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Mariah grasped her hand. “Driving into that hotel parking lot was the best thing that’s happened to me since Michael was sent to the Gulf.”

  “I believe I can deliver your baby if it comes to that but I’d really prefer to do it under better conditions than this, at least somewhere with a fetal monitor. I think we need to call an ambulance.”

  “Okay. Okay, whatever you think is best.”

  She bent over with another pain and Kate decided the time for discussion was over. She hurried to the phone.

  “Don’t leave me!”

  “I’m not leaving. I’m just going to call the ambulance. Hang on, honey. Find a comfortable position and I’ll be right back.”

  Mariah nodded and sank into the small armchair in the room, her eyes full of fear and pain and no small amount of trust.

  Kate could only hope she would be worthy of it.

  Chapter 6

  The storm continued to howl and blow as Hunter made his slow, tedious way back to the hotel, the bag of takeout in one hand and Belle’s leash in the other.

  He had taken her as far and as long as he dared. At least she’d had plenty of exercise for the night. Walking into that ferocious wind made every step twice as much work.

  By the time he’d circled the block twice and stopped at the diner down the street, his muscles burned as if he’d run a marathon.

  The cook and solitary waitress had looked at him like he was crazy to venture out into the storm to the empty diner. He wasn’t so sure they were wrong. Still, his stomach had rumbled pleasantly at the aromas of baking bread and fried onions.

  Food was another thing that had held little interest to him since his release and he took heart at the idea that maybe that particular appetite was returning, too.

  He ordered soup for Kate—a double order of chicken noodle with noodles that looked homemade—and beef Stroganoff for himself, and he had the waitress throw in two orders of boysenberry pie.

  By the time the waitress packaged it up for him and sent him on his way with a warning to be careful, his earlier footprints had all but disappeared under the new onslaught of snow.

  He made new ones as he trudged on, wishing his past could disappear as easily as those footprints in the snow. That he could be clean and new again.

  At the hotel, warmth washed over him as he opened the door. With no free hands, he couldn’t brush off the snow that coated his parka. He could only wish he could shake it all off like Belle did. Instead, it fell off in little clumps as he and Belle walked through the lobby and climbed the stairs to their second-floor room.

  He let himself into the room, expecting to find Kate either asleep or curled up on one of those beds watching television. When he found the room empty, he frowned, concerned. Where could she be?

  The hotel wasn’t exactly overflowing with leisure diversions. No pool, no exercise room, not even an on-site restaurant. What else could have drawn her from the room?

  He would have seen her on his way up if she’d gone down to the lobby for a little company. Where else could she be?

  He took off his wet parka and hung it over the shower-curtain rod where it could drip into the tub, then put out food and water for Belle. While she chowed down, he ate a few bites of the beef Stroganoff while he tried to figure out where Kate might have disappeared to—and tried not to focus on the worry gnawing at his gut.

  Was that her voice? He wondered at a low murmur from next door. It sounded like her along with the sound of children crying behind the door. Before he could analyze it further, he distinctly heard the sound of a woman crying out in pain.

  Without taking a moment to think about it, he pulled his Glock out of his suitcase and rushed out into the hall, then banged on the door. “Kate? Kate, are you in there? Open up!”

  He waited, his heart beating a loud cadence in his ears. When she opened the door, he darted his glance inside to assess the situation.

  The two dark-haired children he had seen earlier were curled up together on one of the beds while the woman he’d given the room to was stretched out on the other one, her face drenched in sweat and her features contorted with pain.

  He jerked his gaze back to Kate, who was looking at him with a naked relief that stunned him.

  “Oh Hunter. I’ve never been so glad to see anybody in my life!”

  Before he could respond, she dragged him into the room behind her. “Can you take Claudia and Joey over to our room and see if there’s a movie on they might like? They’re a little frightened right now.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked in a harsh undertone, engaging the safety on his Glock and shoving it into the waistband of his jeans, at the small of his back, out of sight.

  “We’re having a baby. Well, Mariah’s having a baby,” she corrected. “I’m just helping.”

  “Now? Here?” His voice rose on the last word. The children, who had stopped crying momentarily, started up again and Kate’s look of relief at seeing him shifted to one that bordered on dismay.

  “We called an ambulance at least twenty minutes ago but Shiprock only has two crews and they’re both out on traffic-accident calls right now. The dispatcher couldn’t give us any idea how long it would take to get paramedics here.”

  Well, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about spending the evening staring at the walls of the hotel room to keep from jumping Kate. Thank the Lord for small favors.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  The woman on the bed moaned again. “I’m coming, Mariah,” Kate said in a calm, reassuring voice at odds with the slight panic in her eyes. “I’ll be right there. Hang on.”

  She quickly turned back to Hunter but he could tell her attention was on her patient. “If you can keep the children entertained in our room, that would be a huge help. Maybe they’d like to play with Belle.”

  What did he know about a couple of kids? He shifted his gaze to the two rug rats watching him with tearstained dark eyes. He hated to admit it but he’d rather be helping deliver the baby than be in charge of a couple of bawling kids. And he wanted to deliver a baby about as badly as he wanted to strip naked and run through the streets of Shiprock in the middle of that blizzard.

