“Think of the pioneers. They used to sleep three and four to a bed.”
“Doesn’t seem like it was much of a deterrent,” she teased.
“Not exactly.” I crossed the room to stand beside her. I placed my hands on her shoulders.
“Look, what it all boils down to is making time to still be husband and wife while keeping the communication flowing.”
Allison eyed me curiously. “Since when did you become so knowledgeable about marriage and children?”
I grinned. “I spent years observing the marriages of the Runaway Train guys. AJ, Jake, and Brayden have given me tons of advice on how to survive the first six weeks of newborn life as well as keeping the fires burning.”
“I really don’t want to know what Jake had to say about us keeping our fires burning,” Allison groaned.
“Trust me, he feels the same way about me discussing anything about you. It’s usually only AJ and Brayden who get specific. Since they feel like you’re their little sister as well, they really don’t want to hear much either.”
Allison exhaled a relieved breath. “That’s good to know.” After she grabbed her pants off the floor, she pulled her phone out and eyed it curiously.
“Everything okay?”
I didn’t have to ask to know why she was checking her phone. Even though it was three weeks until Keira’s due date, Allison was a nervous wreck about the baby coming while we were gone to Savannah. Okay, maybe we were both nervous about it.
“Nope. Nothing.”
“No news is good news, right?”
She smiled. “That’s right.” She then jerked her thumb at the bathroom. “Come on. We need to clean up before we go downstairs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
Allison
After our quickie, Rhys and I put ourselves back together in the bathroom. The last thing I wanted was my parents to suspect anything because of his wild hair or my smeared lipstick. Once we were finished, we headed back downstairs with the luggage.
Thankfully, our absence hadn’t been noticed since Mom and Dad had been in the process of saying goodbye to Andrea and her kids, which meant helping pack up the car. Jake, on the other hand, gave us a somewhat curious look, but then appeared too disgusted to question it.
Once the car was packed with our luggage and Mom had handed over a bag of leftovers to munch on during the drive, we said our goodbyes. Normally, I wasn’t as tearful, but today there something about impending motherhood that made me more nostalgic for home and my parents.
As we started down Mom and Dad’s road, I flipped on the radio. Rhys groaned when I settled on a station playing Christmas music. “Oh, come on, Scrooge. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“How about we make a deal?”
“Okay.”
“You get the first two hours of road trip music, and I get the rest.”
I grinned. “Sounds like a plan.”
We were almost two hours south of Atlanta when my phone rang. My heart stopped the moment I saw the caller id. It was Keira. I crossed my fingers she was calling to wish us an early Merry Christmas. “Hello?”
“Um, hey, it’s me. What I thought was my back hurting from overdoing it wrapping presents….it was actually labor.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I actually just got checked in to the hospital.”
“What? Why didn’t you call us before?” I demanded a little more sharply than I should have. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I wanted to make sure I was really in labor, and it wasn’t a false alarm.”