“What is?”
“That black belt in karate you have. And about how you took down Jeff Pearson with one swift kick to his...person.”
Zoey arched her left brow marginally, something she normally only did just before landing a blow. This time, however, she managed to keep herself in check. “Jeff Pearson completed a few questionable maneuvers of his own,” she said softly. “He’s lucky I didn’t call the cops and have him charged with sexual assault after what he tried to do. But I don’t suppose any of the boys in the men’s room ever mention that, do they?”
Jonas stopped smiling immediately. “What did he do to you?”
Zoey decided then that she’d had enough. Typical male reaction, wanting to hear all the lurid details. It was pointless trying to have a reasonable conversation with Jonas Tate. Didn’t she already know that? How could she have forgotten so quickly what kind of a man he was? She reminded herself that she hated him. Had hated him for months. He’d made her working environment almost intolerable since the day he’d arrived at Seton General, and now he was fast on his way to making her personal life unbearable, too. Why on earth had she ever agreed to help him out?
“It doesn’t matter what he did,” she muttered wearily. She turned to the closet again and extracted her coat, thrust her arms into the sleeves of her parka and then began to fidget with the zipper, striving for a quick departure. But naturally, the mechanism didn’t want to catch.
“Man, you guys are all alike,” she added as she continued to struggle with the scrap of metal, more to prevent Jonas from prying further into her personal experiences than because she agreed with what she was saying. “You think you’re doing any woman a favor to exchange a few meaningless words over dinner, then you can’t understand why she doesn’t want to hop in the sack with you as soon as the sun goes down.”
The zipper finally caught, and Zoey tugged it up to her chin. When she looked up, Jonas was watching her levelly, his hands settled on his hips, his eyes stormy.
“Hell, at least Jeff took me out before he tried to nail me,” she said. “All you did was clean up the dirty dishes—which, incidentally, were your own, anyway.”
Zoey told herself that the only reason she didn’t bolt through the front door after that was because Jonas was standing between her and it. But really, she knew she was waiting for him to deny what she had said about all men being alike. She wanted him to assure her he was not like other men, wanted him to say something, anything, that would change her mind about the entire male half of the population. Worse than that, she realized suddenly, she wanted him to reach out to her. Wanted to feel him touch her again. And if that realization didn’t make her go racing in fear out of his house, she didn’t know what else would.
Until Jonas reached over and opened the front door for her. The cold March wind whipped around them, but it was nothing compared to the chill in his eyes. “If that’s the way you feel,” he said quietly, “then you’re right. It would be better if you went home.”
Zoey opened her mouth to object, started to voice her concern about how Juliana would fare without her. Then she reminded herself that Jonas and Juliana had been managing, however questionably, without her for two months now. Neither of them was her responsibility. If he wanted her to leave, then there was absolutely no reason for her to stay.
Except for the fact that it didn’t feel right to leave the two of them alone. Something inside her balked at the thought of Jonas and Juliana not needing her. In spite of her assurances to the contrary only moments ago, Zoey wanted very badly to remain there with them. And it wasn’t, she realized much to her dismay, just the baby who roused such a desire in her.
But Jonas still stood across from her with the door wide open, a clear indication that he didn’t share her feelings. So instead of saying all the things she wanted to say, instead of telling him that she hadn’t meant it when she’d lumped him into the same category as that creep, Jeff Pearson, instead of insisting that she wanted to help with Juliana, Zoey turned silently and crossed over the threshold of Jonas Tate’s front door.
She listened helplessly as it immediately clicked shut behind her. And for some reason, as she stood there shivering in the icy cold wind, it occurred to Zoey that she’d never heard a more distressing sound.
* * *
“Hey, Red, why so glum?”
Zoey looked up from a patient chart she had been studying for five minutes, still unable to recall why she had picked it up in the first place. The melancholy mood that had been dogging her for days, two to be exact—ever since she’d left Jonas’s house the Friday night before—lifted somewhat when she saw Cooper Dugan, one of the paramedics who made frequent deliveries to the hospital, leaning over the nurses’ station counter.
