She nodded towards the door of the second bedroom. She ran her tongue over her lower lip, then caught it between her teeth, the sensuous motion fixating his gaze there.

“You should,” he agreed softly. He leaned to her, gently cupping her face, and brushed a kiss against her cheek, lingering long enough for it to become a caress of breath and lips on her skin. He wanted more, to love her until they were both boneless and breathless.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not giving up on me.”

WELCOME HOME, DADDY

Drew stood and reached for her as if he wanted to pull her into a hug.

A part of Annie longed to accept the comfort he offered. But she couldn’t. The stakes were too high.

Raising her hand, she said, “Don’t. I just wanted you to understand.”

“I had no idea.” His voice was husky. “But you’re wrong about one thing. I wouldn’t have missed it. I could have taken compassionate leave to be there for both of you. You never gave me the chance.”

Annie almost flinched at the loss in his voice. She couldn’t continue to beat herself up wishing she’d done things differently. “So here we are, back where we started.”

Healing the MD’s Heart

Nicole Foster
Welcome Home, Daddy

Carrie Weaver

MILLS & BOON^®

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Healing the MD’s Heart

Nicole Foster

Nicole Foster is the pseudonym for the writing team of Danette Fertig-Thompson and Annette Chartier-Warren. Both journalists, they met while working on the same newspaper and started writing historical romance together after discovering a shared love of the old West and happy endings. Their seventeen-year friendship has endured writer’s block, numerous caffeine-and-chocolate deadlines and the joyous chaos of marriage and raising five children between them. They love to hear from readers. Send a SAE with return postage for a bookmark to PMB 228, 8816 Manchester Rd, Brentwood, Mo 63144, USA.

Chapter One

Nearly a thousand miles from home, Duran Forrester wanted to believe, after all the regretted decisions, frustrations and slams into brick walls over the last months, that this wasn’t the biggest mistake of his life.

Then he reminded himself it didn’t matter. Even if it was, there was no undoing it because he was fast running out of options. More importantly, he was running out of time.

He glanced in the rearview mirror at his son. Noah, his dark hair ruffled and cheeks flushed, sweat beading on his brow, slumped sideways on the seat asleep, clutching his scruffy stuffed panda in a one-armed hug. Ten minutes…ten minutes and they’d be in Luna Hermosa and he’d have Noah at a hospital.

It’s only an ear infection. Some antibiotics and painkillers and he’ll be okay. He’ll be fine. He has to be.

He repeated it to himself as if it were a mantra that could shield him from the fear that struck at him with its cold, sharp edge of panic. And like all the other times, he wondered if this would be when he’d be told it wasn’t okay, that his son would never be fine.

Noah shouldn’t be here, that much now was obvious. Duran had a long debate with himself over whether or not to bring his son along in the first place. Noah had had enough disappointments in his life and Duran didn’t want this trip to be one more. But once he’d found out Duran’s destination, Noah had been so excited and after three days of his seven-year-old’s persistent wheedling, begging and insisting, Duran finally gave in. Despite his misgivings, he’d convinced himself that the trip, if nothing else, would give him precious time with Noah, a few weeks uninterrupted by work and everything life had recently thrown at them.

They’d been less than an hour from their destination when things started to go wrong. Noah’s temperature spiked, he’d started complaining about his ears hurting and Duran’s reason fought his impulse to slam his foot on the accelerator and say to hell with speed limits.

He gripped the steering wheel hard enough to imprint the shape of his hands there, finding it a poor release for the turmoil of worry, frustration, uncertainty and anger that hit him in surges despite his best efforts to keep it shoved to a dark corner of his mind. Mostly everything—his and Noah’s current predicament, the surprises of the past weeks that more often than not had been unwelcome—he could only blame on himself and his recently acquired determination to find out who’d he’d been before Eliza and Luke Forrester had made him their son.

He’d known, since he was younger than Noah, that he’d been adopted, but never had the least desire to find his birth parents until now. His adoptive parents were loving and generous people, devoted to each other and to him, who’d made him feel that it didn’t matter why he’d been given away, only that they were blessed in choosing him and that with them was where he belonged.

