Suddenly she heard a sound—a sound odd and unexpected enough to make her quit jogging down the hall and stop for a second. The sound had seemed like a mewling baby’s cry—but of course, that was ridiculous. When she heard nothing again, she picked up her pace.
In the peach-and-cream kitchen, she flicked on the light, started her espresso machine, then peeled back toward her bedroom, mentally cataloguing what she still had to do. She needed coffee, her hair brushed, an apple for the road, and yeah, something to wear above the waist. She never wore a uniform—if you were going to dress for success with kids, you wore jeans and no symbols or labels to put them off—but that wasn’t to say she could arrive at a crash site topless. There were times she fantasized about giving Wayne an attack of apoplexy—God knew her boss was a hard-core chauvinist—but not today.
She pulled a sports bra over her head, burrowed in a drawer for an old black sweater…then jerked her head up again.
Damn. Somewhere there was a sound. An off-kilter, didn’t-belong-in-her-house sound. A puppy crying? A cat lost in the neighborhood somewhere nearby?
Silently, still listening, she straightened the sweater, pulled on socks, shoved her feet into boots, grabbed a brush. Her hair looked like a squirrel’s nest, but then that’s how it looked when it was freshly styled, too. A glance at her face in the bathroom mirror somehow, inexplicably, made her think of Justin again…and that dream in which his gaze had been all over her naked body.
She scowled in the mirror. First, strange dreams, then strange sounds—she’d seemed to wake up in la la land today, and on a morning when she needed to be her sharpest.
Swiftly she thumbed off the light and started hustling for real. In the kitchen, she poured coffee, then backtracked to the hall closet for her jacket, scooping up the stuff she needed: car keys, an apple, a lid for her espresso, some money for lunch. Almost the minute she finished collecting her debris, her feet seemed to be instinctively making a detour. One minute. That’s all she needed to check all the rooms and make absolutely positive that nothing was making that odd sound from inside the house. It wasn’t as if she lived in a mighty mansion that would take hours to check out. Her ranch-style house was downright miniscule—but it was hers. Hers and the bank’s, anyway.
She’d put a chunky down payment on it last year. She was twenty-eight, time to stop renting. Time to start making sure she had a place and security and in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and a good school system. Her bedroom was cobalt-blue and white, and, since decorating choices scared her, she’d just used the same colors in the bathroom. A second bedroom she used as a den, where she stashed her TV and computer—and anything she didn’t have time to put away. The third bedroom was the biggest, and stood starkly empty—Winona wasn’t admitting the room was intended for a baby, not to anyone, at least not yet. But it was.
The kitchen was a non-cook’s dream, practical, with lots of make-easy machines and tools, the counters and walls covered with warm peach tiles that led down into the living room. A cocoa couch viewed the backyard, bird feeders all over the place, lots of windows…damn. There, she heard the sound again. The mewling cry.
Either that or she was going out of her mind, which, of course, was always a possibility. But she unlatched the front door and yanked it open.
Her jaw surely dropped ten feet. Her ranch house was white adobe, with redbrick arches in the doorways. And there, in the doorway shadow, was a wicker laundry basket. The basket appeared to be stuffed with someone’s old, clean laundry, rags and sheets…but damned if that wasn’t where the crying sound emanated from.
The car keys slipped from her fingers and clattered to the cold steps. The apple slipped from her other hand and rolled down the drive, forgotten. She hunched down, quickly parting the folds and creases of fabric.
When she saw the baby, her heart stopped.
Abandoned. The baby had actually been abandoned.
“Ssh, ssh, it’s all right, don’t cry….” So carefully, so gingerly, she lifted out the little one. The morning was icy at the edges, the light still a predawn-gray. The baby was too swathed in torn-up blankets and rags to clearly make out its features or anything else.
“Ssh, ssh,” Winona kept crooning, but her heart was slamming, slamming. Feelings seeped through her nerves, through her heart from a thousand long-locked doors, bubbled up to the pain of naked air. She’d been abandoned as a child. She knew what an abandoned child felt like…and would feel like, her whole life.
A crinkle of paper slipped out of the basket. It only took Winona a few seconds to read the printed message.
Dear Winona Raye,
I have no way to take care of my Angel. You are the only one I could ask. Please love her.
Winona’s cop experience immediately registered several things—that there’d be no way to track the generic paper and ordinary print, that the writing was simple but not uneducated, and that somehow the mother of the baby knew her specifically—well enough to identify her name, and well enough to believe she was someone who would care for a baby.
Which, God knows, she would.
As swiftly as Winona read the note, she put it aside. There was no time for that now. The baby was wet beneath the blankets, the morning biting at the January-freezing temperatures. She scooped up the little one and hustled inside the warm house, rocking, crooning, whispering reassurances…all past the gulp in her throat that had to be bigger than the state of Texas.
God knew what she was going to do. But right now nothing mattered but the obvious. Taking care of the child. Making sure the little one was warm, dry, fed, healthy. Then Winona would try to figure out why anyone would have left the baby on her doorstep specifically…and all the other issues about what the child’s circumstances might be.
That fast, that instantaneously, Win felt a bond with the baby that wrapped around her heart tighter than a vise. The thing was, as little as she knew—she already knew too much.
She was already positive that the child was going to get thrown in the foster-care system, because that’s what happened when a child was deserted. Even if a parent immediately showed up, the court would still place the child in the care of Social Services—at least temporarily—because whatever motivated the parent to abandon the child could mean it wasn’t safe in their care. A change of heart wasn’t enough. An investigation needed to be conducted to establish what the child’s circumstances were.
Winona knew all those legal procedures—both from her job and from her life. And although she knew her feelings were irrational—and annoyingly emotional—it didn’t stop the instinct of bonding. The fierceness of caring. The instantaneous heart surge—even panic—to protect this baby better than she’d been protected. To save this baby the way she almost hadn’t been saved. To love this baby the way—to be honest—Winona never had been and never expected to be loved.
There were several coffee machines spread through Royal Memorial Hospital, but only one that counted. After he’d switched from trauma medicine to plastic surgery, Justin had generally tried to avoid the Emergency Room, but by ten that morning, he was desperate. Groggy-eyed, he pushed the coins into the machine, punched his choice of Straight Black, kicked the base—he knew this coffee machine intimately—and then waited.
He wasn’t standing there three minutes before he got a series of claps and thumps on his back. It was, “Hey, Dr. Webb, slumming down here?” and “Hi, Doc, we sure miss you” and “Dr. Webb, it’s nice to see you with us again.”
As soon