Page 23 of Baby for Dr. Damaged

“I think it might be more than just offense.” But I can’t keep the smile off my face as I realize how much he wants me to spend the night in here, in his bed, and not elsewhere, in the guest room.

“It would be.” He pulls me even closer, like he wants to try and keep me. “Go to sleep, Amanda.”

My eyes close. This isn’t what I meant to happen today. It’s not how I meant to spend the night, either. But I’m learning to love the way that things turn out when Jackson is around. As long as I’m smart about it, I think that I’ll be able to balance our personal and our professional relationship without him thinking any less of me.

It’s the last thought that I have before sleep overtakes me.

Chapter eleven

Jackson

“Alright,”Isay,earlythe next morning and the word seems almost too heavy. The nanny has already ushered Bonnie off to school, post piano playing. She’s feeling much better after yesterday, but I’ve sent a note along to the teachers, so they don’t make her go through PE today.

Amanda looks up from where she’s perched on the arm of the couch, brushing out her hair and tying it up into a knot. “Alright? What’s alright?”

“I’ll talk with the chief about getting a team put together.” I turn away from her, sliding the coffee cup into the top drawer of the dishwasher, to be run later. The idea of it is still stiff inside my chest. Sometimes, knowing that I’ve helped other people isn’t enough.

The grief of not having been fast enough to help my wife weighs on me, in a manner that I’ve never quite been able to put into words. It’s this constant shadow at my back; if I had started looking sooner, if I had figured it out faster. If I could have come up with a cure, and not just a way to identify it.

And over the years, that has been a driving force for me. It’s part of why I excel in my field. I am constantly trying to do better, to make up for what was lost. Extra hours. Extra shifts. Extra, extra, extra.

But it’s also been a block.

I know that Lawrence’s son has been sick for years. And the thought of not being fast enough for Harris, too, has stopped me from even trying.

I don’t hear Amanda when she gets up. I just feel her arms wrap around me from behind, and then the way that she leans against me. Her forehead presses against my shoulder blade, and in a soft almost trembling voice, she tells me, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” The words come out too sharp. I have to quell my own emotions and repeat, more softly, “Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything yet, and I’m not promising that I’ll be able to actually get anything done.”

“But you’ll help, and that’s enough,” says Amanda. Her lips brush over my back. “I wouldn’t be able to even start researching it without you.”

I turn around in her arms finally, and wrap an arm around her, bringing her close to me. Our lips meet, a slower, tender slide than there usually is. I lean into the kiss, mouthing at her lower lip, and only pull back when we’re both breathless and red-faced.

My fingers brush over her cheek, and she smiles. It’s the sun condensed down into the curl of her lips and the flash of her teeth.

“I’ll see if I can get it approved,” I tell her. “But I’m not making any promises on that, either. Randal can be a hard-ass when it comes to that sort of thing.”

Amanda nods. “Asking about it—”

She’s going to say that asking about it is enough, but it’s not. Doing something isn’t enough, either.

Finding a cure, that would be the only thing that would deserve an ounce of thanks from her, and even that would require it being found in time. Even that would be debatable, just based on how long I’ve put off trying to find one.

So I interrupt her, “Is all that I can promise to do.”

Maybe she understands it, because even though her smile doesn’t dim, her expression goes much softer, and she leans forward, pressing a kiss to the corner of my mouth. “I’m going to drive in to work, and I’ll see you there, okay?”

I nod at her and watch her go. In hindsight, she’s just leaving to give me time to compose myself a little bit more, but at the moment, all I can do is crane my head to the side and watch her ass as she leaves.

The door clicks shut. I’m alone in the house. Once the coffee pot is emptied out, I pad into my bedroom to get dressed, running through the same motions and routines as always. Right before I leave, I gather up the bed sheets—with the proof of our joining stained onto the fabric—and toss them into the washing machine myself.

A quick note is jotted down and left for the housekeeper, asking to make sure that they get dried, and the bed is remade, and then I’m off.

But it’s not a peaceful ride to work. I spend the whole time thinking about what I’m going to tell Randal. He’s the chief of medicine at Mercy General, which means that everything has to be run past him. Every decision, every budget cut, every research project—if he doesn’t approve of it, then it’s not going to happen.

Which means that if I want to get this team together for Amanda, I need to convince Randal that it’s worth the money being poured into the funding for the project, despite the fact that Margur’s is a fairly rare disease.

I have a few tricks up my sleeve though. For one, his sister and my wife used to be very good friends. They went to college with each other. Funny how that turns out, isn’t it?

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