Page 284 of A Matter of Time

“I’m a cop. I have a cool blue light and a siren in my car. Who’s gonna get you there faster?”

“Okay, you win,” he agreed, rushing around the house, hurrying everyone out as we all followed Sam down the stairs.

Four flights down—he wasn’t waiting for the elevator—carrying a very heavily pregnant woman, and he wasn’t even winded when he put her gently in the passenger seat after I spread the trash bag over it, and the floor at her feet. The SUV was huge, but all the parents still had to take a separate car. Three in the back seat—me, her sister, Roxanne, and Chris—was all there was room for.

“Why do I need the trash bag?” Dylan asked as Sam pulled away from the curb, blue light going off like a strobe. “My water already broke.”

He chuckled, reached out and touched her cheek, petting her. “That’s amniotic fluid, sweetheart, it doesn’t stop coming until the baby’s out.”

“Oh.” She looked over her shoulder at Chris. “Did you know that?”

“No.”

She questioned her sister, Roxanne, and then me. None of us had had any idea. When she turned back to Sam, she explained that she thought there was just one big gush like in the movies.

“Nope,” he assured her. “Not at all.”

“How come you know so much?”

Talking kept her mind occupied, and Sam knew all about diversionary tactics.

I was surprised by the amount of things Sam knew about babies. He himself had delivered four when he was a uniformed officer: one in a bank right after a robbery, two in cabs, and one in the back of his squad car. All his sisters had kids and had recounted their birth stories to him and the rest of his family in grisly detail. He had Dylan laughing as he talked about his sister Jen’s birth video and how it had accidentally turned up at the local video store because one VHS tape got swapped for another. Luckily, the guy at the counter had checked it before just putting it back out on the shelf. When Dylan had a contraction, he made her count through it, and told her how well she’d done when it was over.

As we were all climbing out of the SUV in front of the hospital, I felt a hand on my back. I was faced with Roxanne, and she was smiling at me.

“You keep that man, Jory.” She sighed deeply. “Gorgeous and built like that… God! Those arms of his and the way he carried Dyl… Christ. Does he have a straight brother?”

I laughed, because yes, he did.

Chris caught my arm and pulled me in beside him as we walked behind them through the parking lot.

“I wish I could carry her like that.”

Dylan was back in Sam’s arms, talking to him as he walked her through the emergency room doors.

“You have,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but not this far, or for this long.”

“He’s just big, so he can.”

“I wish I was too.”

He sounded completely miserable, and I got it as we stopped at the nurses’ station and they looked up at Sam, all doe-eyed and sighing. It was so romantic—the strong, handsome man carrying his wife into the hospital, able to stand there forever, bearing her weight, and be so gentle as he lowered her into the waiting wheelchair.

Dylan made them wait to take her as she grabbed Sam’s hand and pulled him down so he was squatting beside the chair and they were at eye level. His gaze was warm as he looked at her.

She sighed deeply. “I hate you.”

He nodded, tipped his head toward me. “I know. He hates me too.”

“Don’t think we’ve bonded, because we haven’t bonded.”

“Okay.” He leaned forward, kissing her forehead before he rose to tower above her. I realized then she was still holding his hand.

Most of us stayed in the waiting room except Akiko and Chris, who went in with Dylan, and when Sam and I sat down, he put his arm across the back of my chair and his hand in my hair. Ten minutes later, after he kissed my temple before getting up and walking out of the room, I found all eyes on me.

“Yes?”