“Hi, Coop,” she greeted him as she laid the chart aside. “I’m not glum, just a little distracted is all. Early Monday morning blahs, I guess. What are you doing here so late? Did you get stuck with third shift, too?”
He nodded, his carelessly long, pale blond hair falling forward over clear green eyes. “Yeah, every now and then I get tagged with the graveyard shift. Just brought in a major coronary arrest. I’ve got twenty bucks that say the guy’s not going to make it till morning, so I thought I’d hang around for a while and see if I invested my money wisely.”
“Cooper!” Zoey exclaimed. “Shame on you.”
He shrugged off her chiding. “Hey, he looked like a wide-mouthed bass by the time we got there. ‘Course, I could be wrong,” he added with a negligent swipe of his hand over his cheek. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, I heard you were pulling night duty, too, and I thought maybe we could catch a bite to eat together. What do you say? You coming up for a break anytime soon?”
She sighed and looked at her watch. “Not for another hour or so. Sorry.”
Zoey and Cooper had been friends since they were teenagers, having met in an urban shelter adolescents on the run eventually wandered into for a hot meal. Her month-long stint on the streets of Philadelphia after running away from home was a part of her life about which Zoey preferred to forget. And except for her friendship with Cooper, she let most of her experiences from that time remain well buried in the past. She’d run to escape what she had thought at fourteen was a miserable life-style. And she’d learned pretty quickly what truly constituted misery.
“Well, how about breakfast when we get off?” Cooper added. “My treat. I might be twenty bucks richer by then.”
Zoey shook her head. “No way. I will not be treated to waffles with your ill-gotten gains. Besides, I have plans for the day. At least, I think I do.”
“Doing what?”
“Baby-sitting.”
He curled down his lips in mock disgust. “Ugh. How can you stand it? You’re surrounded by screeching infants all day long. I’d think you’d want some time to yourself on occasion.”
“I have plenty of time to myself,” she told him, squelching the little voice that wanted to say she spent
too
much time alone. “And I love being around babies.”
“I notice you don’t seem to have any of your own.”
Instinctively, her back went up at the comment. “And you know why, too.”
He nodded, making a face at her. “I know why you
say
you don’t. ‘Because the world’s a terrible place’,” he recited in a bland voice. “Too horrible for you to bring another child into it to suffer. Blah, blah, blah.” He leaned farther over the counter and tugged playfully on her braid. “Better be careful, Zoey. One of these days, you might even start to believe that.”
“I do believe that.”
He eyed her skeptically. “And your lack of children would have nothing to do with the fact that you’re just too terrified to let a man get close enough to father one or two for you, right? It has nothing to do with what happened to Eddie.”
She felt her cheeks flame and stood to face him, eye to eye. However, unlike most men, he was in no way intimidated by her overbearing posture. Cooper, after all, was the one who had pulled her out of the blackest period of her life. He was the only human being in the world who had known her during a time of despair, a time of weakness, and he wasn’t afraid of her in any way, shape or form. And that, she supposed, was one of the many reasons why she liked him so much.
“You have no idea what you’re going on about, Cooper,” she said. “It has nothing to do with fear. Nothing to do with what happened to...Eddie.” God, she thought as she stumbled over the final word of her assurance. How long had it been since she’d spoken his name?
Cooper relaxed his posture, and his voice was softer when he replied. “Hey, Zoey, you forget who you’re talking to. I know better than anyone why you don’t want to set yourself up for a fall. And after what happened to you, that’s perfectly understandable. But—”
“What happened to me,” she interrupted him, “is a part of my past. It has nothing to do with who I am now.”
He nodded, but she could see that he was in no way agreeing with her. “Right. Whatever you say, kid. Whatever you say.”
“Look, shouldn’t you be heading over to CCU to find out if your guy made it or not?” she asked pointedly. “I have a lot of stuff here that needs my complete and undivided attention.”
“Message received,” he told her with a brief salute.
