Free Twelve Days by TERESA HILL Page B

so innocently, just as the baby had entrusted herself to Sam that morning when he'd found her awake and crying in her crib.
    She'd had big, bewildered tears rolling down her cheeks, and her arms were thrust out rigidly at her sides, her hands balled into fists. She was kicking her feet and working herself into a frenzy, no doubt because no one had come to tend to her.
    He'd stood there practically choking on his own breath and thinking that surely if he waited long enough someone would hear her and come get her. So that he wouldn't have to touch her and wouldn't have to think of the other baby girl who'd come into his life so briefly and torn his heart apart.
    But no one had come, and she'd gone right on crying and kicking her little feet until he picked her up, with great trepidation and very little skill, not that she seemed to mind. She settled against him with the kind of trust that tore at his heart once again. She was still taking big, gulping breaths that shook her entire body at first, but she snuggled against him like a cat and then started making breathy mewing sounds.
    The slightness of her body had scared him. Her scent had been somehow familiar, and he couldn't put her down fast enough, but the impression of her there lingered long after she was gone from his arms. She'd made him think of his precious daughter, whom his wife didn't even realize he'd wanted desperately and still missed?
    "She was our baby," Sam said.
    "You wouldn't still be in this town if it hadn't been for her. Or for me."
    "Maybe. Maybe not."
    "You always wanted out of here, Sam. You couldn't wait. You told me so all the time."
    "Maybe when I was teenager," he said, not understanding what this had to do with anything at the moment. "This wasn't the nicest place for me to be then."
    "And you couldn't wait to get away."
    "I guess I couldn't," he admitted.
    "You must regret that you never did."
    "I really hadn't thought about it," he said, honestly perplexed. Did she regret everything that ever happened between them? "Rachel, everything was different then."
    Even now, when he was leaving Rachel, he wasn't planning to leave town. He'd spent years building his business and his reputation. And even if he and Rachel weren't together, he couldn't imagine not seeing her every now and then. He wondered if it wouldn't hurt as much to see her once he was gone.
    "I thought you must have so many regrets," Rachel said.
    "About what?"
    "Being stuck here all this time."
    Was that how she felt? Stuck? "This is where our lives were."
    "I know, but..."
    "What?" She thought he really cared where they lived? Not as long as he'd been able to be with her.
    "If it hadn't been for the baby... we wouldn't have gotten married—"
    "Wouldn't we?" he asked, an old, familiar ache of insecurity gnawing at him again. He doubted he'd ever have presumed to ask if she hadn't been pregnant with his child. He wouldn't ask now if she'd agreed only because of the baby. It didn't matter anymore. Soon they wouldn't be married at all.
    "You would have left here, if we hadn't gotten married," she said. "You would have gone to college and been an architect. That's what you wanted."
    "It's what a teenage boy wanted, Rachel," he said softly, thinking about that long-ago dream. "I'm not that boy anymore."
    "Still, I... I wasn't sure you ever wanted the baby. Not like I did."
    He gaped at her, putting the whole issue of their marriage aside and thinking—as he never let himself do—of their daughter. Their precious baby girl.
    He still hurt. His heart hurt. He still had an image of her in his mind, one that came to him at the oddest of times, a memory so fleeting and yet so clear. Once upon a time, they had a daughter. His and Rachel's. She'd been tiny, born two months too early and under the worst of circumstances, and through the tears in his own eyes, he'd seen her, lying so helpless and so very still in an incubator at the hospital in town. He'd known from that first look that there was