A Christmas Blessing Read online

  Standing on shaky legs, she began the endless trek through the deepening snow, cursing and clutching her stomach as she bent over with yet another ragged pain. The wind-whipped snow stung her cheeks and mingled with tears. The already deepening drifts made walking treacherous and slow.

  “A little farther,” she encouraged herself. Three steps. Four. One foot onto the wide sweep of a porch. Then the other. She had made it! She paused and sucked in a deep breath, then looked around her.

  The desolate air about the place had only intensified as she’d drawn closer. There was no wreath of evergreens on the front door, no welcoming light shining on the porch or from any of the rooms that she could detect. For the first time, she allowed a panicky thought. What if she had made it this far, only to find herself still alone? What if Luke had packed his bags and flown away for the holidays?

  “Please, God, let someone be here,” she prayed as she hit the doorbell again and again, listening to the chime echo through the house. She pounded on the glass, shouted, then punched the doorbell again.

  She heard a distant crash, a loud oath, then another crash. Apparently Luke was home, she thought dryly, as she began another insistent round of doorbell ringing.

  “For cripe’s sakes, hold your horses, dammit!”

  A light switch was thrown and the porch was illuminated in a warm yellow glow. Finally, just as another contraction ripped through Jessie, the door was flung open.

  She was briefly aware of the thunderstruck expression on Luke’s face and his disheveled state, only marginally aware of the overpowering scent of alcohol.

  And then, after a murmured greeting she doubted made a lick of sense, she collapsed into the arms of the man who’d killed her husband.

  Chapter Two

  “What in blazes…?”

  Luke folded his arms around the bundled-up form who’d just pitched forward. Blinking hard in an attempt to get his eyes to focus, he zeroed in on a face that had once been burned into his brain, a face he’d cursed himself for cherishing when he had no right at all. He’d seen that precious face only minutes ago in the sweetest dream he’d ever had. For an instant he wondered if he was still dreaming.

  No, he could feel her shape, crushed against his chest. He drank in the sight of her. Her long, black hair was tucked up in a stocking cap. Her cheeks, normally pale as cream, had been tinted a too-bright pink by the cold. Her blue eyes were shadowed with what might have been pain, but there was no mistaking his sister-in-law.

  “Jessie,” he whispered, worriedly taking in the lines of strain on her forehead, the trickle of sweat that was likely to turn to ice if he didn’t get her out of the freezing night in a hurry.

  When in hell had it turned so bitter? he wondered, shivering himself. There hadn’t been a snowflake in sight when he’d sent Consuela off. Now he couldn’t see a patch of uncovered ground anywhere. Couldn’t see much of anything beyond the porch, for that matter.

  More important than any of that, what was his sister-in-law doing here of all places? Was she ill? Feverish? She would have had to be practically delusional or desperate to turn up on his doorstep.

  He scooped her up, rocking back on his heels with the unexpected weight of her, startled that the little slip of a thing he’d remembered was bulging out of her coat. She moaned and clutched at her belly, shuddering against him.

  She’s going to have a baby, he realized at last, finally catching on to what would have been obvious to anyone who was not in an alcohol-altered state of mind. No one in the family had told him that. Not that he’d done more than exchange pleasantries with any of them in months. And Jessie would have been the last person they would have mentioned. Everyone walked on eggshells around him when it came to anything having to do with his late brother. If only they had known, if only they had realized that his guilt was compounded because he’d fallen for Erik’s wife, they would never have spoken to him at all.

  “You’re going to have a baby,” he announced in an awestruck tone.

  Bright blue eyes, dulled by pain, snapped open. “You always were quick, Lucas,” Jessie said tartly. “Do you suppose you could get me to a bed and find Consuela before I deliver right here in the foyer?”

  “You’re going to have a baby now?” he demanded incredulously, as the immediacy of the problem sank in. He would have dropped her if she hadn’t been clinging to his neck with the grip of a championship arm wrestler.

  “That would be my best guess,” she agreed.

