Page 47 of Bear with Me
He met my gaze. "It's wonderful, as long as you're okay with it, too. This is all so sudden. We met, I went into heat, I'm jobless and pregnant …"
I reached across the table and took both of his hands in mine. "You're my mate, and this is the best news I've had since I got triple overtime on President's Day." We'd had a huge snowstorm that weekend, and I'd spent sixteen hours clearing snow, mostly from government building parking lots, to prepare for the next business day.
He laughed. "This might delay my new job."
"It's fine." I made enough money to support Blake if he never got a job, but he didn't want that. He wanted to provide for his little sister, and he was too proud to let me do it for him.
"We're having a baby." He rubbed his belly and grinned.
My face ached from smiling so wide. "We are!"
I had a feeling, but I would let the birthing assistant tell him if we were having more than one.
CHAPTER 20
BLAKE
Denise,Ollie's family's birthing assistant, lived south of Chicago. Her country home was an hour's drive from the cabin, most of it highway. When she led us around her back porch to a set of cellar doors, I tried not to panic. The stairs were wide and clean, and the tile floor at the bottom gleamed.
She motioned me to the raised examination table. The walls were painted a light blue, and the table itself was the modern type with all the clamps and restraints tucked away when they weren't needed, but from all the closed drawers on the side, I worried they would make an appearance.
"It's going to be fine," Ollie whispered against the back of my head, rustling my hair and sending a shiver across my skin. The basement air was cooler than the warm spring sunshine, but it wasn't unpleasant.
I swallowed hard and hopped up onto the table. Denise and Ollie exchanged a look. "Have you told him?"
"Told me what?"
"Let's take a look and see how many heartbeats we find."
I blinked. "Heartbeats?"
"You could be carrying twins, or triplets."
The floor suddenly seemed very close, and Ollie's arms came around me, holding me upright on the table. "It's all right." He rubbed my back. "My mom had twins and a set of triplets."
"Then she had one more." Denise chuffed a laugh. "Your mom was a dream client. She put my kid through college."
"Seven kids, but only four pregnancies," I reminded her.
"Four pregnancies is a lot for a shifter," Denise said. "Most get their two-in-one pregnancy and call it quits."
Yes, I was on board with that. If I was having more than one kid at once, I would certainly look into permanent birth control.
"Did your family have multiples?" Denise asked me.
"My cousins are fraternal twins, two girls. They're the only ones I know of."
She nodded. "That would explain it. It's far more likely for a shifter to have multiples than it is for a human, but it's not unheard of."
Ollie helped me to lie back on the table, and Denise prodded my belly with her stethoscope. "I hear two strong heartbeats. I'll take a look on the ultrasound to make sure they've attached to the womb. If they haven't, we'll have to monitor more closely for the next few months."
"Why? Is something wrong?"
She patted my shoulder. "Let's not worry about it until we know for sure."
The gel she spread over my still-flat belly was cool and thick. She turned on the monitor, and I followed her every move as she pressed the wand to my flesh. It was so strange to see inside my body that way, with nothing more than sound waves.
"There's the first one. They're attached, which is wonderful." She waved the wand around until it picked up the sound of the second heartbeat. "And the other is attached, too. Fabulous. But …"
