Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Papa, what am I doing to do?” Hillary was sobbing, panicking about everything from how the baby was early to how she didn’t have her pillow here to this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.
Sam didn’t know what to do.
He needed to call his folks and warn them that there was going to be a baby and tell them to activate the family phone tree.
He needed to call Valerie and Tanya. He needed to call Kacey.
He needed to figure out how he was supposed to get a brand-new baby home.
He should probably change plane tickets. He needed to—
“Sir, can I speak to you?”
He ducked his chin to the nurse, then stood and smiled at Hil. “I’ll be right back.”
His heart was pounding a million miles a minute as he walked out of Hil’s earshot. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Oh, honey, nothing. Breathe.” The little blonde who sounded southern patted his arm.
He blinked at her. “You are not from here.”
“No, sir. I’m a traveling nurse out from Dallas. Can I give you a little advice?”
“I’ll take all the advice I can get.”
And that was no lie.
“She needs to calm down. Her blood pressure is through the roof, and it’s not really doing her any good.
The baby’s coming, and everything looks healthy.
They’ve done the ultrasound—the baby is in position; she’s a good size.
She’ll be a little baby, but she’s not painfully small.
She’s not in danger at all.” She smiled at him, eyes crinkling at the edges.
“Can you kind of help me calm her a little? It would make a world of difference.”
“Of course I can.” He was the papa. He slipped his phone into his pocket and went to sit with his daughter, who was sobbing.
“Mi’ja—”
“Papa, I’m scared.”
“I’m right here. I was going to be here with you in Santa Fe. I can be here with you in Boston. It’s Boston. Think of the stories you’ll be able to tell. Can you imagine? You’re going to be able to put this on this baby for years.”
Hil searched his eyes. “Yeah?”
He made a mental note to call his abue, too and let her know his nieta was coming.
“She wasn’t supposed to be here until a little after Christmas, and now we’ll have a baby for Christmas.
We’ll have to go shopping. Find her her first everything.
Before we leave here, we should get her that baby’s first Christmas ornament we talked about.
That way we’ll have one from here and one from home. ”
She smiled at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, yeah. This is a good thing.”
She reached out and grabbed his hand. “I guess, right? It’s okay?”
“She’s going to be fine. They say she’s going to be little, but not too little. She’ll be my nieticita.”
She took a deep breath. “I’m going to call Mama and text my girlfriends. You need to call Abue, huh?”
“I do. I need to warn everybody that we’re going to have to do this a little different than we thought, but it’s not a tragedy.
It’s wonderful. I know it was a shock, and I know you’ve been unhappy about today, but we got to look forward now.
Think about your little girl.” Sam needed to take those words to heart too.
He needed to think about that baby and about his Hillary and not about that this stupid kid who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.
It wasn’t fair to say that Annette and Bobby were assholes because they weren’t. They hadn’t had any more idea than he had about Max showing up with a girlfriend. Not that he wasn’t still pissed, because it was Thanksgiving, and this shit sucked.
Sam stepped out of the room, though, because Hils was already dialing her mom on her own phone. And he was incredibly grateful to that nurse telling him to get his shit together and buck her up.
His phone had three messages from Evan that were obvious from voice text while he was in the car.
Hey, babe. Caught behind an accident. Be there soon
Hey, traffic is moving again
In the parking garage. Be right up
He knew be right up could take half an hour because Evan would have to check into the front desk and get a visitor’s badge and get cleared to come up to the pregnancy floor.
He was glad because it gave him a minute to catch his breath.
That last text had come in five minutes ago and he needed the time to decide what he was going to say to Evan.
He didn’t want to be at odds with his lover. He wanted to be a united front. He wasn’t sure how this was gonna play out.
He understood that Evan was damn protective of Max after all, and who knew what spending time with his family had done as far as Evan’s emotional state.
Sam knew what was going on with his deep kind of feelings, and that was that he needed to call his mom.
“Happy Thanksgiving, mi’jo. Is your big fancy dinner over already?”
Sam blew out a breath. “We never got to eat dinner, Mama. Hillary’s water broke.”
There was a hard pause, and then all the noise from the house backed off. “Ay dios mio. What do you need? Do you need us to come?”
God yes, but there wasn’t time. “Not yet. It’s Thanksgiving. It’s all stopped. Have your supper, hang out there, and pray for my girls, no?”
