Daddy by Default
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Muriel Jensen
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Chapter One
Darrick McKeon strode rapidly through the Emergency entrance to Valley Memorial Hospital. If he could have made himself invisible, he would have. He was anxious to get in and out without being stopped by a crisis in Supply, a staff grievance or a request by the reigning orthopedist for yet another piece of equipment with a multimillion dollar price tag.
There was always more activity in the ER than elsewhere in the hospital, so everyone was too busy to notice him.
Yes! He’d made it past the gift shop and the cafeteria. One more long corridor to the administrative offices and he could get his golf clubs and be out of here for three weeks.
He didn’t intend to check his messages or look through his mail. He’d already given up three precious days of his vacation to attend the Northwest Hospital Association conference on security held in Seattle.
He’d found it a more effective method of sedation than sodium thiopental. Valley Memorial already had the finest and most consistent security of any hospital its size, but the board had considered it important for morale and image that Valley Memorial’s administrator attend. And a large part of his life was dedicated to keeping the board happy.
His office was half a corridor away. He was going to make it.
Darrick picked up his pace, grateful that Bev wouldn’t be there on a Sunday afternoon to slow his progress. His secretary was hardworking and devoted, even heroic, but since her husband had left her a year ago with four children under ten, she was like Pauly Shore on steroids. And he didn’t want her following him around the office, trying to apprise him of every new development in the hospital—among the patients and the staff—when all he wanted was to retrieve his golf clubs. He was dedicated to his job, but after a year of arbitrating departmental rivalries over budget money, he needed his vacation.
“Darrick!”
“Mr. McKeon!”
“Mr. McKeon!”
Rats! Caught. And from three sides.
Darrick stopped at the end of the corridor. His office door had been flung open and Bev stood in the doorway, looking shocked and condemning.
Ellen Brock, head nurse in Obstetrics, approached him from one side. She was built like a defensive lineman, and Darrick got the distinct impression she was waiting for any sign that he was going to try to rush past her.
Will Champion, OBGYN, approached him from the other side. There was confusion and sympathy in his face.
It took Darrick a moment to realize that this was not just an alliance formed to ruin his free time. They all looked upset and angry about something.
“What is it?” he asked, looking from face to face. He stopped at Bev’s. “What are you doing here on a Sunday?”
“Trying to find you,” she replied a little stiffly.
That didn’t make sense. “But you knew where I was. You had the phone number of the conference center. You knew I was due back this afternoon.”
Brock came to stand in front of him. “Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?”
“Because,” he replied patiently, “I’m officially on vacation. My parents are a thousand miles away, my brothers and sister are distributed around the globe and usually beyond the reach of the telephone, and thanks to this hospital, I have no time for a social life. Therefore—any call would be business and I’m—all together now—on vacation!”
He pushed past Bev into his office. “So, I don’t know what the problem is, but I’m really not here. If you’re having a crisis, you should be lying in wait for Paul Miller. The director of finance is in charge while I’m gone.”
He went straight to the closet for his clubs, slung the bag over his shoulder and turned to find his doorway blocked by three determined bodies.
“I thought you were different,” Brock said judiciously.
Bev closed the office door. “How could you, Mr. McKeon?” she asked in a faltering voice.
Will sighed. “You’re going to have to do something about it now, buddy. Particularly since she’s gone.”
Darrick dropped the bag to the floor and propped it against his desk, accepting that he wasn’t going to get out of here without finding out what this was all about and getting Miller in here himself.
“Different from what?” he asked, perching on a corner of his desk. “How could I what? And do something about what?” Then, remembering Will’s last remark, he frowned. “Gone as in…dead? Who?”
Ellen Brock came forward to look him in the eye. “Different from other men. You come on as though you have respect and concern for the women you work with, then you go and…”
Bev pushed her aside and confronted him. “I was always proud to work for you, and when you made the tough decisions, I backed you up. But true integrity goes beyond the job and into the bedroom!”
While he wondered what in the hell that meant, Will stepped between him and Bev. “Not gone as in dead,” he clarified. “Gone as in ran away.”
“Who,” Darrick demanded, “is gone?”
Will jammed his hands in his pockets and shrugged a shoulder. “She was admitted as Rachel Whitney, but we can’t find any evidence to back up her identity. She said she didn’t have insurance, but gave us a large cash deposit. And now she’s gone.”
“And the deposit didn’t cover the procedure?”
“Yes. It covered it.” He frowned at Darrick as though watching his face for evidence of something. “But she left them here when she took off.”
Darrick still couldn’t grasp the problem. “Left what?”
“The twins.”
