The Baby Surprise / The Father for Her Son

“I don’t mind at all,” Paige assured her. “In fact, I’m grateful for the company.” And for the buffer that her cousin’s presence would provide when Zach showed up later.

“Is that coffee I smell?” Megan was already moving toward the kitchen.

“Yeah, but I thought you gave it up for your pregnancy.”

“I did, aside from half a cup in the morning,” her cousin agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t drink in the luscious scent.”

Paige smiled. “I can make you a cup of tea.”

“That would be great.” Megan eased herself onto one of the stools at the breakfast counter while Paige filled the kettle and set it on the stove to boil. “Where’s Em?”

“Sleeping.”

“Which means I’m intruding on the only quiet time you have during the day.”

“Sometimes it’s too quiet,” Paige said.

“Has Zach been here already today?”

She shook her head. “He said he wanted to come this afternoon, to go with Emma and I on our daily trek to the park.”

“I know you’re not thrilled with him hanging around,” Megan said, “but you have to applaud his effort. The man is definitely trying.”

“I know he is,” Paige admitted. “And Emma is starting to warm up to him. Yesterday she threw a block at his head.”

Megan’s brows lifted. “That’s warming up?”

“Before that, she completely ignored him.”

“Then I guess that’s warming up,” her cousin agreed.

“But enough about Zach,” Paige said, wanting to talk about anything but the man who seemed to occupy far too many of her thoughts already. “Tell me about this backache that had you up in the night.”

Megan shrugged. “I’ve had twinges for a few days. Which probably isn’t surprising, considering that I’m hauling around an extra twenty-four pounds and I’m three days past my due date.”

Paige smiled as she turned off the kettle and poured water into a mug. Her cousin’s obvious disgruntlement confirmed that she’d expected her baby to pop out precisely on schedule and was none too pleased with the delay. She set a box of lemon cookies in front of the expectant mother along with the tea.

“Didn’t I just say that I’ve put on twenty-four pounds?” Megan demanded, but she was already opening the box.

“You did,” Paige agreed. “But I happen to know that those are the baby’s favorites.”

“Which probably explains twenty-two of those pounds,” her cousin mumbled around a mouthful of cookie.

They chatted and ate cookies while Megan drank her tea and looked longingly at Paige’s cup of coffee. But before her tea was finished, Megan slid off the stool.

“Are you okay?” Paige asked.

Megan shrugged. “I can’t sit for too long, or stand for too long, or do anything without feeling restless and … oh.”

Paige was immediately on her feet and beside her cousin. “Meg—what’s wrong?”

The other woman’s face was pale, her eyes wide. Paige wasn’t sure how it was possible, but her cousin somehow looked both excited … and terrified.

“I think … my water … just broke.”

“Ohmygod.”

Megan just nodded.

Paige’s brain scrambled. She’d been through this before, when Olivia had gone into labor with Emma, but at the moment she couldn’t remember what to say or do. “Okay. Um. What are we supposed to do now?”

“I don’t know about you,” Megan said, sounding fairly calm, “but I’m going to call Gage.”

“Oh. Right. Good idea.” Paige turned to reach for the phone on the counter but stopped when Megan grabbed her arm, hard. “Contraction?”

Her cousin nodded.

“Are you breathing?”

Megan nodded again.

And then, as if Paige wasn’t already frazzled enough, the doorbell rang.

She handed the phone to Megan before she went to answer the door.

“Oh, Zach. I’m sorry, but this really isn’t a good time.”

“But I called this morning and you said—”

“This morning my cousin wasn’t standing in my kitchen in the beginning stages of labor,” she told him. “But now I have to get Emma up from her nap so we can take Megan to the hospital—”

“Or I could stay with her,” Zach offered.

“With Megan?”

He smiled, and even in the midst of all the chaos and confusion, her heart gave a giddy leap. “With Emma.”

“Oh, of course.” But she hesitated.

He was offering an obvious and easy solution. But her brain was still scrambling, and while her hormones were urging her to take whatever this man was offering, she wasn’t quite ready to trust him alone with the little girl who had been entrusted to her care—even if he was Emma’s father.

