by Jessie Lane
Four minutes away from our house, and another contraction hit Gin. She breathed through it like a champ, just the way that Lamaze teacher had taught her. I might have been proud if she hadn’t been squeezing my hand so tightly that she almost broke something.
When she finally stopped trying to remove my hand from my arm, I asked, “You okay, babe?”
Gin shot me a look that said, if she could reach over to punch me in my nuts, she totally would. I took that to mean I had apparently said the wrong thing.
From there on out, I decided to stay quiet until we reached our destination. Only, the silence didn’t last. This time, it was Ginny making the crazy comment.
“Pull over right now, Lucas. The baby is coming!”
Jaxon squealed for joy in the backseat, while my heart dropped to the floorboard.
“You’re kidding me, right, angel?”
An aptly timed contraction hit her hard, making her scream instead of breathing through it. I pressed the gas pedal all the way down to the floorboard, right next to my thrashing heart.
“You’re not delivering our baby in my truck! Hold her in till we get there.”
My normally calm wife was long gone. In her place was a screaming madwoman who looked at me as if she wanted to strangle me.
“Are you kidding me? I can’t keep the baby in.”
After turning onto the road that led to the hospital, still ten miles away, I said, “Yes, you can. Just cross your legs or something.”
“Lucas Young, I swear to God, I’m going to kill you!”
“Now, now, angel. The preacher said for better or worse when he married us. That means you have to put up with me all the time.”
As another contraction hit her, she growled at me through her teeth like some snarling beast, “If you ever knock me up again, I’m going to cut your dick off!”
“Cut your dick off? What’s that mean, Daddy?” Jaxon asked from behind us.
“See what you did now, Gin? He’s going to go to preschool and say that. When he does, I’ll make sure to tell his teachers it was all your faul—hey, now, what are you doing?”
Ginny was reclining her seat back as far as it would go and bracing her feet against the truck’s dashboard.
Lying there, panting as if she had run a marathon, silent tears running down her face, she yelled, “What’s it look like? I’m having a baby!”
Pure panic set in as I saw the honesty in her eyes.
“But your water hasn’t even broke!” I shouted back. We were only a mile from the hospital because I had been hauling ass, and with how she was acting, I was starting to worry we wouldn’t make it in time. “Oh, no, you aren’t. You are not delivering my daughter in this truck. You just hold the hell on, angel; we’re almost there.”
Taking my cell phone out of my pants pocket, I called the hospital on speaker phone.
“Hello?” a tired sounding nurse said.
“Yes, ma’am, my name is Lucas Young, and my wife is about to have a baby.”
I stopped at a red light, just as the nurse asked, “Has her water broke, sir?”
Grinding my molars, I told the truth, “No, it has not.”
“Hold on one second please, Mr. Young, while I pull up your wife’s file.”
Before I could object, the nurse put me on hold, and the most godawful elevator music started playing. Thankfully, I didn’t have to listen to that shit for long.
“Mr. Young?” the nurse asked as she picked the line back up.
“Yes.”
“Sir, the notes from the doctors indicate that your wife has been in here thirteen times for false labor. The doctor instructed you not to bring her back unless her water broke.”
“Listen, lady, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but my wife is in a lot of pain over here. We’re already heading to the hospital, and I don’t care what those fucking notes say, you’re checking my wife over.”
“Fucking notes!” Jaxon giggled.
Ginny reached over and smacked my arm. “Whose fault now, huh?”
“How are her contractions, then? Are they close?” the nurse that I had completely forgotten about interrupted before I could say something smart back to Gin.
Ginny panted through the beginning of another contraction. “Three minutes apart, and one minute long.”
Those were the magical words the nurse needed to here.
“I’ll have a wheelchair waiting for you outside the emergency room entrance.” With that, she hung up, and I pressed my gas pedal a little harder.
“Hurry, Lucas, please. I feel like I need to push.”
Shaking my head violently, I ordered, “No pushing. There is absolutely no pushing in this truck.”
She gave me a strained watery laugh. “There’s a lot of things we’re not doing in this truck anymore. That’s how you put me in this condition in the first place!”
Glancing in my rearview mirror, I checked on our son and saw him preoccupied with painting my window with his drool. At least he wasn’t listening to our conversation anymore.
“I thought we agreed not to talk about how our children were conceived in front of them.”
Ginny didn’t respond, gripping the oh shit bar tightly as she breathed through her nose with exaggeration.
“Hold on, baby, hold on.” With screeching tires, I made a left-hand turn into the hospital and raced for the emergency entrance.
Ginny was screaming bloody murder by the time I parked in front of the emergency entrance, where two panicked-looking nurses waited with a wheelchair.
Before I could even get out of the truck, the two nurses had Gin in that wheelchair and rushing her through the emergency room doors. Therefore, I unbuckled Jaxon, grabbed him up in my arms, and started running after them. I had no idea nurses could move so damn fast.
Pushing through the emergency room doors, I watched as a whole team of people surrounded her. One was hooking Ginny up to an IV while another two were getting her undressed. A doctor was pulling a pair of gloves on, and by the time he was done, they had my wife naked, covered only by one of those flimsy paper hospital sheets, and legs spread on the table.
Hell, I had been having sex with the woman for years, and even I couldn’t get her naked that fast. Not that I had time to dwell on that, because the doctor inserting his gloved hand into my wife’s vagina was making my eye twitch in irritation.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked, not giving a shit that my son had heard me cussing.
The doctor looked back at me from over his shoulder and replied, “I was going to check how much her cervix is dilated, but it seems we’re already past that point.”
