Protecting Her Royal Baby. Beth Cornelison
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He’d held babies this small when his nieces had been born, but somehow this felt different. He was being entrusted with a child not even twenty minutes old, given the responsibility of a father’s care and protection. He swallowed hard, hesitating.
“It’s okay, Dad,” the nurse said, chuckling. “Baby won’t break.”
Hunter pushed out a cleansing breath and slipped his hands around the tightly wrapped bundle lying against Brianna’s chest. In the process of gathering the baby into his arms, he brushed intimately against her breasts. When her breath caught and her gaze darted to his, heat spread through him and raised a flushed prickling in his cheeks. “Sorry.”
In response, she twitched her lips in a brief, nervous grin as she released the baby to him. He could feel the heavy throb of her heartbeat against the back of his hand as he adjusted his grip on her son. His pulse drummed in his ears as he pulled the tiny life close to his chest and cradled the baby’s head in the crook of his arm.
“Hey, sport,” he crooned to the puffy-faced baby, who wrinkled his face and whimpered pitifully like a puppy. “No, no. Don’t cry. Mom will be right back.” As Brianna was wheeled out for her CT scan, her troubled gaze lingered on him. Hunter gave her a nod and a wink. “I got this. Don’t worry.”
But as soon as Brianna and the nurse disappeared, the baby loosed a plaintive wail. A bubble of panic swelled inside him. A crying baby was usually his cue to pass a baby back to mom or dad. But he was supposed to be playing the dad role for the next few hours. Yikes.
“Shh. Easy, fella.” He gave Brianna’s son a little bounce and patted the baby’s bottom the way he’d seen his brother Grant do with his daughters when they were infants. “You’re okay, dude. I’m gonna help your mom out, and everything’s going to be just fine.”
He paced the small room, trying to comfort the crying baby, wishing the nursery staff would hurry and take the baby upstairs. As he cradled the infant, rocking his arms from side to side, he flashed back on the accident that had brought him here. Brianna racing down the highway, losing control of her car. Bullet holes in the back of her flipped sedan.
A chill rippled through Hunter. Who had fired at Brianna, and why? Was she still in danger, or had she been victim to a random crime? He recalled her fear of someone hurting her when he’d first tried to help her, and uneasiness scraped through him.
No matter how he looked at it, the cards were stacked against Brianna. Amnesia, a new baby...and some unknown threat to her safety. He may have known her for only an hour, but she had no one else. She and her baby needed him, needed his support, his friendship...and his protection.
He gazed down at the new life in his arms. So tiny. So fragile. So...vulnerable.
“Don’t worry, sport. I’m going to take care of you and your mom,” he promised Brianna’s son. “I’ll help her remember who she is, where your dad is. And I will make sure both of you stay safe.”
* * *
“Where the hell are you, man? You’ve been gone for three hours!” Hunter’s older brother Grant said the minute he answered Hunter’s call.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Hunter cut his brother a lot of slack for his sharp tone, and a stab of guilt also poked him for worrying Grant. His brother had been through hell in recent months, having tragically lost his wife in May. Grant was now a single father, raising his two young daughters alone, and didn’t need any extra grief on his plate. Considering the tumult of the spring and the circumstances surrounding Tracy’s death, Hunter should have called sooner so Grant wouldn’t worry.
He’d left for his jog from Grant’s country home after Sunday lunch with the Mansfield clan. He’d been expected back inside an hour to shower and watch the Saints game with their dad. Since Tracy’s death, the family had been spending a lot more time with Grant, helping with the kids and hoping to lift his spirits.
“Sorry about the radio silence.” Hunter could imagine Grant—and their mother—pacing the hardwood floors of Grant’s farmhouse, fretting about him. “I’ve been...distracted. I’m at the hospital with—”
“The hospital!”
Hunter winced. He should have led with a disclaimer. “I’m fine! Really. But I witnessed a car accident, and I rode in the ambulance to the E.R. with the woman whose car flipped.”
“Aw, skunk.” Grant mumbled the kid-safe curse he and his wife had invented when their oldest started repeating everything she heard. “Is the woman okay?”
“She hit her head pretty hard and has no memory of who she is at the moment. That’s why I’m here. She was pretty scared, but she and the baby are okay other than that, I think.”
“She had a baby with her?” Grant’s tone ratcheted up a degree on the worry scale.
Hunter raked his fingers through his sweaty hair. He really needed a shower, but wouldn’t leave the hospital until he knew Brianna was all right. “She was in labor. She just had the baby a few minutes ago.”
“Skunk,” Grant repeated. “No wonder you stayed with her. So...when do you think you’ll get back here?”
“No telling. Go on and eat dinner without me. I may swing by my apartment for a shower later, but I doubt I’ll make it back out to your place today.” He remembered then that his truck was sitting in Grant’s driveway. “Wait, my truck’s out there, and I need it.” He winced, hating to beg a favor from Grant, who had two small kids to deal with. Maybe his parents could bring him a vehicle. “Are Mom and Dad still there? Could one of them bring my truck to the hospital when they head back into town?”
“I think we can work something out between the three of us.” He heard Grant sigh. “So this woman has no idea who she is? There was nothing with her that identified her? A wallet or cell phone or piece of mail?”
“Not that I found with my preliminary search, but I plan to go back out to the car and look again.” Hunter glanced up to see Brianna being wheeled out of the radiology department. “Text me when you get here with my truck, okay? I gotta go.”
“Sure. Love ya, bro.”
“Back atcha.” Hunter tugged a sad grin, wanting to tease his brother about unmanly professions of feelings. But knowing why his brother had started telling him he loved him at the end of phone calls and visits made teasing impossible. The suddenness of Tracy’s death had shaken the whole family. Factor into that the third Mansfield brother, Connor, returning to WitSec with his wife and daughter, and the family had plenty of reasons to be particularly mindful of family bonds. They all hugged more, said frequent “I love yous” and didn’t take their time together for granted.
As the hospital aides rolled Brianna’s stretcher closer, he couldn’t help but wonder about her family. Did she have anyone looking for her? Was someone, even now, pacing the floor and waiting for her to call? A pang of sympathy prodded him and fired a sense of urgency inside him to find out who she was and where she lived.
Her eyes found his as she neared him, and he sent her an encouraging smile. “They took your son upstairs to be checked more thoroughly by the staff pediatrician. And they’re getting a room ready for you on the maternity floor.”
She nodded, then winced, her hand lifting to her temple, where her head had a new bandage.
“Any news from the CT scan?” he asked.
“Not yet.” Her sky-blue eyes clouded with worry. “The doctor is reading it now.”
* * *
“The CT scan and MRI both show what we suspected,” the staff neurologist said, his hands shoved in the pockets of his white lab coat. “You have a significant concussion, which has caused swelling in the brain. That swelling is what has caused the memory loss. I have every reason to believe that as the swelling goes down, you should get most, if not all, of your memory back.”
“Most?” Brianna gaped at the silver-haired