  Luke was so stunned—so damned drunk—he couldn’t seem to come to any rational decision. If Jessie had realized his condition, she would have headed for the barn and relied on one of the horses for help. He had a mare who was probably more adept at deliveries than he was at this precise moment. His old goat, Chester, was pretty savvy, too. Jessie would have been in better hands with them, than she likely was with him.

  “Lucas?” Her voice was low and sweet as honey. “Could you please…”

  He sighed just listening to her. The sweetest little voice in all of Texas.

  “Get me into a bed!”

  The shout accomplished what nothing else had. He began to move. He staggered ever so slightly, but he got her into the closest bedroom, his, and settled her in the middle of sheets still rumpled from the previous night. And several nights before that, as near as he could recall. He’d ordered Consuela to stay the hell out of his bedroom after he’d found little packets of some sweet-smelling stuff in his sock drawer.

  He stood gazing down at Jessie, rhapsodizing to himself about her presence in his bed, marveling at the size of that belly, awestruck by the fact that she was going to have a baby here and now.

  “Luke,” she said in a raspy voice that was edged with tension. “I’m going to need a little help here.”

  “Help?” he repeated blankly.

  “My clothes.”

  “Oh.” He blinked rapidly as he watched her trying to struggle out of her coat. Awkwardly, she shrugged it off one shoulder, then the other. When she started to fumble with the buttons on her blouse, his throat worked and his pulse zoomed into the stratosphere.

  “Lucas!”

  The shout got his attention. “Oh, yeah. Right,” he said and tried to help with the buttons.

  For a man who’d undressed any number of women in his time, he was suddenly all thumbs. In fact, getting Jessie out of her clothes—the simple cotton blouse, the oddly made jeans, the lacy bra and panties—was an act of torture no man should have to endure. Trying to be helpful, she wriggled and squirmed in a way that brought his fingers into contact with warm, smooth skin far too frequently. Trying to look everywhere except at her wasn’t helping him with the task either. Every glimpse of bare flesh made his knees go weak.

  The second she was stripped bare, he muffled a groan, averted his gaze and hunted down one of his shirts. He did it for his own salvation, not because she seemed aware of anything except the demands her baby was making on her body. Surely there was a special place in hell for a man whose thoughts were on sex when a woman was about to have a baby right before his eyes.

  She looked tiny—except for that impressively swollen belly—and frightened as a doe caught in a hunter’s sights. He felt a powerful need to comfort her, if only he could string an entire sentence together without giving away his inebriated state. If she knew precisely how drunk he was, she wouldn’t be scared. She’d be flat-out terrified, and rightfully so. He wasn’t so serene himself.

  “Where’s Consuela?” she asked, then let out a scream that shook the rafters. She latched on to his hand so hard he was sure that at least three bones cracked. That grip did serve a purpose, though. It snapped him back to reality. Pain had a way of making a man focus on the essentials.

  The baby clearly wasn’t going to wait for him to sober up. It wasn’t going to wait for a doctor, even if one could make it to the ranch on the icy roads, which Luke doubted.

  “Consuela’s in Mexico by now,” he confessed without thinking. “She left earli
er today.” When panic immediately darkened her eyes, he instinctively patted her hand. “It’s going to be okay, darlin’. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  “I’m…not…worried,” she said between gasps. “Shouldn’t you boil water or something?”

  Water? Water was good, he decided. He had no idea what he’d do with it, but if it got him out of this bedroom for five seconds so he could try to gather his scattered thoughts, it had to be good. Coffee would be even better. Gallons of it.

  “You’ll be okay for a minute?” He grabbed a key chain made of braided leather off his dresser and gave it to her. “Hang on to this if another pain hits while I’m gone, okay? Bite into it or something.” It had worked for cowboys being operated on under primitive conditions, or so he’d read. Of course, they’d also been liberally dosed with alcohol at the time.

  Jessie’s blue eyes regarded the leather doubtfully, but she nodded gamely. “Hurry, Luke. I don’t know much about labor, but I don’t think there’s a lot of time left.”

