The Baby Surprise by Brenda Harlen Page A

he spoke, Paige had almost forgotten Zach was there. Or maybe she hadn’t actually forgotten so much as she’dwished she could forget. In any event, she was as protective of her cousin as she was of Emma, and she had no intention of letting him intrude on her life any more than he already had.
    â€œThat’s not necessary—” she began, only to be interrupted by Megan’s hopeful request, “Are you sure you wouldn’t mind?”
    â€œOf course not,” Zach assured her.
    â€œI’m leaking,” the laboring mother-to-be warned.
    To his credit, Zach paled only a little, and his response was a casual, “Leather seats.”
    â€œThank you.” Megan turned back to Paige. “My bag’s beside the door in the nursery. You have a key and the code for the alarm?”
    â€œYes, but—”
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œIt’s not great,” she felt compelled to protest, but her cousin was already hustling—as much as she could hustle in her current condition—down the driveway toward Zach’s Jeep, leaving Paige to stare after their retreating forms.
    Through the baby monitor, she heard Emma stirring in her crib, and she pushed aside her annoyance and frustration to focus on the baby. Once she’d dealt with the waking child’s immediate needs, she’d go get Megan’s damn bag.
    Â 
    When Paige arrived at the hospital about an hour later, Megan still hadn’t been admitted. Instead, she was pacing the waiting room with Zach beside her. Paige’s pulse jolted when she saw him. He wasn’t the first man whose appearance had affected her in such a way, but it was more than his dark good looks and long, hard body that made her belly quiver this time. It was the realization that a man so big and strong could be so gentle, as he was being with Megan right now.
    She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but she saw her cousin smile in response to something he said. Thesmile slipped and she reached toward the wall to brace herself as another contraction hit. But Zach was right there, taking her hand, talking her through the pain.
    Paige paused in the doorway—caught for a moment in the memory of doing the same things during her friend’s labor, of keeping Olivia focused on her breathing while trying to distract her from the pain and silently cursing the man who had impregnated and then abandoned her friend.
    Watching Zach with Megan, she was struck by the contradiction between what Olivia had told her about the baby’s father and what—after only a few days—she knew about the man who was Zach Crawford. And she couldn’t help but wonder how different things might have been for Olivia and Emma if he’d known about the pregnancy.
    If Zach was Emma’s father.
    She shifted the still-sleepy baby to her other shoulder and acknowledged that even she was getting weary of her incessant protests about something everyone else seemed willing to accept as fact. Maybe she was being difficult. Maybe she was stubborn. But she wasn’t ready or willing to simply let Zach step into the role of Emma’s father without any concrete proof. She wasn’t ready to lose the little girl she loved with her whole heart.
    Â 
    Gage arrived at the hospital only a short while after Paige, causing her to speculate that he’d either been on his way back from Manhattan already when Megan called him or he’d challenged land-speed records in his haste to get to his wife’s side. In any event, Megan had finally been admitted, Gage’s parents had shown up and Ashley had come by after school with Maddie.
    Paige hovered in the background, reading some of Emma’s favorite books to her and observing the scene. This part was unfamiliar to her. With Olivia, things had been mostly quiet and low-key—her friend had told no one but Paige when she’dgone into labor. She’d had no family hovering in the