About the Baby

No, she couldn’t tell him. Not now. She needed more time to figure it out in her own head, more time to decide what her options were before she asked him for his advice. With Lucas, it was always better to have a few backup plans in place before talking to him. Otherwise, he’d just take over and she’d find herself right back where she’d started.

Closing her eyes for a moment to clear her head, she opened them to find Lucas staring straight at her. Since she couldn’t meet his eyes, not when she was lying to him, she shifted her gaze behind her—and realized they’d stopped in front of her favorite park. Suddenly the idea of doing something mindless, something just for fun, appealed to her in a way nothing had for a very long time.

Was it absurd? Yes.

Was she going to do it, anyway? Absolutely.

Maybe it would buy her the time she needed to figure out exactly what it was she wanted to say. Because the look in Lucas’s eye said he wasn’t going to let her get away with evading him for long. Not this time. Not tonight.

“Wanna swing?” she asked him, nodding to the park behind him.

“Swing?” It was like he’d never heard of the word.

“It’ll be fun.” She walked closer to the locked fence that kept the public out after eleven at night.

“Are you kidding me?” Lucas demanded. “I want to talk about what’s going on with you and you want to go play in the sandbox?”

“Swings, not sandbox,” she said, tossing her shoes over the fence before grabbing onto the fence and starting to climb. “Try to keep up.”

“I would if you weren’t completely insane.” He paused. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she asked, reaching for the top of the fence and pulling herself up. “I can’t leave my shoes here—those are my only pair of Jimmy Choos.”

“The park is closed!” he hissed.

“And your point is?”

“My point is, it’s closed. You can get arrested for trespassing, you know.”

“Give me a break. It’s a public park.” Hiking her dress up to the tops of her thighs, she climbed over the fence, careful of the iron spikes, then dropped down to the grass below. “Are you coming?” she asked, picking up her heels and pretending she didn’t care if he followed her or not.

Lucas sighed heavily and she could all but see his eye roll as he said, “Of course I’m coming. This is downtown Atlanta. God only knows what could happen to you in there.”

As he pulled himself up and over the fence in a couple of smooth, well-coordinated movements—much smoother and well-coordinated than her own—she refrained from reminding him that she’d managed to survive on her own in places a lot rougher than Atlanta. But the last thing she wanted was to bring her job into the conversation, not when she’d done everything in her power to avoid talking about it.

He dropped to the ground beside her. “So what do you want to do now?” he demanded, his voice put-upon. But he couldn’t hide his grin—or the dimple in his left cheek that only came when he was deeply amused by something.

“We’re in a park, Lucas. What do you think I want to do?” She grabbed his hand and took off, running full out down the grassy hill that led to the playground equipment. But about halfway down, she tripped over a sprinkler head. As she stumbled, Lucas tried to stop her fall and somehow they got all tangled up together. They hit the ground, hard, and then they were rolling down the hill, Lucas instinctively wrapping his arms around her to protect her.

They came to a stop against the side of a small gazebo, a few feet from the bottom of the hill. Lucas hit with an oomph, though she wasn’t sure if that was because he’d born the brunt of the hit or because she had landed on top of him.

Certain she wasn’t helping matters, she struggled to climb off him, but was so dizzy from the roll that she ended up straddling him, her head on his chest as she tried to keep the world around her from spinning. She glanced up at Lucas, who had a very disgruntled look on his face—like he couldn’t imagine that he had somehow been a part of anything so undignified. The absolute shock, mingled with the sight of his expression, made her throw her head back and giggle like crazy.

Immediately, his hand shot up to the back of her head, his fingers probing her scalp. “Did you hit your head?” he demanded, trying to sit up. Which wasn’t easy considering she was stretched out on top of him and laughing like a hyena.

“If you could see your face,” she sputtered, “you’d laugh, too.”

His left eyebrow rose in that adorably sardonic way of his, which only made her amusement harder to control. Within moments, he joined in and the two of them laughed themselves silly.

This was what she missed the most when she was working on location. Kara rolled onto her back and looked up at the slightly wider expanse of sky above them. She decided it wasn’t Chinese takeout or her big feather bed or access to a regular shower that she missed most—though a shower did run a close second. No, what she missed more than anything was Lucas.

Spending time with her other friends and colleagues was never as much fun as spending time with him. Oh, he walked the walk of the rich, Southern gentleman, but inside that smooth, slightly reserved exterior was a wicked sense of humor and an incredible capacity for fun. He didn’t show it to many people, and she couldn’t help being grateful that she was one of the chosen few he could let down his guard with.

“What now?” he finally asked when their laughter had quieted. “You want to fall off the monkey bars, maybe break your collarbone? Or should we go for something more sedate, like riding the merry-go-round till we puke?”

She reached over, rested a finger against the right corner of his mouth and pressed upward. “You need to smile when you say that stuff. Someone who doesn’t know you might think you’re serious.”

“I am serious. If we try hard enough, maybe we could hang ourselves on the swings.”

“Make fun of me all you want,” she said, swatting his shoulder. “But you have to admit this is a lot better than that stupid gala.”

“So is a root canal, darlin’, so don’t get too full of yourself.”

She went to smack him again but he moved lightning fast and caught her fist in his hand. His face turned serious. “You’ve been running an awful lot tonight, Kara. It’s time to settle down and tell me what it’s all about.”

Closing her eyes, she tried to block out the concern on his face, but in the end she couldn’t do it. Not when he was still holding her hand, his thumb stroking softly across the back of her palm.

“I can’t breathe. I just—I can’t…” Her breath caught on a sob she could no longer swallow down. It had been sitting there for days and weeks, maybe even months, waiting to escape. She tried to stop it—and the ones that came after it. The last thing Lucas needed was for her to turn into a basket case. Yet, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop the surge inside of her.

“Aw, baby, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he murmured, sitting up and pulling her onto his lap.

She went without a struggle, letting him rock her as she sobbed out all her pain and frustration and fear. Her last few trips—to Colombia, Somalia and the Sudan—had been awful. So awful that there was a part of her, despite what she’d told Lucas earlier, that couldn’t imagine going back.

Sure, she could map the outbreak of the disease, figure out where it started and why. That helped people in the long run—she understood that. It was why she’d chosen to be an epidemiologist to begin with. But it didn’t do anything for people in the short-term and she wasn’t sure she could take it anymore, to watch people die terrible deaths in the hope that somehow she could save others two, five, ten years down the road.

Finally, she wore herself out, the crying subsiding to the occasional shudder. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into his tuxedo shirt, ashamed of her loss of control now that she was coming back to herself. Lucas had enough on his plate—the last thing she’d wanted to do was burden him with more.

For long seconds Lucas didn’t answer, just stroked her hair softly. She had pretty much given up on a response when he said, “You don’t need to be sorry. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

This time she was the one who took long seconds to answer. And when she finally did find her voice, the only words that came out were, “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning, baby.”

She would, except at this point, she had no idea when that was.

CHAPTER THREE

“I’MTHINKINGOFLEAVING the CDC.”

He knew she was waiting for an exclamation of surprise or denial, and though he was shocked, he made sure not to show it. Instead, he just looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

“You know, I became an epidemiologist because I wanted to help people. I could have taken my medical degree and joined the Peace Corps or For the Children, but I wanted to do more than only treat the victims after the fact. I wanted to track viruses, to figure out how they start so we could prevent outbreaks from happening in the future.”

“And you don’t want to do that anymore?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to do that. It’s just—” She tried to find a way to explain what she was thinking. “You know, the locals have a phrase down there, one all the relief workers and mercenaries and warlords have adopted in the last few years. TIA. Do you know what it means?”

He shook his head.