Instant Gratification

Emma looked up and locked gazes with him, nodding her thanks.

Ah, hell. He wouldn’t have walked away from a stranger in need, and he wouldn’t walk away from this. Funny how he’d always thought he’d done it all in his thirty-two years, but as it turned out he hadn’t, and though he knew next to nothing about birthing a baby, he knew two things. One, it was going to be damned messy, and two, intimate.

Which meant he was about to get messy and intimate with a woman he didn’t know how he felt about.

Then Lilah’s next scream tore his soul, and incapable of just standing there, he moved closer.

“Support her from behind,” Emma demanded when he dropped to his knees beside her, trying desperately not to look. “Don’t let her lie flat. She needs to be propped up. Neely, help me get this Chux pad beneath her for a clean area.”

Oh, Jesus. He was going to have to look.

“There are no needles,” Emma told him. “I’m fresh out.”

He met her eyes, and there in those sharp baby blues, behind the fierce determination he was coming to think of as her game face, he caught a flash of amusement.

Then it was gone. “The baby’s head is crowning,” she said quietly. “We don’t have time to get her out of here. I need to know. Are you in this or not?”

Hell. If she could do this so calmly, he sure as hell could, too. “In.”

Lilah cried out and fisted a hand in Stone’s shirt, pulling hard against his hurting ribs. “I need to push!” she yelled, panting.

“Okay,” Emma soothed. “But let’s get you into a better position first.” She looked at Stone, and he nodded.

Smiling as reassuringly at Lilah as he could muster, he moved in behind her, taking her weight against him, which prompted a sigh from her. “Better?”

“Yes.” Cradled, her back to his front, she gripped both his arms and immediately started writhing. “Oh God, oh God, another one. Another contraction already!”

“It’s okay,” Neely told her, but her eyes were wild. “It’s all going to be okay. We planned this, we knew it was going to be rough.”

“Rough on who?” Lilah, lost in her pain, squeezed Stone’s arms like a vice. “Listen, I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Lilah.” Emma looked up from between Lilah’s propped knees. “I can see the head. I need you to push now.”

“This was a bad idea,” Lilah gasped. “I don’t want to push anymore.” She lifted her head up to Neely. “Let’s just go home, okay? You don’t mind, right? I’ll push tomorrow, I promise.”

“Oh, baby,” Neely whispered with tears in her eyes as she stroked Lilah’s hair. “You can do this. I know you can.”

“But I can’t.” Lilah started sobbing. “I just can’t. You do it for me, okay? Please, Neely? Please do it for me.”

She sounded so terrified that even Stone was wishing he could do it for her, but once again Emma took charge. “Lilah, this is all you. Just some pushing, and then you’re done. You can do this.”

“No, I can’t-ohmigod, another one!” She screamed, thrashing around in agony while Stone tried to keep her on the clean pad.

Neely whirled on Emma, tears streaming down her face as she grabbed Emma by the front of the shirt. “Goddammit, do something for her!”

“Whoa.” Stone leaned over Lilah, intending to pry Neely’s hands off of Emma. She was in this position because of him, which made him responsible for her, but he forgot one thing.

Emma could hold her own.

She simply shrugged off Neely and put her hands on the woman’s shoulders. “Get it together,” she told Neely quietly and firmly. “Lilah needs to see that you have it together.” Then without waiting for Neely to decide whether she could or couldn’t handle it, Emma came up on her knees and leaned into Lilah, getting right in her face, which by default was also right in Stone’s. “Lilah, listen to me. I need you to-”

“I can’t!”

“Yes, you can, and you will. Push.”

When she spoke like that, with all that authority and certainness, even Stone wanted to push.

“I can’t”!” Lilah cried again.

If he’d been Emma, he might have been tempted to remind Lilah that she’d wanted this, that if she’d gotten herself to a hospital like common sense dictated, she might have been given pain medications, maybe an epidural, but she’d come here.

By her own choice.

“Look,” Emma said, in all her glorious New York tough-ass edginess. “Yes, this sucks golf balls, the pain is like being ripped in two. But the baby is here, Lilah. Right here. All you have to do is push and it’ll be over and you’ll be able to hold your baby.”

“My baby,” Lilah repeated weakly, sweat running down her temples.

“That’s right,” Emma said firmly, hair falling loose, her clothes smeared with blood and her own sweat, kneeling on the blanket out in the wilderness that Stone knew she wasn’t too fond of.

It was fascinating to him. She was fascinating to him, and elegant and sophisticated, and so not the priss he’d thought. Not anywhere close.

“Your baby,” Emma reminded Lilah. “There’s a big prize at the end of this hell, and it’s your beautiful baby. Now let’s do this.”

Stone watched amazed as Lilah let out a breath, stopped crying and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

It boggled Stone’s mind. Emma hadn’t coddled. It certainly wasn’t in her nature to be particularly sweet or gentle in her firm determination either, but she was undoubtedly extremely, undeniably, kind as she bulldogged through and got her way.

Right then and there, Stone felt a little catch in his gut. Not a crush, not exactly, but something that might be worse.

Far worse. Which was going to be damned inconvenient.

“A baby,” Lilah murmured roughly to Neely as they kissed. “I actually almost forgot.”

Neely laughed through her tears, and back on track now, swiped Lilah’s face, stroked her legs, doing the deep breathing with her.

“On the count of three,” Emma said, in charge of her world, and at the moment, also Stone’s. “One, two, three!”

Lilah pushed, and screamed, and pushed some more, and Stone thought she was going to break both his wrists, but then she sagged back against his very sore chest, panting for breath. Realizing his pain was nothing compared to hers, he didn’t mention it. “Doing great,” he said, hoping it was true, and also hoping he had some unbroken bones left when she was done.

“The head’s out,” Emma said, doing something with a suction bulb between Lilah’s legs that Stone didn’t want to know about.

“Push again,” Emma directed.

“Oh, God.”

“You can do this, Lilah. I can see your baby’s beautiful head. Now sit up and push!”

Stone braced himself, said goodbye to the rest of his bones, and kept his eyes on the sky while Lilah straightened and pushed.

And pushed.

This was accompanied by plenty of screaming, more squeezing, and out of the corner of Stone’s eye he saw TJ standing out of the way, his back turned, on the phone to the hospital, the bastard, not getting bled on and not getting his bones broken.

“Look,” Neely suddenly cried. “Ohmigod, look!”

Stone instinctively looked. He saw…

Oh, Jesus. He saw blood and gore, and female parts stretched to limits that boggled his mind and made him