Excerpt of Baby Wanted by Cathie Linz

"I can't believe I did that!" Lori Parker Bains
moaned, wishing she could hide under the closest bale of hay.

When Lori had set out that chilly November morning,
stoically determined to attend Kane Hunter's wedding, she
never dreamed she'd end up in the church basement along with
the stored props for next month's Christmas pageant, rolling
in the hay with…

"We both did it," her ex-husband, Travis, languidly murmured from right beside her.

"It was a mistake," Lori declared, her voice as
unsteady as her fingers as she sat up and hurriedly sought
to redo the button front of her deep purple dress, which
Travis had so recently undone.

There was a moment of utter silence. Then Travis muttered,
"Damn right it was a mistake." His curt statement
was punctuated by the sound of him angrily zipping his
slacks, the noise adding an emphatic exclamation point to
his words. Cursing under his breath, he sat up and jammed
his feet into his expensive gray snakeskin boots.

Staring at him, Lori saw Travis as if for the first time, as
if he were a seductive stranger who'd just taken her
innocence. The teenager she'd married had matured into a
hard man, and she was struck dumb by the sheer physical
impact of him—tall, strong, mysterious. A woman's
fantasy of a cowboy lover. His rippling muscles were formed
by hard work on his ranch, not by any workouts in a fancy gym.

She blinked, willing herself to remember that this man was
her ex-husband and therefore not suitable material for her
fantasies.

"We're divorced, for heaven's sakes," Lori stated in
that logical tone of voice she used on her patients.
"Have been for five years."

"And six months, but who's counting," he said.

"It was the wedding," Lori insisted, tugging loose
bits of hay from her short blond hair. "And the
champagne they had at the celebration beforehand."

"Which you barely touched."

"You had enough for both of us," she retorted.

"Sure, blame it on me. You're real good at that,
Lori," Travis mockingly noted. He wasn't about to admit
that the reason he'd been so pleased to toast Kane Hunter's
wedding was because the good doctor was marrying Moriah and
not Lori. Travis was all too well aware that Kane and Lori
had been more than just working associates—the two had
been dating before Moriah had returned to Whitehorn. The one
time Travis had seen the doctor kiss Lori on her front
porch, he'd wanted to tear Hunter's tongue from his throat.

For her part, Lori ignored Travis's accusation. As a
certified nurse-midwife, she was used to assisting with new
beginnings, new life. But she didn't want a new beginning
with Travis. There was no new life to be had in their
relationship.

So why did you just make love with him? a persistent voice
in her head demanded.

"It was just sex," Lori muttered.

"Damn good, incredible sex!" Travis retorted.

She couldn't argue with him there.

"Besides, you were the one who started this by
crying," he reminded her.

"It's not my fault," she said, defending the teary-eyed state that had sent her scurrying down the steps into the empty basement while all the other guests boisterously took off with the happy couple for the reception being given elsewhere. All the guests except for Travis. "I always cry at weddings," she added. But she'd cried more at this one.

Because Kane's wedding to Moriah put a final nail in the
coffin of Lori's dreams—her dreams of settling down
and raising a family with Kane. Deep down, Lori knew she was
crying more for the lost dream than for Kane. She knew he
belonged with his first love, Moriah.

But it was hard—damn hard—to be sensible and to
maintain a stiff upper lip when you saw the wave of reality
sweeping away the sand castles you'd so lovingly built. The
future she'd thought she'd have was gone, her plans washed
away. She'd been alone again. Until Travis had taken her
into his arms and comforted her and kissed her… and
made love to her.

"You didn't cry at our wedding," he reminded her.

His words made her pause. Her hesitant gaze settled on
Travis's face. The only illumination in the crowded basement
came from the exit sign over the door leading to the steps,
and from the single frosted window high up on the wall.

The winter sunlight coming in through that window
transformed his face into a study of shadows and angles. His
jaw was as uncompromising as the nearby snow-covered
mountains. His hair had been recently trimmed and just
brushed the top of his ears on the side, falling to the
collar of his shirt on his back. In the summer his light
brown hair was streaked with blond, turning it golden, but
now that winter was beginning to grip the countryside, the
color was a little darker. She knew he'd been a towhead as a
kid; his dad had shown her boxes filled with photos.

