spectacle of herself in front of the whole church, nearly cost me my job when she ripped Dolly's hat off and threw it in my face. I explained it all away to the old man, but when I went to tell her this had to stop, I ended up in her bed again.
She makes me laugh. She makes me think there ought to be more to life than twelve hour days over the mill books. She's the devil in woman's disguise. I want her every minute of every day.
I sent her my mother's teapot today. It doesn't match her mother's teacups, but she'll understand.
Chapter 14
Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot.
"The baby is coming?" Axell shouted.
"I'd offer you a cup of tea, but I think we'd better start for the hospital." She unwrapped her feet from the quilt and stood up. She was barefoot, and her toenails were painted copper brown.
Axell gaped at her shapely feet rather than staring at her shoulders or anywhere between. "Hospital. Right." Stunned, his brain ceased functioning.
The baby was coming. His car was in three feet of water a mile down the road. Maya was naked.
"Axell?" she asked patiently. "Is everything all right?"
He summoned his courage and looked up. She didn't eat enough. Still, her thin face glowed with expectation and her eyes were blue-green lanterns of excitement beneath her mound of auburn hair. Something odd inside him stirred. He figured it was terror.
"Have you called for an ambulance?" he demanded.
"The phone's out," she said. "That's why I've been sitting here waiting for someone to show up. You're my lifeline. I knew God couldn't be so cruel as to not offer me a way out of this. Let me see if my dress has dried yet."
Shakily, Axell reached in his sopping back pocket and retrieved his wet cell phone. "God works in mysterious ways," he reminded her with a sarcasm she didn't deserve as he punched the buttons. "My car died a mile down the road. And the road is washed out."
Her smile froze on her face as she anxiously watched him dial.
The line crackled but he could hear the phone ringing on the other end. Clinging to desperate hope, Axell glanced away as Maya's face stretched taut with pain, and she eased back into the rocker. Fingers gripped into fists, he waited for the emergency operator.
He barked the problem and the directions into the phone as soon as he had the operator on the line. He reminded them the road was washed out. He repeated everything. Twice. The operator seemed enormously slow at grasping the immensity of the problem. Taking a deep breath, Axell fought for calm. Maya bent over in agony and he nearly lost it.
"Hurry, will you?" he shouted into the phone. "She's going to have the baby on the kitchen floor if you don't get here soon!"
Frantically listening to the curt voice on the other end of the line, Axell nodded, then waited until Maya straightened. "Is there a bed in this place?" he demanded.
She grimaced and nodded toward a small room on the right. "The infirmary. I've already made it ready, just in case. Can't they get here?"
Axell clutched the phone as he would a life raft in a raging river, but Maya looked so scared, he lied. "They can always send a helicopter." Grimly, he turned back to the voice on the line. If he was all Maya had, he'd damned well better do this right.
He'd never done anything right in his life that involved a woman.
"Look, I'm on a cell phone. The lines are down out here. I've got to preserve this battery. Give me basic instructions and get someone here as soon as you can."
He scribbled as fast as he could across a first-grader's alphabet pad. Panic wouldn't help. Screaming at Maya for her boneheadedness might relieve his frustration, but it wouldn't get the baby delivered. If he didn't think about what he had to do, maybe he could get through this. Maybe he could pretend he was talking to a mechanic telling him how to replace a faulty carburetor.
Maya studied him soberly as Axell flung down the pen and closed the phone. "We're stranded, right?"
He took a deep breath. "Pretty much. The water goes down quickly once the rain stops. There might be time. How far apart are the pains?"
"Maybe four minutes." She grimaced at his reaction. "My water broke hours ago. I decided it was safer to deliver the baby myself than