“Paige!”

She whirled away from the door, summoned by her cousin’s impatient demand.

Zach stepped into the foyer behind her. Holding back a sigh of frustration, Paige chose to ignore him and focus on Megan.

“Gage said he’ll meet us at the hospital, but he’s going to be a while.”

Knowing how devoted her cousin’s husband was to his wife and how excited they both were about the baby, Paige was more than a little surprised by this response.

“He’s in Manhattan,” Megan explained.

“Manhattan?”

Megan nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “He’s supposed to be here.”

“He will be here,” Paige promised, almost certain it was true. After all, it was only a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Manhattan, and Megan would undoubtedly be in labor a lot longer than that. “But in the meantime, we should get you to the hospital.”

“I need my bag.”

“I can get your bag after I get you to the hospital.”

“I need to take my bag to the hospital,” Megan insisted.

Paige knew her cousin’s insistence wasn’t as much about the bag as it was about the fact that Megan didn’t want to go to the hospital without Gage, because she didn’t want to have her baby without the baby’s father by her side. So Paige took her hands and squeezed gently.

When Megan looked up, Paige simply said, “Breathe.”

Megan drew in a lungful of air, then exhaled it slowly.

“Better?”

The mother-to-be nodded. “But I still want my bag.”

“Honey, your house is in the opposite direction from the hospital.”

“I could take Megan to the hospital and you can go pick up her bag when Emma wakes up from her nap.”

Until he spoke, Paige had almost forgotten Zach was there. Or maybe she hadn’t actually forgotten so much as she’d wished she could forget. In any event, she was as protective of her cousin as she was of Emma, and she had no intention of letting him intrude on her life any more than he already had.

“That’s not necessary—” she began, only to be interrupted by Megan’s hopeful request, “Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course not,” Zach assured her.

“I’m leaking,” the laboring mother-to-be warned.

To his credit, Zach paled only a little, and his response was a casual, “Leather seats.”

“Thank you.” Megan turned back to Paige. “My bag’s beside the door in the nursery. You have a key and the code for the alarm?”

“Yes, but—”

“Great.”

“It’s not great,” she felt compelled to protest, but her cousin was already hustling—as much as she could hustle in her current condition—down the driveway toward Zach’s Jeep, leaving Paige to stare after their retreating forms.

Through the baby monitor, she heard Emma stirring in her crib, and she pushed aside her annoyance and frustration to focus on the baby. Once she’d dealt with the waking child’s immediate needs, she’d go get Megan’s damn bag.

When Paige arrived at the hospital about an hour later, Megan still hadn’t been admitted. Instead, she was pacing the waiting room with Zach beside her. Paige’s pulse jolted when she saw him. He wasn’t the first man whose appearance had affected her in such a way, but it was more than his dark good looks and long, hard body that made her belly quiver this time. It was the realization that a man so big and strong could be so gentle, as he was being with Megan right now.

She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but she saw her cousin smile in response to something he said. The smile slipped and she reached toward the wall to brace herself as another contraction hit. But Zach was right there, taking her hand, talking her through the pain.

Paige paused in the doorway—caught for a moment in the memory of doing the same things during her friend’s labor, of keeping Olivia focused on her breathing while trying to distract her from the pain and silently cursing the man who had impregnated and then abandoned her friend.

Watching Zach with Megan, she was struck by the contradiction between what Olivia had told her about the baby’s father and what—after only a few days—she knew about the man who was Zach Crawford. And she couldn’t help but wonder how different things might have been for Olivia and Emma if he’d known about the pregnancy.

If Zach was Emma’s father.

She shifted the still-sleepy baby to her other shoulder and acknowledged that even she was getting weary of her incessant protests about something everyone else seemed willing to accept as fact. Maybe she was being difficult. Maybe she was stubborn. But she wasn’t ready or willing to simply let Zach step into the role of Emma’s father without any concrete proof. She wasn’t ready to lose the little girl she loved with her whole heart.