The why still didn’t matter; now and urgently, the who did. Looking at Noah again, he wished, for his son’s sake, he had another choice. And he prayed, hard and long, this didn’t turn out as badly as when he’d contacted the woman who considered him her biggest mistake. His birth mother.

I didn’t want you then. There’s nothing I can do for you now. It was a long time ago. My family doesn’t know about you and I plan to keep it that way.

No amount of pleas or appeals changed her mind.

But she had given him something—two names and another chance to keep his hope alive.

The first he couldn’t allow himself to think about right now.

It was my kind of luck, all bad. It wasn’t anything but too much whiskey and one long night with that cowboy, and then he disappeared and I ended up with the two of you.

Two. And just that fast he found out he was a twin. Ry Kincaid hadn’t wanted to be found and even less wanted to be called his brother. But neither of them could deny who they were and after an uneasy meeting, had left it unresolved while Duran made it his business to track down the second name on his list.

Jed Garrett. Rancho Piñtada, Luna Hermosa, New Mexico.

His father—and the man he wanted to meet most…and least.

The little girl grinned and Lia Kerrigan smiled back, returning an exuberant hug, accepting a kiss made slightly sticky by Nina’s refusal to give up her sucker. Lia only wished these infrequent office visits didn’t amount to the majority of time she got to spend with her youngest sister. Then again, for a woman with seven siblings, it was amazing how little time she’d spent with any of them. Her oldest brother she’d never even met, and the others were more like strangers with whom she happened to share a parent.

Old pain, made worse by the knowledge that as much as she cared for Nina, inevitably they would end up with the same distant relationship. Circumstance and the more than thirty years’ difference in age would see to that.

Lia immediately pushed the maudlin thought away, putting it down to too many working hours at the hospital and her office and her dad showing up with Nina ten minutes before the much anticipated end of her eleven-hour day. It was typical of him and yet it never failed to irritate her. Walter Kerrigan was a successful orthopedic surgeon who should have understood better than anyone the demands on his daughter’s time. But since the day Nina, his fifth child, was born, he’d insisted on making the drive from Santa Fe anytime he decided Nina needed to see a pediatrician, disregarding Lia’s repeated requests for at least an advance phone call.

“Madelyn wants to know if you’re planning to come to the housewarming,” her father asked when Nina, locating the stack of books Lia kept in her examining room, was happily engrossed in studying her favorite. “She says she’s left you several messages, but you haven’t gotten back to her.”

Lia stopped herself from sighing. Walter’s fourth wife was twenty-nine to his sixty-two. In fact, Madelyn was six years younger than Lia herself, but the only thing they had in common was that they were both female. Lia couldn’t think of a worse way to spend a Saturday night than a party at her dad’s new house. It was impossible not to love Nina, but she couldn’t say the same for Nina’s mother. “I’ve been busy,” she gave the usual excuse. “And I may be on call this weekend.”

“You always say that,” Walter said, his dismissive tone clearly saying he didn’t believe her. “It wouldn’t hurt if you would come to visit us once in a while, if nothing else to see Nina. You complain enough about not being able to spend time with her. Bring that fireman of yours—I can’t remember his name—the one you’ve been seeing.”

“Tonio Peña, and that’s been over for more than a year now.”

“Has it?” Walter assessed his daughter with the slight concentrated frown that he gave a particularly difficult-to-treat injury. “I suppose he went the way of the others. Relationships seem to be a self-fulfilling prophecy with you. You expect them to turn out badly and so they do.”

“You taught me well,” Lia retorted, defensiveness sharpening her voice more than she’d intended. Maybe there was some truth in what he said, but her father, who acquired and discarded wives and girlfriends as easily as if he were trading in a car for a better model, could hardly claim to be an expert on successful relationships.

“The difference between us is it doesn’t hurt me when it falls apart,” Walter said. “Unlike you, I gave up my illusions that anything lasts forever a long time ago. There are advantages to being married, but they aren’t so great that I feel the need to sentence myself to a lifetime of misery if it doesn’t work.”