As he spun around to leave, Zoey remembered something she wanted to ask him. “Hey, Coop,” she called out after him.
“Yes?” he replied, spinning back around.
“You kill a lot of time in the east wing, don’t you?”
He lifted one shoulder in a casual shrug. “Sure. When there are no runs I need to make. All the best-looking nurses work in the east wing,” he added with a wink.
She ignored the compliment and said instead, “Meaning you spend a lot of time gossiping, right?”
“Well, now, I wouldn’t exactly call it gossiping,” he defended himself. “I prefer to think of it as networking.”
Zoey nodded blandly. “Right. Networking. At any rate, do you...” She paused for a moment, wondering how best to discreetly ferret out information about herself without having it sound as if she was, well, ferreting out information about herself. Finally, she stammered, “Do you...do you ever hear any...you know...talk...about me?”
Cooper arched his brows, though whether in surprise or to stall for time, Zoey wasn’t sure.
“Talk?” he echoed. “About you?”
“Talk,” she repeated dryly. “About me.”
“Oh...” he hedged. “Gee, it’s hard to say. We men talk about so many things, you know. Swimsuit calendars, hockey, liquor, stewardesses, guns....”
“Me?” Zoey asked again. “Do you ever talk about me?”
He eyed her warily. “Why do you ask?”
“I have it on very good authority that I’m known among the men of Seton General as a real, um, as a real threat to the family jewels.”
“Oh,
that,
” he said with a careless wave of his hand.
She gaped at him. “What do you mean, ‘Oh,
that?
’ Is it true? Is that what all you guys think about me?”
“Don’t worry about it, Zoey. You should consider it a compliment. Nobody likes Jeff Pearson anyway.”
“But—”
“We men have nothing but respect for you, kid. You’re practically one of us.”
Practically one of them? she thought. Good heavens, who’d want to be one of
them?
“Then it is true,” she said dismally.
“Hey, there are worse things you could be considered,” he remarked. “There’s no shame in being a tough broad.” And with that heartening reassurance, Cooper saluted her again and made his way toward the elevators.
A tough broad, Zoey marveled as she watched him leave. Her male co-workers thought of her as a tough broad? Is that what Jonas thought her to be, too? Well, so what if he did? she thought further. She
was
a tough broad. Wasn’t she? Hadn’t she been going out of her way for years to convince people that she was someone they’d be better off not messing with? Why was she surprised to discover she scared men? At least, this way, they’d leave her alone. Wasn’t that what she wanted?
It used to be, she realized. Until a couple of days ago. Until she’d wandered blindly into Jonas Tate’s house to find him struggling to raise a baby girl, and had witnessed a side of him that was scared and uncertain and vulnerable. Until she’d realized that maybe men weren’t quite the ogres she’d always thought them to be. At least...one of them didn’t seem to be.
She glanced down at her watch again to find that it was not quite 2:00 a.m. She wondered if Jonas was asleep or awake, wondered if Juliana was blissfully lost in slumber or crying out in distress. And for some reason, she knew she belonged in that big house with them. For some reason, she suddenly felt responsible for them both.
Until the two of them were on more solid footing, anyway, she amended. The least she could do was make sure Juliana was comfortable and happy. Zoey felt she owed it to the little girl to make sure she never felt as out of place in Jonas’s life as she herself had felt for so long in her aunts’ lives. And, she realized reluctantly, Jules was a baby Zoey could actually help. A baby she wouldn’t have to sit by and watch suffer because there was nothing she could do.
Two o’clock, she repeated to herself as she reached once more for the patient file she had abandoned. She imagined Jonas in his purple silk pajama bottoms balancing Juliana in one arm while he tried to heat formula with his free hand. They really did need her, she told herself. And just because he had asked her to leave his house the other night didn’t mean she couldn’t return this morning.
She could handle Jonas Tate and the confusing feelings he aroused in her, she vowed certainly. She was a tough broad, after all.
