A Family of Her Own (Dundee, Idaho #3)(49)
Author: Brenda Novak

To her alarm, she felt the baby move lower, into the birth canal. Then Katie experienced a new kind of pain—the pain of delivery?—and knew they weren’t going to make it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BOOKER GLOWERED AT THE wet, shiny road. They’d only been driving for fifty-three minutes, but he’d spent every one of those minutes cursing the rain. And the road. And the pain. And the panic. And Andy. And Mike Hill—he didn’t know why he was angry at Mike, he just was. And everything and everyone else he could think of, including himself and his inability to drive any faster without risking their lives. He’d been crazy to let Katie convince him to take this chance. Except he couldn’t help siding with her in wanting to reach Boise and real help, if at all possible.

“Booker?” Katie said breathlessly.

He grunted, following the dotted white lines in the center of the road like a safety rope.

“Booker?” she repeated, the pitch of her voice significantly higher.

“What is it?” He finally looked over, but he didn’t like what he saw. She was crying and sliding closer to him so she could lie down.

“You have to…pant, pant…stop.”

“We can’t. There’s nothing here, no one to help us. We’ll make Boise in another forty-five minutes. Just hang on, okay? The road will straighten out in a few more miles and then I can shave off—”

“Booker, please!” The words, torn from her, filled him with dread.

“The baby’s coming right now?”

Tears pooled in her eyes. “I can’t stop it.”

At that moment, he would rather have faced a whole gang of Hell’s Angels bent on taking him apart piece by piece than help Katie deliver her premature baby out in the middle of nowhere. But what choice did he have? The worst seemed inevitable. There was no way out.

Swallowing a fresh string of curses, he slowed and looked for a safe place to pull over. After a short distance, a narrow road materialized on the right, heading into a forest. It was remote and muddy, but Booker had a four-wheel drive, and they had to take what they could find.

Tree branches scraped the sides of the truck as they bounced through potholes and puddles. When they’d traveled a hundred yards or so from the highway, he parked but left the engine running so he could keep the heater on. Warmth was the one thing he could provide.

Katie was turned the wrong way for him to assist her, but he knew it would be a lot harder for her to change positions than for him. Reluctant to get out in the rain and blast her with cold air, he flipped on the cabin light so he could see and carefully maneuvered his large body around hers in the cramped space. A moment later he was on the passenger side, crouching with one knee on the seat and one foot planted on the floor.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “I—I have to take off my pants.”

“Close my eyes?” he repeated, astonished. Somehow this wasn’t what he’d expected. “You’re worried about modesty right now?”

“I know it seems silly, but I’m hurting and bleeding and—” her chest heaved as she worked to catch her breath “—I’ve never felt so vulnerable or unattractive in my whole life. And now my…my pants have to come off and—” She suffered through another contraction.

“And?” he prompted.

She caught her breath. “And I’ll be…completely exposed, at my absolute worst.”

Booker shook his head in bewilderment. “So? I’m going to see it anyway.”

She couldn’t answer immediately. Her eyes closed as she endured yet another pain, then she muttered, “I’ll do it myself. This…this is my problem, not yours.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“What will Ashleigh think about you being here with me?”

“Forget about Ashleigh,” he snapped. “She doesn’t have anything to do with…anything. And I might not be the best person for this, but I’m all you’ve got.”

Their eyes met and Katie’s filled with tears again. “Do you love her?”

He couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. Katie was about to have a baby!

“No,” he said. “I never did. Now let’s get these pants off.” Nudging her hands away when she moved to help him, he stripped off her jeans and her underwear, and tossed them on the floor. Then he turned up the heat, to make sure the baby would be warm enough, and supported Katie’s legs. At first she resisted his attempts to gently open them so he could see what was happening with the baby, but another pain convinced her she had no choice about that, either.

“Men should have to suffer—” she swallowed “—such indignities.”

Booker would’ve smiled, except he was too scared. With each contraction, blood and fluid leaked out. But he saw no baby. He thought they might have given up on the trip too soon, that they might have made it a little farther down the road if only they’d kept going. But then she cried out and bore down in earnest—and a tiny bald head slowly emerged.

At his first sight of the baby, Booker felt as though someone had landed a right hook to his chin. His pulse raced and he saw stars. For a moment, he thought he might pass out—drop right there on the floorboards of his truck.

“Booker?” Katie cried, obviously realizing something was wrong.

Steadying himself with a hand on the dash, he closed his eyes and found the anger he’d felt earlier, let it bolster and sustain him. He’d handle this the best way he knew how. He would not wimp out on her. “I’m here,” he said. “I’m here. I’m fine.”

“Okay. I believe you. But I’m so scared….”

“You’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” He was trying to reassure himself as much as her because he had no idea if it was normal for the baby’s head to appear without the rest of it.

Breathing heavily, Katie tried to see the baby while Booker sorted through the snippets of childbirth scenes he could remember from various television shows or movies. Linens and boiling water. They always asked for linens and boiling water. But he didn’t have either and wouldn’t have a damn clue what to do with them, anyway.

Using the inside of his T-shirt, because it was cleaner than anything else available to him, he wiped the blood and fluid from the baby’s face. Its eyes were closed. Its mouth, too…

Several seconds passed. When nothing else happened, Booker felt his panic rise. Surely this wasn’t normal. Surely the baby couldn’t survive very long half in and half out. It looked dead already….