LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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