“Then bring him to me,” she commanded her lowly servant, one arm stretched out and her fingers fluttering. She was a queenly study in sweaty chocolate browns and luscious pinks this morning. Alex wanted to obey, but—
“Not yet,” Doc Fitz purred, as if she hadn’t performed the greatest miracle of her life. “I’m not finished with this handsome boy yet. Just a couple more tests, Kelsey. I’ll be quick.”
“Is he breathing okay?” she asked, peering around the nurse who was assisting her OB doctor.
“He’s just fine, but he sure gave me a scare when his heart decided to stop for a couple minutes there. Didn’t you, big guy?” she asked the now squirming baby boy.
“What caused it?” Alex asked tersely, needing that problem fixed right damned now.
“To be honest, I’m not precisely sure. Birth is hard, even on tough little soldiers, and sometimes babies are in a big hurry to be born. They want out. If he’s anything like you, he probably crushed his umbilical cord on his mad dash to freedom. It wasn’t wrapped around his neck, and that’s a good sign. Thanks to Dr. Brown’s decision to perform the C-section right here, Bradley wasn’t without oxygen for long. Probably simple hypoxia. His cord got pinched during those last moments of labor just long enough to scare all of us.”
She turned to really look at Alex then. “You can breathe now, Dad. You and Kelsey make beautiful babies.”
He didn’t want to just breathe. He wanted to cry. And roar! He was a dad again! He… they had a son. Kelsey needed this third little boy so bad. Aw, hell. Tears flooded his vision, blurring his view of heaven. He dashed them away. Quickly, damn it.
While Kelsey’s doctor finished his work, Dr. McKenna Fitzgerald-Villanueva worked quickly, assessing Bradley, talking to him as if he understood everything she said. His hair was a lighter brown than Lexie and Kelsey’s. He blinked up at her with the startling wonder of a newborn. He had so much to look forward to.
McKenna wasn’t only an old friend, she was also married to one of Alex’s best agents. Even now, Beau Villanueva stood patiently outside Kelsey’s door, waiting to be invited in to celebrate the newest addition to The TEAM. Several other agents and their wives waited with him, which was probably the only reason Beau hadn’t already barged in. The man had less patience than Alex.
The only one missing in this family Alex called The TEAM was the woman he’d loved first. His mom. Abigail Stewart would’ve loved being here for the birth of her first grandson.
“There we go,” McKenna crooned.
By then, Kelsey’s doctor had packed up and excused himself. His nurse had left with him. Bradley’s feet had been blackened and printed like the little criminal he was, guilty of scaring his mom and dad like he had. Alex’s fingers itched to hold him. He needed the scent of his son in his nose, and he needed to kiss the little beggar. But mostly, he needed to be the one who carried his son across the room and put him in his mother’s arms. That was a father’s right, not McKenna’s.
“May I?” he asked Doc Fitz pointedly.
She looked up at him again, and damned if she didn’t see right through him. But he guessed most doctors could tell a smitten fool when they saw one. In a deck of poker cards, Kelsey was the queen of hearts. He was nothing more than her most humble servant.
“Of course,” McKenna said as she finished wrapping Bradley, turning him into a snug, blue-and-white-striped papoose. Gingerly, she lifted him from the exam table and transferred him into Alex’s arms. “He’s all yours, Dad.”
With one hit of the scent off that little boy’s dark, wet head, more tears sprang to his father’s eyes. A son. Alex had a son, his first, Kelsey’s third. He almost hated to give this newborn boy to her, afraid of the memories this little man might invoke. But nothing could bring the boys she’d lost, Jackie and Tommy, back, and this wasn’t her second chance to be the mother of a son. This was simply, irrevocably, Bradley’s time on Earth. Kelsey had to be feeling the same tender emotions Alex was today. She’d be remembering the births of her other boys, the same as he was remembering the day Abby was born.
And just as swiftly, Kelsey would remember how she’d lost them, and where they were buried. Like Jackie and Tommy, dear sweet Abby was also gone. And this precious moment was just one of those oddly wretched, overwhelmingly joy-filled, spiritual moments in time, when it seemed the family members they’d lost were with them again. Unseen, but just as alive as the wiggling baby in his hands.
It wasn’t often Alex thought about his mother, but he felt Abigail Stewart’s sweet presence here today. She would adore Kelsey, and she’d be thrilled to be a grandmother again. The grandparents who’d raised Alex, Patrick Bradley and Patricia Rose Southerland Stewart, Paddy and Pat, were here as well, both beaming down on him, Kelsey, and Bradley with love and pride. Probably tearing up, too.
The thought struck Alex hard. Because that meant Sara, his first wife, had to be here as well, and Abby, his first darling daughter, had come with her mom to meet her brother. The thought unnerved him, nearly unmanned him. But Kelsey’s arms were stretched open wide, waiting. Smiling. With his nose still flat against the head of the tiny man in his arms, Alex leaned into the woman he adored with his whole heart, and whispered, “Here’s your son, Mama.”
Of course, tears were streaming down her cheeks by then. Kelsey was a crier, and today, Alex was, too.
“Ohhhh,” she mewed, as she too, flattened her nose and lips to their son’s damp head, kissing Bradley while she breathed him in the same way Alex had. “I
