couldn’t do anything about that right now other than give birth to this precious child and start putting the pieces of her life back together.
“How long before the ambulance gets here?” she asked again, this time through the grunts and groans.
Lawson might have given her the answer, but Eve didn’t hear it because another contraction came. She hadn’t thought the pain could get worse, but she’d been wrong about that. She nearly reached for Lawson’s hand again, but everything inside her was screaming to do something else.
“Help me get out of my panties,” she gritted through clenched teeth.
The words were very familiar. Probably because she’d said them, or something similar, to Lawson moments before he’d rid her of her virginity. There’d been pain that night, too, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to this. Medieval torture was nothing compared to this.
Lawson’s forehead bunched up. “Uh, maybe the medics can take them off. Or I could call Garrett. He’s in the house.”
“No. Not Garrett.” She didn’t want anyone other than the medics or a doctor seeing her like this. It was bad enough that Lawson was having to witness it. Plus, she didn’t want Garrett slipping in the puddle. “Just help me with the panties.”
Lawson was clearly uncomfortable getting her partially naked, but that screaming inside her was still going on. Along with another loud message for her to push. But she couldn’t do that, not until the medics came because it would make the baby come before they got there.
She pushed.
Eve couldn’t stop herself. She bore down, making that bear growl that Lawson had already warned her about, and since he wasn’t ridding her of her panties, she fought to get them off.
“Please don’t let me die,” she told him. “Please let my baby be all right.”
Lawson looked up at the ceiling as if searching for some kind of divine assistance. “You’re not dying. Both you and your baby will be fine.”
Oh, she wanted to latch on to that poorly attempted reassurance, but the craziness was building and building. “How do you know we’ll be fine? Have you ever delivered a baby before?”
“No. Just calves.” He shimmied the panties off her. “But I suspect it’s about the same.”
The horrified look on his face said otherwise.
“Is something wrong?” Eve asked.
“No, nothing’s wrong. But I see the top of a head.” The color drained from his face.
Eve was certain the color drained from her face, too, but it didn’t last because she had to push again. That no doubt put some color back in her cheeks since she was straining and grunting.
“Here.” Lawson thrust his left hand at her again, an invitation for her to squeeze the crap out of it.
So, that’s what Eve did. She squeezed, pushed, cursed and grunted. Lawson was doing some of those things, too, in addition to putting his right hand between her legs.
“You’re almost there,” he said. “One more push should do it.”
She honed in on the sound of his voice and pushed. Then, just like that, the pain vanished. Not just a little bit of it, either. It completely went away. She looked down to see if Lawson had worked some kind of magic. No magic though.
Lawson was holding her son in his lap.
There was a split second of stunned silence from all three of them, but it didn’t last. The baby started to cry, and Eve could tell from the loud wail that there was absolutely nothing wrong with his lungs. That nothing wrong applied to the rest of him, either.
He was perfect.
Yes, perfect. Even with that squalling red face, balled-up fists and spindly legs. And huge feet. He was like a really pissed-off Hobbit. But he was her precious little Hobbit.
Lawson reached up on the kitchen counter, grabbed the roll of paper towels, and he coiled them around the baby like a hooded blanket. They certainly made a picture with him tending the baby like that. The boy she’d once loved holding the newborn boy she already loved with all her heart.
“No horns,” Lawson said.
She froze, blinked, but Eve quickly stopped the horrified look that was forming on her face when she realized he was joking. The corner of his mouth lifted into a smile, and he eased the baby into her arms.
Suddenly, her life didn’t seem like so much of a mess. All things seemed possible. But it didn’t last. It was gone in a flash—as was Lawson’s smile when his gaze connected with hers. Eve saw it then. The hurt she’d caused because of the choices she’d made.
No, not all things were possible.
“I’ll see what’s keeping the ambulance,” Lawson said, getting to his feet.
He was still bleeding, and limping, but Eve had never seen a man move so fast. At least until he reached the puddle, and his feet flew out from under him again. He dropped like a stone, his backside and head smacking the floor a second time.
Knocked out cold.
And that’s how the medics found Lawson when they came rushing through the door.
“YOU KNOW, MOST people don’t scowl when they look at newborns,” Lawson heard Garrett say.
His cousin was coming up the hall of the hospital toward him, and Garrett stopped shoulder to shoulder with Lawson outside the nursery viewing room. Lawson figured he was indeed scowling, and he was doing that while looking at the baby in the incubator on the other side of the glass.
Eve’s baby.
The scowl wasn’t for the newborn though. Nope. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that he’d been born three-and-a-half weeks early and that his mom was someplace she shouldn’t have been—the Granger Ranch.
“Most people don’t have a concussion and stitches on their ass,” Lawson grumbled. Or a wrecked image.
There was nothing left of his tough cowboy reputation. Lawson was certain of it. He knew both of the medics who’d come to the ranch, and they were blabbermouths. Blabbermouths who would embellish what they’d seen on the floor of the guesthouse, and pretty soon the gossip all over town would be about his ass stitches.
“I heard about the stitches,” Garrett confirmed. “Did a rhinestone from Eve’s phone really get embedded into your butt cheek?”
And that comment confirmed Lawson’s theory about the blabbermouths. Lawson certainly hadn’t called his cousin and told him what had gone on with him in the ER after the ambulance had brought Eve and the baby to the hospital.
“It wasn’t a rhinestone,” Lawson corrected him, and he was pretty sure it would be a correction he’d have to make a lot. “It was a jagged
