Page 73 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

He looked at me.

“I need you to breathe,” I said. “Because right now you look like the one about to pass out, and I can’t be worrying about you and having this baby at the same damn time.”

Something in his face cracked open a little, some of that panic softening into something closer to embarrassment. “I’m good.”

“You are not good, but that’s okay. I love you anyway.”

He laughed—a short, startled sound, like the laugh surprised him more than it surprised anybody else in the room. “I love you too. Let’s go have our daughter.”

“Now that’s more like it,” Mama said, already moving toward the door herself, grabbing her purse off the counter. “I’m riding with y’all. Raven, you follow behind with Honor and Saroya. And Amai, make sure your mom knows we’re on the way to the hospital.”

“I already texted her,” Amai said. “She’s leaving now.”

“Good boy,” Mama said and patted his cheek on her way past him, the way you’d pat a nervous dog that finally sat when you told it to.

The drive to the hospital took eighteen minutes, and I spent every single one of them either gripping the door handle through a contraction or staring out the window, trying to convince myself I wasn’t scared. I was managing the pain, and I was terrified.

Amai drove like a man walking a tightrope—too slow through the intersections, too fast on the straightaways, correcting himself every few seconds like he couldn’t find the right speed for a situation this important. Mama sat in the back seat behind me, one hand resting on my shoulder the whole ride, not saying much, just being there, which was somehow more comforting than anything she could’ve said.

“You doing good, baby,” she said once, low, just for me. “You doing real good.”

“It hurts, Mama.” I hadn’t meant to say it that plain, that scared, but it slipped out between one contraction and the next. Once it was out, I couldn’t take it back.

“I know it do. It’s supposed to. Don’t mean nothing’s wrong.” Her hand tightened on my shoulder. “You a Renois. We built for this.”

By the time we pulled up to the hospital entrance, my contractions were coming five minutes apart and lasting almost a full minute each, hard enough that I’d stopped trying to talk through them and just gripped whatever was closest—the door, Amai’s arm, my own knee—and rode it out with my teeth clenched.

Amai practically carried me through those doors. I told him I could walk, and I mostly could, but he wasn’t hearing it. One arm locked around my waist, moving me through the lobby like the floor might open up and swallow me if he let go for a second.

“My wife’s in labor,” he told the woman at the desk, and I noted—even through the pain, even through everything—that he’d called me his wife, which we weren’t, not on paper, not yet, but he said it like there wasn’t a question in it.

Things moved fast after that. A wheelchair. A hallway. A room. A nurse asking me questions I could barely answer through the pain—how far apart, how long, did my water break, what was my pain level on a scale of one to ten.

“Eight,” I said, which was a lie. It was closer to a ten, but I didn’t want to scare Amai worse than he already was.

“She’s a liar,” Mama said from the doorway. “It’s a ten. Look at her face.”

The nurse looked at my face and adjusted whatever she was writing without arguing.

They got me changed, got me hooked up to monitors, and the doctor on call—not Dr. Broussard, who was already on her way in but hadn’t arrived yet—checked me and told me I was at seven centimeters, moving fast for a first labor, which apparently meant Tru had decided she was ready and wasn’t interested in taking her time about it.

“Seven?” Amai repeated, like the number itself was information he needed to process. “That’s good, right? That’s close?”

“That’s close,” the nurse confirmed.

Amai exhaled like she’d told him the war was over.

Odette arrived maybe fifteen minutes later, rushing into the room with her purse still on her shoulder and her breath coming quick like she’d run the last stretch of hallway.

“Where is she—oh, there she is—baby, look at you.” Odette came straight to my bedside, took my free hand in both of hers, and I felt the tremor in her grip, the same nervous energy that had Amai bouncing on his heels by the window.

“Hey, Ms. Odette,” I managed between breaths.

“Don’t you ‘Ms. Odette’ me right now. You about to make me a grandmother.” Her eyes were already wet. “How you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a truck,” I said.

She laughed, short and thick with emotion, squeezing my hand tighter.