The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle by RaeAnne Thayne

Author:RaeAnne Thayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2008-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Her low words seemed to echo through the quiet kitchen, reaching deep inside him to a raw wound he thought had healed long ago.

Why the hell was he telling her this? He never talked about Suz and their baby. Never. There wasn’t another soul on earth who knew this part of his past, of the guilt and pain that had been his constant companions for so long after her death.

He had been so alone, so angry. Just a stupid, powerless punk, bitter at the world and especially at the substandard hospital’s emergency room that had delayed admitting her because they were a poor teenage couple without health insurance, and at the incompetent doctors who hadn’t diagnosed her toxemia in time to save either of them.

Mostly he had been consumed with guilt. He had vowed to love and cherish and take care of Suz and their baby and he had screwed up.

He still carried that guilt inside him like an anchor, though he had become so accustomed to it after all these years that it just seemed a part of him now.

He knew it had been his fault she died. If he had done a better job providing for them, it wouldn’t have happened. Early in her pregnancy he had taken a construction job with health insurance but had ended up walking out because of the callous way the company treated its workers.

She had wanted to apply for government assistance, as her mother and sisters and everyone else in the inner-city projects where she had grown up had done. But Carson’s prickly pride wouldn’t allow it. He had promised her he would find another position with insurance before she had the baby, but times had been tough and he had failed. And because of his pride and stupid convictions, his wife and son had died.

He could never forgive himself for that.

He had vowed as he stood over the two side-by-side graves that he would never allow anyone else to depend on him. He couldn’t be counted on, nor could he count on anyone else. His childhood had taught him that.

He had worked hard to graduate from college in three years by taking a double load of classes. He had used the small malpractice settlement from the hospital to invest in his first company, a failing Silicon Valley software start-up with a winning product but poor management. He had turned it around in eighteen months then bought another company and another and had been doing it ever since.

Every McRaven company provided extensive health-care programs for its employees, especially prenatal care. It was a primary part of the business model.

None of the success he found would ever ease the guilt over those two lives that had depended on him.

“What was his name?”

He blinked away the past and realized Jenna was watching him closely, her features soft with sympathy.

“Your son,” she said when he didn’t answer. “What did you name him?”

“Suzanna picked out Henry James. She’d always loved the author—and the name—so that’s what I stuck with.

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