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” he promised. Stone-cold sober, if he could manage it.

  He fumbled the first pot he grabbed, spilled water everywhere, then finally got it onto the stove with the gas flame turned to high. With a couple of false starts, he got the coffee going as well, strong enough to wake the dead, which was pretty much how he felt.

  For a moment he clung to the counter and tried to steady himself. It was going to be okay, he vowed. He’d delivered foals and calves. How much different could delivering a baby be? Of course, mares and cows had a pretty good notion of what they were doing. They didn’t need a lot of assistance from him unless they got into trouble.

  Jessie, on the other hand, seemed even more bemused by this state of affairs than he was. She’d obviously been counting on a doctor, a team of comforting nurses, a nice, sterile delivery room and plenty of high-tech equipment. A shot of some kind of painkiller, too, more than likely. What she was getting was a drunken amateur in an isolated ranch house. It hardly seemed fair after all she’d already been through. After all he’d put her through, he amended.

  An agonized scream cut through the air and sent panic slicing through him. He tore down the hall to the bedroom. He found her panting, her face scrunched up with pain, sweat beading up on her brow and pouring down her cheeks. Damned if he didn’t think she looked beautiful, anyway. The door to that place in hell gaped wider.

  “You okay?” he asked, then shook himself. “Sorry. Dumb question. Of course, you’re not okay.”

  He grabbed a clean washcloth from the linen closet, dashed into the bathroom to soak it with cool water, then wiped her brow. He might not be exactly sober yet, but his brain was beginning to function and his limbs were following orders. For the first time, he honestly believed they could get through this without calamity striking.

  “You’re doing fine,” he soothed. “This is one hell of a pickle, but nothing we can’t manage.”

  “Did…you…call…a doctor?” she asked.

  A doctor? Why hadn’t he acted on that thought back when he’d had it himself? Maybe because he’d figured it would be futile. More likely, because his brain cells had shut down hours ago just the way he’d wanted them to.

  “Next thing on my list,” he assured her.

  She eyed him doubtfully. “You…have…a list?”

  “Of course I have a list,” he said, injecting a confident note into his voice. “The water’s boiling. The coffee’s on.”

  “Coffee?”

  “For me. You don’t want me falling asleep in the middle of all the fun, do you?”

  “I doubt there’s much chance of that,” she said, sighing as the pain visibly eased.

  Her gaze traveled over him from head to toe, examining him so intently that it was all Luke could do not to squirm. Under other circumstances, that examination would have made his pulse buck so hard he wouldn’t have recovered for days. As it was, he looked away as fast as he could. Obviously, this was some sort of penance dreamed up for his sins. He was going to be stranded with Jessie, forced to deliver his brother’s baby, and then he was going to have to watch the two of them walk out of his life. Unless, of course…

  “Luke, can I ask you a question?”

  He was relieved by the interruption. There was only heartache in the direction his thoughts were taking. “Seeing how we’re going to be getting pretty intimate here in a bit, I suppose you can ask me anything you like.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  He had hoped she hadn’t noticed. “Darlin’, I don’t think you want to know the answer to that.”

  This time he doubted Jessie’s groan of anguish had anything to do with her labor pains.

  “Luke?”

  “Yes, Jessie.”

  “Maybe you’d better bring me a very big glass of whatever it was you were drinking.”

  He grinned at the wistful note in her voice. “Darlin’, when this baby turns up, you and I are going to drink one hell of a toast. Until then, I think maybe we’d both better stay as far away from that bottle as we can. Besides, as best I can recall, I smashed it against the fireplace.”

  She regarded him with pleading blue eyes. “Luke, please? I’m not sure I can do this without help. There’s bound to be another bottle of something around here.”

  He thought of the cabinet filled with whiskey, considered getting a couple of shots to help both of them, then dismissed the temptation as a very bad idea. “You’ve got all the help you could possibly need. I’m right here with you. Besides, alcohol’s not good for the baby. Haven’t you read all those headlines warning about that very thing?”

