The Twelve Dates of Christmas by Susan Meier

Author:Susan Meier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

ELOISE ROLLED OVER in bed the next morning, not able to get herself to crawl out and face the day.

She wasn’t the kind to overthink things, but why would someone choose to wait in the intensive care unit of the children’s ward instead of the maternity waiting room?

She let the obvious reasons flit through her brain. Maybe Ricky had spent time there himself as a child. Or maybe one of his siblings had. Or maybe he’d had a child who’d been there. Maybe a child born prematurely, as Tucker and Olivia’s child had almost been the night before.

The last one made so much sense that new scenarios began rolling through her head. Scary scenarios. Things his friends’ wives would call a tragedy. Things she had no basis to believe. Things that had no grounding in reality.

With a growl, she shoved off the covers, climbed out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen. Laura Beth already sat at the little round table, drinking tea.

“Hey.”

“Hey. You’re up early for someone who was at a party last night.”

She walked to the counter and started making a pot of coffee. “We took Olivia to the hospital.”

Laura Beth gasped. “Last night? Is she okay?”

“False labor. She’s fine. Baby’s fine.”

“But...”

She faced Laura Beth. “But what?”

“There’s but in your voice. Like there’s a catch. She’s fine but she’s on bed rest or something. What’s the catch?”

“There is none. It was just false labor. She’s really fine.” She bit her lower lip. “But my fake date did something that puzzled me.”

“What?”

“He waited in the children’s ICU instead of the maternity waiting room.”

“Maybe he thought something would be wrong with the baby, so he waited there.”

She gasped and closed her eyes. Of course. That made so much more sense. His choice of waiting place wasn’t about him but Olivia’s baby.

Unfortunately, by the time she walked to the table and sat, she’d poked a hole in that theory. “Isn’t there a neonatal ICU? One just for newborns?”

Laura Beth shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know much about hospitals, but there may be a special ICU for newborns.”

Confused again, Eloise sucked in a breath. “Well, he’s also on the hospital board, so maybe he was just looking around, checking on things.” She thought of the nurse who’d talked to him and grimaced. “No. That’s not it either. A nurse came up to him. She acted as if she knows him.”

“If he’s on the board, of course she knows him.”

She shook her head. “No. This was more like she knew him personally.”

Laura Beth winced. “Was she young and pretty?”

“Middle-aged but very pretty. Still, it wasn’t that. The way she reacted to him was more like she was accustomed to seeing him.” She tried to remember their conversation. “She said stay as long as you like...as if he’d been in the ward before, staring into that ICU room.”

Picking up her empty cup, Laura Beth rose from the table. “I think you’re making more out of this than you should because you’re trying to figure out the ‘tragedy’ those dinner party wives told you about.

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