This was going to come together for him any minute; he was sure of it. He just had to ask the right question. “Okay.” Darrick ignored the women and concentrated on Will. “You’re telling me that a woman was admitted under an assumed name, gave birth to twins and subsequently abandoned them?”
Will still wore that watchful look. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Well, that’s an Adult and Family Services problem.” Darrick was beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Except that Will had seen this sort of thing happen before. Why was it creating such a trauma this time? “You know the procedure. Make sure the babies are healthy, call AFS, and they’ll try to find out who the father is.”
“We know who the father is.” Bev took a few steps closer. “Rachel Whitney Whoever did put the father’s name on the birth certificates.”
He frowned at her. “Well, call him.”
Brock wedged her way in between Will and Bev. “We did. But he didn’t answer his cell phone.”
Darrick prided himself on being quick-witted. He had an MBA from Stanford, had brought Valley Memorial out of the red during the six years of his administration and had personally made a small fortune on the stock market when everyone else was losing money.
So why didn’t he understand what Brock was telling him?
Will put a hand on his shoulder, apparently taking pity on him. “She listed D. K. McKeon as the father, Darrick. That’s you.”
All right. That was clear enough. He remained still while the words registered. And remaining still wasn’t easy when one’s blood pressure rose fifty points and one’s heart went into ventricular fibrillation.
He had a baby? Twins? No. Oh, no.
“Would you like oxygen?” Brock asked, an edge of sarcasm to her voice. “Or shall I just get a crash cart?”
“Wait a minute.” Darrick struggled to think clearly. “Is D. K. McKeon all that’s on the birth certificate?”
Will took a step back as Darrick got to his feet. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, there isn’t a full first name? Does it say Darrick K. McKeon?”
“No, but you’re…”
“Yes, I’m D. K. McKeon,” Darrick interrupted. “But I have two brothers, Dillon and Duncan, both with the middle initial K.”
Brock blinked, then considered a moment. “But you’re the one who is administrator of this hospital where the mystery woman left her babies. She probably just put your initials because she knew everyone would know who you were.”
Okay. Oxygen was getting to his brain now. He was beginning to put things together. “Were the babies full term?” he asked.
“Thirty-four weeks,” Brock replied crisply. “But they were perfect.”
Thirty-four weeks. That put conception of the babies at about the second or third week in September. Maddie Hale had left in July to take the teaching job in Virginia, and he hadn’t had a relationship since.
Dillon, however, ran a clinic, but traveled from one global crisis to another with the Northwest Medical Team, and he had a George Clooney reputation. He was fearless and reckless.
Duncan, on the other hand, went from one movie set to another, and everyone knew that actors often became so engrossed in their roles that even they couldn’t tell reality from fantasy. And if Darrick’s memory served, early last fall Duncan had been in Mexico filming with Yvette Delacourt. He’d portrayed a suave but lethal villain in love with a border guard’s wife.
The beautiful movie star might have abandoned a baby rather than put her career on hiatus while she stayed home with it.
But how likely was that? Studios no longer tried to protect pristine images—there weren’t any. And if she had given birth, why would she have done it in Portland rather than Los Angeles?
If Dillon had impregnated a nurse or doctor on his team, would she have come to this particular hospital to have the babies, intending to abandon them to his brother?
He didn’t know what to think. Nothing made sense. Everything he suggested to himself was likely, but it was easy to come up with counterarguments.
“What did the mother look like?” Darrick asked. Yvette Delacourt had been in the last Batman movie. Certainly someone would have recognized her. “Tall, slender blonde with killer blue eyes?”
Will raised both eyebrows at that description. “No. Brunette with long hair. Average height and build. Very quiet.”
Darrick shook his head. Didn’t sound like any woman he’d had anything to do—
His private claim to innocence was banished instantly by the image of a beautiful brunette whose body had appeared average. But making love to her had turned out to be anything but.
He hadn’t remembered her because he’d been thinking in terms of relationships. And Skye Fennerty had been a one-night stand. Actually, a one-night flight. Or, more correctly, a crash.
This couldn’t be, he thought, knowing even as his mind formed the words that it could. Lives, fortunes, destinies often changed dramatically on the turn of a forbidden moment.
And he’d had one last September 14. He remembered the date specifically because he’d been on his way to his parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary in Skye’s twin-engine, modified bomber. But fate had had other plans.
He ran a hand down his face to try to conceal the complicated emotion ricocheting inside him—confusion, anger, wonder, possession, and then anger again.
“Where are the babies?” he demanded of Will.
“We have them in Pedes,” Will replied, exchanging an uncertain glance with his companions.
Bev and Brock were studying him, apparently confused by his confusion.
