“Good! Good!” Amy was sweating, too, staring intently at his sister’s…nether regions. He watched her eyes widen. “Here it comes!”
His sister gave one more enormous push, and then, for a second, everything was silent.
Amy looked up, and her voice broke as she said, “Your baby is here.”
Another wail then, and not Kat’s. Amy’s eyes filled as she looked at him—his did, too. “I think you should get a blanket? They said we should keep the baby warm.” She was whispering now, all the fight seeming to leave her.
He bolted to the linen closet in the hallway and came back with a stack of towels, sheets, and blankets. Both women were doing a mixture of crying and laughing. Amy covered the baby, whom she’d placed on Kat’s chest, with a beach towel.
“Now we wait for the professionals,” Amy said, still sniffling a little. “But she looks great!”
“She?” Kat asked, clutching at Dax’s hand again.
Amy nodded. “Yes! Didn’t you know?”
Kat shook her head, grinning through tears. “No. But I had a hunch.”
“Dax!” came a voice from the living room. “They’re here.”
“Yes!” He ran out to meet Gary and the paramedics. The bedroom was too small for the assembled crowd, so after asking Amy a few questions, the paramedics asked everyone to wait outside.
“Is there supposed to be so much blood?” Amy asked, grabbing his arm as she followed him out. “There was a lot of blood.” General Amy, the magnificent creature who’d gotten them through this, was gone, having been replaced by a wide-eyed, frantic woman on the verge of panic.
All he could do was shake his head. It seemed impossible that anything bad could happen now that the baby was out. But women died of postpartum hemorrhage sometimes, didn’t they? Just as he was about to join Amy in a group panic attack, one of the paramedics came out.
“Everything is fine,” she said, smiling. “Kat has a beautiful daughter who appears healthy, and she’s doing great herself.”
He’d stood reflexively when she entered, but now he sagged back onto the couch, limp with relief.
“My partner is cutting the cord now. We have a marine unit waiting to take her to the mainland. From there, we’ll take her to Saint Mike’s to get checked out, but from this vantage point everything looks good. They’ll likely keep her overnight and send her home in the morning.”
“Thank you.” He heaved a shaky breath and turned to Amy. “And thank you.”
“Yeah,” the paramedic said with a grin as she turned to head back to the bedroom, “I hear you were a real boss in there.”
Amy shook her head. “She did all the work.”
Before he could protest, his sister and niece—he had a niece!—were being carried out on a stretcher.
“Can he come with me?” Kat asked the paramedics.
“Of course,” said the paramedic they’d been talking to. She looked at Amy. “But we can only take one of you.”
Amy held her hands up as if she was being robbed. “Oh, I’m not family.”
“I should take her instead of you,” Kat said, swatting Dax’s arm as she was carried past.
She wasn’t wrong. He could only nod and follow them outside where they transferred Kat to a waiting gurney.
“Amy!” Kat shouted as they prepared to load her into the ambulance.
“Yeah?” Amy leaned over a grinning Kat.
“I will see you again. And when I do, I will shower you with the accolades you deserve.” She turned to look at her baby, and Killer Kat looked almost…maternal for a moment. “We will see you again, I mean.”
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked Amy, ignoring the fact that everyone was waiting on him.
“Yeah!” She nodded vigorously. “You go. I’m fine.” Her eyes darted around like she was trying to figure out where she was, and when she caught sight of herself—she was still wearing the polka-dot bikini—she laughed. “I’ll just change and head home.”
“Just leave out the back door—you can leave it unlocked.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t know he was doing it until he was doing it.
He kissed her. Not a drawn-out, passionate kiss like the ones they’d shared before. Just a quick one, on the lips, while he framed her face with his hands. Quick, but hard. Urgent.
Why? Who the fuck knew? The situation just seemed to call for it.
Chapter Nine
After she got home and showered, Amy was tempted to just put on her pajamas and go to bed with her iPad and browse real estate listings. That was her default mode. But she pep-talked herself out of it. She’d just delivered a baby for heaven’s sake. Why not put all that adrenaline to good use and, like, go out and do something non-work-related?