by Jeanne Allan
“Birdie won’t sue, and you won’t screw up.” Luke guided her over to the faucet and turned on the water. “Don’t worry. You’re doing fine in there.”
“Fine!” JJ. swiveled away from the faucet, her wet hands dripping on the floor. “I’m babbling a bunch of nonsense I heard on television. I’m not going to deliver a baby.”
“You’re going to deliver a baby.” Luke grabbed a clean towel from the drawer and gently dried JJ.’s hands. “I’ll get the hospital on the phone.”
JJ. stood rooted to the floor in front of the kitchen sink. “You must have delivered hundreds of cows and horses. This won’t be any different. You deliver the baby, I’ll talk on the phone.”
Luke corralled her face between his large hands. “I’ll do what I can, but I think Birdie would prefer a woman. You’re always claiming you’re competent and capable and don’t need a man rushing to your rescue. Put your money where your mouth is, O’Brien.”
“This has nothing to do with whether I’m a competent person or not. I simply don’t have the knowledge or expertise to safely deliver Birdie’s baby.”
Luke lightly kissed her lips, then turning her around, gave her a slight push in the direction of Birdie’s bedroom. “Go welcome your Supreme Court Justice.”
JJ. stopped at the room’s threshold, gathered her composure and fixed a smile on her face. “How we doing in here?” she asked, filling her voice with cheer as she entered the room.
Birdie tried to return J.J.’s smile, a weak effort quickly curtailed as she let out a wail.
J.J. grabbed the younger woman’s hand and uttered soothing gibberish. Birdie’s pain seemed to last an eternity. A few crushed hand bones were irrelevant.
At last the younger woman sank, exhausted, back against the pillows. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to holler, but it hurt.”
“Yell all you want,” JJ. said. She wiped Birdie’s sweating face with a paper tissue.
“I’ve got help on the phone,” Luke said from outside the room. “He wants to know how far apart the contractions are and how long they last.”
“How am I supposed to know—” Birdie’s cry cut off J.J.’s words. JJ. felt as exhausted as Birdie when the pain finally eased. “I hope he timed that,” JJ. snapped over her shoulder.
“He wants to know if you can see anything.”
“See anything? Like what? Oh.” JJ. disengaged her hand from Birdie’s frenzied grip and moved further down the bed and lifted the blankets from Birdie’s legs. She had to try twice before she could force the words from her arid mouth. “I think I see the top of a baby’s head.”
Birdie started screaming again.
JJ.’s heart lodged in her throat. “Luke, Luke, oh, oh, oh, Luke...”
He was beside her, the phone pressed to his ear as he relayed instructions. “Okay, O’Brien, gently guide, no pulling, there, his head, hold him gently under the chin, support his head, okay, here he comes, okay, okay, okay, fella, okay, doing good, Birdie, okay, okay!” The last came as an exultant shout.
The baby’s lusty cry filled the bedroom.
In a blur J.J. took the twine Luke handed her, tied the umbilical cord twice and cut between the twine with the scissors Luke assured her he’d sterilized. She gently wiped out the baby’s mouth with her finger and cleaned his nose. A warm rag appearing in her hand, she wiped off the baby’s face, smiling down at unfocused blue eyes.
In spite of the pointed head, wrinkled face and the disgusting glop covering the baby’s body, J.J. thought the infant the most beautiful, wondrous creature she’d ever seen.
Birdie was crying and asking questions that could barely be heard over the sound of the squalling infant.
The baby started shivering. Instinctively J.J. pulled the covers from Birdie, ripped open her nightgown and gently laid the baby facedown on his mother’s chest. She folded the nightgown and then the covers over mother and child.
“He’s beautiful, Birdie.” So beautiful, tears welled in J.J.’s eyes.
Birdie smiled wearily down at her new son. “He is beautiful. Thank you, J.J.”
Luke cleared his throat. “Um, he’s a she.”
As one, Birdie and J.J. lifted the blankets and inspected the baby. Both broke into giggles.
“I didn’t even notice,” J.J. said.
