“How should I know? Your mama wouldn’t let me anywhere near the delivery room. She said having babies was women’s work.” He glanced at Cody with an unmistakable look of envy. “Wish I’d had a chance to be there just once, though. Seems to me like it must be a flat-out miracle. You going in there with Melissa?”

“If she’ll let me,” Cody said. “She’s still making up her mind whether to be furious at me for kidnapping her this afternoon.” He moaned. “I must have been out of my mind. I didn’t even think about the fact that she might go into labor.”

“Cody, you weren’t at the other end of the world,” Harlan reassured him. “You’d barely made it out of town. You got her here in plenty of time. The only way you could have gotten here much faster would have been to park her in a room upstairs for the last month of her pregnancy. Now, settle down.”

“It’s easy for you. It’s not your baby she’s having.”

Just then the nurse came out. “Mr. Adams, would you like to step in for a minute? We’re getting ready to take Melissa to the delivery room.”

Cody shot a helpless look at his father. “It sounds like she’s not going to want me in there.”

“Maybe it’s time to stop bullying the girl and tell her how much you want to be there,” Harlan advised.

Cody doubted it would be as simple as that. Indeed, Melissa shot him a look of pure hatred when he walked into her room. Of course, that might have had something to do with the whopper of a contraction she appeared to be in the middle of.

He accepted a damp cloth from the nurse and instinctively wiped Melissa’s forehead with it.

“You’re doing great,” he said.

“How would you know?” she retorted.

He grinned at the fiery display of temper. “Okay, you got me. I have no idea. No one’s running around the halls panicking, though. That must mean something.”

“They’re used to this,” she retorted. “I’m not. Besides, they’re just observers. I’m doing all the work.”

“If you’d let me take those natural childbirth classes with you, I’d be more help about now.”

She latched onto his hand just then and squeezed. It was either one hell of a contraction or she was trying to punish him by breaking all of his knuckles. As soon as the pain eased, she glared at him again.

“Go away.”

“I don’t think so,” he countered just as stubbornly. “I want to share this with you.”

“You want to see me writhing around in agony,” she snapped.

“No,” he insisted. “Having a baby is a miracle. I missed out on Sharon Lynn’s birth. I’m going to be with you for this one.”

“Why?”