That apparently was one philosophy he and her mother shared, Lia reflected, after her father and Nina had left. Shaking off her unprofitable introspection—it certainly hadn’t gotten her anywhere in the past—she finished the notations on Nina’s chart and was seriously contemplating a long bath and a cold drink when her pager beeped. Bath and drink became unlikely when she recognized the number as the emergency room extension.

“Doctor Nunez wanted to know if you could help with a sick case, a little boy,” the nurse said when Lia called in. “We’re busy this evening, and Doctor Nunez thought you could handle it more quickly.”

Translation: Hector doesn’t like kids. The thought of inflicting a harried Hector Nunez on a sick child was more than enough to hurry her to the emergency room.

Her first thought entering the curtained cubicle was the man sitting on the edge of the examining table, a protective arm around the boy curled up against his chest, was going to be difficult. His expression clearly said he was prepared to treat anyone who approached his son as an adversary until proven otherwise. Yet glancing over the boy’s chart, she thought he’d probably earned the right.

The paperwork raised questions, though, about what Duran Forrester, who listed his profession as filmmaker and gave an address in Los Angeles, was doing a thousand miles from home, in Luna Hermosa of all places, with a sick child.

“Mr. Forrester?” She gave him a quick appraisal, getting a fast impression of unruly dark brown hair that tended to slant over one eye and a runner’s body, long, hard and lean under the black shirt and jeans. The silver stud earring he wore and his sensual good looks probably had people mistaking him for someone who spent his time in front of the camera rather than behind it. His eyes, trained on her now, gave her the feeling he was sizing her up and that she so far hadn’t measured up to his standards. She wasn’t exactly at her best after nearly twelve long hours, her khaki slacks and white shirt showing the day’s wear, makeup faded and her dark auburn hair doing its best to escape her ponytail. But there was nothing she could do to fix that now, and so she pulled her professionalism around her, put on a polite smile and settled for ignoring it.

“I’m Lia Kerrigan, I’m the staff pediatrician.” As she came around to the bedside opposite Duran Forrester, the boy half glanced at her, his eyes dull with fever. “You must be Noah. Or maybe this is Noah?” She tweaked the ear of the stuffed panda the boy clutched tightly.

A spark briefly flared in the boy’s eyes. “That’s Percy.”

“Percy’s a nice name for a puppy,” Lia said conversationally as she started her exam, working around the bear and Duran Forrester, aware he was closely watching her every move.

“He’s not a puppy,” Noah protested. “He’s a panda.”

“Really?” Lia took a quick temperature reading while she gave the bear due consideration. “Are you sure?”

Noah held up his friend for inspection. “See?”

“Mmm…well, you could be right. But since I’ve never actually seen a real panda before, I’m not sure.”

“I saw two, once. In a zoo. They were awesome.” Noah leaned back against his dad’s shoulder. “My ears hurt.”

“I know, honey,” Lia said softly, gently stroking a few wayward locks of hair from his forehead. Noah so much resembled his dad, a younger version of the man with the same messy dark hair and deep river-green eyes, that she could easily imagine Duran Forrester as a child. Illness, though, had paled Noah and painted violet shadows under his eyes. “I’m going to see what I can do to fix that.”

Giving Noah what she hoped was a reassuring smile, she moved around the bed nearer to Duran. “Normally, I’d send him home with an antibiotic. But you two are a long way from home and Noah’s circumstances require special care—” She let the sentence trail off, not sure how much she should say with Noah listening. “I think it would be better if he stayed the night. I’m sure you understand there could be complications and I could do a better job of monitoring him from here.”

He didn’t answer right away, but gave her that assessing look, clearly weighing her advice against his own judgment. Lia thought it was even odds whether he’d agree to her suggestion. Finally, he gave a curt nod. “All right. If you think it’s best.”

“I don’t wanna stay here,” Noah said. “I wanna go home.”

“Not tonight, buddy,” Duran told him, putting his arm around Noah again and drawing him closer. “It’s just one night. And I’ll stay with you, I promise.”

