STORM: A Standalone Romance (33 page)

I was released from the hospital a week after the babies were born. In that time, a breast feeding expert came and spoke to me, showing me how to pump milk from my breasts, explaining how often I should do it and problems to watch out for. And then she sat with me and Cole in a back room of the NICU and showed me how to encourage him to latch on. He wasn’t quite strong enough yet to suck properly, but he was clearly interested in the process. The doctor said it would be a few weeks before he was strong enough to latch on long enough to nurse a full session. When he reached that point, he would be able to go home.

The girl wasn’t doing as well. They had her in a covered isolette and wouldn’t let us touch her. She had an infection when she was born that had gone unnoticed until then. They were treating her with some pretty serious medications. Her lungs were also under developed, so she was on oxygen and had to have medications to treat that, too. She was so tiny…I stared at her for a long time the first time I saw her, fear enveloping me. Her color wasn’t good. Her size was unbelievable. And she didn’t seem to move nearly as much as Cole did.

I stood over her isolette in street clothes—the first street clothes I’d worn in months—my hand pressed to the warm plastic as though she could feel it.

“You should give her a name.”

Nicolas was standing behind me, but he wasn’t looking at the baby. He was watching the nurse adjust Cole’s IV.

“I thought you’d like to do that.”

I glanced at him. “Me?”

He nodded, his eyes reluctantly moving up to my face. “You’re the reason she’s here. It only seems right that you should have some input.”

I wanted to believe him, but the way his eyes flicked toward her and then quickly moved away told me that he was convinced she wasn’t going to make it. But I knew deep in my heart that she wouldn’t have come this far if she wasn’t strong.

“Vivienne Martina,” I said quietly.

“Vivienne?”

“It means lively.” I glanced back at him. “Full of life.”

He nodded. “And Martina?”

My throat began to ache as tears burned there. “My mother’s name.”

He touched my shoulder lightly. “It’s beautiful.”

***

He drove me to his house and carefully helped me out of the car, holding my arm as I slowly made my way to the front door. Even though my surgery was a week ago, I was still sore. And, after two months in bed, my muscles seemed to have forgotten what to do. It was going to take me a while to get back into shape.

The house looked pretty much the same as it had the last time I saw it. I sat on the edge of the couch, the memory of the argument Nicolas and I were having when I first went into labor flashing through my mind. His expression was unreadable when I looked at him, so I was pretty sure he was remembering the same thing.

“You can stay in your old room, if you’d like. Or you can move closer to the nursery, if that would make you more comfortable.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, but then, I realized that he was referring to the closeness of the guest room I was previously staying in to his master bedroom. The nursery was on the other side of the hall, so the guest room beside it was as far from the master bedroom as possible.

Why would he think I wouldn’t want to near him?

I shrugged. “I don’t suppose it matters.”

Nicolas came closer to me, settling on the coffee table that sat in front of the couch. He leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees. He studied my face for a long minute.

“We haven’t really talked about what happens next.”

Again, I was a little lost. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what he was talking about.

“The doctor feels the babies should be on breast milk for at least six months.” He paused, again searching my face as though he expected to see something disagreeable there. “I know six months is a long time. If you’d rather I contract with a milk bank—”

“No. It’s better for them if it comes from me.”

He inclined his head slightly. “But I’ve already forced you to give up five months of your life to me and the babies. I can’t, in all conscious, ask you to give up more. But…” He straightened up and dragged his fingers through his hair. “I will double the fees the contract promised you. And, as we talked about before, you’ll get pictures every two months and you’re more than welcome to come visit them whenever you want.”

“Whenever I want?”

A deep sadness settled in his eyes as he regarded me. “It seems only fair since you went through so much to get them here.”

My heart seemed to dance in my chest. I had thought he would send me away and never let me see them. But this…it was more than I could have hoped for.

“What about Virginia?”

Nicolas’ face tightened again. “She’s still pushing forward with this custody battle. We have a court date in three months. Until then, the judge has ruled that she should be allowed a visit once a week with the babies at the hospital. She was supposed to show up last night, but she never did.”

“I’m really sorry about that. I honestly thought I was trying to help.”

Nicolas opened his mouth to respond, but then snapped it shut again. He stood up and went to the back doors, resting his hand against the glass as he stared out at the back garden.

“Right now, all I care about is getting Cole and Vivienne home safe. Whatever comes after that, I guess we’ll deal with it then.”

He seemed almost vulnerable as he stood there. I wanted to go to him and tell him everything was going to be okay, but I didn’t really know that, did I? This whole mess, it was my fault. I should have kept my nose out of it. I never was much good at that.

     I went upstairs a few minutes later and unpacked the bags Adam had brought to my room for me. I opened the drawer in the bedside table and found a bag of Xanax I’d hidden there months ago. I picked it up, remembering the stack of bags like this, some filled with prescription drugs, one or two filled with cocaine. I’d found the drugs in a false bottom of a drawer in Nicolas’ bathroom. Constance took the other bags away, giving them to Adam to dispose of. But I hid this bag because it was Xanax that Nicolas was accused of slipping into Aurora’s drink the night she died. I didn’t want Constance to see it. She was already convinced that Nicolas was guilty for reasons I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to give her more fuel for that particular fire.