I
t was a bad dream, Jonas decided as he stood in his pajama bottoms and robe, framed by his front door. He frowned at the maddeningly cheerful woman who had arrived on his porch. The sun was just coming up over the house across the street, staining with orange and gold the long hair that streamed from beneath her red knit cap, throwing a circle of light around her head that looked incongruously like a halo. Yet he knew Zoey Holland was anything but an angel. The emotions she stirred in him were devilish, to say the least.
Her parka was open enough that he saw she was wearing a dark burgundy Haddonfield High School sweatshirt over faded jeans, instead of the hospital scrubs she had sported on her arrival a few mornings before. She carried a sack of groceries in one hand and a small canvas weekender bag in the other. Clearly, it wasn’t an errand for Lily Forrest she was running this time. Evidently, this time she had every intention of spending some serious time with him.
“I’m baaaaaack,” she said with a smile as she nudged past him and into his living room.
Jonas pushed the door closed and pulled his robe more tightly around himself, securing the belt with an extra knot. Why he should do so was a mystery, since Zoey had never expressed the slightest interest in disrobing him before, and really, should she decide she wanted to do so now, he had no desire to stop her. There was just something about her having come to his house with her own free will that unsettled him. That, accompanied by the fact that she seemed to be in such a good mood, had him thoroughly rattled.
“Yes, but what are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m baby-sitting,” she told him. “Remember? I’m going to be watching Jules for the next two weeks and helping you out with her.”
“I thought you’d changed your mind about that.”
She shrugged, clearly unconcerned. “So I changed it back. Besides, you still owe me for the groceries I bought Friday.” She indicated the paper bag in her arms. “I’ll just put it on your tab. Now where can I stow my stuff?”
“Your...stuff? What stuff?”
“My pajamas and toiletries and stuff.”
Jonas was still struggling to comprehend her quick change of heart, and as a result, her intentions didn’t quite register. “You’re moving in?”
“Only for a couple of days. Until you get some sleep. Then I’ll just come over in the mornings and stay until you get home from work. Eventually, I’ll have to get some sleep, too, you know.”
“I know, but—”
“So where can I put my stuff?”
“Aren’t you working nights for Jeannette? How are you going to manage this?”
“I got my shifts covered for tonight and tomorrow night.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “You’re juggling your schedule an awful lot for me.”
“It’s not for you,” she reminded him.
Jonas nodded, feeling more tired than he’d ever felt in his life. “That’s right. How could I forget? You’re only doing this for Juliana.”
“Right. So where can I stow my stuff?”
He lifted his hand to his forehead, as if by doing so he could keep his thoughts from spilling out of his brain. “Hold on for a minute,” he said. “Let me just get my bearings here. You’re still willing to give me a hand with Juliana?”
“Sure.”
“Even after I propositioned you?”
Zoey arched her brows in mock censure. “Oh, but you didn’t proposition me, remember? At least, you said you didn’t.”
“Okay, even after I
allegedly
propositioned you?”
“I’m sure that was all just a misunderstanding,” she said indulgently. “Wasn’t it?”
Jonas tamped down the urge to yank her into his arms and kiss her senseless to illustrate just how perfectly she
had
understood his intentions of the other night. Instead he only sighed and nodded. “Yeah,” he finally said. “You completely misunderstood.”
She smiled, clearly comprehending just what a big lie that was. “I thought so.”
“You really don’t mind sacrificing two weeks to help out me and Juliana?” he asked softly.
“I really don’t mind,” she assured him.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Jonas studied Zoey for a long time without speaking, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. As usual, he marveled at how beautiful she was, noted how her green eyes reminded him of a summer field, and was amazed by how badly he wanted to bury his hands in her mass of red hair and bring it to his lips. But he noticed other things about her, too, when he looked at her this time. He’d always thought of Zoey Holland as little more than a pain in the butt, had considered her to be a mouthy, militant man-eater placed on this planet to do nothing but make his life miserable. He’d always seen her as edges and angles and no softness at all.