He walked purposefully past them, headed for the nursery. He passed the viewing window before he reached the double doors and stopped to look. In the front row on the right side were two babies so tiny they occupied the same isolette. And like some wonder of nature in babies generally considered too young to relate to their surroundings—their inch-long little hands were linked. The twins. He noticed that with a blow to his heart. He took it as a sign that they knew they’d been abandoned and had decided that survival required that they join forces.
He understood that feeling. It spoke to him. The McKeon siblings had always been that way, and even when they’d lost six-year-old Donovan, his spirit remained woven into each one of them, alive and significant in their hearts.
And these babies had shared a womb. What was it like, he wondered, to share the elemental darkness of prebirth—to know life together even before life knows you?
“Come on.” Will caught his arm and drew him toward the doors. “I’ll introduce you to your daughters. Your…their mother named them.”
Brock and Bev followed them inside.
A pretty young nurse with brown hair caught back in a bun, gently untangled the tiny fingers and placed one of the babies in Darrick’s arms.
“Ah…” He tried to resist, prepared to explain that holding babies had never been part of his job description, but Brock had bent Darrick’s arm to receive the baby.
“This is Michelle,” the young nurse said, smoothing the pink blanket in which the baby was wrapped. She indicated the hospital bracelet. “They’re so identical, we have to read who’s who.”
Darrick noticed the baby’s warmth against him and the clean fragrance of talcum. But he felt no weight in his arms. The other baby looked no bigger.
That was confirmed for him the next moment when Will took the first baby from him and the young nurse put the second one in his arm.
“And this is Gabrielle,” she said. “We’ve been calling them the angel babies because they’re named after two of the archangels. Aren’t they beautiful?”
They were. Though every little detail of feature and limb was in miniature, the babies were exquisite. Feathery dark hair stood up in little Mohawks above blotchy but plump cheeks, button noses, Cupid’s bow mouths. Perfect little fingers moved gracefully in sleep.
“Are they…big enough?” Darrick asked Will.
“Five pounds each, give or take an ounce,” Will replied with a smile. “Very good for twins. And the rash is only temporary. It’ll be gone in a few days.”
“You taking them home with you?” Brock asked aggressively.
Darrick felt the clutch of panic in his chest. He could live without three weeks at Salishan Lodge, golfing, but what was he going to do with two infants?
There was no woman in residence at his place, and his mother was a thousand miles away. He’d seen women defeated by one baby. What was he going to do with two?
And he had no crib, no…no…whatever else it took to keep babies happy.
“I have a bassinet you can borrow,” Bev said helpfully, suddenly more smiling than judgmental. “And an infant seat.” Then she frowned suddenly. “Though you’ll need two of those.”
“I can get you a second one so you can get the babies home,” Brock said briskly. “The auxiliary’s donated a few just for that purpose.”
Darrick knew he was experiencing shock, but he heard himself tell his secretary and the busybody nurse that he would appreciate their help. Then he watched Will and the young nurse put the babies back in the isolette, and like the split screen on a state-of-the-art television, he saw his life crumble and dissolve on the other screen.
Babies. Two of them. His. God.
Now that the babies were together again, their hands moved unerringly toward each other’s and they linked fingers in their sleep.
In the space of an hour and a half Brock fitted his car with two infant seats while Bev went home to get the bassinet and promised to meet him at his place.
The Pediatrics Department donated blankets and diapers, bottles and formula and a few other necessities. Will put the babies, who were still sound asleep, in the infant seats, and he and Bev and Brock and most of the Pedes Department and first-floor staff stood around to wave him off as though he were leaving for an Olympics competition—or some fatal secret mission.
In the fifteen minutes it took him to get home to a quiet country house on a shady little lane on the edge of town, one baby awoke and quickly woke the other.
They screamed in unison, urgent, desperate cries that made him certain he’d lose them to asphyxiation before he even got them home.
Bev ran out of his house to meet him, took one of the babies, infant seat and all, and hurried inside with it. He did the same with the other and found her in the kitchen, the infant seat propped on the island countertop while she gave the baby a bottle.
As he placed his twin beside the one she fed, Bev held out another bottle. He took it, put the nipple at the baby’s lips, and the deafening screaming stopped. He couldn’t believe it. The silence seemed to ring around him.
He leaned wearily on an elbow as he held the bottle. He’d had the twins for an hour and a half, everyone else had done everything for him, and he was already exhausted.
“What are you going to do?” Bev asked him with concern. “How are you going to deal with two infants by yourself?”
He had no idea.
“I don’t suppose you saw the babies’ mother?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t know anything about this until this afternoon, when Brock called me in because the woman had run off and they’d spotted your name on the birth certificates. They thought I might be able to reach you.” She hesitated a moment then asked quietly, “So, they are yours?”
