It was obvious that the Polanski baby was in a hurry to be born. Madison looked at Jason over the sheet covering Lila’s raised knees. “We don’t have time to wait for the ambulance.”
Lila moaned and Tommy went a shade paler, which Madison wouldn’t have thought possible. She frowned at Jason and nodded toward Tommy. Catching her meaning—or maybe he’d already noticed for himself—Jason spoke bracingly to the other man, reminding him that two doctors were there to help and the ambulance was on its way.
“But it’s too soon,” Lila kept repeating, her voice catching in frightened little sobs.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Madison said reassuringly. “Lots of babies are born at eight months and do very well. I happened to have been a couple weeks early, myself. My family said it’s because I’ve always been too impatient to wait my turn for anything. Maybe little Polanski here is the same way.”
Her light tone seemed to accomplish what she’d hoped. Lila looked somewhat reassured when she gasped out, “Joseph. His name is Joseph. After Tommy’s daddy.”
“That’s a very nice name. Jason and I will take good care of you and Joseph until the ambulance gets here, okay?”
Lila’s eyes went wide as her entire body shuddered. “I need to push.”
“Oh, honey, can’t you wait a little longer?”
“No, I can’t wait!” she snapped at her worried husband. “Get over here and start doing that coaching thing. And you,” she added to Jason, “stop fussing over Tommy and help Madison, will you?”
Jason obviously knew better than to laugh, though he and Madison shared a quick, amused look at this sudden change in tone from the sunny, mild-mannered woman they’d met earlier.
The EMTs arrived some fifteen minutes before young Joseph emerged. Because it was too late to load Lila into the ambulance, they waited nearby with the ambulance incubator while Madison and Jason completed the delivery. Madison was grateful to have them—and their supplies—at hand during the final stages. She and Jason worked effortlessly together, barely having to speak to each other as they coordinated their movements, both encouraging Lila and Tommy during the process. By unspoken agreement, Madison took over as primary delivery doctor while Jason performed the nurse duties. When Joseph was out and the cord cut, Madison passed him off to Jason while she finished caring for Lila.
Even as busy as she was caring for her own patient, she noted out of the corner of her eye that Jason handled the newborn with both confidence and competence. There were a few tense moments of silence after the birth, but they all exhaled in relief when Jason was able to clear the baby’s airway and elicit a shrill, indignant cry.
“He’s a little scrawny, but he looks good,” Jason assured the anxious parents while the medics rushed forward to begin transport procedures. “As far as I can tell from my preliminary examination, he’s going to be just fine.”
Tommy and Lila stared at their son with tear-streaked faces expressing exhaustion, stress, awe and instant, unconditional love. Madison blinked back a few stray tears of her own. She had almost forgotten how much she’d enjoyed that part of her labor and delivery rotation, though she still preferred the specialty she had chosen.
The medics took the fussing baby from his parents to secure him inside the ambulance incubator where he’d be safe and warm for the trip to the hospital. And then Lila was transferred to a gurney and wheeled out to the ambulance with Tommy walking alongside her, holding her hand. Gayla and a couple of other ranch employees had already begun cleanup in the lounge, and Madison suspected that within a very short time, there would be no evidence of the events that had taken place here.
Exhausted herself now, she turned to Jason when the Polanski family was out of their sight.
“Oh. My. Gosh,” she said with an exaggerated wipe of her forehead. “That was not the way I expected to wrap up the day’s events.”
Looking a little peaked, as well, he gave her a lopsided grin. “You and me both. I’m just glad you were here.”
“Right. So you could hand off the messy part to me.”
He nodded. “I won’t argue with you. L and D was never my forte.”
“Mine, either. Head doc, remember?” She tapped her forehead. “Whole different end of the patient.”
Jason laughed and reached out seemingly on impulse to give her a bracing squeeze around the shoulders. “You did good, Doc Esmeralda.”
“You did good, yourself, Dr. Jones,” she conceded, letting her head rest against his shoulder just for one weak moment. The experience they had just shared only added to the unexpected—and decidedly inconvenient—bond that had formed between them at last night’s party.
Still determined to keep peace with BiBi, she promised herself she would hold him at arm’s length again. In just a moment.
“Oh, wow, we just saw Lila and Tommy and the baby onto the ambulance. They’re on the way to the hospital now. You two really—” Seeing Madison standing in the circle of Jason’s arm, BiBi stopped abruptly in the doorway of the lounge, her excited words trailing off.
Madison stepped quickly away from Jason just as Carl and Corinna appeared behind BiBi. She was pretty sure Corinna hadn’t seen anything—not that there had been anything to see, she reminded herself impatiently.
“Jason and I were just congratulating each other on remembering our med school training. Although he made me do most of the work,” she added with a teasing scowl.
Jason grinned and reached for the cowboy hat he’d tossed onto a chair earlier. “Delivering babies is women’s work,” he drawled, settling the hat onto his head. “Us cowboys just pass out cigars afterward. Anyone got any cigars?”
Madison snorted and swept toward the door. “We’d better get out of here now, before we step in any of that manure he’s shoveling,” she told BiBi, linking arms with her friend and winking at Corinna. “Come on, I’ll tell you all about my brilliant doctoring during the bus ride back to the hotel.”
Either she’d reassured them with her joking toward Jason, or maybe the fact that she didn’t even glance back at him as they walked away, or the sisters were simply too interested in hearing all the particulars about little Joseph’s birth to focus on how friendly Madison and Jason had become during the delivery. They stopped giving her searching glances and started peppering her with questions that didn’t stop all the way back to the hotel. Others on the bus wanted to know all the details, as well, so Madison ended up telling the story several times. She was careful each time to focus more on her own involvement with Lila, keeping Tommy and Jason in the background of the tale and of roughly equal importance.