I was going to say something about her needing a woman doctor to check her cervix, but my brain was stuck on something he had said. “What do you mean, we’re past that point?”
“Mr. Young, the baby is crowning.”
What. The. Fuck?
“How in the hell can the baby be crowning when her water hasn’t broken yet?”
The doctor shrugged nonchalantly, as if my daughter wasn’t about to be born, and therefore, the world’s most perfect baby. “It happens sometimes.”
Losing my patience, I snapped, “Well, how about you make it un-happen then, Doc? And shouldn’t we be moving up to the labor and delivery ward?”
He shook his head as two nurses covered him in a doctor’s gown and prepped him for delivering my little girl. “One, I can’t break her water now. It would be dangerous with the baby that close to being delivered. Besides, it should break any second now from the stress the mother’s body is going through with the delivery. Two, there is no time to move her to the maternity ward. Your wife is delivering now, Mr. Young.”
That was about the time that Gin let out another bloodcurdling scream. The nurse beside her held her hand and did her best to help her through the contraction, but this delivery was much different from Jaxon’s. Ginny had no pain relievers or drugs in her system this time. My angel was in an absurd amount of pain, and
I was beginning to feel like a jackass for not believing her sooner when she had said it was time to go.
Turning his back to me, the doctor sat on a stool between my wife’s legs and said, “Okay, Mrs. Young, when I tell you to push, I want you to bear down with everything you’ve got, all right?”
Gin nodded, and everyone grew quiet. The nurses watched the contraction monitor for a hint of an oncoming contraction, while Ginny laid there and tried to catch her breath. It didn’t take long, and then the doctor was telling her to push, push, and push again.
Unbelievably, all it took was six pushes and a miracle popped out. Literally. The baby literally shot out of Ginny, something not missed by my incredibly astute son who cried out happily, “Look, Daddy! Baby Wendy fly!”
The nurses giggled, the doctor chuckled, and Ginny looked mortified at Jaxon’s outburst. Of course, I couldn’t imagine any woman who would be happy that something came flying out of her vagina.
We probably would have all laughed about it for a while, but the room suddenly went deathly quiet. All that could be heard was the loud gasp of one nurse who was standing directly beside the doctor, helping him.
Why wasn’t my little girl crying?
Panic clawed at my chest as I stepped forward, fearing what I might see. There couldn’t be many good reasons for a newborn baby not to cry.
Gin picked up on the vibe of the room and started to worry, too.
“Where’s my baby? I want to hold her.”
“It’s amazing,” one nurse whispered as I took another slow step forward.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” whispered another.
As the murmuring between the nurses became louder, I finally stepped up to the doctor’s free side and looked down at his hands.
Instead of holding a baby, he was holding an unbroken amniotic sac. Worry was my first instinct.
“Is she okay, Doc?” I asked with a gruff voice.
The doctor didn’t take his eyes off what he held. “She’s perfectly fine, Mr. Young. Do you realize how rare this is? I’m afraid that if I blink, it’ll all be a dream.”
“Let me down, Daddy. Wanna see baby Wendy!” Jaxon tried to wiggle himself out of my hold, but I tightened my grip on him.
“What’s going on?” Ginny asked, sounding scared.
Looking up at my wife while trying to hold our squiggling son still, I said, “Wendy was born in her amniotic sac.”
Jaxon stopped squirming long enough to look at his mother and announce rather proudly, “Wendy flew out like Peter Pan, Momma!”
A red blush immediately spread across my wife’s face and down her neck. It was hard to hold my laugh in.
The click of a camera distracted me. Looking over, I found a couple of the nurses snapping pictures of Wendy in her amniotic sac, still resting in the doctor’s hands.
One of them abruptly looked up at me with a chastised look and asked, “You don’t mind, do you, Mr. Young? Caul births are so incredibly rare. They only happen about one in every eighty thousand pregnancies. We’ve never seen one in real life before.”
I shrugged my shoulders, guessing it was okay.
Looking back at Ginny, I saw her worried expression, so I walked over and gave her a kiss on the lips.
“You did good, angel. I’m so proud of you.”
The side of her mouth tipped up in a grin. “Some might say we did it together, you know?”
I laughed. “No doubt about that. Special woman, special baby, and a special birth. All due to my incredibly amazing DNA.”
Gin smacked my arm playfully as the doctor looked over at us.
“Okay, we’re going to break the amniotic sac. Are you ready to meet your daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Young?”
“Yes!” Ginny all but shouted in glee.
Two seconds later, I heard a gush of liquid, nurses cooing, and then a little slap of skin on skin, followed by the strong wail of our little girl. The nurses then placed her on Ginny’s chest, and the three of us watched the newest member of our family with tears in our eyes.
“She’s beautiful,” Gin whispered.
“An angel, just like her momma,” I murmured back, then leaned over to give my glowing wife another kiss.
Life was good. Now I had to call all our family and friends so they could meet the newest member of the Young family. Even better, I didn’t have to name my baby after Jaxon Wall this time.
About the Author
Jessie Lane is a best-selling author of Paranormal and Contemporary Romance, as well as, Upper YA Paranormal Romance/Fantasy.
She lives in Kentucky with her two little Rock Chicks in-the-making and her over-protective alpha husband, who she’s pretty sure is a latent grizzly bear shifter. She has a passionate love for reading and writing naughty romance, cliff hanging suspense, and out-of-this-world characters that demand your attention, or threaten to slap you around until you do pay attention to them.
She’s also a proud member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA).
For more information on Jessie Lane:
http://jessielanebooks.com/
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