She. Despite the blue blanket, the baby was a girl. Shouldn’t have made any difference, but somehow he’d felt even more protective once he’d heard that. He hoped the doctor operating on her was good, that he was well rested and at the top of his game.
An hour went by, maybe two. Finally his patience was rewarded when Jackie came out to grab a can of cola from a vending machine in the hall. Dressed in scrubs, she leaned against the machine with exhaustion, a hand on her neck as she waited for the can to drop.
“Sore, huh?”
Her head shot up at his unexpected presence and she winced.
“Sorry. Shouldn’t have snuck up on you.” He wanted to make her sit down for a minute. Maybe get some ice for that neck. Or massage it for her. Instead he leaned over to snag her cola out of the machine. When he handed it to her, she pressed the cool can against the side of her neck.
“You should be at home, looking after yourself.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “It’s just a pulled muscle. I consider myself lucky.”
Whiplash would send most accident victims running for the nearest liability lawyer. Casey’s admiration for the woman increased. “How’s it going in there?”
“Not too bad. The burn victim…” She squeezed her eyes shut as if blocking a horrible mental picture. “He and our baby’s mom are the only fatalities. The really good news is that we had a young woman trapped in a car who couldn’t move her legs, but it turns out her injuries won’t be permanent.”
“What about the rig driver?”
“Amazingly, he walked away with minor cuts and a few bruises.”
“Life makes no sense sometimes.”
She looked at him as if what he had said was somehow profound. “Yes. Like that poor mother. Now that she’s dead, who’s going to look after her baby?”
He encountered tragedies like this all the time in his work. She must, too. Yet he had to agree that this particular situation hit harder than most.
“With any luck she has a good father,” he said.
“I hope they find him soon. Though I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to tell him what happened.”
He nodded, feeling again the sense of affinity that they’d shared at the accident scene. They’d been strangers, tossed into circumstances beyond their control, but their impulses had been identical. To help as many people as they could.
And now that the emergency was over, Casey was left with the strong feeling that he needed to see this woman again. Not because she was pretty, or sexy, though she was both those things. No, he felt a pull that had nothing to do with the usual reasons he sought out a woman.
“Jackie, I—”
She shifted her gaze from him to the floor and backed up a step. The movements were slight, but enough to make his confidence falter.
“I’ve got to get back in there. We need to treat a couple of fractured bones. Our baby’s still in the operating room…”
Our baby. He liked that she’d said it that way, connecting the two of them to the child they’d saved. “Is she okay? Do you think I could see her?”
The expression in her eyes softened. “That’s nice of you to be concerned. But her operation won’t be over for a while yet. I’m not sure if they’ll allow visitors after that.”
“Well, until they locate her next of kin, I feel kind of responsible for the squirt.”
“I do, too. But they will find her father soon, don’t you think?”
“Probably working on it right now.”
Jackie started to leave, then turned back. “Thanks for getting us to the hospital so quickly.”
Seeing Jackie smile at him, Casey felt an unaccustomed twisting of his heart. He really did feel the most inexplicable concern for that child—a paternal response that was shockingly out of character. He hadn’t been faking it just to win Jackie over.
But he had to admit that in the past, he wouldn’t have been above using tactics like that.
He suddenly felt ashamed.
“Jackie?”
She paused again, and he could tell she was impatient to move on.
“What time does your shift end?”
“Not for ten more hours. It was nice to meet you, Officer Guthrie.”
Then she was gone, having made it all too clear that she had no intention of seeing him again.
CASEY RODE ACROSS the street to the gas station, where he washed his regulation bike and filled it with gas. He chatted briefly with the woman at the till—he and Debbie were big fans of the Mighty Ducks—then headed the few blocks back to the station to park his bike in the garage and hand in his tickets for the day.
He found his lieutenant reading copy straight from the fax machine. Tank Gordon, in his forties but so clean-cut he could pass for ten years younger, checked him out.
“That was quite a mess on PCH today. You okay? What happened?”
“I’m fine. I was on my way back to the station at the end of my shift. The collision happened right in front of my eyes. First a sedan burst into flames. A tractor-trailer rig right next to it lost control and overturned. Cars piled up on both sides of the highway.” He shook his head, remembering.
“You left the scene without clearing an exit route for the emergency vehicles.”
Casey frowned. Was he being reprimanded here? “Backup had arrived, sir. We had lots of men on hand. I figured it was more important to get an injured baby to the hospital.”
“I heard.” The lieutenant was holding a grin in check.
“Huh?”
“They’re running footage on the evening news. Picked yourself a pretty little nurse, I’ll say that for you. Reminds me of Sally Fields in her younger days.”
Used to being teased about his ability to attract lovely women, Casey bristled this time. “Jackie Kellison was amazing out there. I’ll bet she saved more than a couple of lives.”
“So you didn’t notice her huge brown eyes? Or long, bare legs?”
“Cut the B.S., Lieutenant. In case you’ve forgotten, we had an injured baby on that bike, too. Her mother was killed in the crash.”
The lieutenant sobered with that. “Yeah. I know.”
“Any luck locating next of kin?” In those hours he’d paced the ER floor, Casey had worried a lot about the father. He couldn’t stop imagining the man coming home from work and wondering where his wife and baby were. Then the phone would ring and his life, as he’d known it, would come to an end….
Lieutenant Gordon turned to watch the fax machine slowly regurgitate a new sheet of paper. “Actually, the baby’s family is turning out to be a problem.”
“What do you mean, a problem?”
“We haven’t been able to ID the woman. And that car she was driving?” Gordon pulled out the latest fax and handed it to him. “Take a look at this.”
JACKIE’S SHIFT ENDED at dawn. She didn’t change out of her uniform since the shorts and top she’d been wearing yesterday afternoon were too torn and bloody to salvage. At the water fountain, she stopped to pop two muscle relaxants. She’d considered taking them earlier in her shift, but had worried that the medication might make her drowsy.
As a result