over his father’s small-town legal practice on a temporary basis while Mac Browne had heart surgery.

Okay, so she might possibly have asked Dev, over their meal, if he ever intended to settle down.

He’d probably said no, he didn’t. The I-have-nothing-to-offer thing, again.

And then he’d definitely—twenty seconds or five minutes later—said that he didn’t want kids. Fatherhood didn’t fit with his plans.

Which was fine, she’d thought, because he was only in town for a short while, and she’d only gone into this dating thing so she could finally get a thirteen-year crush well and truly out of her system and then wave him goodbye. A big grin, and no regrets.

Or not.

If I sleep with him, he’ll break my heart when he leaves, she’d thought back then. And if I don’t sleep with him, he’ll still break my heart when he leaves….

But that was last October, and he was still here. The accident would explain part of it. October eighth, the two of them driving home after dark from date number four, a fall hike in Hocking Hills followed by dinner, when a driver in an oncoming car had lost control around a bend. Devlin had broken his leg in three places and had a permanent metal plate in there, but he didn’t even walk with a limp at this point, so shouldn’t he be safely back in New York or in a hotel room in Geneva by now?

Instead he was standing here on her parents’ summer deck sharing a joke with her dad, throwing up his head when he laughed, shirt fabric pulling across his broad shoulders when he raised a beer can to his lips, reminding her far too strongly that she hadn’t remotely gotten the crush out of her system last fall, or during the nine months of coma and rehab since.

He’d come to visit her in the hospital five times since she’d woken up, seen her at her most vulnerable, in tears and struggling to move and speak, fighting her own uncooperative body. He’d been so supportive, but cautious at the same time, never talking about anything too personal, and she had no idea what it all meant. Her brain still felt scrambled, tired, and life was a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing.

“Is she out here? How is she?” This was Jodie’s Aunt Stephanie, following Elin out to the deck. Seemed as if everyone had been invited today. Jodie began to feel overwhelmed and more than a little tired. She’d been discharged from the nearby rehab unit yesterday, and would still be attending day therapy sessions there for a while. She’d spent just one night, so far, in her own precious bed.