A beam of watery sunlight landed on his hand as he reached
for his sheepskin jacket. She knew that hand as well as her
own. She knew he'd gotten the scar between his thumb and
index finger at the tender age of six, when he'd tried to
rope his first calf. Those lean fingers of his had been the
first to ever touch her intimately.

Looking at his broad back, Lori wondered where she and Travis had gone wrong. They'd been high school sweethearts. He'd sat next to her the first day of her freshman-year English class, and when he'd turned those incredible blue eyes of his her way, kabang! She'd fallen for him like a baby grand piano pushed out of a tenth-story window.

To her amazement, he'd seemed to fall for her, too. They'd
dated steadily until graduation and gotten married in early
August. It had seemed meant to be. Fate. Her destiny.

Travis was absolutely right; Lori hadn't cried at her own
wedding, which had taken place in this very church. She'd
been too euphoric, too excited. Her dreams were coming true.
It had been the happiest day of her entire life. A perfect ten.

Less than six years later, her happily ever after was
over— done in by reality. Not by infidelity, or any
other momentous rendering. No, it had been done in by things
like overwhelming workloads, lack of money, lack of time
together. They'd grown apart.

Lori had always hated that phrase. She was a firm believer
in fixing things that went wrong. But how could you fix
something too vague, too ethereal to put your hands on? She
only knew that the love she and Travis had shared had
somehow melted like the winter snows in the spring, leaving
emptiness behind.

Immediately after the divorce, Lori had moved away from her
hometown of Whitehorn to the big city of Great Falls,
Montana. There she'd continued her work as a registered
nurse, in the delivery room of one of the city's larger
hospitals, while also going on to specialize in clinical
midwifery skills. She'd stayed in Great Falls almost three
years, and by the time she'd left, she'd passed the rigorous
certification process that made her a CNM—certified
nurse-midwife—and was working at a well-respected
birthing center in the city.

Almost three years ago she'd returned to Whitehorn to join
the small medical team at the Whitehorn Family Practice. In
addition to that, one day a week she worked with Dr. Kane
Hunter out at the Laughing Horse Reservation, doing prenatal
clinics. She'd returned to her hometown because she'd felt
needed here.

She'd known she would run into Travis; Whitehorn was too
small for her not to. But she'd managed. Quite well. Until
now. Now she'd fallen off the wagon big-time. And they
hadn't even practiced safe sex. Her face burned at the
memory. After all the speeches she'd given to young women,
after all the pamphlets she'd handed out… "I
can't believe I did that," she repeated, her moan even
more distraught this time.

"We did it, and which part can't you believe?" Travis countered. "The part where you came apart in my arms or the part where you dug in and demanded more?"

"The part where you didn't use a condom," she
snapped back furiously.

"There was never a need when we were married."

That was true. They'd both been virgins when they'd gotten
married. And the threat of AIDS wasn't something they'd
worried about. For birth-control purposes, Lori had taken
the pill in those days. "We aren't married anymore,"
she curtly reminded him.

"I didn't come down here expecting this to happen,"
he growled.

"We should have stopped."

Her eyes caught his intensely blue ones and she looked away.
There were too many memories in his eyes for her to deal
with now, memories of the passionate explosion they'd just
shared. Things between them had ignited faster than a brush
fire.

"Twenty-twenty hindsight is useless," Travis stated.
"And if you're worried about communicable diseases,"
he added bluntly, "there's no need. I got a clean bill
of health a few months ago at the hospital's blood drive."

"Same here," she said.

"I'm not in a high-risk category," he told her curtly.

"Neither am I."

"You mean you haven't… you and Kane
didn't…?"

"I'm not talking about that with you," she said.

"You talk about sex-education stuff with half the
population of this county," he reminded her.

"You're not asking for factual information, you're
asking for personal information."

"We just made love, Lori. I think that gives me the
right to get personal—"

"You think wrong," she interrupted. "You often
did," she angrily tacked on. Her emotions were a jumble
of contradictions, too mixed-up to untangle at the moment.
She only knew there was no going back. First and foremost
she felt the need to protect herself, to reduce her
vulnerability. "I've got my own life now. My own dreams.
And they don't include you."

Shooting her a look fiery enough to incinerate the entire
building, Travis grabbed his black felt Stetson, turned on
the heel of his custom-made boots and walked out.

Two weeks later, Lori grimaced as she approached the
White-horn County Hospital staff room. Her period had come,
along with the attendant cramps, and she'd been feeling
weepy all day.