Gage arrived at the hospital only a short while after Paige, causing her to speculate that he’d either been on his way back from Manhattan already when Megan called him or he’d challenged land-speed records in his haste to get to his wife’s side. In any event, Megan had finally been admitted, Gage’s parents had shown up and Ashley had come by after school with Maddie.

Paige hovered in the background, reading some of Emma’s favorite books to her and observing the scene. This part was unfamiliar to her. With Olivia, things had been mostly quiet and low-key—her friend had told no one but Paige when she’d gone into labor. She’d had no family hovering in the wings and no visitors had shown up until the day after Emma’s birth. Of course, Paige hadn’t thought too much about it at the time because she hadn’t had anything to compare it to, but now that she did, she couldn’t help but feel both sad and sorry that her friend had been so alone.

She smiled at Cameron when he came in to give his sister-in-law a quick pep talk and a hug before taking his daughter—despite her vehement protests and heartfelt pleas to stay until her new baby cousin was born—to her grandparents’ house. Ashley stayed, almost as excited about the impending arrival of her niece or nephew as she was about the birth of her own baby due in another couple of months.

Because the waiting room was still rather crowded and Megan was pacing the halls and didn’t seem as if she was going to have the baby anytime soon, Paige decided to take Emma down to the cafeteria for a snack.

Although she hadn’t invited him to come along, Zach followed them into the elevator and, after he’d been so great with Megan, Paige couldn’t bring herself to tell him to get lost. And even if she did, he probably wouldn’t listen to her anyway.

Of course, he then insisted on paying for their coffee and Emma’s snack, which made her feel even guiltier for wanting to ditch him. But when they were settled at a table and Emma was happily squeezing cubes of red Jell-O in her fists—and occasionally stuffing one into her mouth—she had to ask, “Why are you still here, Zach?”

He shrugged. “I’m curious.”

“About what?”

“The whole process, I guess. I never had a chance to experience any of the stages of pregnancy or childbirth with Olivia because I never even knew that she was pregnant.”

“And if you had known, you still would have been in Afghanistan while she was having your baby in Syracuse.”

“I could have asked for leave.”

“But there’s no guarantee you would have got it, is there?”

“No,” he admitted, sounding so genuinely regretful, Paige felt her heart softening toward him.

“She was in labor nineteen hours,” she told him.

Zach’s head swiveled toward her. “That’s right—you were her birthing partner.”

She nodded. “I was surprised she chose me. I mean, we’d become pretty good friends at law school and were both pleased when we got hired on at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne, but I thought there must have been someone else she was closer to.”

“She was an only child born late in the lives of both of her parents,” Zach remembered. “And she lost them both the year after she graduated.”

Paige nodded again and wondered why she was surprised that he knew those details. Obviously he and Olivia had engaged in conversation and sex—which was definitely not a path she wanted her mind to be wandering down, because just thinking of Zach and sex in the same sentence made her blood heat and her pulse race.

The attraction she felt for him was purely physical—and not entirely unexpected, considering how long it had been since she’d been with any man and that she’d never known a man who oozed testosterone the way Zach Crawford did. She also knew her feelings were wrong—and self-destructive. Unfortunately, that knowledge didn’t give her any more control over them, but it did help her refocus her attention on their conversation.

“I was hesitant at first,” Paige said, referring to the childbirth classes she’d attended with Olivia. “Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I was terrified that I would screw up or somehow let her down. But I finally agreed.

“Every week on our way to class, she would thank me again, telling me how grateful she was for my support, as if I was doing her this huge favor.”

“To her, you were.”

“Maybe,” she acknowledged. “But I realized, as her pregnancy progressed and the date of Emma’s birth drew nearer, that I was the one who was grateful. Because the whole process of growing a baby really is a miracle and I was thrilled to share in it.”

“Did Olivia know she was having a girl?”

“Yeah. She didn’t like surprises, and she was determined to know the baby’s gender so that she would be better prepared for her arrival.”

Zach finished his coffee. “Was she happy?”

