Beneath a Southern Sky - By Deborah Raney Page 0,105

“Daddy! It’s my Daddy!” she said, turning to the man in the doorway. She galloped across the room.

“Hi, punkin.” He knelt to embrace her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and nuzzled his face with her own like a puppy beside itself with happiness. He stood with Natalie in his arms, and a sob rose in his throat, taking him completely by surprise. Over Natalie’s shoulder, he looked into Daria’s eyes. She was looking at the other man, her face veiled in anguish. He now noticed the scars on the man’s arms and hands and realized that this man he’d thought to be a stranger was indeed Natalie’s father. Cole squeezed her tightly to himself, amazed at how featherlight she was in his arms, how sweet her silky fine hair smelled.

Natalie let loose of his neck long enough to lean down and touch Daria’s toe through the sheet. The little girl smiled shyly at her mother and wrinkled her nose. “You look funny, Mommy.”

Daria’s lovely features had been transformed into a mask of utter misery. This couldn’t be good for the baby. What must this stress be doing to her?

“Daria,” he started.

Nate apparently saw the same thing in her face, for he strode to her bedside and bent to read the monitors. “Are you all right?” he asked. But it seemed to Cole to be the loving, possessive husband, not the physician, who was asking the question.

Daria nodded. Smiling wanly, she looked from one man to the other. “Nate,” she said softly, her voice quavering. “This is Cole. Cole, Nathan.”

Thirty-One

Nathan stared at Colson Hunter, his emotions running the gamut from fury to compassion and back again. Hunter reached out tentatively to shake his hand, and Nate took it, truly uncertain if it was anger or possessiveness or sheer terror that motivated the fierceness of his own grasp. Without speaking, they released their hold on each other. Nathan turned away quickly, ostensibly to adjust the dials on the fetal monitor that displayed the baby’s heartbeat.

Struggling to put aside the unsettling feelings that meeting this man had incited, he tried to remember from his obstetrical training what the safe parameters were for the baby’s heartbeat. The machine emitted a steady whoosh, whoosh, but the pace seemed quite rapid to him.

“Did they tell you what this number should be?” he asked Daria, trying to keep his voice even, painfully aware of Hunter’s presence behind him.

“It’s been staying between 115 and 140, I think,” she told him, her voice forced and artificial. “I heard a nurse say they didn’t want it to go much above 150.”

“Okay,” he said. “Good.”

He continued to busy himself with the medical equipment in the room. It had been half a decade since he’d worked with such technology, but some things were beginning to come back to him. He took his time, acutely aware that he would have to look Colson Hunter in the eye again at some point. Right now he wasn’t sure he trusted what his own response might be. He felt as though Hunter’s eyes were boring into his back. And the fact that his daughter was happily ensconced in this man’s arms caused his own heart to beat too quickly and a bitter taste to rise in his throat.

He checked the monitor one more time and straightened. “You’re sure you feel okay, Daria?”

She nodded wanly.

“I’m going to go check on something at the nurse’s station. I’ll be right back.”

As a paltry atonement for his cowardice, he met Hunter’s gaze and nodded as he left the room. He spoke with the head nurse. After he was satisfied that the reading on the fetal monitor was within reason and that they were watching Daria closely, he walked away from her room. He simply couldn’t go back in there with the man who had taken over his life while he suffered alone in the jungle. Is this how God rewards his servants? Stop it, he chided himself. But his emotions did not submit. As he walked down the hallway the disturbing scenes continued to play over and over like a film on a continuous loop. In his mind’s eye, he watched his daughter run into Colson Hunter’s arms again and again. Daria’s quiet introduction pounded in his head, a haunting soundtrack to the film. Nate, this is Cole, she’d said. He wondered if she had rehearsed her words, if there was significance to the order of the introduction. He seemed to remember that the rules of etiquette