But now he could see that he’d been wrong about that. There was, indeed, a softness in Zoey. More than that, there was a definite uncertainty about her. He understood suddenly that it was all an act, this tough-guy attitude she adopted around other people. She wasn’t all edges and angles. She had some definite soft spots and curves. And not just of the more obvious physical variety, either. All at once, Jonas was anxious to know more about her. He wondered why she behaved the way she did when, clearly, she wasn’t a tough guy at all. And all at once, he felt himself warming toward her even more.
“You can put your stuff in the spare room next to Juliana’s nursery,” he heard himself say, unable to recall when he’d chosen to speak. “You’ll be able to hear her with no problem.”
“Sounds good,” Zoey replied. She placed the sack of groceries on the coffee table and extended her weekender bag toward the stairs. “I’ll follow you,” she told him.
He wondered briefly just how far she would follow him, wondered what would happen if he led her into his room instead of the spare room and encouraged her to spend the night there. She’d probably pop him in the eye, he assured himself, only half in jest. And then she’d walk out of his life for good.
“This way,” he said, pushing the errant thought away. Visualizing Zoey in his bed, naked and demanding, was just too troubling an activity to continue. “Juliana is sleeping,” he added as they ascended the stairs, dropping his voice to a low whisper.
“Did she do any better this weekend?” Zoey asked as they crept past the nursery.
He shook his head. “No. Except for Friday night, while you were here, she’s screamed like a maniac every time I’ve tried to comfort her. Obviously, she still hates me and can’t stand to have me come near her.”
“I’m sure that’s not it.”
He uttered a derisive sound as he entered the spare room with Zoey on his heels, but made no further comment.
“You should find another pediatrician,” she told him again as she tossed her bag onto the bed. “Maybe it’s something organic.”
Jonas tried to banish the image of Zoey tossing herself down on the bed beside her bag and throwing her arms open wide to welcome him. “The doctor she’s seeing is one of the best we have on staff,” he replied gruffly. He cleared his throat before adding, “He assures me there’s nothing physically wrong with her. So I can only surmise that it must be something
I’m
doing wrong.”
Zoey wanted to disagree with him, wanted to reassure him that whatever was troubling Juliana probably had nothing to do with him at all. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure she’d be telling the truth. After all, Jonas had done nothing but trouble Zoey since the day she’d met him.
“Well, put your mind at ease for a little while,” she told him. “I’ll see to Jules for now, and you can take a breather. Tonight you can get a good night’s sleep, and you’ll be amazed at how much better you’ll feel in the morning. Things are going to work out fine, Jonas. I know they will.”
His eyes fairly lit with fire when she spoke his name, and she got the distinct feeling that he was thinking about something he really shouldn’t be thinking about. His spare room suddenly seemed uncomfortably small, not to mention warm, and she squelched the instinct to run like some small quivering prey.
“Umm, why don’t you go ahead and get ready for work?” she suggested. “I’ll go downstairs and put away the groceries. When Jules wakes up, I’ll see to her. You just take the day for yourself.”
“Take the day for myself,” he repeated quietly. He shook his head slowly. “What a concept. I can’t remember the last time I had a day to myself. It seems almost too strange to even consider it.”
Zoey’s heart picked up pace a little at the note of helplessness in his voice. “Jules has really turned your life upside down, hasn’t she?”
Jonas sighed heavily. When his gaze met hers, he suddenly appeared more exhausted than she had ever seen a human being look. “More than you could ever know,” he said softly. “Had someone told me a year ago that the arrival of something as small and harmless as a baby could change things so utterly and irretrievably, I never would have believed it. I can’t begin to describe to you how much Juliana has disrupted things.”
“I think I can imagine,” she said softly.
Something in her voice disquieted Jonas, but before he could pursue the matter, she spoke again.
“You resent her a little for it, don’t you?” she asked.
He shrugged, but couldn’t deny the truth in the charge. “Yes, I suppose I do sometimes. I want things to be the way they were before. Just for one day, I’d like for my life to be my own again. I’d like for things to go back to being normal.”
