He took her hand, but rather than pushing it aside, he pressed it to his cheek. Just for a moment. And then he moved it aside. “How do you know?”
“All right.” She inclined her head as if to give him his due. “I can’t give you a written guarantee. But I also can’t give you one that says I won’t die in a traffic accident because I got hit by a car while driving down to Newport Beach. Or that I won’t die choking on your mother’s extra dry turkey next Thanksgiving. But,” she went on, a smile curving her mouth, “I’m reasonably sure I won’t die in childbirth. More sure of that than I am about not getting hit by a car or choking on your mother’s turkey,” she added for good measure.
Jason sighed, taking her hands in his. He forced himself to look her straight in the eye as he tried to make her understand the full extent of his concern. “Laurel, don’t take this the wrong way.” She looked at him warily, waiting. “But you’re old.”
She pulled her hands away and turned from him all in one motion. It turned out to be a little too fast, because the sudden movement made her feel dizzy. Shutting her eyes made it worse, and she swayed. The next thing she knew, Jason had his arms around her, holding her steady. Getting her bearing, she pushed him away from her.
“I’m all right,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “And I am not old.”
Jason held his hands up before him, as if to push away what he’d said, or at least the way he’d said it. “Okay, bad choice of words.”
“Horrific choice of words,” Laurel corrected vehemently. “Forty-five is the new thirty-five,” she told him, echoing Dr. Kilpatrick again. “And thirty-five is not old.”
“What I’m trying to say is that you’re too old to have a baby.”
Even though she’d said the same thing to her doctor not more than an hour ago, hearing her husband say it to her had Laurel up in arms. Suddenly, she didn’t feel too old to be a mother. She didn’t feel any older than she had when she’d had Luke, Morgan or Christopher. Why was he behaving this way now of all times, when she needed him to be supportive?
News stories she’d read came to her out of nowhere, backup statistics she now lobbed at Jason. “There was a Russian woman who gave birth to a baby at sixty-seven last year. Five years ago, there was an actress in Hollywood who used to be on a sitcom in the seventies. She gave birth to twins. Guess how old she was?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
No, she thought, he didn’t. In so many ways.
“She was fifty-one years old. And the babies are fine,” she told him triumphantly, as if their condition was her own personal victory. “Women are giving birth to their first babies later these days. And that’s where the real risk lies, with first-time births. I’ve already had three babies. My body’s broken in.” She saw the look in his eyes. “Not broken down,” she informed him tersely, second-guessing what he was thinking. “Broken in. This’ll be a piece of cake for me.”
He wasn’t convinced. She could see that by the way he set his jaw. She loved the man dearly, but when Jason came to a conclusion, he stuck by it as if he’d been put there with crazy glue. “Would you like to talk to Dr. Kilpatrick?”
This was a losing battle. He’d been with her long enough to know that. It wasn’t that he relished the idea of what he was proposing; it was just that if he had to make a choice between Laurel and a baby, it would be Laurel each time. He didn’t want to look back and find himself wishing that he had made a choice when he had the power.
“What I’d like to do,” he told her, “is talk some sense into you.”
He made it sound as if this was all on her. As if she’d somehow done this all by herself. Maybe he needed to be reminded of how this kind of thing worked. “Hey, this isn’t my doing alone, buster. As I remember, I had help.”
These days, by the time he got home from work, he was far too tired to think of making love with his wife. The job drained him. And when he did have spare time, he wanted to use it putting together the train layouts that had been sitting in boxes for, what was it, almost two decades now?
But every so often, Laurel would come to him with that look on her face, wearing something sexy and sheer. And there was this particular perfume she wore on those occasions. A man couldn’t think when the space in his head was all taken up with that scent.
“You seduced me,” he accused.
She threw her hands up. “You found me out. I put engine oil behind my ears and made noise like an AmTrak passenger train leaving the station.”
The deadpanned statement brought a laugh out of him.
Laurel breathed a sigh of relief. At least he was laughing again. The sound instantly made her feel more mellow.
“It’s going to be all right, Jason,” she promised, putting her arms around him and leaning her head against his chest. “Really.”
Funny how things turned out, she thought. She’d been hoping Jason would comfort her about what was ahead and here she was, reassuring him instead.
Jason kissed her forehead. His breath lightly fluttered against her skin as he asked, “So, how far along are you?”
She did a quick mental calculation, remembering the last time they’d made love. The time before that was too far in the past to count. “Three weeks.”
He glanced at her, surprised at her precision. “There’s room for error.”
She moved her head slowly from side to side. When it came to their life together, the man remembered nothing. While she, on the other hand, remembered everything. “There’s no error.”
Jason pressed his lips together in a reproving frown. “I want you to get a complete checkup.”
“That was what today was supposed to be about,” she reminded him, not that she expected him to remember that, either. Jason had a habit of not retaining information unless it had to do with either his work or his hobbies. She counted herself lucky that he remembered the boys’ birthdays, although he tended to forget the years. As far as listening went, her husband had gotten “uh-huh” down to an art form. “Dr. Kilpatrick gave me a complete physical.”
“More complete,” he insisted. “Blood work, an amniocentesis.” He saw her frowning. “You know, like you did with Christopher.”
With Christopher, there had been some complications at the outset and she’d wanted to make sure the baby she was carrying was all right. Personally, she’d thought it was like being harpooned. She didn’t see a need to go through the ordeal the test represented this time around, since all she felt was queasy.
But she kept that to herself because she didn’t want to create too many waves right now. Now that she’d calmed down, she could see that Jason was obviously trying to come to terms with the bombshell she’d just dropped on him.
That made two of them, she thought. “Yes, sir, Dr. Mitchell, sir.” She saluted.
His eyes narrowed even further. “I’m serious, Laurel.”
“I never thought you weren’t.”
He couldn’t tell if she was deadpanning again, being sarcastic or for once, being serious. He changed the subject. To a degree. “Did you tell your mother?”
“Not yet.” She’d been too dazed to call anyone. And then she smiled as she thought of her mother. “This is going to knock her for a loop. She thought we were going overboard when we had Christopher.” Her mother’s philosophy had always been simple: two hands, two kids. According