“She was thrilled,” Paige said. “I’m not sure that was true in the very beginning. As far as I know, she struggled through the early stages of oh-my-God-I’m-pregnant-what-do-I-do-now? on her own. She didn’t even tell me until she was through her first trimester, and then it was a very matter-of-fact ‘I’m pregnant. Yes, I’m keeping the baby. No, the father isn’t going to be involved, and will you go to prenatal classes with me?’”

“I’m glad that she didn’t seem to have any doubts about having the baby—if a little surprised,” he admitted. “She seemed so completely focused on her career. During the time that we were together, she certainly never said anything to me—she never even hinted—about wanting a baby.”

“I don’t think she had thought about it, not until she realized she was pregnant. But she was a wonderful mother.” Tears stung her eyes as she thought about Olivia with Emma, how much her friend had loved her baby and everything Emma had lost when she’d lost her mother. “She was so patient with the baby. Sure, she got overwhelmed and frazzled on occasion, but she never took it out on Emma. She simply and completely loved her little girl.”

“Tell me about when Emma was born,” he said.

“You really want the details?”

“Yeah.”

Paige shrugged. “Her water broke at three o’clock in the morning, so she knew that labor would be starting soon, but she figured she had time to shower and shave her legs first—as if the ob-gyn cared about her razor stubble.”

“I can see Olivia worrying about something like that,” Zach said and smiled.

“Yeah, well, she took a chunk of skin off her ankle bone because she had the razor in her hand when the first contraction hit.”

He winced. “Ouch.”

“And that was only the beginning.”

“When did she call you?”

She thought back, trying to remember. So many details of that day were permanently etched on her memory. Others were less clear. “It was around four, I think. She’d managed to finish her shower and dry her hair and get dressed, but the contractions were coming every fifteen minutes or so, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to drive herself to the hospital.”

“Which proves that she’d considered it,” he noted.

Paige nodded. “Thankfully, I only lived a few blocks away, so we were at the hospital before five. Of course, her doctor didn’t show up until seven, and even then, he wasn’t ready to admit her because the labor hadn’t progressed very far.

“Anyway, long story short, Emma was born just after ten p.m. that night.”

“Why do I get the feeling that you skipped over a lot of stuff?”

“Because I didn’t think you wanted to hear about the contractions stalling and the baby being in distress and finally being delivered by emergency C-section.”

Nor did she want to think about those complications—and the accompanying terror—while Megan was in labor. Of course, she was confident her cousin could handle just about anything. Because from the minute she’d learned that she was pregnant, Megan had been reading everything she could find on pregnancy and labor and childbirth. In fact, Paige wouldn’t be surprised if the mother-to-be couldn’t teach the doctor a thing or two.

Still, Paige would feel a lot better once the baby was actually born. Because although it was true that women had been having babies since the beginning of time, it was also true that even with all of the progress in modern medicine, there were still occasions when things went wrong. And although Paige knew it was both silly and futile, she crossed her fingers under the table, hoping that nothing would go wrong for Megan or her baby.

“Yeah,” Zach finally responded to her comment. “It’s hard enough to think about how differently things could have turned out fourteen months after the fact. I can’t imagine what she—and you—went through at the time.”

“Olivia was a trooper throughout the whole thing,” she told him. “But when they finally pulled the baby out, we both cried right along with Emma.”

“Thank you,” Zach said softly.

Paige looked over at him, surprised. “For what?”

“For telling me,” he said. “But especially for being there, for Olivia and Emma.”

“It was my pleasure—and an absolute thrill to hold Emma in my arms when she was only minutes old.” She glanced at Zach again and felt an unexpected twinge of guilt, as if she’d stolen an experience that should have been his. But then she remembered the point she’d made earlier—that even if he had known about Olivia’s pregnancy and wanted to be there for the birth, things might not have played out any differently.

Except that there would have been no question about the baby’s custody when Olivia died. Or maybe the accident never would have happened, because Olivia wouldn’t have driven to New Jersey to tell Zach about the baby because he would already have known. But it was pointless to play “what if” at this stage. All they could do now was move forward, even if neither of them knew exactly what direction was forward.

