by Caro Carson
She gasped for breath.
“This time, you don’t have a choice,” Caden said.
She nodded. “The right answer is yes.”
* * *
As he drove, Caden looked at the endless stretch of empty road ahead, at the clock on his truck’s dashboard, at Tana as she sat beside him. She looked serious, but she wasn’t in pain at the moment. It had been four minutes since the last contraction.
Caden kept one hand on the steering wheel, but he held out his other, just in case she wanted to hold it. He wished his pickup truck had lights and sirens. He wished the hospital wasn’t halfway to Austin. He wished County Road 89 didn’t wind through empty cattle country.
Don’t panic. She had just one big contraction, almost five minutes ago. You have plenty of time. Hours and hours.
Tana took his hand. “The baby can’t come today. I’m only at thirty-seven weeks. It’s not ready yet. It can’t come for twenty more days.”
“It’s okay if he does. Or she does. Thirty-seven weeks is far enough along. Everything is good.” Caden remembered that from his training. The survival rate for babies born after thirty-six weeks was very high.
The survival rate. His heart squeezed in his chest.
Tana squeezed his hand and braced her other hand on the window, palm flat, as if the contraction was trying to knock her sideways in her seat. Caden counted silently until she relaxed. Fifty-five seconds. Four minutes apart.
“I think this is real labor,” she said. “I’m scared.”
You and me, both. “Why don’t we call your Lamaze coach? It might be less scary if you could talk to them. They should start heading for the hospital now, too.”
“I don’t have one yet.” But the next contraction was already building, so she rushed the rest of her words, pain sending her pitch higher and higher. “I’m doing the all-in-one-day Lamaze class on Saturday.”
I doubt that.
“I don’t know who to ask. My mom lives too many hours away, and Ruby’s not into babies—” By the time she got to Ruby, her voice was a squeak. “I should have asked Shirley. She’s had babies, but I didn’t want to bother her, because she’s got babies that need her and oh, my God, this is—”
When the contraction ended, she wiped at her eyes with the napkins from his apple pie, and she began to cry in earnest.
His heart broke for her.
“I don’t have anyone. I’m scared.”
“You have me. Do you hear me? You have me. Everything’s good.”
He paid attention to the road, but he could feel the way she was staring at him.
“You’re not dropping me off?” she asked, sounding surprised. “You’re staying this time?”
This time. Caden hadn’t meant to let her down in January, but there’d been no way to go with her.
“Please stay. I want you to stay.”
His heart gobbled up those softly spoken words, greedy to hear that she wanted him by her side, if only as her friend. Right now, being her friend felt more important than anything else.
“I’m staying. We’ll tell everyone I’m your Lamaze coach, so they won’t ask me to leave. I won’t leave you, even if they do.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I can’t imagine how a Lamaze class could possibly prepare you for this. This—oh!—is—so—intense.” She squeezed his hand. This time, she gave a short shout with the contraction, not a scream, but the sound of exertion, like an athlete hurling a javelin, a volleyball champ spiking the ball. “Haa.”
She gulped some air as the contraction ended. “How much farther? I want an epidural.”
I would, too. He couldn’t be the first man to both admire a woman’s fortitude and simultaneously think Thank God, I don’t have to go through that.
“We’re halfway there. We have lots of time. Your water would break before you could actually push the baby out.” When responding to an intrapartum call, they were to put sterile absorbent pads on the gurney before seating the patient.
Tana was silent for an eternal minute. He took his eyes off the road for a quick glance at her face.
As another contraction built, she spoke in bursts of quick words, taking little breaths between them. “Maybe it did. At the diner. In the bathroom. I didn’t know. I thought—it was a lot—a lot of—pee. Just pee—just weird. More weirdness. Sorry.”
Caden drove on, forcing the fear down. They had time. If not, he had some experience. He’d gotten to a caller’s house minutes after a baby had been born. Once. The baby had been breathing and crying. The mother had been talkative and happy, the father had been in a daze, but Caden hadn’t been there during the delivery.
They had time.
Tana braced her hand on the ceiling and gave a javelin-throwing haa.
Or not.
“Are we going to make it to the hospital?” he asked her, a respectful request for information. It was time for him to focus.
She shook her head wildly. “No. I think it’s coming out. It can’t. It can’t—haa.”
“Okay. Good. Everything’s good.”
Caden pulled off the road. He got out of the truck, so that he could yank his go-bag from behind the bench seat. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, in a good way. He felt focused, able to think. Don’t drop the baby. That was the most important principle they’d been taught, years ago. The baby would be slippery. They were to instruct the woman to lie on the floor, so there was no way the baby could fall and jerk the umbilical cord, tearing placenta free.
He wasn’t going to have Tana lie in the dirt on the side of the road, that was for sure. He’d catch that baby before it could slip off his truck’s leather bench seat, as if his life depended on it.
It did. If Tana’s life and her baby’s life depended on it, then his did.
“I can’t have a baby in a truck,” Tana said breathlessly. “I have an appointment next week for the hospital preregistration. It’s not real labor.”