“Sure he will, and Percy, too,” Lia added. “You’re lucky he’s not a puppy, though. We don’t let puppies in here. But pandas are different. They get to be special guests.”

Diverting Noah’s attention from having to spend night in a hospital room, Lia made a big show of giving Percy his own ID bracelet, checking his heartbeat and finding him a surgical cap to keep his ears warm, earning her Noah’s approval and most surprising, a smile from Duran Forrester. It wasn’t much, a quick sideways slant of his mouth, but it warmed some of the cold places inside and left in their place a warm, satisfied glow.

She personally saw to settling Noah in a room, and after getting him to eat a little chicken noodle soup and drink some apple juice, she tucked him into bed. Drowsy from the mild painkillers she’d given him, his eyes drooped closed almost immediately, and Lia, straightening, looked directly into Duran’s frown.

“I need to make a call,” he said, fixing his attention on Noah. “I’ve missed an appointment I had here and I should let him know where I am.” He patted his shirt pocket, came up empty, and his scowl deepened. “Damn, I left the number in the car.”

Lia considered telling him she’d stay with Noah while he retrieved the number and made his call, but figured, as protective he was of his son, he wouldn’t agree. “Where were you headed? This is a small enough town, I might be able to help you.”

“Rancho Piñtada. I was supposed to meet with a Rafe Garrett at five.”

Whatever she expected, it wasn’t that. “Are you a rancher as well as a filmmaker?” she asked lightly, curious, but not wanting to probe.

“No. My business is personal.” He didn’t volunteer anything else and she heeded the clear message to back off.

“I know Rafe and Jule. I’m their pediatrician, too.” She grabbed up a brochure from beside the bed and scrawled down the number. “Rafe should be at home by now, especially if you were supposed to meet with him.” Hesitating, she reconsidered her unspoken offer and then said, “I’ll sit with Noah while you make your call, if you like. I don’t mind. Technically I’m off duty and there’s nowhere else I need to be. And he shouldn’t wake up in the few minutes it’ll take to make your call.”

Again, she got silence and that look and then finally, he unbent a little. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “I’ll make it quick.”

He pushed his way out of the room, leaving Lia to drop into the chair beside Noah’s bed. She watched him as he slept, wondering at Duran Forrester, who he was and why he was here, what personal business he could have with Rafe. It was none of her business, but she couldn’t help but be curious, partly because Rafe’s family was famous for their dramas, but mostly because of the air of secrecy Duran insisted on keeping close around himself and his son. She recalled the paperwork and the deliberate empty space under mother’s name, as if Noah’s mother had never existed. Questions, and more questions, and she wasn’t likely ever to get any answers.

Duran didn’t leave her much time to speculate. He came back less than ten minutes later, his expression blanked, as if he’d gotten news that had blindsided him. Mindful of his emotional privacy, she pretended not to notice. “Were you able to reach Rafe?”

Nodding, he moved to stand by Noah, staring down at his son. Very gently, he brushed his fingertips over the sleeping boy’s cheek. The love in his face was clear and strong, and yet there was grieving in it, too. Lia had to stop herself from reaching out to him, the desire to comfort was that powerful even though she knew any reassurance she could offer would be hollow and unwelcome, coming from a stranger.

For some reason—though she knew it what was she should do—she couldn’t simply detach herself from the situation, walk away, go home and leave Duran Forrester to face the long night ahead, with only his fears for Noah as company. It wasn’t her job to stay; she’d already done far more for the two of them than usual. Yet she had the impression, without having any real basis for knowing, that Duran was alone in more than just the sense of being a stranger in town and that kept her in the room, giving herself excuses to stay.

“I know Noah wasn’t very hungry earlier,” she ventured, a poor outlet for her feelings but the best she could do, “but you didn’t get any dinner at all. How about I bring us both something? I don’t know about you, but lunch was a long time ago for me.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, but you’re alone in a strange town with a sick little boy and you’re going to be spending the night in a very uncomfortable chair. The least I can do is treat you to some of our gourmet hospital cuisine. Besides, like I said, I’m hungry, too.” Not giving him an opportunity to refuse, she got up and moved quickly to the door. “I’ll be back.”