Emma wriggled, trying to get out of the high chair, just wanting to move. Cubes of Jell-O were scattered on the tray and on the floor, but clearly she’d had enough of her snack and was ready to escape her confinement. Paige glanced at her watch and frowned. “I can’t keep her here all night.”

“I could—” Zach began, then snapped his jaw shut.

She sighed. “I know I’m being unreasonable. I just can’t seem to stop myself.”

“And I don’t know what to say or do to reassure you that I’m not going to disappear with her.”

Paige put her empty cup on the tray beside his. She didn’t know if it was the eagerness with which he’d listened to the story of Emma’s birth or the attentiveness she’d observed in his interaction with the child, but she decided that it was time—maybe past time—to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Would you trust me with your Jeep?” she asked him.

His brows rose. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

She responded by digging her car keys out of her purse. “Leave me yours and you can have mine to take Emma back to my place. It’s easier than trying to move her car seat,” she explained, then couldn’t resist adding, “That and I have antitheft tracking, so if you take off with the baby, the cops won’t have any trouble finding you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said drily, as he unhooked the tray from the high chair.

Desperate for freedom, Emma flung herself forward. Paige had a flash of panic as she remembered that she hadn’t fastened the grimy safety strap around the little girl’s waist, but Zach—obviously having anticipated the move—blocked her easily with a hand.

Emma frowned and opened her mouth to protest, but before she could make a sound, Zach had deftly plucked her from the seat and set her on her feet. She looked up at him, grateful but still wary, and took a few tottering steps toward Paige.

“Pawk?” she said hopefully.

It was her new favorite word and her favorite place. There was a small park at the end of the block where they lived in Syracuse and a bigger park even closer to the house on Chetwood Street, and Paige had gotten in the habit of taking Emma there after her nap. The little girl had been most displeased to be going in the car instead of to the park when she woke up today and clearly hadn’t forgotten.

“You’re going to go home with Zach,” Paige told her.

Emma stole a cautious glance in his direction, then shook her head. “Pawk,” she said again.

“I can’t today,” Paige said.

“But I can,” Zach said.

Emma stole another glance at him, but continued to cling to Paige.

“What’s your favorite thing at the park?” he asked. “The swings or the slide?”

Emma seemed to get what he was saying and her love of the park apparently outweighed her lingering uncertainty about this new man who had suddenly appeared in her life, because she looked right at him this time and said, “Pawk?”

He nodded.

Emma released her hold on Paige and held out her arms to Zach.

Chapter Five

When Paige returned to the maternity-wing waiting room, she found that Gage’s brother, Craig, and his wife, Tess, had joined the party. There were also two other, older couples, who she figured were the prospective grandparents of some other baby.

She slid into the vacant chair next to the sofa where Ashley sat close to her husband. Her head was on his shoulder, and his hand was on the curve of her belly. The baby must have kicked because Cam’s hand snapped back and Ashley laughed.

“You’d think I’d be used to that by now,” he murmured.

“You’d think,” Ashley agreed.

Paige felt an unexpected pang of envy as she watched them interact. She couldn’t be happier for both of her cousins, even if she’d never thought she wanted what they had. For certain, she’d been shocked and panicked when she’d learned that she had been named Emma’s legal guardian. And in that moment, she’d been certain that she did not want the responsibility of an infant.

Of course, her feelings had soon changed. Now she couldn’t imagine her life without Emma and she refused to worry what Zach’s presence could mean for the status quo she’d established with Olivia’s baby, or what it could mean to the idea that had only recently begun to take root in her mind and her heart of someday having a baby of her own—a brother or a sister for Emma.

Ashley looked over at her. “Where’s Emma?”

“She went home with Zach.” She glanced at her cousin for reassurance. “Please tell me I haven’t made a very big mistake.”

“You haven’t made a very big mistake,” Ashley said obligingly.

The words did little to alleviate her concerns. She chewed on the edge of a thumbnail, as she sometimes did when she was worried, but she didn’t realize she was doing it until Ashley gently tugged her hand away from her mouth.

“He hasn’t been alone with her before,” she said, trying to explain the origin of her concern.