“Okay, baby, but can you turn sideways for me? Put your feet right here where I was sitting.” He didn’t know why he was calling Tana baby when she was having a baby, but he wanted to get her away from the edge of the seat.
“It’s coming,” she cried. She sat sideways on the bench with her back against the door, one hand braced against the dashboard. She only had one hand free to tug on the elastic waistband of her stretchy pants. “Help me.”
“Okay, baby. There you go.”
Ironically, he had baby wipes in his go-bag, because they were good for decontaminating the skin after fighting a fire. Every fire released toxic particles, so their policy was to wipe off their skin before they drove back to the station to shower more thoroughly.
He opened the wipes and cleaned his hands. They were shaking, but he felt pretty calm, considering he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and neither did Tana.
“Haa. The head, oh, my God, I feel the head.”
Damn, this was it. He wanted to wipe off the seat first. It couldn’t be clean enough for a new baby, but the wipes left the leather more wet. More slippery. “Wait! I have a blanket.”
“Wait?” Tana glared at him while panting. “Wait?”
He dug behind his seat for the blanket he kept in case the truck broke down in winter weather. Firefighters tended to be overprepared like that. The baby wouldn’t go sliding across a blanket, he hoped. “Lift your hips a little, baby. There you go.”
Tana was silent now. With her eyes closed, she concentrated as she pushed. Caden stood on the running board and leaned into the cab. He wrapped his hand around her ankle, just to hold her, not to take her pulse. He didn’t need to; she was as alive as a human could be. He watched her face and felt humble.
“The head,” she breathed.
Then he had a baby’s head in his hands, warm from its
mother’s body, a surreal feeling.
Tana was silent, so he spoke softly. “Keep pushing, baby. Let’s find out if it’s a girl or a boy.”
In a rush, the whole baby slipped out, right into his hands, the most incredible thing that had ever happened in the universe.
“The baby.” Tana no longer sounded frightened. She was incredulous. “Look. There’s the baby. The whole baby. It’s out.”
The baby looked so peaceful. Caden hated to wake it, but newborns were supposed to cry, and he was supposed to help. He held the baby chest-down in his palm and rubbed its back briskly.
The baby took its first breath and cried its first cry, and Caden knew that if his own life ended at this second, he would feel he’d lived long enough.
The baby sounded so indignant. Caden laughed in relief, laughed in gratitude that the birth had gone like it was supposed to—except they were in his truck.
He relished his role as the announcer: “It’s a boy.”
“He’s so beautiful. He’s perfect. Oh, let me have him.”
“He’s slippery. Here.” It was an awkward reach to place the baby on Tana’s chest, because Caden was only halfway in the cab, but she settled her baby onto herself as she told Caden to look at his eyes, look at his face, look at him, look at him. It was unbearably sweet, that litany of motherly love.
Caden hated to interrupt, but he had to. “We need to dry him off. He’ll get cold.”
Baby wipes wouldn’t do the trick, and Tana was sitting on the only blanket. Caden backed out of the cab, unsnapped his plaid shirt with a quick yank, and shucked it off his shoulders. “Here we go.”
“Get in. Shut the door.” Tana struggled to sit up and move her feet off his seat.
Caden stopped her with a hand on her ankle again. “You stay put. Stay just the way you are.”
He was aware the umbilical cord was still attached. There was something about keeping the baby and mother above or below or beside each other, but that clear sense of focus had fled, and he was lucky he could think of his own name right now. Tana and the baby seemed to be as comfortable as possible in the situation. He didn’t want to move them.
“I want you to be in here,” Tana said, and he was amazed she could sound so normal and speak so clearly after performing a miracle. Even more amazing, she was thinking about him. “Don’t stand out there and shut me in here. I can move so you have room.”
“Stay as you are. I’ll come around to your side.”
That was how Caden found himself with Tana in his arms once more. He sat with the hard door against his back, so Tana could rest her back on his bare chest. The baby rested on her chest. The plaid shirt was tucked all around the baby to keep him warm. Caden finished his call to 911 and dropped the phone onto the floor, so he could wrap his arms around them both, woman and baby, keeping them warm, keeping them safe.
They were his. At this moment in time, they were his to have and to hold, in the cab of a truck on the side of a road. He didn’t want the ambulance to come.
“Are you okay?” Tana whispered.
“Everything’s good.”
“It really is.”
They were quiet for a moment, and then Caden ducked his chin to see her, and she turned her face to see him, and the moment their eyes met, they started laughing, really laughing, big, genuine laughs. Caden wasn’t sure why, but they laughed like they were little kids who’d gotten away with some crazy candy caper. They’d fooled all the adults and pulled off some wacky stunt.
“We did it,” Tana said. “Can you believe this? We did it.”
“Yeah. Let’s not do it this way again, though.”
She rested her head back on his chest, so she could keep looking at her baby, but she talked to Caden. “You didn’t fool me, you know. You kept saying everything’s good when everything was out of control. What a funny thing to say.”
He rested his cheek on top of her head. “Everything was good, though, or we wouldn’t be sitting here right now. It wasn’t as funny as you telling me it was a baby, like you hadn’t expected a baby to come out. ‘A whole baby,’ you said.”
