“Mavis, since you got pregnant, when haven’t you wanted to talk about the baby?” Eve leaned over, took a canapé from her plate. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Yeah, but this is a specific thing, that involves you.”
“Me?” Eve licked her thumb and decided to steal another loaded cracker from Mavis’s plate.
“Uh-huh. We want you to be my backup coach.”
“You’re taking up baseball?” Eve bit into the salmon thingy with the stuff, and decided it wasn’t half bad. “Shouldn’t you wait until you get the kid out of there?”
“No. Labor and delivery coach. You’d back up Leonardo when I have the baby.”
Eve choked on the canapé and turned white.
“Take a drink, darling,” Roarke said with a laugh in his voice. “Put your head between your knees if you feel dizzy.”
“Shut up. Are you talking about . . . like, being there? In the actual place at the actual time? In the same room as . . . it.”
“You can’t coach me through it if you’re in Queens, Dallas. You gotta have a backup coach, somebody who takes the class, learns about the breathing and the positions and the . . . stuff. Daddy Bear’s first string, but you have to have one on the bench.”
“Can I just stay on the bench? Outside?”
“I need you there.” Tears swam into her eyes until they shimmered brighter than her boots. “You’re my best friend in the whole universe. I need you with me.”
“Oh man. Okay, okay. Don’t flood. I’ll do it.”
“We feel,” Leonardo said, and offered Mavis a green cloth to dab at her eyes, “that first for friendship there’s no one who we want to share this miracle with more. Added to that, you’re the most steady and solid people we know. In a crisis, you’d keep your heads.”
“Our heads?” Eve repeated.
“We want Roarke there, too.” Mavis sniffed into her cloth.
“Me? There?”
Eve turned her head and saw—with pleasure—the rare sight of utter panic on his face. “Not so damn funny now, is it, ace?”
“We’re permitted, even encouraged, to have family present,” Leonardo explained. “You’re our family.”
“Ah, I’m not sure it’s quite proper for me to be . . . to see Mavis in that condition. Under those . . . circumstances.”
“Get out.” Sniffles forgotten, Mavis giggled and tapped Roarke playfully on the arm. “Anybody with a vid player’s seen me mostly naked. And this isn’t about the proper. It’s about family. We know we can count on you. Both of you.”
“Of course.” Roarke swallowed a great deal of wine. “Of course, you can.”
When they were alone, sitting in the soft light of dusk with the candles Summerset had lit flickering, Roarke reached out, gripped Eve’s hands in his.
“They could change their minds. It’s still months away, and they could easily change their minds and want this . . . event to be a private one between them.”
She looked at him as if he’d sprouted a second head. “Private? Private? This is Mavis we’re dealing with.”
He shut his eyes. “God pity us.”
“And it’s just going to get . . . more.” She pulled away, sprang up. “Before you know it, before you know it she’s going to want us to deliver the thing. They’ll want to do it here, in our bedroom or something, with cameras—live feed to her fans. And us pulling the thing out of her.”
Utter and genuine horror leaped into his eyes. “Stop it, Eve. Stop it now.”
“Yeah, live feed, that’s Mavis to the ground. And we’ll do it.” She spun back to him. “We’ll do it because she’s just sucking us in. Sucking us in like some . . .” She windmilled her arms. “Like some big sucking thing. Some big pregnant sucking thing.”
“Let’s just calm down.” With the images Eve painted playing in his head, Roarke took out a cigarette. Lighting it, he ordered himself to think rationally. “Surely you’ve done this sort of thing before. You’re a cop. You must have at least been on hand during a birthing.”