Kat grimaced and his attention immediately sharpened until she was his only focus. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“A pain,” she said, trying to smile. “That one was sharp.”
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. “Sharp how?”
“Sharp, like a real labor pain instead of a Braxton-Hicks.” He shot to his feet, but she put out a hand to stop him. “Johnny, calm down. It might be a real pain, it might not be. We have to wait. What time is it?”
“Two minutes after nine.”
“Okay, good. We have to time the pains. If they’re regular, then it’s labor. If I don’t have another one, we’ll call this a really severe false contraction and go with that.”
“Where’s your bag?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “The same place it’s been every time you asked me that over the past month. Inside the closet, sitting on a footstool. Everything I need is there. I’ll also need my purse, which is tucked beneath my nightstand.”
“You still eating?” he asked, nodding toward the casserole that she hadn’t yet finished.
“Yes, of course,” she said, reaching for the plate with a shaking hand. He didn’t like that her hand shook. She picked it up and took a bite. “Mmm. How did you like it?”
His plate was empty. He’d polished it off while she opened her presents. “It was delicious. You’re a fantastic cook.”
She snorted. “I read recipes. And I follow them. That’s what it is.”
“Well you’re a damned fine recipe follower.”
She pushed the plate away with the casserole a little over half eaten. “I’m not really all that hungry. If you put this away for me, I’ll eat it later.”
He didn’t like that she wasn’t eating, but he nodded and took her plate to the kitchen. He put away the big casserole dish and then he covered her plate and set that in the fridge too. He cleaned the dishes, glancing over at her every once in a while. But everything seemed fine and he started to relax a bit.
“Oh shit,” she said, and he dropped the towel he’d been holding and hurried to her side.
“Is it labor? Do we need to go?”
Thank fuck he’d kept the driveway shoveled. The snow was falling again, but he didn’t doubt his ability to get her to Riverstone. He’d already arranged with Dr. Puckett to take his wife there for her delivery. Kat’s age and her history as an operator, plus her status as his wife, meant he got to pull some strings and get her into the private facility for the birth.
“I think it’s labor, yes,” she said. “But I’ve only had two pains in thirty minutes. It’s not time to go. You have to wait for them to get closer together. Besides, Roman took eighteen hours from onset of labor to birth. We have plenty of time.”
He didn’t know what that meant for this pregnancy or why it was relevant. Still, she looked calm. He wasn’t.
“You don’t think having two in thirty minutes is enough?”
Kat laughed. “Johnny, you really didn’t pay a bit of attention in that childbirth class, did you?”
“I did,” he grumbled. “But I can’t think when you’re in pain.”
“When they’re about five minutes apart, we’ll go. Okay?”
“Okay.” He didn’t like that, but she seemed confident. “You’re early, Kat. You kept telling me you had a week to go.”
“I was supposed to, but babies do what babies want sometimes. Roman was two and a half weeks late.” She smiled up at him. “Looks like we might get a Christmas baby after all—or maybe the day after. We’ll have to be so careful about her birthday in future, you know?”
Mendez could only shake his head. “What are you talking about?”
“Her birthday. You don’t get double the presents or double the attention when your birthday is on or near Christmas. We’ll have to make it special for her, so she doesn’t feel overshadowed by the holiday.”
“We can give our kid double the presents, you know. We have the money.”
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s true.” She frowned. “But we still have to make her day special. She’ll want birthday parties and all the things a kid normally gets. It’ll be hard on Christmas day. I really hope she comes tomorrow instead. Not that tomorrow will be easier with it being the day after Christmas.”
“So we pick a day earlier in the month, or in January, and hold her parties then. Big parties at Chuck E Cheese with games and shit.”
Sounded like a nightmare to him, but whatever. He’d do it for his daughter and his wife.
Kat laughed. “Oh Johnny, you sure are a scream sometimes. You don’t want to go to Chuck E Cheese with a bunch of kids. You’d rather be dropped into a war zone with only your bare hands and a cell phone with ten percent battery left.”
“That obvious?”
“Yes, baby, that obvious. But it’s a good thought. Parties on a different day, I mean. We’ll figure it out. She’ll be fine.”
He liked that he made her laugh, but he didn’t know what to do right now. For one of the rare times in his life, he felt helpless. He was a man of action. A man who got things done and didn’t wait for others to do it for him. He planned missions, directed a large Top-Secret facility with men and women who were responsible for keeping the world safe from global catastrophe, and he didn’t know what to do at this very moment when his wife was about to have a baby. He couldn’t command the baby to come. Couldn’t command Kat to get in the truck and head for the hospital until she was ready. He couldn’t make anything happen and it drove him crazy.
“What do we do now, Kat?”
She looked up at him, her expression softening, and he knew he must have sounded like a whiny kid or something.
“We wait. She’ll either come or she won’t. So let’s stop twiddling our thumbs and do what we usually do,