Nicolas never mentioned the missing drugs. That meant they weren’t his, right? I mean, I never thought they were, but Constance has known him longer than me. If she has suspicions…I can’t help but wonder. But I can’t really make myself believe that Nicolas is guilty of hurting his wife, let alone stupid enough to keep the evidence here in the house. Nicolas was a complicated guy. He had a pretty messed up childhood. His mother was a drug addict who used him in ways that are unspeakable. And that’s made him weary when it comes to trusting other people. But he’s a good man. Despite Constance’s doubts, I believed he was innocent of these charges.

I don’t know why I held on to the drugs. And I don’t know why I just tossed them back into the drawer.

I curled up in a big, comfortable chair by the window and pulled out the breast pump. My arms felt empty. And my belly was suddenly this big, alien thing. It wasn’t the flat—or semi-flat—part of my anatomy it was before the babies, but it wasn’t the hugely rounded bump it was with them. It was somewhere in between, a foreign thing that felt like someone else’s body. My pre-pregnancy clothes didn’t fit. My maternity clothes didn’t fit. I felt...odd.

I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. I was thinking about the day Nicolas kissed me in the living room downstairs before I was pregnant, before everything fell apart. I told myself afterward that I was horrified by what he’d done. But, in reality, it was the most intense thing I’d felt up until that moment in my life.

His kiss was mind-blowing. I used to read that phrase in romance novels and I’d roll my eyes. No kiss could be that intense, right? But then I met Nicolas and from that first moment—even with Aurora in the room, talking about how happy having a baby would make the two of them—there was something about the way he looked at me that made my bones turn to liquid. I thought it was because he was handsome and he had this deep voice that was just irresistible. But when he kissed me that day, I knew I was lost.

I bit his lip. Even now I wanted to laugh at the memory of the shock on his face. I don’t think anyone had ever denied him in that way before.

Not that my resistance lasted long. The moment he came to retrieve me—the babies—I jumped most willingly into bed with him. And again and again after he brought me to Los Angeles. In fact, I was in his arms not more than fifteen minutes before we argued and I went into labor on Thanksgiving Day.

It killed me when we argued. And it hurt every time he came to see me, but refused to speak to me. But then, when I went into labor in the middle of the night, he was there. Why was he there? Was he there every night? I remember a nurse mentioning once that he never asked for a blanket. I hadn’t thought to ask then what she was talking about. But now…did he spend most nights there? If so, why did he never wake me? Why didn’t he tell me?

And now. He wanted me to stay for six months. For the babies.

Was it wrong of me to hope there was a little more to it than that? To hope that he wanted me to stay because he cared about me?

Did I want to stay for him?

I’d been so focused on the babies, on the idea of never seeing them again. But was there more to my motivation, too?

I loved the way it felt when he touched me. I loved lying with him in his bed. I loved…hell, there wasn’t anything about it I didn’t like. But did that mean I was in love with him?

Was I in love with Nicolas Costa?

“Okay, Cole, let’s see if we can do this.”

I touched the baby’s cheek, and he immediately turned his head toward my finger. That was a good sign. The nurse said they’d delayed his afternoon feeding because they knew I was coming. He was clearly hungry. The only question was, would that translate into him latching on and nursing as he should?

I set him in my lap and opened my blouse, tugging my breast out of my bra. Three weeks we’d been doing this, and for three weeks Cole did little more than gum at my nipple. The nurse said that was normal, that a preemie didn’t always understand the connection between suckling and nourishment, especially when he was used to getting his fill through a tube run down his throat. Cole was doing well otherwise, gaining weight and passing all the standards the doctors set for him. He just had to learn how to nurse so that he could go home.

I really wanted to take him home. And I knew Nicolas did, too.

I lifted the baby into my arms and rubbed my nipple against his lips. He opened his mouth, but like all the times before, he just kind of gummed at it. A little milk came out, anyway, since my breasts seemed always ready to explode—but it didn’t encourage him to suck.

Frustration welled in my chest as I whispered to him. “Come on, Cole, just try.”

But he just kept gumming.

I felt like a failure. Wasn’t this supposed to be one of those things that just came naturally? Shouldn’t I just know, instinctively, how to do this? Why was he having so much trouble figuring it out?

There was a tap on the door. I thought it was the nurse, coming to take Cole back to his isolette. I was only supposed to have him in this little room for a few minutes. They worried he’d get too cold being out of his isolette. I wasn’t ready to give him up, so I pretended I didn’t hear the tap as I bent to kiss the top of Cole’s warm, sweet, little head.

“Everything okay?”