Birdie stiffened. “J.J., another one!”
J.J. hurried to check. “Not a baby.”
Luke stood by Birdie’s head, watching mother and child. “I imagine it’s the afterbirth.”
“Oh,” J.J. said. “There, now I think we’re done. Luke, a towel, I guess.” She bundled it between Birdie’s legs as a thunderous pounding sounded at the front of the house.
“That’s one healthy set of lungs.” The first man into the bedroom beamed at Birdie. “Sounds like you went ahead without us.” He slapped a blood pressure cuff on Birdie as a second man headed for the baby.
Too many people crowded the room and sucked the oxygen from the air. The blood drained from J.J.’s head, and she stumbled into the kitchen. Voices from the bedroom barely penetrated the fog smothering her brain. She washed her hands and flopped down on the nearest kitchen chair. Behind her metal clanged; male voices asked questions; Birdie answered softly; wheels squeaked. The infant screamed lustily.
J.J. sensed movement behind her, the sounds traveled down the hall, and then the front door opened and closed. Silence settled over the house.
J.J. looked down at her trembling hands. She’d done it. She’d delivered Birdie’s baby. Not that Birdie had required all that much help, when it came right down to it. Still, in spite of the fact J.J. had been more terrified than she’d ever been in her life, she’d hung in there and delivered the baby. Triumph and satisfaction surged through her body. She wanted to stand up and shout at the top of her lungs.
Footsteps came down the hall.
J.J. glanced down at the filthy front of her clothes and jumped up to grab the large apron hanging on a hook near the stove. She slipped her head through the top opening as Luke entered the kitchen.
He stepped behind her and tied the apron strings at her waist, then rested his hands on her shoulders. “You did good work in there, O’Brien.”
“And people say watching television is a waste of time. Hungry?” She switched on stove burners and shuffled pans. “Everything’s almost ready. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I hope they feed poor Birdie at the hospital. She never did get dinner.” The water boiled and J.J. dumped the macaroni into the pan.
Luke pulled the cheese and grater toward him to finish up the task Birdie’s baby had interrupted. “I’m serious. You done good, O’Brien. Shucks, now I know what you’re capable of, I’d even trust you with my favorite cow.”
“Cow!” She spun around. “You can’t compare a human life to a—” The teasing light in Luke’s eyes stopped her. “Beast,” she said appreciatively. “She was a beautiful baby, wasn’t she?”
“Beautiful? I didn’t want to say anything in front of Birdie, but I’ve never seen such an ugly kid. That red face and pointed head... Birdie put on a good show, but she must have been sick at going through all that for a scrawny, shriveled peanut.”
J.J. smiled. “Most babies look like that when they’re first born. In a month she’ll look totally different.”
“How come you’re suddenly the expert on babies?” Luke asked, setting plates and eating utensils on the kitchen table.
“I have two younger brothers and two nephews—” she stirred cheese and milk into the drained pasta “—but believe me, changing diapers and delivering babies are poles apart.”
“You’ve actually changed diapers?”
“And I’m darned good at it,” she said in a challenging voice, sitting across from him at the table. “My nephews are four and six now. They don’t care if I’m ‘just a girl.’ All they care about when they come to visit is I know where to buy good pizza and I take them to the zoo and the amusement park and to watch the Rockies play baseball. Wh
y are you looking at me like that?”
He shook his head, not answering. “What’s your favorite ride at the amusement park?”
“We like the merry-go-round the best. Quinlin, he’s the oldest, insists on a black horse. Keefe doesn’t care about color.” She grinned. “Their eyes would bug out if they saw Hondo and Johnny. We’ll have to take a picture of me beside them—without your uncle’s coat on—to send to the boys.”
“Sure.” Luke asked questions about the rest of the family.
J.J. found herself telling him about the unending competition between herself and her brothers. “Mom and Dad treated us as equals. There was none of this girls do the dishes while the boys mow the lawns. I grew up shooting hoops, digging my own fishing worms, arguing politics at the dinner table. It wasn’t until I got to school I learned girls were supposed to sit quietly with their hands folded while boys shouted out the answers and got all the attention. My brothers always let me tag along after them but, of course, their friends didn’t want a girl hanging around.”