“That’s never going to happen,” Zoey told him, “so you might as well resign yourself to it.”
“I know.”
“You can achieve a new kind of normal, though, if you work at it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, no matter what, you’ll never have your old routine back. But you can get into a new one. Once you and Jules establish a routine, things will start to feel, well, normal. A new kind of normal, like I said, but still...”
Jonas smiled, wanting to kiss her for trying to reassure him. Oh, hell, he thought. Who was he kidding? He wanted to kiss her for significantly other reasons than that.
“Thanks, Zoey,” he said instead.
She was clearly taken aback by his words. “For what?”
“For trying to help.”
“It will get better, Jonas,” she promised him with a soft smile that sent his senses reeling. “You’ll see. It won’t always be like this. The first six months of a baby’s life are always the toughest for parents. But it does get easier eventually.”
“You talk as though you’re speaking from experience.”
A ripple of melancholy threatened to undo her for a moment, but she recovered quickly. “A couple of close friends have become parents recently, that’s how I know. Me, I don’t want children.”
“You sound awfully certain about that.”
“It’s something I decided a long time ago.”
“Why?”
“It’s not important. Just a fact.”
“But—”
“You’re going to be late for work if you don’t hustle,” she interrupted him before he could inquire further into her personal life. “And if what you say about Juliana is true, she’s going to be waking any minute. I need to get organized before she does.”
Jonas didn’t want to hustle. He wanted to keep talking to Zoey. This was the first conversation they’d ever shared that hadn’t led to some kind of verbal assault. He discovered to his surprise that he very much wanted to learn more about her. Wanted to know why she didn’t want children when she obviously liked babies enough to work around them every day. More than anything, though, he wanted her to keep looking at him as she had since her arrival on his doorstep that morning—as if she really cared about what happened to him.
He opened his mouth to say something—though what exactly, he wasn’t sure—when, as if on cue, Juliana erupted into consciousness in the room next door. Her unrelenting wails sent Zoey scurrying through the door and left him standing alone in the spare room. Only then did Jonas realize something very strange—
someone else was seeing to Juliana’s needs.
On the heels of that revelation, he discovered something else—for the first time he could recall, it felt kind of odd not seeing to her needs himself.
He shook the feeling off as he followed Zoey and the baby down to the kitchen, then watched as she expertly juggled infant in one hand and formula in the other. Her movements with Juliana were fluid and graceful, confident and capable. She cooed words of comfort to soothe the child while her breakfast was heating, and Juliana replied by quieting considerably. Zoey was clearly a woman who was more than comfortable caring for a baby, a woman who would obviously be able to handle a few of her own. Yet she had assured him she didn’t want any of her own. He couldn’t help but wonder why.
“Go on,” Zoey told him as she seated herself at the kitchen table to feed Juliana. “Don’t give either one of us a second thought. Enjoy your day of freedom.”
Enjoy your day of freedom.
Zoey’s words resounded in his brain as if bouncing off metal walls. Somehow, having the day to himself left him feeling anything but free. Zoey and Juliana would be ominously absent. And he was quite certain he would be giving more than a second thought to each of them.
Jonas nodded mutely and staggered backward from the two females in his kitchen. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought there would come a day when he’d find two females invading his home. Two females, he marveled further, and neither of them caring a whit for him. What was really funny, though, was the quietly dawning realization that he was growing quite fond of them both.
* * *
“Lesson number one,” Zoey said that evening as she and Jonas bent over the bathtub in the master bathroom. “Bathing the baby.”
She looked over to see how he was faring and was helpless to stop her smile. To say he appeared to be uncomfortable was a gross understatement. In fact, he seemed to be terrified.
She had placed Juliana’s plastic tub inside the larger bath tub, and now the baby sat inside it, splashing merrily at the warm water with swiftly gyrating hands and feet. Jonas supported her head with one hand and cupped the other over her pudgy little tummy, and the vision of the tiny, helpless baby held so securely by big, capable hands made Zoey’s smile broaden. Maybe there was hope for the two of them yet.