She pushed it gently. The baby was in a wooden crib near the wall. Small, younger than a year, she thought, though it was hard to say exactly, red-faced, soaked through its wrappings, crying in that terrible, exhausted way. But it was what she saw when she stepped closer that made her breath catch.
The baby was burning up. She could feel the heat from 2 ft away. The child's skin had that awful, dry, papery look that she recognized from the winter her nephew had nearly died of scarlet fever back in Ohio when she was 19. She'd sat with him for three nights straight, and she hadn't forgotten what that looked like.
The way fever could make a person's skin look somehow thinner, like something was consuming them from the inside. "Hello," she said softly to the baby, because she didn't know what else to say. She looked around the room. There was a chair near the crib, and in the chair, slumped sideways with his head against the wall, was a man.
He was asleep, or something close to it, big, broad- shouldered, with dark hair that needed cutting, and several days of beard, and the look of a man who had not slept properly in longer than just the past night. His hands were in his lap, and even in sleep, they were clenched, not loose, like his body didn't know how to let go of whatever it was holding. This was Nathan Cole. She didn't wake him yet.
She crossed to the crib first and put her hand flat to the baby's forehead and confirmed what she already knew. High fever. Too high to be comfortable. Maybe too high to be safe.
She looked around the room for water. There was a pitcher on the small table near the window, half full. She pulled the cloth from her travel bag. She'd packed it out of habit, a piece of soft cotton she used for general purpose, and she wet it in the water from the pitcher and laid it gently against the baby's forehead.
The baby's crying shifted. Still crying, still frightened and exhausted and sick. But something in the pitch changed just slightly. Like even that small bit of cool cloth registered somewhere beneath the fever.
"I've got you," she said quietly. "Not for any audience. Just because it was the thing to say." She heard the chair creek behind her.
"Who are you?" It wasn't a question. The voice was rough from sleep and something else underneath sleep. Something roar.
How did you get in here? She turned around slowly. Nathan Cole was on his feet. He wasn't a small man.
He filled the doorway between the chair and the crib with the particular kind of presence that came from a man who was used to physical work, used to holding things together with his body when everything else failed. But what struck her wasn't his size. It was his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had not slept enough in months and knew it and had stopped fighting it.