Divine Design (22 page)

“I know, darlin’,” he returned. “I should have told you I knew the truth and that it didn’t matter anymore, as long as we could be together. However,” he said, his tone changing drastically, becoming sharp and vehement. “I’m not the wonderfully forgiving guy you’re thinking I am right now. And so help me Meghan, if you ever run from me again or lie or withhold information from me again, you’re going to have hell to pay. Do you understand me?” he added, as he took a firm grip on her upper arms, preparing to give her a good shake and then hug her until she popped.

He never got to the embrace. As he took hold of her, Meghan let out a bloodcurdling cry of pain and agony. Everyone in the room gasped loudly, as her legs buckled and she fell against Michael, who uttered a shocked, “Good Lord,” in lieu of a lengthy prayer.

“Oh, Michael,” she wailed, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I love you so much. Please don’t let me die now. Don’t let our baby die. Not now!”

“No one’s going to die, darlin’,” he said, his drawl covering the panic he felt. He scooped her huge body into his arms and started for the door. “How long have you been like this?”

“All morning,” she replied wearily.

“How far apart are the contractions?” he demanded, more than a little rattled.

“I’m not sure anymore. I think this is the fourth one since I came downstairs,” she answered vaguely, holding on tightly to Michael.

“Dammit, Meghan! Why didn’t you say so,” he shouted. Then as Meghan’s head fell weakly onto his shoulder, his voice softened. “It’s okay, darlin’. Tell me when the next one starts, then take a deep …”

The door closed behind them. Wrapped up in themselves, they understandably didn’t pay any heed to the commotion they left behind them in the pub.

The men who had stood to defend Meghan when Michael had grabbed her and she had cried out in pain were now returning to their seats. The room was abuzz with conversations on what had just transpired. A pool was immediately started with bets as to whether or not Meghan and Michael would make it to the hospital, and a round of drinks on the house was ordered by an anxious grandfather-to-be.

A harried and bewildered Lucy rushed in on the pandemonium, and to her repeated inquiries as to what was happening, she got at least half a dozen different versions of the facts. However, they’d all come to the same conclusion. Meghan was about to deliver.

“I knew I shouldn’t have stopped,” she said, as she grabbed up her purse and coat again. “I ran into an old friend at the airport and she insisted we stop for coffee and catch up on each other’s lives,” she explained, as she finished fastening up the front of her lightweight coat. She turned and headed toward the private rear entrance at the back of the pub. “I feel just awful. I should have been here.” Then she disappeared through the door.

Seconds later she reappeared, a sly, knowing smile on her face.

“On second thought,” she confided to anyone listening, as she took a place at the bar beside Connie, “Who needs a fifth wheel at a time like this? The second round is on me, Pop.”

Michael, in his frenzy, carried Meghan through the emergency doors at the hospital, shouting, “We’re having our baby now,” between calm, soothing instructions to Meghan.

Meghan took little comfort from his words. All the way to the hospital, he’d punctuated the Lamaze exercises with “I love you, Meghan,” and “Everything’ll be fine, darlin’.” Oh, she knew he was well intentioned, but it wasn’t his body trying to turn itself inside out to deliver this baby. She was worried about the baby. How much more of this could the infant take? What if something was wrong? The book had said “very painful,” not excruciating. It said labor could last anywhere from twelve to twenty-four hours and came in gradual stages. If this was the beginning, she’d never last to see the end of it. If this was indeed transition and it was all nearly over, hadn’t it happened quicker than it should have? Was something wrong? Would her baby survive?

In addition to asking herself every age-old question asked by every laboring mother since the beginning of all time, Meghan was trying to focus on enduring each contraction as it came, bearing each intense pain until the darkness faded and the world came back into focus.

Michael had been asked to leave while Meghan was examined and prepared for delivery. The nurse told him to change into “delivery garb,” which consisted of a way-too-small green gown, paper overshoes for his boots, and a paper hat no self-respecting cowboy would be caught dead in, except maybe if he were about to have a baby.

Back at Meghan’s side he found her more and more upset. The intensity of the pain and her ever-increasing fear were leading her into a state of panic. She was like someone he’d never met before. His attempt to rub her aching muscles was met with a growl and a warning to keep his damned hands to himself. At one point she reached out and grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and ordered him, through gnashing teeth, to get her something for the pain because his stupid breathing exercises were “a crock.” If Michael hadn’t been so worried about her, he might have been embarrassed.

It was about then that a short man with fuzzy gray hair and spectacles waltzed into the room with a piece of paper and a small black book in his hands.

“This is turning out to be quite a day for you two,” he said in a thin, reedy voice, as he stood grinning at the overwrought parents-to-be.

“You damned well better be a doctor,” Meghan told him bluntly.

The little man frowned and turned to Michael, hoping for a better reception.

“Well?” Michael boomed. “You’re not the man who was here before, so who the hell are you?”

“I’m Judge Thaddeus Murphy. I’ve come to perform the nuptials,” he explained, wondering if he’d wandered into the wrong room.

“What nuptials?” Meghan and Michael asked together.

Thad Murphy had sat on the bench for almost thirty years. In that time he’d only performed one other of these delivery-room weddings and had often wondered about the ethics of it as neither partner appeared to be in a sound state of mind under the circumstances. Such was the case here, but he was now considerably older and wiser.