“Of course, mi’jo. Anything.”
“Can you have her aunties start getting stuff ready around the house? We’ve got a baby on the way, and we don’t have time like we thought, so everything is gonna need to be ready to use.”
“Of course. Por supuesto. Can I talk to her?”
“She’s on the phone with her mom.”
“Oh bueno. That’s good.” She sighed softly, and he could see her in his mind’s eye, bright pink apron that Stephanie had made her twenty years ago on, hair piled up on the top of her head in a messy bun. “Your guy? Is he with you?”
“He’s on his way up right now.”
“Yeah, okay. What about them? Are they nice? They’re going to be good people to our Natasha?”
He shook his head, thankful that his mama couldn’t see him, because that wasn’t fair, that immediate refusal. “I think so. The parents are good. He’s a nineteen-year-old kid, Mama.”
“Eighteen-nineteen only comes in stupid.”
He rolled his shoulders, trying to make his neck pop. “Yeah, it does. I was pretty stupid—”
“Aye! No one gets to talk about my baby that way.” Mama snapped.
“Mira, look, you manned up. You are a good papa. I have never been so proud of you as the day you brought that baby home from the hospital. I never doubted that you were going to take care of her and love her the way she deserved, but you know what’s more important than that? ”
Sam was going to break down and sob. “No, Mama, I don’t know.”
“She never doubted. She still doesn’t.”
He swallowed hard, because he couldn’t breathe. “I’m scared for her, Mama.”
“Sí, te entiendo. Yo también, but we don’t tell her, no? In that room, it’s all good, and I pray for you. Me and your papa, all your sisters, your smart-assed brother and that evil woman he married. We’ll all pray.”
“That’s a lot of good praying, Mama.” He did grin then just because he couldn’t help it. His mom was a paragon of womanhood.
“It is, and it allows you to just go in there and tell her how much you love her and stay with her until that baby comes. Don’t worry about a thing here, mi’jo. We’ll take care of everything, and be ready when she comes home.”
“That sounds really good Mama. Thank you. I love you.”
“Te amo, mi hijo.”
They hung up and Sam peeked in on Hillary, who was still chatting animatedly on the phone and actually smiling, so he waved a hand at her. When he caught her eye, Sam mimed getting a drink and she bobbed her head. That gave him a minute to go down to the waiting room and get a bad cup of coffee.
Evan came running into the waiting room, searching for him. “Hey, how is she? How are you? What happened? I mean, don’t answer that question. I know what happened, but is that what happened? Did Max cause this?”
The temptation to say yes was huge, but he didn’t do it, because it was a lie.
“Being mad can’t make your water break. She was probably way closer to being ready than we thought, or who knows?
I mean, we just don’t have any idea, but no, being freaked out wasn’t what did it.
Not alone, anyway. It was probably a mixture of stress, the flight, getting around, and then regardless, she probably would have had this baby sooner rather than later. ”
“I’m sorry.”
“What for?” Because that was the important thing.
“Max and—”
Sam held up one finger. “No. I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry about Max. You didn’t have any control over him. He is an adult.”
“So what do you want me to be sorry for?”
Sam’s eyebrow lifted, and he was so close to losing his temper. “I don’t know if I want you to be sorry for anything, but I’ll tell you right now, the time of excusing that boy for anything, it is over.”
“I don’t think—”
“You’re going to have to think about it, because there are going to be eighteen years of problems. Not always, but there will be, because he’ll do things that piss her off, and she’ll do things that make him crazy.
They’ll both get married to other people and have other kids, and his relationship with this baby will become a problem.
While I don’t need you to be anti-Max at all, your job is to be pro-Hillary. ”
Evan looked at him. “Sam, my job is to be pro-Natasha.”
Relief flooded him at those words and he nodded. “You’re right. Hillary is my baby girl, and therefore it’s my job to be her champion, but if you’re pro-Natasha then that works for me.”
“Don’t get me wrong.” Evan stepped up close enough for him to feel the body heat pouring off him. His coat was open to reveal his Henley shirt and the strong column of his neck the V-neck of the shirt showed. “I am also a champion of Hillary.”
His shoulders slumped a little and he leaned just enough that he could feel Evan supporting him. “I know that, but I’m not sure I can handle you chasing off after Max when we need you at home.”