  But Kate was looking at him with such faith and entreaty in her expression he knew he didn’t have a choice. He tried not to let her see how daunted he was by his assignment. “Okay. Sure. No problem.”

  Famous last words. It took every ounce of guile he possessed to convince the children to come through the connecting door. They didn’t want to let their mother out of their sight, so he agreed to leave the door open and at last they came with cautious curiosity once he let Belle out of her kennel.

  To his great relief, the dog worked her usual magic. The children were nervous at first around her but as soon as they realized Belle was a big softy, they relaxed. In a few moments, the three of them were happily wrestling on the floor.

  There. That wasn’t so tough. With a thoroughly ridiculous sense of accomplishment, Hunter helped the girl find Belle’s favorite rubber bone from her pile of supplies and showed her how to toss it to the other side of the room.

  Each time Belle padded after it with a weary, puzzled obedience, the two children giggled as if she were wearing clown shoes and a big rubber nose.

  As they seemed to be sufficiently distracted, Hunter returned to the connecting doors between the rooms so he could watch the drama unfolding next door.

  Kate Spencer in action was an incredible sight, one he couldn’t manage to wrench his eyes from.

  She never seemed to stop moving—she wiped the forehead and held the hand of the distressed mother; she called the hotel desk clerk for extra linens; she measured and timed contractions; she took heartbeats and blood pressures and temperatures; all the while she kept watch out the window through the whirling snow for the paramedics with an expression on her face that seemed to grow more worried by the moment.

  A cell phone buzzed suddenly on the bedside table and the woman—Mariah, Kate had called her—
grabbed for it.

  “Oh Michael,” Mariah said, then began to weep. The baby’s father? Hunter assumed so, by her reaction.

  He wasn’t trying to eavesdrop but he couldn’t help hearing snippets of her side of the conversation. “I should never have tried to come by myself. I know. I’m so sorry. I wish you could be here. I miss you so much.”

  Kate wandered over to him during the phone call to give Mariah a little more privacy. “Her husband is a pilot out of Hill Air Force Base,” she told him. “He’s stationed in the Persian Gulf. Her father died of cancer a few days ago and she’s come home to the reservation to help her mother with arrangements.”

  “That’s tough.” He was suddenly vastly relieved he had gone with his instincts and surrendered this room to the woman.

  “How’s it going in there?” she asked.

  He glanced back at the children, who had finally tired of catch and were snuggling on the floor with Belle while they watched the animated movie he’d found on cable. The girl looked like she was going to nod off any minute while the younger boy seemed hypnotized by the movie.

  “Fine. What about you?”

  She aimed a careful look toward Mariah Begay. When she saw the woman was still wrapped up in her phone conversation with her husband, Kate turned back to him with a frown. “Not as well as I’d hoped. The baby is a frank breech. If we were in a hospital I would recommend a C-section to get him out quickly but I don’t think we’re going to make it in time. He’s already moved down into the birth canal.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Try to help Mariah hang on until the paramedics get here. With any luck, that will be soon.”

  “She’s in better hands with you than with some frazzled paramedics.” The gruff words sounded awkward and stilted but he meant every word.

  Her eyes widened at the compliment and she gazed at him with such touched gratitude that he had to grip his hands into fists to keep from reaching for her right there, despite the circumstances.

  Before he could do something so foolish, Mariah moaned a little and Kate hurried back to her patient’s side.

  Twenty minutes later, Kate’s nerves were as tightly wound as a bowstring and she was as sweat-soaked as Mariah.

  She had never felt so inept, all fumbling hands and indecision. During her ob-gyn rotation, she had participated in dozens of deliveries but only a handful of those had presented in labor as breech. All but two of those had resulted in C-sections.

  Her total sum of experience was in the controlled environment of a sterile, well-equipped hospital with all the latest diagnostic equipment, not in a small, slightly shabby motel in Shiprock, New Mexico, where she had little but a stethoscope.

  Every decision she made here seemed life or death. Never had she felt the pressure of her oath more keenly.

  If only those blasted paramedics would get here!

  She turned back to her patient. “Okay, I need you to hold on, Mariah. Breathe, sweetheart. Try not to push.”

  “I have to push,” the woman wailed. “I can’t stop!”

  Kate drew in a ragged breath. She was afraid they were past the point of no return here. The baby was coming, ready or not.

  She would just have to make sure they were ready. A quick check told her the baby’s rump was already presenting.

  Every moment she continued to try to delay delivery increased the chance of cord prolapse, where the blood and oxygen supplies were cut off from the baby with each uterine contraction.

  Fear was a heavy weight in her stomach, but she recognized she had no choice.

  While she was considering the best course of action, she caught sight of Hunter. He had angled his chair in the connecting doorway so he had a view into both rooms. Kate couldn’t see Claudia, but Hunter held little Joey on his lap and the boy was sound asleep.

  The sight of Hunter looking so solid and big, his eyes a deep, concerned blue, gave her an odd sense of comfort. She felt a little less alone.

