Forcing the issue certainly wasn’t working. Every time he had tried to broach the subject of marriage or even the baby after that, Caitlyn had regarded him with a defiant expression and left the room. It hadn’t taken long to realize that pushing her to talk was counterproductive. In what he’d come to recognize as true O’Brien fashion, anything she perceived as pressure just made her dig in her heels. Lesson learned, he concluded. He needed to take his own advice and be patient and let her come to terms with their situation in her own time, no matter how frustrating he found the delay. Even trickier was tuning out Mick’s unrelenting pressure. Noah needed to keep the long-range goal in mind. He was at the nurses’ station going over patient charts when Peyton Harris, the chief of obstetrics and gynecology, joined him. “Do you have a minute?” the obstetrician asked. “Sure,” Noah said.
