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He tugged at the collar of his white shirt, wishing he could loosen the tie and open the top button. He checked his watch, and waited. The wind had picked up outside. Inside, the courthouse was silent, eerily so.
He checked his watch again.
He paced to the far end of the hallway. Jiggling the loose change in his pocket, he paced back to the rest-room door. It had been fifteen minutes. What could she possibly be doing in there?
He had a mother and a younger sister, and while he didn’t pretend to understand what women did with all their little tubes and vials and lotions, he knew it could take a hell of a long time. He strode to the far wall again. He checked his watch again. He listened again.
He couldn’t hear a thing.
He was getting a bad feeling about this. Pacing to the rest room, he raised his fist and knocked decisively.
Silence.
He knocked again, louder.
More silence.
“Kelly?”
Still, nothing.
“Kelly!” His voice thundered through the courthouse.
At least she answered this time. Her “yes” was more like the plaintive sound of an injured kitten, raising the hair on the back of his neck.
“You okay?”
“I…don’t think so.”
He opened the door far enough to stick his head inside. She was lying on the floor, her face ashen. He threw open the door and rushed inside. “What’s wrong?”
She lifted her head weakly. “The baby. I think it’s coming.”
“You think it’s coming! Now? Here?” His voice boomed, echoing, causing even him to cringe.
She rolled to her side, as if to try to get up.
“Don’t move.”
Resting on one elbow, she breathed deeply. “I had a little backache. Just a tiny one, mind you. And then, the next thing I knew, I doubled over. My water broke. The pains haven’t stopped for more than twenty or thirty seconds and they last well over a minute and a half. According to my prenatal classes, that means I’m in the final stages of labor.” Her voice started to shake. “First babies are supposed to take hours and hours. Days. They’re supposed to take days.”
She wet her dry lips, those full, ought-to-be-a-law-against-them pink lips. Grey’s mouth thinned in irritation. “Okay, you doubled over. You’re in the throes of labor. Why the hell didn’t you call me?”
She’d closed her eyes, and was breathing strangely. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face.
Finally, she said, “I…didn’t know…you were…still here.” She took several more deep breaths before relaxing. Her eyes opened, and her gaze unerringly met his. “Why are you still here?”
“Good question.” But he thought it was a good thing he was. A good thing for her. That bad feeling was getting worse.
Grey’s great-grandfather, George WhiteBear, claimed every Comanche man, woman and child had his or her own guardian spirit. The old man had made several journeys in search of his of late. Grey had never felt the need to do the same. George WhiteBear’s guide was a coyote. There were no coyotes in the Comanche County Courthouse. Some would say that was a good thing. Grey could have used help in any way, shape or form.
He saw Kelly’s phone lying next to her on the floor. Lowering to his haunches, he reached for it. “Why didn’t you call 911?”
“I tried, all right? Why are you so grouchy?”
He wasn’t grouchy. He was focused.
Maybe he was a little grouchy.
He punched in the three digits. At the first sound of the busy signal, he punched the off button. “The emergency phone system must be down.”
“Or overloaded.”
“Damn.”
“I hear you. And I understand your frustration. But my baby can hear you, too, so would you mind not swearing?”
She pushed herself to a sitting position. He could tell it hurt. Her coat was open. For the first time, he noticed she was wearing a long, moss-green knit dress and sensible leather boots. She placed both hands on her stomach, which seemed to be rock-hard. Her green eyes narrowed, and her face grew even more pale.
Grey didn’t know what the hell to do.
He jumped to his feet and paced the small room. Kelly moaned quietly. She was in labor. The pains were close and severe. He started to swear, only to clamp his mouth shut before he’d completed the word. He was judge of Comanche County. He didn’t swear. He had when he was younger, but not anymore.
Damn it to hell, what was he going to do?
He stared at his reflection in the mirror. The black-brown eyes staring back at him seemed to narrow and dilate. Strangely, a sense of calm settled over him. It started behind his eyes, moving down to his throat, easing the tense muscles in his shoulders, uncurling the knot in his stomach.
“Can you get up?” he asked. Even his voice sounded calmer.
She swallowed tightly and nodded. The moment she tried to rise, she slumped down again. This time, her groan was agonizing.
He turned on the water and punched the hand soap button. When his hands were clean and relatively dry, he lowered to his haunches again. “I’m going to pick you up. Tell me if I hurt you.”
“If you help me to my feet…” Her voice trailed away on a sound that was barely human. “Maybe I can walk.”
It wasn’t easy to help her to her feet. He didn’t know where to put his hands. It seemed he couldn’t put them anywhere without brushing the outer edge of her breast or the hard girth of her stomach. He ended up putting an arm around her back. She grasped his other hand. Her grip was strong. She was strong. She proved it by making it to her feet. Once there, she leaned against the counter behind her. “Well. So far so good.” Swaying, she took a step. It cost her.
Without conscious thought, Grey swung her into his arms. He staggered backward a step. She was slender, but she was about five feet six. And pregnant.
A glance at her face showed a small smile. While she steadied herself by wrapping an arm around his neck, probably in an effort to hold on for dear life, he redistributed her weight more evenly in his arms.
“Are you sure you can do this?” she asked quietly.
The sound he made had a lot in common with a snort again. “Just open the door.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
She pulled on the door. Using his foot, he pushed it to the wall, then shouldered his way through.
“Where are we going?”
Until he saw the elevator door that was standing open, he hadn’t known. Entering the small compartment, he said, “There’s a sofa in my chambers.”
He figured she would have argued, if another pain hadn’t ripped through her. She squeezed her eyes shut, and he swore every muscle in her entire body tensed.
They reached his chambers before her pain subsided.