He knew he had to say it out loud to believe it—to find a way to deal with it. “They could be,” he admitted. “But if they are, their mother never said a word to me.”
“Men,” Bev said with a judicious shake of her head. “You fool around and never look back.”
The ironic thing, Darrick thought, not bothering to counter her accusation aloud, was that he’d never behaved like that. He’d never been into keeping sexual accounts and setting records, and he’d never been irresponsible or deliberately careless.
Except the night of September 14. And then, when he’d finally reached his parents’ house, he’d called Skye several times and left messages, but she’d never returned his calls. He’d tried again when he’d gotten home, but her continued silence forced him to conclude that that night hadn’t meant as much to her as it had to him. So he’d put her out of his mind.
He stared at the baby sucking greedily on the bottle and tried to imagine Skye Fennerty simply walking away from her and her twin. He couldn’t.
But then, he’d only known Skye all of about twenty-four hours.
Bev glanced at the clock.
“I’m sorry this ruined your Sunday with your kids,” Darrick said guiltily. “I’ll see that you get a full day’s overtime.”
“It’s all right,” she said wryly. “I’ll go home as soon as we get them back to sleep. You’re the one who’s in for a nightmare couple of weeks.”
“Mmm. Good thing I’m on vacation, or I’d have probably had to bring them to the office for you to file or something.” That was gallows humor, he knew. Otherwise, he didn’t feel as though he had an amused bone in his body.
Bev showed him how to burp the babies, then rock them back to sleep. She gave him a book she claimed contained every fact he would need to know about the care of infants and left him her phone number at home and told him he could call her at any time.
Then she left.
Darrick stood in the middle of his empty, silent house and experienced the impact of knowing his life had been changed forever. It was like a one-two punch that had driven him to his knees.
He’d felt this overwhelmed only once before in his life, and that had been when he was seven. His little brother Donovan had died, and no amount of screaming and pleading on anyone’s part—even his father’s—had had the power to bring him back.
“All right,” he told himself bracingly. “You’ve got a few more years on you since then and considerably more experience. You know you have an intellect and a determination you can trust. They always come through for you. You can do this.”
Right. He could do this. First thing on the agenda was to call his mother and see if she would fly down to help him until he could do the second thing on his agenda. That was to find Skye Fennerty and find out what in the hell she thought she was doing.
HIS MOTHER’S VOICE was breathless. “Did you come running up from the basement?” Darrick asked conversationally.
“No, I just ran in from the car because I forgot the tickets, of all things!” She laughed. It always righted the world somewhat to hear her laugh. “Good timing, Darrick! One minute later and your father and I would have been on our way to Las Vegas. What is it, love?”
Another trip. His parents were enjoying their retirement by taking off on small trips whenever the spirit moved them. And it did often.
He couldn’t spoil it for them, and he couldn’t squeeze the news that they might be grandparents into a two-minute conversation. “Nothing, Mom.” He forced a light tone of voice. “I was just checking on you. Wondering if you’ve heard anything from Dillon or Duncan.”
“No, we haven’t. Far as we know, Dillon and his staff are still out of touch somewhere in Nicaragua, and according to the schedule Duncan left us, he’s somewhere on a tributary of the Nile and won’t be finished filming for another couple of weeks. Why? Did you need them for something?”
“No,” he denied quickly. “Just trying to keep up with everybody.” He heard a horn honk in the background. “You’d better go. Say hi to Dad.”
“Darrick…?”
“Love you, Mom. Put a couple of bucks in the dollar machine for me, would you?”
“Of course.” She hesitated a moment. “You’re sure there was nothing particular you wanted to talk about? Dori should be back from London in a couple of days.”
“Great,” he said, praying that was true. “Maybe she’ll stop by. Call me when you come back. Bye.”
Darrick went to pour himself a cup of coffee. Then he wandered back into the living room and made himself deal with the reality that, for a while at least, he was going to have to cope with the crisis of fatherhood alone.
Neither of his brothers would be back for a couple of weeks, and even if the twins did belong to one of them, he was the designated caretaker until they came home.
Well, he thought drily, listening to the silence, he might make it if the babies slept for three weeks.
He took the cordless phone off the desk, settled into a comfortable chair and asked the information operator for the number of the Mariposa Airport, Fennerty Air Service’s base of operations.
“Fennerty’s out of town for a few days,” the small airport’s manager told him when he dialed the number. “She’s due back day after tomorrow. Can I give her a message?”
“Thanks,” Darrick said. “I’ll just call back.”
He turned off the phone and laid it on the arm of his chair. That had been surprisingly easy. He’d had visions of having to trace Skye Fennerty across the country to find her. But she was still in Mariposa.
The day after tomorrow he was going to make her wish she wasn’t.