“I still can’t believe it. He’s here. He’s a real baby. Look at him. Look at his little ear. Look at the tiny nose...”
Caden listened and fell completely, deeply in love. She was the woman of his dreams, and he’d known it from the first. He wasn’t going to wait for a woman like her to come into his life, because that would never happen. There was no other Montana McKenna.
She’d insisted she didn’t need a man during her pregnancy. She’d started that pregnancy without a relationship, deciding she wanted a baby without a man at all. She didn’t want romance.
But she’d wanted to be friends with him, apologizing over nothing so he might like her better. Friendship was what she needed, for now. He loved her, so he would be that friend for her.
But someday soon, Caden was going to try to win her heart.
“Oh, look, Caden. Look at his little mouth. It looks like he’s smiling.”
She already had his.
Chapter Fourteen
The baby was sleeping.
The nurse had wrapped him up in a blanket like a little burrito, and the baby seemed to be most content that way. Tana was most content when she held him, which was why she hadn’t let him go, not since Caden had left them in their hospital room.
Firefighters couldn’t skip work or call in sick, she’d learned. Another firefighter who’d already worked for twenty-four hours had covered for Caden until midnight, though, a woman firefighter who had her own children to go home to, and Tana was grateful for her generosity. At midnight, like some kind of firefighting Cinderella, Caden had left the hospital to go to the station.
Tana had made her first attempt at breastfeeding, then fallen asleep for a few hours, but she was up now, feeling like she had enough energy to swim ten miles and set ten world records while she was at it.
Ruby had come early, before work. She was tiptoeing around, filling the room with balloons and flowers.
“You don’t have to be so quiet,” Tana said. “He’s sleeping pretty hard. You, um, you didn’t want to hold him, did you?”
“He looks cute, but I don’t want to wake him. They aren’t so cute when they cry.”
Tana was relieved. She’d barely been able to stand it when the nurse had taken the baby out of her arms to take his temperature.
Ruby sat on the foot of the bed. “Now tell me everything. I want every gory detail.”
“So, I was at the diner, the one outside of town, interviewing this scholarship candidate from Dallas. He’s got a fantastic backstroke. I think he could fill the gap when Appelan graduates.”
Ruby made a hurry up gesture.
“He left, and then Caden Sterling just walked up out of nowhere and sat down.”
“Caden Sterling? As in, Mr. Hot Buns at the grocery store? As in, Mr. Waltz-with-only-you-all-night?”
“As in, the paramedic who has treated me twice now for fainting. I think he was checking on me to make sure I wasn’t on the verge of fainting again.”
“Huh. Okay.”
Tana told Ruby everything, every detail she could remember, because it made it seem more real. If it weren’t for the baby in her arms, she’d think it had been a crazy, vivid dream.
Ruby’s jaw dropped open and stayed open as Tana finished her tale. “Caden Sterling delivered your baby? On the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere? Good gravy on a biscuit. He was already the world’s hottest CPR instructor. Now he’s...” Ruby waved her hands around, at a loss for words. “It’s enough to make a girl think about having a baby. Almost. Not quite. But still...there’s something very sexy about a man who can handle any kind of emergency.”
Tana rolled her eyes. “There was nothing sexy about it, believe me. Not for a moment.”
She m
eant it, but her brain instantly popped up the image of Caden stepping back and ripping off his shirt for her baby. It had a vibe like Clark Kent ripping open his shirt to reveal he was Superman. She might want to think about that later, when she wasn’t feeling all bloated and swollen.
Then he’d climbed halfway into the truck, leaning over them with his shirt in his hand. He’d been bare chested, a very masculine body in motion. She’d been aware of that aura of strength as he’d held himself above her, taking his time as he used his own shirt to dry her baby. She’d felt so grateful that he was sheltering her when she was so vulnerable. Sheltering. Not sexy.
When she’d wanted him to stay with her, he’d walked around the hood of the truck to her door, bare-chested in low-slung blue jeans in the golden light of the setting sun...
Eye candy. She hadn’t thought about it at the time. Leave it to Ruby to point it out.
Tana was in a new phase of her life now. Sometimes, a man with a bare chest in blue jeans was just a man with a bare chest in blue jeans.
Not when it’s Caden.
Her parents arrived.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Tana said, which made Ruby look at her funny. Of course, her parents were here, but it was only eight in the morning. They must have left Houston before dawn and rushed here to see her, like normal, proud parents.
Ruby left, and Tana sat, propped up in her hospital bed, beaming at her parents. They were supporting her, they were interested in what she was doing, they were here. And, for once, she hadn’t failed them. She was holding a real baby. She’d done it!
As she told them the story, they seemed a little appalled at how she’d done it, though. Her mother sank slowly to perch on the hospital’s vinyl rocker-recliner. Her father stayed standing in the corner, but he didn’t say anything. He looked a little seasick, actually.
There was a quick knock at the open door, and Caden himself walked in, wearing the dark blue uniform he’d been wearing at Halloween. Her already-happy heart just about burst with extra happiness to see him, her friend, the friend who’d been there during the most amazing part of her life.