Why? She turned thirty today, but that wasn't the reason for
her emotional state. The weepiness was caused by the fact
that, with her period coming, she now knew she wasn't
pregnant. There had been a good possibility that she might
have been after her interlude with Travis.

It was only now that she realized how much she'd been
secretly contemplating the idea of having a baby, savoring
the possibilities since she and Travis had made love. Not
the possibilities with Travis; she knew better than that.
But to have a little baby of her own to love… The
tugging appeal of that had crept up on her and stolen into
her heart.

Since becoming a midwife, Lori had helped and guided more
than two hundred mothers in delivering healthy babies. She'd
seen the miracle of birth firsthand and up close. But she'd
never experienced it herself. She'd always had to hand the
baby over—into its mother's loving arms. She'd never
been able to keep any of the infants herself. She'd never
had an infant nursing at her own breast. And she wanted
that. Wanted it badly.

Blinking away the threat of tears, Lori took a deep breath
before entering the hospital's staff room. A nice, calming
cup of hot tea was called for here….

"Surprise!" a dozen people shouted all at once,
swarming around Lori. "Happy birthday!"

Lori knew she had to look as stunned as she felt. The staff
lounge, so recently decorated for the upcoming holidays, had
additional birthday decorations festooned from the walls.

Molly, a nurse who worked with Lori at the Whitehorn Family
Practice, hurried to her side. "I guess you thought we
forgot about your birthday, huh?"

"I'd just as soon have forgotten my thirtieth birthday," someone in the group good-naturedly noted.

"We wanted to surprise you," Molly continued excitedly.

"You certainly did that," Lori noted with a wobbly
smile.

The next fifteen minutes were filled with laughter and the mocking black humor so often found among those in the medical profession. It was reflected in their presents to Lori— a pair of bifocals, a T-shirt that said Thirty Isn't Old… for a Tree! and a funeral wreath with the words May your youth rest in peace, Lori! written on the black-ribbon banner.

Dr. Errol Straker put a temporary damper on the celebration
when he made an appearance. He carried a lot of weight in
the small hospital and he never let Lori forget that fact.
He also disapproved of nurse-midwives, and his subtle and
not-so-subtle verbal cuts reminded Lori that her
professional battle for equity wasn't over by a long shot.

Some might actually consider Dr. Straker, with his silvery
hair and brown eyes, to be a fairly good-looking man, albeit
an unbearably superior one. He was in his mid-forties and
wore power as if it were indelibly starched into his white
lab coat.

"I heard you girls were having a party back here,"
Dr. Straker noted with a joviality that Lori knew to be
fake. He often used that tone when preparing to deliver a
real zinger. Boldly walking over and cutting himself a piece
of cake, he then turned and asked, "So who's the lucky
birthday girl?"

"Lori," someone replied.

Straker's laser gaze settled on her, his expression one of
indulgent condescension. "Ah, our little rebel midwife.
Well, enjoy things while you can, Lori." He patted her
on the shoulder. "The future is always filled with
uncertainty, isn't it?" He smiled again, this time like
a wily ferret, and then thankfully was gone, taking his
pilfered piece of cake with him.

"Imagine Straker the Streaker putting in an
appearance," one of the nursery nurses murmured, using
the supercilious doctor's nickname.

"He probably just wanted to sample the air we poor peons
breath," someone else replied.

"Not to mention sampling the cake," the secretary
from Admissions added.

With much laughter, everyone hurried to sample some of the
delicious devil's food cake provided by Molly, who possessed
a chocolate thumb where baked goodies were concerned. The
intricate holiday gingerbread house on display back at the
Whitehorn Family Practice was another of her creations.

"You look depressed," Molly noted as she joined Lori
in a relatively quiet corner of the room. "I hope the
presents didn't make you feel too bad. You know how this
gang is…."

Lori shook her head. "It's not that."

"What then?"

"I know it sounds like a cliché, but I'm starting
to feel my biological clock ticking. And it's sounding like
a time bomb about to go off," Lori said a bit morosely,
while brushing a crumb of chocolate cake from her trademark
lavender lab coat. "I'm thirty already. A lot of my
patients have two kids or more by the time they're my age."

"And they look twice your age. You may be thirty, but
you look like you're barely out of high school."

"That's not an advantage in my profession. It's a little
difficult to inspire trust in my patients when they keep
asking me how old I am," Lori noted.