What do I do? he mouthed. Josie started laughing.
She turned back to find Alex going over Laura’s chart, his frown deepening as he read further. She stood up on tiptoes, raised her eyebrows, and tried to get a look, but he was too tall and the chart was too far away. “Anything to be worried about?” she asked in a low hiss.
“Nothing so bad that we can’t continue with the midwife,” he said. “But this is one I’m going to have to watch very, very carefully.” Inscrutable, this one was. Snapping the chart shut, he kept a very neutral—almost too neutral—look on his face, his voice professional and moderate.
His hand brushed against hers as he lowered the chart, and she felt a zing of every form of energy in the universe coalesce into that point of contact. “Unfortunately, it looks like you’re stuck with me for most of the night on this case.” Avoiding eye contact, he looked at a spot above Laura’s head. “If Sherri agrees,” he added in a slightly deferential tone. Unreal. Doctors didn’t do that—defer. To anyone.
“Unfortunately?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
He seemed to consider that, breathing in through his nose, taking his time to answer. When he did, one hundred percent of his attention was focused on her. She liked that very much. “The unfortunate part is that her case is high risk enough that she needs an OB consult for most of the night,” he explained, a practical tone in his voice that made her think she had completely misread what she thought was a flirtatious signal, her stomach clenching and her heart hardening to save herself the social embarrassment of thinking that someone this hot and this interesting would have any interest in her.
“But,” he said, his finger touching the inside of her elbow, making a slow, steady trail into the soft inner flesh and then writing tiny circles in the middle, a pretty obvious symbolic move on his part, “the fortunate part is that, given the amount of time I’m going to need to focus on the case, and the nineteen hours left on my shift, I think you and I are going to become very well acquainted.”
“Me?” she squeaked. His fingers stopped and she nearly sobbed with the exit of his touch, her solar plexus, her abs, her everything all tight with anticipation and with some sort of paradigm shift in the universe that made everything about him, him, him.
“Yeah, Josie. You.”
“I need to pee!” Laura shouted. Josie deflated on the spot. Way to kill the mood, she thought, and then clamped down on her brain, on her thought process, which was far better than clamping down with some of the other muscles in her body that were pulsating right now.
What in the ever-loving hell was she doing?
All her attention needed to be focused on Laura, not on Dr. Alex Derjian. Flashing him a smile, she got herself out of the situation, extracting her ego, her attention, and her cl*t from this diversion. Two out of three of those should be focused on Laura and the third—well, she had a box of electronic toys to handle that one. She didn’t need another crazy romantic entanglement right now, and certainly not in the middle of Laura’s birth.
She should be focused on her friend’s vagina—not her own.
Chapter Three
This was a new low, even for Alex. Coming on to a patient’s support person during the woman’s labor? Alex had seen it happen before, unscrupulous doctors hitting on doulas. Twice in his short career, he’d even seen the expectant fathers hitting on nurses or other women in the room while the poor, laboring mom writhed in pain and agony. At least he wasn’t the baby daddy here. Although, he thought as he peered around the room, he still wasn’t sure who the baby daddy was. Sherri had briefly explained that this was an unusual romantic entanglement between the laboring mom and the two men in the room.
Alex watched how tender they were with her, how the tall blonde seemed to focus her in meditation and to calm her down, bringing her out of the anger and into a more neutral, calm energy that allowed her to handle the waves of contractions far better than she had while upset and bitter. He admired what they were doing, capable of so much more than he saw in most traditional unions. He wondered why he hadn’t seen this before. Flashing back on some of the two hundred births he’d been part of or observed, he couldn’t think of another situation where two men had been so eagerly devoted to one woman.
Not wanting to interrupt them, he took a quick look in the chart and saw nothing noted under “father’s name.” He wondered who they were, how they felt about this whole arrangement—but more than anything, he was curious. How do you do this? How do three people act as one? And which one was the father? Sherri had said that they didn’t want to know, and that seemed even more astonishing to him. If he helped to create a baby, damn right he’d want to know that he was the father.
But this was different, he sensed, as he watched the two men help Laura stand and begin to take some slow steps. There was an interplay between them, an easiness between the men that spoke of a kind of connection he respected but couldn’t fathom. Each directed his attention fully on Laura when she needed the engagement. Under their eager assistance, she blossomed a bit, even laughing as the tall blonde made a joke, and somehow she chuckled through a contraction, the motion making her belly tighten. Alex watched carefully, his practiced eye noting that she still hadn’t dropped.
Between polyhydramnios and the fact that she was a first-time mother, he guessed it really was going to be a long night. That fact he celebrated in his head, a great contradiction to most cases. In nearly every laboring case, he wanted it over quickly. Not to rush nature, but simply to bring closure to the family and to greet the new life that came into the world in his trained hands.
With Laura, he hoped, too, that she would find as little suffering as possible, and that he could help Sherri in whatever way to make sure that the birth was smooth, managing the risks as much as possible. More than anything, he hoped that it was a long, slow, steady birth that gave him plenty of time to talk to Josie.
Touching her like that had been a gamble. Her blushing response emboldened him, made his body react so swiftly he cursed the scrubs, which showed all too publicly what regular pants could hide. That simple touch ignited him and made him want her more. Pretending to read the chart, he mulled over the handful of seconds he’d touched her inner arm, how her breath had hitched, the way the pulse at her throat had been visible, picking up.
She stood behind Laura now, rubbing a lacrosse ball up and down the chain of muscles from her mid-back to her coccyx. Laura bent over slightly, supported by the brown-haired guy, groaning with ecstasy—and then her knees buckled as another contraction hit, and both men shifted to hold her up.