This was bad. He had no knowledge of medicine. He hadn’t so much as had a cold in twenty years. And while he’d helped his cousin, Bram, deliver one of Bram’s prize quarter-horse colts a few years ago, Grey had no idea how to deliver a human baby.
With painstaking care, he lowered Kelly to the leather sofa. Instantly, he grabbed the phone on his desk and tried 911 again. The results were the same. He dialed his mother’s number next. He got her machine. He was in the middle of dialing his sister’s number when the phone went dead.
Reluctantly, he hung it up.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The ice must have taken down the phone lines.”
“My cell phone isn’t working, either. I’m going to have my baby here, aren’t I?” There was hysteria in her voice.
“I think so.”
She gasped, and he said, “I can think of worse places.” He could think of better ones, too. Hospitals. Clinics. The moon.
Kelly took a series of deep breaths. “The labor instructor lied. Breathing doesn’t help.”
“It’s got to be better than the alternative.”
Her pain subsided long enough to appreciate his stab at wry humor. She eased back on the supple leather sofa, taking stock of her situation. The baby was coming. She could feel it pressing lower and lower. It hurt so bad. She couldn’t call the hospital or her doctor. But she was warm and dry. And she wasn’t alone.
She placed a hand on her swollen abdomen.
“Lie back and rest.”
She could hear Grey fluffing a pillow. A moment later, he tucked it under her head.
“Talk to me,” she whispered, her eyes closed. When he made no sound, she realized he probably didn’t know what to say. She whispered, “Who decorated your chambers?”
“My sister, my mother and my grandmother. Does it show?”
She smiled, again the epitome of diplomacy. “My grandmother made this pillow for me before she died,” he said. “She made one for my sister, my brothers, and all our cousins.”
Kelly felt him taking the pins from her hair. She focused on the heat in his fingertips. She lost her concentration during the next pain, but he was still there those interminable minutes later, when the contraction subsided.
“What do you say we get you out of your boots?”
She reached for her ankle, but he took over, sliding the right boot off easily. She didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or scared out of her wits. Placing a hand on her belly, she thought about the baby and said, “I can do this.” She said it six times in all.
The next thing she knew, her other boot was off, too. While he placed it against the wall with the first one, Kelly said, “Women used to have babies at home all the time. We’ve all heard stories of women who gave birth, then went back to work in the rice paddy.”
“It’s not quite as bad as that,” he answered.
“Exactly.”
She brought her legs up, and groaned.
Grey raked his fingers through his hair. “You’re going to have to remove some clothes, Kelly.”
Her eyes were round all of a sudden. She swallowed her panic admirably. “Would you mind turning around?”
He stared at her for a moment before giving her the privacy she’d requested. “Giving birth is no time for modesty.”
“I know, but the only people who are supposed to see a woman like this are her doctors and her lover.”
Grey had no business thinking what he was thinking at a time like this. It was the way she’d said lover.
The quiet rustle of fabric on leather was punctuated by an occasional catch in her breathing. “What was your grandmother’s name?”
Grey didn’t comprehend the question. “What grandmother?”
“The one who made you and all her grandchildren a pillow like this one?”
He turned around again, and saw that Kelly was covered up with her coat. She was still wearing her green dress, but her undergarments were folded neatly on the floor near the couch.
“Her name was Gloria WhiteBear Colton. Her husband, my grandfather, died before she gave birth to twin sons, my father, Tom, and my Uncle Trevor, who died a long time ago. My grandmother raised my five cousins, but she had a hand in raising my brothers, sister and I, too.”
Kelly gripped his hand as another pain gripped her. Grey tried to decide what he should be doing. In the movies, somebody always boiled water at times like these. That was the extent of Grey’s medical training. He wet some paper towels at the small sink in his lavatory, then smoothed them across her face. “Did your prenatal classes prepare you for what’s going to happen?” he asked.
“More or less.” Her eyes were closed, her breathing deep and even. “You should have heard me proclaiming how I was going to have my child naturally. What I wouldn’t do for an epidural or some other painkilling drugs right now.”
“You have your sense of humor. That’s good.”
Another pain took her. When it was over, she said, “Keep talking. Even when I don’t seem to be listening.”
“I’m not much of a talker.”
“Oh.”
“It’s one of the downfalls of growing up in a large family. It isn’t easy to get a word in edgewise.”
“I have one older sister. It was never easy to get a word in edgewise in our house, either.” There were a few seconds of silence. And then she asked, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
He ended up naming and describing all four of his brothers, his sister, as well as his five cousins. He wasn’t sure she heard half of what he said, but it didn’t matter. He sat on a straight-backed chair pulled close to the leather sofa. His chambers were in the interior portion of the old courthouse, which meant there were no windows. The only light came from hundred-year-old fixtures on the paneled walls and a lamp he’d turned on on his big, mahogany desk.
He reminisced about simpler times, and what it was like growing up in a loud, boisterous family. She was breathing quietly when he started to tell the story of the time he, Billy, Jesse, Sky and their cousin Willow had been visiting the family ranch.
“We climbed up a rickety ladder nailed to the wall in the barn. At the top was a window with no glass where barn swallows and doves roosted. From there it was an easy climb out onto the roof of a lean-to that housed straw and machinery and little animals that scuttled, heard but rarely seen. We all knew that roof was forbidden territory. That was half the allure. The other half was the view. We sat up there in a row, smugly enjoying our adventure. Our grandmother’s voice carried around to the back of the barn, calling us in for lunch. Being the oldest, I went last, the others climbing down ahead of me. We could smell the homemade soup and fresh-baked bread before we reached the house.”
“What kind of soup?” Kelly asked.
