The Second Time Around by Marie Ferrarella

Author:Marie Ferrarella [Ferrarella, Marie]
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2007-06-22T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Finished with his breakfast, Jason rose from the table and took his plate and cup to the sink. Since Laurel’s unexpected condition had taken them by storm, he found himself doing things around the house just to try to make her life a little easier. It wasn’t something he’d done before, but this time around, it seemed like the way to go.

Depositing the dishes, he paused to look at her. She was standing next to the sink, distracted. She seemed uneasy and oblivious to what was going on around her. He knew why. She was due for an amniocentesis this afternoon.

“Want me to be there with you?” he asked.

She turned to him, confused, and he nodded toward the calendar where she’d marked the appointment. That he even took notice of what was written there surprised her. She’d mentioned it to him in passing, but that was when she’d first made the appointment. She hadn’t expected him to retain anything about the conversation. Jason wasn’t into remembering things like that. Especially when it came to the baby. Most of the time, he avoided talking about their being new parents again. It was as if she was just gaining weight arbitrarily instead of being pregnant.

“Can you?”

Jason shrugged into his jacket, straightening his tie. As hard as it was for him to make peace with this turn of events, he knew how much it meant to Laurel to have him there. “It’ll take some shifting around, but I can make it.”

She wanted to tell him that it was all right. That she was a big girl—bigger at this point than she was happy about—and that she could do this on her own. But he’d shown such little support that she jumped at the chance to have him with her. To again be that team they’d always been before. Besides, she did feel a little uneasy about this afternoon.

All right, scared—she felt scared. The idea having to face a nurse equipped with a needle that doubled as a javelin, of playing Moby Dick to the woman’s Ahab, made her hands and feet turn icy cold and her stomach queasy.

So she gave up the brave facade she always liked to keep up and nodded. “Yes, I’d like that.” Laurel took a deep breath, and then let it out, trying to steady her suddenly erratic pulse. “You know, I don’t really have to do this,” she told him. “There’s nothing in the rules that says I have to have this test done.”

“Don’t you want to be sure that everything’s okay with the baby?”

Guilt popped up. When he put it that way, it sounded so selfish on her part.

Because it was.

With a sigh, she nodded. She’d researched the procedure online to see if anything had changed since she’d had it done twenty-one years ago. There was a short video she could have done without. Now she couldn’t get the image of the oversize needle out of her head.

“Yes, of course I do. I just don’t relish the idea of being harpooned.

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