“Are you Mary Meghan Shay?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered a little indignantly.

“And are you Michael James Ramsey?”

“Yes,” was Michael’s tentative answer.

“Do you two want to be married?” the judge asked solemnly.

“Yes,” they both said automatically.

“That’s good enough for me,” the fuzzy-headed man declared. “Sign here, and you’re tethered together forever,” he waxed poetically.

Both men waited for Meghan’s next contraction to pass, then smiled as each other while she and her nurse signed the paper; one as the bride, and the other as her witness.

Fifteen minutes later, Meghan and Michael watched the birth of their child, heard its angry wail, and all was calm again, contented and loving. The nurses and doctor congratulated Michael and met the real Meghan Shay Ramsey for the first time, adorable and charming and back to being herself.

Several hours later a glowing, if somewhat weary Meghan held court in her hospital room. Enthroned in crisp white sheets and propped with pillows, she smiled radiantly at her devoted subjects, as her nurse finished her ministrations.

“Yours is one delivery we won’t soon forget,” the nurse teased Meghan with a wink. “What a day,” she said, as she left the room.

“She can say that again,” Michael agreed, grinning broadly. “It can’t be every day they help deliver a baby and witness a wedding in the same hour.”

Everyone chuckled in unison, recalling with amused relief the events of the day.

“I still want to know where the judge came from,” Meghan pondered aloud.

All eyes turned to Sean Shay, who gave a careless shrug before delivering his simple explanation. “Judges aren’t as sober as most people think, and I haven’t been standin’ behind that bar for the last thirty years for nothing. I just called in a couple markers and got a few strings pulled to get the blood tests and waiting time waived by Judge Murphy. It was the least I could do for my first grandchild, considering the way you two were bungling everything. I’ve never heard such a ridiculous story,” he said, shaking his head in wry amusement.

Meghan lowered her eyes. “I did bungle things, didn’t I?” she uttered remorsefully.

“No more than I did,” whispered Michael, as he placed an adoring kiss at her temple. “Besides,” he added in more normal tones, “I thought we decided this was all meant to happen. We were simply playing out our parts in the divine design of things … including that first night. Lord knows, no mere mortal could have staged this and still come out with a happy ending.” He laughed from deep in his chest. He bent slightly to take Meghan’s hand in his. Their gazes met and they smiled their mutual happiness and contentment, silently repledging their devotion to one another.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey?” came the nurse’s voice from the doorway. “Your daughter wishes to join this party.”

The newest member of the Shay-Ramsey clan was delivered into her mother’s arms and held lovingly. Grandfather, uncles, godmother, and parents alike oohed and ahhed over her beauty and perfection.

“We’re saving all the yellow blankets in the nursery for her,” the nurse noted, then explained, “The pink ones clash with that red hair of hers. You’ll never be able to claim there was a mix-up at the hospital and you took home the wrong baby,” she teased. “That one is most certainly yours.”

Meghan beamed her pride and laughed good-naturedly.

“She certainly is,” piped Lucy. Then she added, “And well worth all the trouble.”

“Oh, yes,” Meghan agreed, her voice filled with awe. Then looking from her daughter into the loving, proud eyes of her husband, she said, “Well worth it. But next time I think I’ll do it in a more conventional manner.”

Michael chuckled and placed a tender kiss on her brow. Giving her a menacing glance, he said, “Damn right, you will.”

Mary Kay McComas is an acclaimed romance novelist and the author of twenty-one short contemporary romances, five novellas, and three novels. McComas has received several honors and awards for her work, including the Washington Romance Writers’ Outstanding Achievement Award and two Career Achievement Awards from
Romantic Times
(one for Best New Author and another for Innovative Series Romance).

Born in Spokane, Washington, the third child of six siblings, McComas graduated with a bachelor of science degree in nursing. She worked for ten years as an intensive care nurse. After marrying her husband and having their first child, the family moved to the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia, and McComas soon retired from nursing to raise her family, which included three more children.

Throughout her childhood and into college, McComas battled undiagnosed dyslexia. As a result, she was an infrequent reader in her youth and early adulthood. It wasn’t until after the birth of her youngest son that McComas began reading for pleasure—books hand-picked by her older sister for their humor. Gradually, she branched out with her own choices, reading widely, until one book changed her life. “Eventually I bought IT. You know … that one novel that even a dyslexic amateur can tell is poorly written, with no plot and horrible characters,” she explains. “I told my voracious-reader husband, ‘I can do better than this!’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’”

McComas’s first book landed her an agent, who helped sell four of McComas’s stories and secured the author a four-book contract within a year. McComas published her first book,
Divine Design
, in 1988, and followed it with seven more paperback novels.

A favorite of both fans and reviewers, McComas has been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award eight times and has been a Romance Writers of America RITA Award finalist twice, once for Best Short Contemporary Fiction and once for Best Novella. Over the course of her “third career,” as McComas refers to it, she has expanded her scope beyond contemporary romances. She frequently contributes to Nora Robert’s J. D. Robb anthologies and her paranormal novellas have garnered continuous praise.

McComas continues to live in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband, three dogs, and a cat. Her four grown children live nearby. Read more about Mary Kay at marykaymccomas.com.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1988 by Mary Kay McComas

Cover design by Julianna Lee

978-1-4804-8429-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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