  “I don’t think the baby’s going to be inside me long enough to get so much as a sip,” she said.

  As if to prove her point, her body was seized with another contraction. Going with sheer instinct, Luke reached out and placed his hand over her taut belly. The skin was smooth and tight as a drum as he massaged it gently until the muscles relaxed.

  He checked his watch, talked to her, and waited for the next contraction. It came three minutes later.

  He wiped her brow. “Hang in there, darlin’. I’ll be right back.”

  She leveled a blue-eyed glare on him. “Don’t you dare leave me,” she commanded in a tone that could have stopped the D-Day invasion.

  “I’m not going far. I just want some nice, sterile water in here when the baby makes its appearance. And we could use a blanket.” And something to cut the umbilical cord, he thought as his brain finally began to kick in without prodding.

  He’d never moved with more speed in his life. He tested the phone and discovered the lines were down. No surprise in this weather. He sterilized a basin, filled it with water, then cleaned the sharpest knife he could find with alcohol. He deliberately gave a wide berth to the cabinet with the whiskey. He was back in the bedroom before the next pain hit.

  “See there. I didn’t abandon you. Did you take natural childbirth classes?”

  Jessie nodded. “Started two weeks ago. We’d barely gotten to the breathing part.”

  “Then we’re in great shape,” he said with confidence. “You’re going to come through this like a champ.” The truth was he was filled with admiration for her. He’d always known she had more strength and courage than most women he’d known, but tonight she was proving it in spades.

  “Did you call a doctor?” she asked again.

  “I tried. I couldn’t get through. Don’t let it worry you, though. You’re doing just fine. Nature’s doing all the work. The doctor would just be window dressing.”

  Jessie shot him a baleful look.

  “Okay,” he admitted. “It would be nice to have an expert on hand, but this baby’s coming no matter who’s coaching it into the world, so we might just as well count our blessings that you got to my house. What were you doing out all alone on a night like this anyway?”

  “Going to your parents’ house,” she said. “They invited me for the holidays.”

 
; Luke couldn’t believe that they’d allowed her to drive this close to the delivery of their first grandchild. “Why the hell didn’t Daddy fly you over?”

  “He offered. I’m not crazy about flying in such a little plane, though. I told him the doctor had forbidden it.”

  Luke suspected that was only half the story. He grinned at her. “You sure that was it? Or did that streak of independence in you get you to say no, before you’d even given the matter serious thought?”

  A tired smile came and went in a heartbeat. “Maybe.”

  He hitched a chair up beside the bed and tucked her hand in his. He would not, would not allow himself to think about how sweet it was to be sitting here with her like this, despite the fact that only circumstance had forced them together.

  “Can’t say that I blame you,” he said. “If you don’t kick up a fuss with Daddy every now and then, next thing you know he’s running your life.”

  “Harlan just wants what’s best for his family,” she said.

  Luke smiled at her prompt defense of her father-in-law. One thing about Jessie, she’d always been fair to a fault. She’d even told anyone who’d listen that she didn’t blame him for Erik’s death, even with the facts staring her straight in the face. It didn’t matter. He’d blamed himself enough for both of them.

  “Dad’s also dead certain that he’s the only one who knows what’s best,” he added. “Sometimes, though, he misses the mark by a mile.”

  Her gaze honed in on him. “You’re talking about Erik, aren’t you? You’re thinking about how your father talked him into staying in ranching. If Harlan had let him go, maybe he’d still be alive.”

  And if Luke had been on that tractor, instead of his brother, Erik would be here right now, he thought. He’d known Erik couldn’t manage the thing on the rough terrain, but he’d sent him out there, anyway. He’d told him to grow up and do the job or get out of ranching if he couldn’t hack it. Guilt cut through him at the memory of that last bitter dispute.

  He glanced at Jessie. The mention of Erik threw a barrier up between them as impenetrable as a brick wall. For once, Luke was glad when the next contraction came. And the next. And the one after that. So fast now, that there was no time to think, no time to do anything except help Jessie’s baby into the world.