Page 11 of Sterling Heat

“I’m coming.” The call echoes back to us and I hear shoes tapping on the tile. “Can you see the head?”

Sebastian and I lock gazes. “You need to look,” I snap.

“Do you trust me?”

Did I? I didn’t know him, but I needed him. And something told me he’d never harm me or my baby.

“Yes,” I whisper, confident while quiet.

He nods once, lowering his gaze. His eyes narrow then widen. “The baby’s coming.” His hushed whisper is awe and stress.

Vale falls against the bench behind my head and lifts my upper body. Sebastian’s head snaps up. “Trade places.”

“You got this,” she says to him over me.

“I can’t do this,” he grouses. Panic fills those brilliant blue eyes.

“You can.”

There’s a battle of wills while they shoot dagger eyes at one another over me that I don’t have the bandwidth to interpret right now. “I’m pushing.” It’s the only warning I give before I press forward, gripping my bent knees while Vale holds my back upright.

With a sluice and a rush, my body releases my little wonder, and I can only hope Sebastian caught her.

“Put her on Enya’s chest,” Vale says, but Sebastian is staring down at his hands.

“Let me see her,” I beg, my body shuddering with the aftershock of expelling a tiny human.

Slowly, he lifts her, and a quiet cry escapes the smallest body. Everything blurs in my vision— Sebastian’s look of shock, the baby being lifted over my chest, the bakery around us.

Relief washes over me as I sob at the miracle laying on my breasts and the reality that my future begins right now on a bakery bench.

Chapter 4

[Sebastian]

Holy fuck, that was intense.

As Enya is wheeled out of the bakery on a stretcher with the baby swaddled against her in another Curmudgeon Bakery t-shirt, I stare after them through the front window.

Go with them, something inside me screams.

I just held a baby in my hands. A baby I delivered when I’m the last man who should touch a new life.

Pinned in place, I’m not ready to turn and face the scene of the crime. The place where a miracle just made a gigantic mess of my bakery. I’m not ready to release them from my sight, which is ridiculous.

Enya doesn’t belong to me. The baby isn’t mine.

“How do you know her?” Vale says beside me, wiping off her hands. I never even got mine washed or sanitized before touching that innocent little babe covered in muck.

“I don’t.”

“But you knew her name.”

“She was in here once. A long time ago.”

Vale watches me but I can’t take my eyes off the ambulance with its back doors now shut and the lights on.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” Her salacious tone turns my head, and her expression is a cross between a scowl and a smirk.