“I expect that changed.”
“In high school,” J.J. said with a sigh. “Suddenly I couldn’t move without tripping over those same boys. Not because of my athletic abilities or my brain. Because of my stupid face. My introduction to the realization the world thinks anyone with a halfway pretty face must be a total bimbo.”
“I’ll bet you were class queen, prom queen, queen of everything.”
“You’d lose the bet. The boys bored me. The girls resented me for disdaining what they wanted. I took refuge in books and finished high school in three years.” She added glumly, “Class valedictorian.”
Luke helped her stack the dirty dishes in the dishwasher. “With all the doctors in your family, I’m surprised you didn’t go into medicine and become a doctor or a nurse.”
“I always wanted to be a corporate lawyer, a mover and shaker. It must have been all those dinnertime political discussions. Besides, every woman doctor I knew was a gynecologist or a pediatrician. My mom’s a nurse and wanted me to go into nursing. Nothing against nurses, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life having men tell me what to do.”
Luke laughed. “You sound like my sister Sara.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Two, both pilots in the air force. Mick, Michelle, is in a C-5 squadron in Delaware. She met her husband, Far, when they were at the air force academy. Sara, she’s three years younger than Mick, flies 141’s out of Travis AFB in California.”
J.J. looked at Luke in astonishment. “You have two sisters who are fighter pilots?”
“Not fighter pilots. Right now they think they’d like to be, but I imagine when Far and Mick decide to start a family, Mick will resign her commission. And Sara will settle down once she meets the right man.”
“You mean they’ll both give up their careers and stay home to be good little housewives?” JJ. asked sweetly.
“My mother says her career was taking care of my dad and us kids. She followed Dad without complaint, and made a home for us wherever we lived, whatever the conditions. She didn’t call it a sacrifice—she called it a privilege,” he said stiffly.
“Is that what she wants for your sisters? To be a private maid and mistress to some man?”
“She sure as hell doesn’t want them dying in the trenches with a bunch of men.”
“That has nothing to do with their gender. She wouldn’t want you dying in the trenches. Just because you think women are incapable of protecting you, doesn’t mean they are.”
Luke gave her a narrow-eyed look. “If I’m ever in a really tight spot, I can’t think of two people I’d rather have on my side than Mick and Sara.” He walked out of the kitchen.
Leaving J.J. staring after him in total astonishment. Luke Remington admitting he’d accept help from a woman? Sure, he’d accepted help from J.J. when it came to delivering Birdie’s baby, but delivering babies was an area most men assumed women held the patent on. Like her brothers, much of the time Luke probably forgot his sisters were female.
When Ad Parker had threatened him with a knife, Luke had practically thrown a temper tantrum about J.J. coming to Luke’s aid. Luke was no different than the boys in high school. He didn’t care one iota about J.J.’s brains and abilities. All he wanted was to go to bed with her.
He wasn’t about to get what he wanted.
CHAPTER SIX
“O’BRIEN, wake up, O’Brien.”
J.J. opened her eyes. Luke’s nose was inches from hers. “What?” Dregs of sleep clogged her brain.
“You were having a nightmare. You kept hollering ‘no.’ ” He sat on the edge of her bed.
Bits and pieces of her dream flashed back, and her heart drummed against her rib cage. “I was delivering Birdie’s baby, and everything went wrong,” she said, groggy with sleep. “The baby wasn’t a baby at all, but a huge horse, and it had antlers. And the antlers turned into knives and Birdie kept screaming her baby was dead and I didn’t know what to do and her husband kept telling me I was a lawyer not a doctor and I was killing her baby and killing her and all I was wearing was an apron and Parker kept walking behind me and I knew I needed to find you but I couldn’t remember where the barn was and I looked and looked...” J.J. jammed her fist into her mouth, biting down on her knuckle to stop the torrent of words.
Luke rescued her hand. “It’s okay, O’Brien.”