Calling the cafeteria from the nurses’ desk, she asked for the meals to be delivered to Noah’s room. Then she checked in with the night staff and her service, telling them she was off duty but intended to stay for a while to monitor Noah. By the time she was done, the food had arrived and she slipped back inside the room. Duran had dimmed the lights and was sitting in the chair facing the bed, his forehead propped on his fist, weariness evident in the slump of his body.

“It’s not the best,” she said, indicating the trays when he glanced up, “but at least it’s dinner.”

He pushed himself up in the chair, nodded in reply and they ate in silence for a few minutes, the air in the room thick with things they left unsaid. Finally, he pushed the tray aside and, speaking quietly so as to not disturb Noah, asked, “Is everyone in town as nice as you?”

She laughed, inexplicably self-conscious at his compliment. “I don’t think I can answer that without sounding as if I’m bragging or dissing someone else. There are a lot of good people here. It’s why I’ve stayed for so long. I like being in a smaller town. I’m sure it’s considerably different from L.A., though,” she added, risking a comment on his personal life, even if it was of the most innocuous kind.

“Night and day,” he agreed, seeming not to mind. “But I’ve only lived there since college. I grew up not far from here, just outside Rio Rancho. This is not that different.” Leaning back, he tilted his head against the wall, briefly closing his eyes. “I’m thinking about moving back, at least to New Mexico—work permitting, that is. I’ve arranged things so I’m between projects and I can have some time to decide. But, ultimately, L.A. isn’t the best place to raise a child.”

“I can only imagine living in a place like L.A. Even so, you seem to have done a good job with Noah. I know it’s not easy raising a child on your own.”

“Personal experience?”

“Hardly,” she said, the laugh this time sounding more like a harsh exclamation. “But I am a pediatrician. I see lots of different kinds of families.”

He raised his head to look at her, with that intense, disconcerting way of his that gave her the sensation he was dissecting her soul. “I always wanted the same kind of family I had growing up for Noah. I really did have the two great parents, the faithful dog and the New Mexico version of a white picket fence.”

“But?”

“But my ex-wife didn’t see it that way. She walked out before Noah turned one, got a quick divorce, gave me full custody and I haven’t seen her since. So Noah’s had to get by with just me.”

“He doesn’t appear to have suffered for it,” Lia said softly. “And things could change.”

“Not for me,” he said in a tone that put a full stop to any ideas he would ever contemplate another serious relationship. “I won’t risk putting Noah through that, loving someone and then losing them. He’s been through enough already. He was too young when his mother left to realize she didn’t want him. He sometimes asked why he doesn’t have a mother and I still don’t know what to tell him.”

She could understand and yet there was sadness in the finality of his words, his certainty that love would never touch his life again with enough strength to make him want to take another chance. But then again, didn’t she, better than anyone, know that the odds were he was right, that it was as likely to turn out badly as well? Any parent who loved his child as much as he did would consider the risks not worth it—unlike her own parents, to whom children were apparently incidental to disposable relationships.

A light knock on the door interrupted them and Lia, thinking it was the night nurse, got up to answer it. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with Cort Morente, a friend, but one of the last people she would have guessed she’d be seeing here and tonight.

“Cort—how did you know…?” She stared at him, completely confused. Duran had said he was in Luna Hermosa to meet with Rafe and now Rafe’s younger brother showed up here, out of the blue. “Is something wrong with one of the kids?” she asked, although she couldn’t imagine why Cort wouldn’t have just called her if there was a problem with one of his four children, even if it had been an emergency.

“No, they’re all fine. I wasn’t looking for you.” Cort looked behind her to where Duran had gotten to his feet and Lia instinctively stepped aside. The two men faced each other, Duran tense, already on the defensive, and Cort cautious, as if weighing his options before making a move. When he finally did, it easily qualified as something she’d never expected him to say.

“I came to see my brother.”