  She turned back to Mariah. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  The hotel staff had supplied them with every clean towel in the place. They had already stripped the bed of all its linens and covered it with a plastic sheet, also supplied by the nervous desk clerk. Now Kate spread several layers of towels under Mariah and had her scoot to the edge of the bed.

  “I want you to lie on your side. It’s going to be a little awkward to deliver that way but that position will increase blood flow to the baby. That’s important right now since we don’t have any real way of checking for fetal distress.”

  “I don’t care how hard it is. Just keep my son safe!”

  Kate settled her into position just as another contraction hit her. Mariah cried out. “I have to push.”

  “Okay. Go for it.”

  With Kate offering encouragement and positioning help, it only took two pushes for the baby’s legs and torso to slide free.

  “You’ll be happy to know your OB was right. It’s still a boy. One more push and you’ll be able to hold him. Come on, now.”

  This was the trickiest part. A dozen possible complications rattled through her mind as she supported the baby’s torso in the crook of one arm and inserted the fingers of her other hand inside the uterus to keep the cervix from contracting around the baby’s neck and strangling him.

  On one high, thin cry, Mariah pushed again and pushed out the baby’s head in a gush of blood and fluid.

  “Lots of hair on this one,” Kate said, trying to hide her fear at the baby’s blue color. “He’s a tiny one.”

  Mariah started to weep and shake in reaction. “Why isn’t he crying? What’s wrong? Is he okay?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Hunter rise to his feet, the boy still sleeping in his arms, but she had no more than half a second to register that. “I’m working on him. Let me clean him up.”

  With the bulb syringe from her medical kit, she suctioned out the tiny boy’s nasal passages, then rubbed him vigorously with a clean towel, both to clean off the birth fluids and to wake up his nervous system.

  The baby wasn’t breathing on his own, though his little heart was still beating. She had to hope he was getting some oxygen from the placenta that Mariah had yet to deliver but without a monitor, it was impossible to know for sure.

  She needed to get him breathing fast. Off the table she’d set up as an improvised instrument tray for the few inadequate supplies she had with her, Kate grabbed her pocket mask and covered the infant’s nose and mouth.

  She gave two gentle puffs of air and saw the infant’s lungs expand. Come on kiddo, she thought. Take over now.

  Her own heart raced as she waited. Just when she was afraid she would have to start compressions, the infant gurgled a little then started to cry, weak at first then building in intensity.

  Kate grinned as a vast relief washed over her. “There you go. You get good and mad at me. That’s the way,” she crooned, wiping off the rest of the fluids then wrapping the tiny figure in another towel before handing him to Mariah.

  “Will he be all right?”

  “He’s pinking up great now. He’s tiny, probably no more than five pounds, but I think he’ll be just fine.”

  For a few moments, Kate admired the elementally beautiful sight of a mother holding the tiny life she had brought into the world, then she got down to business cutting the cord and delivering the placenta.

  Just as she was wrapping things up, voices and a flurry of activity in the hallway signaled the arrival of the paramedics—a good hour after they’d been called.

  “I guess this is our patient?” A burly Navajo with a solid chest and two thick braids led the way with a stretcher.

  “Yeah, but now you get two for the price of one,” Kate answered.

  “Bonus.” He grinned at her and then at the new mother and her baby. His eyes widened when he saw the woman. “Mariah Begay? That you?”

  “Charlie Yazzi! Last I heard you were in Phoenix.” Mariah’s eyes lit up despite her ob
vious exhaustion.

  “No. I married a woman of the Bitter Water clan, born for the Salt Clan. My wife, her folks live here. She wanted to be close to them so we been back in Shiprock for a few years now.” His features sobered. “Heard about your pop. I guess you came back to the Rez for his funeral, yeah?”

  Mariah nodded and held her baby just a little tighter.

  “Mike with you?” the paramedic asked.

  She shook her head, her chin wobbling a little, but didn’t speak as the other paramedic started checking vitals.

  “He’s stationed in Iraq and is trying to swing leave right now,” Kate said quietly.

  “You’re by yourself? Didn’t I hear you already had two little kids?”

  Mariah gestured to the other room, then sudden panic flickered across her tired features. “Joey and Claudia! I can’t leave them here. What will I do with them while I’m at the hospital until my mom can come up from Naschitti?”

  Kate started to offer to watch them but Charlie Yazzi cut her off. “They can stay at our place tonight. Marilyn and the kids will love the company. My house is just a block away and she can be here in five minutes to get them. Don’t even think about arguing. It’s the least we can do. Now let’s get you two to the hospital, where you belong.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Kate shut the door after Charlie Yazzi’s wife had bundled up Claudia and Joey and taken them out into the night.

  The room seemed unnaturally quiet after all the chaos of the evening. She turned back to find Hunter standing in the connecting doorway, his midnight eyes glittering.

  “Wow. You sure know how to show a guy a good time.”

  She laughed even as exhaustion seeped through her, so overwhelming she suddenly felt as if her bones had dissolved.

  He moved toward her. “Seriously, you were incredible, Kate. Watching you in there was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. That baby would have died if you hadn’t been here, wouldn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d go that far.”

  “I would. I saw how blue he was and how worried you were. Then you were working on him and suddenly he was this crying little creature, flailing his arms around and looking normal.”