His words didn’t make a dent in her nightmare-fogged mind. “Before I went to sleep I lay here thinking of all the disastrous things that could have happened. It could have been a breech birth, or the cord could have wrapped itself around the baby’s neck, or I could have dropped her.” Horrible images kept replaying in her mind, and without thinking, she rolled toward him, getting a death grip on the arm closest to her. “What if Birdie had hemorrhaged to death? Or the baby hadn’t started crying? And don’t babies go blind if you don’t clean their eyes? and I don’t remember if I cleaned her eyes. Why was she crying so much? Did I hurt her when she was born? I don’t think I pulled on her, but maybe I did? Maybe I hurt her neck. She could be paralyzed, and it would be all my fault.”
“O’Brien—”
“I know, people deliver babies all the time, I keep telling myself prehistoric women had babies, Native American women and pioneer women had babies, peasant women had babies in the fields, I should quit worrying about it, but every time I shut my eyes—What are you doing?” She woke suddenly to full awareness as Luke stood and picked her up in a cascade of blankets.
He kicked the blankets out of his way. “Trying to get some sleep.” Carrying J.J. across the hall, he dumped her in the middle of his unmade bed.
His sheets retained the slightest hint of warmth where he’d been laying. “I can’t sleep here,” J.J. protested.
“Apparently you can’t sleep across the hall.” Luke walked around the bed. “At least this way when you start screaming as if you’re about to be murdered, I won’t freeze to death running to see if you’re okay.” Hauling back the down comforter, he crawled into the bed and pulled J.J. over next to him. “You know I called the hospital and Birdie and her daughter are doing fine. The excitement’s over. Go to sleep.”
She drew comfort from Luke’s warm body. A weakness she regretted and would never admit to him. “It’s easy for you to be blasé. You’ve probably delivered hundreds of cows and horses, but I’ve never delivered so much as a puppy. Not that I was scared or anything. I don’t get scared, not even when I didn’t want to ride on the roller coaster, and Blaine said girls were always afraid to ride them and I said I wasn’t afraid and I rode it and the next two days I couldn’t move my neck because it was so sore but that wasn’t because I was scared, and when I took the exam to get into law school and took my law boards I didn’t throw up after both tests because I was scared so it must have been something I ate and—”
Luke wrapped his arms around her, pushing her face into his chest. “Are you going to talk all night?”
/> J.J. twisted her head around so she could breathe and blew his chest hair away from her nose. “No, I’m not, really I’m not, it’s just I’ve never done anything like delivering a baby before, a human being, a live baby, and I—”
Luke’s palm cut off the flow of words. “There’s only one way to shut you up—” he tugged her body toward the head of the bed so her face was level with his “—isn’t there?”
She shook off his hand. “I’m sorry, I’ll be quiet. I won’t say another word, I promise...you go ahead and go to sleep, I’ll be as quiet as a mouse...you won’t hear another word from—”
Luke’s mouth swallowed the rest of her promise.
The touch of his lips against hers had the same effect as a match tossed into a pile of dry grass. J.J. plastered herself against Luke’s hard, muscled body, greedily devouring his kisses. She’d been assaulted by a full complement of emotions today, most of which she’d been forced to suppress or contain. There was no thought of denying herself now. She neither knew nor cared which of them ripped off his pajama bottoms or her nightgown. She only knew she couldn’t abide anything between them.
Animals mating in the wild demonstrate cautious restraint. Luke and J.J. loved each other with a fierce intensity that knew no rules and allowed no holding back. Afterward, J.J. lay sated, yet drained, an odd combination, but one that described her state perfectly. “The state of well-being,” she said drowsily.
Luke murmured an agreement, before adjusting her body to fit against him. Then he slept, a hand laying claim to one of her breasts.
J.J. nestled against him, unabashedly seeking to share his body heat as she struggled to corral her thoughts, to think about what she’d done. She hadn’t succumbed as much as she’d met Luke head-on. A tiny laugh tickled her throat. Body-on was more apt. Even as she thought about it, her nipple swelled to press against Luke’s palm. His hand tightened possessively.