Duran’s first reaction was the completely irrelevant thought that maybe meeting unknown relations got easier after the first one. If so, by the time he’d gotten through all the relatives he seemed to have acquired, it should be simple, no struggling with mixed feelings or debating whether he was doing the right thing for Noah and himself.

Rafe Garrett had at least warned him, when Duran had called to postpone their meeting, that he and Ry Kincaid weren’t Duran’s only brothers. Five of Jed Garrett’s sons were living in Luna Hermosa and for some reason Rafe didn’t make clear, none of them wanted him to meet Jed first. He supposed this one had been elected to come here and determine what exactly it was that Duran wanted. From the steady, calculating gaze he got, Duran guessed Cort Morente’s business depended on him being a quick and accurate judge of character and that Cort was deciding the truth of his claim to being Jed’s son and what his motives were for showing up in Luna Hermosa.

Duran glanced back at Noah. His son slept on soundly, oblivious to the drama around him. Leaving Noah’s bedside wasn’t Duran’s first choice, but Noah would likely be asleep for hours yet and he didn’t want this first meeting with his Luna Hermosa relations constrained by the need for quiet and the concern Noah might wake up and overhear.

Lia must have sensed his hesitation because she took a step closer to the bed and told him, “I’ll stay with him.”

The rush of gratitude at her understanding seemed too intense, out of place for her simple gesture. But for an odd moment, Duran felt they were allies.

“If you wouldn’t mind—” he flicked a hand toward the door “—I think you could help explain. You understand…”

Without a pause, she nodded and after checking Noah once more, followed him and Cort outside the room.

Duran turned to Cort, not sure where to start.

Cort spoke up first. “This is not how we intended this meeting to happen. But when Rafe called and told us about your son, we wanted to see if there was anything we could do.” He made the offer and it sounded sincere. But there was a certain reservation in his manner—not quite suspicion, but a withholding of trust, an unwillingness to take Duran’s claim of kinship at face value.

He couldn’t blame the man; he hadn’t brought any proof of his blood tie to Jed Garrett. He had none for himself, except the word of the stranger who had given birth to him. But he had to convince Cort Morente to make good on that offer because he couldn’t afford to fail the way he had with his birth mother.

“Don’t take this wrong, but I’m finding it hard right now to get my head around going from being an only child to having six brothers,” Duran said slowly. “To be honest, though, it’s more than I could have hoped for under the circumstances, especially if you meant it when you said you wanted to help.”

“Mr. Forrester—” Lia began. “Duran,” she amended when he looked at her. “If it makes it any easier—” She stopped, and he could see in her eyes she wanted to intervene, maybe spare him having to say it, but knew it was his to tell.

“I’m not trying to make it harder,” Cort said, “but I can’t say I’m not curious about those circumstances. Jed doesn’t know you and your brother exist or, believe me, the rest of us would have heard about it by now. I have to wonder why you decided to track him down after all this time.”

“I never knew he existed, either. My—” he couldn’t call the woman his mother “—she didn’t put his name on my birth certificate. I had to find her first to get it.”

“Are you sure Jed’s your father then?”

“She is. She gave me his name and the name of his ranch and the town it was in. It’s all she gave me,” he added, unable to keep the anger that still lingered from his meeting with the woman out of his voice, “except to tell me about Ry—Ry Kincaid, my twin. I didn’t know about him until a few weeks ago. We were split up after we were born.” Drawing in a long breath, he tried to let it out slowly, to ease some of the tension crawling up his back and neck, stiffening his muscles. “I never cared about whether or not I had any other relatives, it didn’t matter.”

Cort assessed him and Duran understood that Cort, too, was protecting someone—his brothers, his family, maybe even Jed Garrett. “And it matters now,” Cort said flatly, a statement of fact rather than a question.

“More than anything. I’ve been trying to track down as many blood relatives as I can. I’m running out of time.” He steeled himself to say what he hadn’t dared acknowledge in his head, yet battled daily in his nightmares. “My son is dying.”

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Healing The Md's Heart

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Available in April 2010 from Mills & Boon® Special Moments™

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