It was Nicolas. I’d last seen him holding Vivienne in what they called a kangaroo hold where he unbuttoned his shirt and placed the baby’s bare skin against his. I must have been incredibly insane because I found the scene intensely sexy. How someone could find a man holding his child sexy, I don’t know. But I did. And now I felt weird about it.

That, coupled with my frustrations, just broke a dam. I started to cry, big teardrops dripping on the baby’s cheek.

“Hey,” Nicolas said, closing the door and coming to sit beside me on the tiny loveseat. “What’s the matter?”

“I can’t do this,” I mumbled. “He won’t take to it. And if he doesn’t, he’ll never be allowed to come home. And if I can’t figure out how to do it with him, how will I ever do it with Vivienne? And she needs this so much more than Cole, and I just—”

“Slow down,” Nicolas said, as he slid his arm around me. “One thing at a time.”

“He won’t nurse. I don’t know why.”

“Are you doing everything the lactation consultant told you to do?”

“I think so.”

“Do you mind if I try?”

I glanced at him, a comical image of him trying to get the baby to nurse from his small nipples filling my mind. If I hadn’t felt so desolate, I might have laughed. Instead, I just shrugged.

Nicolas ran his hand over the back of the baby’s head, caressing him with such gentleness that it almost broke my heart. He was so good with the babies. At first, it seemed like he favored Cole. I thought maybe it was because he was a boy. But then, after we gave Vivienne a name and the doctors began to offer encouraging news about her progress, he began spending as much time studying her through the walls of her covered isolette, the first to hold her and the first to try the kangaroo hold. He was clearly devoted to both babies, and that eased the few remaining doubts I’d had.

Not that the opinion of the surrogate had any weight.

Nicolas held the back of the baby’s head to keep him close to my breast. Then, he touched me, lifting my breast a little, squeezing my areola between two fingers to encourage more of it into Cole’s mouth. The baby’s eyes widened as he took it, suddenly sucking down with a force that took my breath away.

“That’s my boy,” Nicolas said with a little bit of chuckle.

“He’s doing it.”

“He is.”

I glanced at him, his smile irresistible.

“Thank you.”

He shrugged even as he leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Anytime,” he whispered against me.

Cole came home two days later.

Nicolas made a big deal of taking pictures as I carefully carried the baby up the front steps of the house. I was scared to death of dropping him on the marble steps, but I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face. The moment we were through the front door, Nicolas swept Cole from my arms.

“Welcome home, my boy,” he said, swinging around so that the sleeping baby could take in everything. I don’t think Cole cared much. He nursed right before we left the hospital, so he was good for a few hours. Eating, sleeping, clean diapers…that was about all Cole cared about at this point.

Adam and Constance joined us in the living room, big smiles on their faces. Constance fussed over Cole like he was the first baby she’d ever seen. I couldn’t help the pride I felt as I watched.

“This deserves a toast!”

Nicolas brought a bottle into the room that was nicely chilled if the bit of frost on it said anything. He poured four glasses and brought two to where I was standing by the back doors, whispering against my ear, “Apple cider.”

I smiled, touched that he would make such a concession for me—especially when he raised his glass and announced, “I’m sure it’ll be all over the news later, but I wanted to be the first to tell all of you. My lawyers called this morning.”

Constance looked up from where she was staring into Cole’s face, making funny little cooing sounds. There was a sudden tightness to her eyes that annoyed me. I knew Constance well enough to know her expressions. And I knew this expression was one that said whatever Nicolas was about to announce was wrong.

But Adam…he was beaming like all was perfect in the world.

“The waiter in New York who swears he saw me put something in Aurora’s glass?” Nicolas looked at me, his eyes actually twinkling. “He recanted his story. Now he insists that Aurora took the pills quite willingly the second I left the room.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, turning into him. “I knew he was lying.”

“He was lying. He has a record a mile long, and he was trying to make a deal in another case against him. But when the DA failed to keep up his end of the deal in this other case, the guy changed his story.”

“So they have to drop charges against you now.”

“They have.”

Relief washed through me in wave after wave of pure emotion. I laughed as I threw my arms around Nicolas’ neck.

“That’s incredible!”

Nicolas’ arms came around my waist, and he tugged me so tight against him that the familiar feel of his body woke something deep inside of me that had gone dormant during my time in the hospital. However, it also made me conscious of my soft, flabby stomach. I took a step back, but Nicolas’ arm tightened around my waist.

He studied my face for a long second, clouds of emotion floating through his eyes. Spontaneously, I reached up and kissed him lightly on his lips.

I don’t know what got into me, or if it was even something I should have done. But when he tugged me closer to him and deepened the kiss, I was grateful that being near him made me forget my fears and act on whims like that.

He let me go a moment later, and I caught Constance watching us. Disapproval radiated from her eyes. I withered under her gaze, the wonder and excitement of Nicolas’ kiss dying on my lips.

“I should take Cole upstairs,” I said, slipping him from her arms and leaving the room, my heart pounding as if I’d just got caught drinking wine behind the rectory or something.

I didn’t understand Constance’s problem with Nicolas. But I planned to find out.