“It gets better,” I heard someone call from farther in the house. “You’ll never guess where she conceived Sinbad’s baby.”
I winced.
“The last prison he was in,” someone else called out. “Bet!”
Fuck.
“Blaise!” Beckham gasped, scandalized.
“Jesus Christ,” Sin pulled me so that my attention was back on him. “Where did you get that fucking cut on your lip?”
“There was a scuffle,” I grumbled, not meeting his eyes. “And that scuffle in turn got really close to me while I was walking to the break room. I swear to God, Sin. I’m in the D unit. That’s people that are in there for white-collar crimes, and they’re wimpy men at that. Plus, I’m in the infirmary! I did everything right. I’m on light duty. The warden is super cool. I know him well. He’s good. I swear. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
That’s when he caught my chin and tilted it up so that his eyes could meet mine.
“And what if that happens again? What if the next time it harms our baby?” he countered.
He did have a point.
Shit.
“If I quit… I don’t have anything else to do,” I said. “I don’t make enough to live, and I’ll have to go home. There’s nothing here to do unless I want to drive an hour into Kilgore and work there. And, just sayin’, but the only thing I’ve ever done is work as a prison guard. I haven’t even waitressed. I don’t have a college degree. That means driving an hour for a minimum-wage job that’ll suck. While I’m pregnant. Which they’ll not look too kindly on. I know—know—that they’re not supposed to discriminate because I’m pregnant, but seriously. They will. Who wants to hire someone that they’re going to have to give time off to in eight months? Or, hell, even before that because I’ll have doctors’ appointments and shit like that to do.”
By the time I was done ranting, he was looking at me like I was crazy.
“You could work here until the baby comes,” Lynn, one of my grandfather’s good friends, said as he came into the room. “That work you did today was wonderful. You calmed that baby down. You stuck with her. I could use a few good, cool heads around here. There seems to be some missing. Plus, you could do light duty. Things that we know won’t get you in trouble.”
I blinked miserably at Lynn. Then shook my head as if to clear it.
“You can go back to the prison guard life after you have our baby.” Sin looked happy at the turn of events. “Or not at all. Because you want to stay home with our kid.”
“It really is nice working with them,” Beckham nodded her head in agreement. “And I could use some help.”
“I could, too,” Hunt, one of the men I’d met just today, said. “I’m drowning in work.”
“And you could help me,” Zach said as he came into the room.
I grinned wickedly at my old friend.
Zach, Beckham, and me all in one place.
This was bound to be great.
“Zach, will you deliver my baby?” I grinned.
Zach’s eyelid twitched. “I’m not a doctor anymore. Remember? I’m a convicted felon.”
“But you promised,” I whined.
“You promised me, too,” Beckham got in on my game. “You said that you’d do whatever we needed when you became a doctor. You promised us both when we were eleven that when the time came, whatever specialty you chose, you would help us in any way you could. And since you didn’t deliver Hiro, I’m gonna have to have another one so that you can deliver that one.”
A long time ago, during one of our many MC get-togethers, all of us Dixie Warden MC kids had made a pact. That we’d stick together no matter what. And when the time came, family took care of family.
Only, none of us had thought that Zach would go into life being an OB-GYN delivering babies and looking at women’s hoo-hahs all day long.
“He is not going anywhere near you,” Sin snapped as he pulled me into his side. “Over my dead body, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Zach shuddered. “When we made that pact, there wasn’t supposed to be any of that going on. I always thought I was going to be a neurosurgeon.”
Everybody laughed, and the tension that was once upon a time in the air dissipated.
My shoulders slumped right along with it.
“I have to give two weeks’ notice, or they won’t hire me back,” I told the room at large. “And my feet are killing me, I’m starving, and I’ve had to pee for the last hour. Can we go inside and do that now?”
Everybody moved at once, dispersing in opposite directions.
I really did have to go to the bathroom, though. And I couldn’t even take my time taking in the beautiful house I’d walked into.