A Christmas Blessing

the stratosphere.
“Lucas!”
The shout got his attention. “Oh, yeah. Right,” he said and tried to help with the buttons.
For a man who’d undressed any number of women in his time, he was suddenly all thumbs. In fact, getting Jessie out of her clothes—the simple cotton blouse, the oddly made jeans, the lacy bra and panties—was an act of torture no man should have to endure. Trying to be helpful, she wriggled and squirmed in a way that brought his fingers into contact with warm, smooth skin far too frequently. Trying to look everywhere except at her wasn’t helping him with the task either. Every glimpse of bare flesh made his knees go weak.
The second she was stripped bare, he muffled a groan, averted his gaze and hunted down one of his shirts. He did it for his own salvation, not because she seemed aware of anything except the demands her baby was making on her body. Surely there was a special place in hell for a man whose thoughts were on sex when a woman was about to have a baby right before his eyes.
She looked tiny—except for that impressively swollen belly—and frightened as a doe caught in a hunter’s sights. He felt a powerful need to comfort her, if only he could string an entire sentence together without giving away his inebriated state. If she knew precisely how drunk he was, she wouldn’t be scared. She’d be flat-out terrified, and rightfully so. He wasn’t so serene himself.
“Where’s Consuela?” she asked, then let out a scream that shook the rafters. She latched on to his hand so hard he was sure that at least three bones cracked. That grip did serve a purpose, though. It snapped him back to reality. Pain had a way of making a man focus on the essentials.
The baby clearly wasn’t going to wait for him to sober up. It wasn’t going to wait for a doctor, even if one could make it to the ranch on the icy roads, which Luke doubted.
“Consuela’s in Mexico by now,” he confessed without thinking. “She left earlier today.” When panic immediately darkened her eyes, he instinctively patted her hand. “It’s going to be okay, darlin’. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“I’m…not…worried,” she said between gasps. “Shouldn’t you boil water or something?”
Water? Water was good, he decided. He had no idea what he’d do with it, but if it got him out of this bedroom for five seconds so he could try to gather his scattered thoughts, it had to be good. Coffee would be even better. Gallons of it.
“You’ll be okay for a minute?” He grabbed a key chain made of braided leather off his dresser and gave it to her. “Hang on to this if another pain hits while I’m gone, okay? Bite into it or something.” It had worked for cowboys being operated on under primitive conditions, or so he’d read. Of course, they’d also been liberally dosed with alcohol at the time.
Jessie’s blue eyes regarded the leather doubtfully, but she nodded gamely. “Hurry, Luke. I don’t know much about labor, but I don’t think there’s a lot of time left.”
“I’ll be back before you know it,” he promised. Stone-cold sober, if he could manage it.
He fumbled the first pot he grabbed, spilled water everywhere, then finally got it onto the stove with the gas flame turned to high. With a couple of false starts, he got the coffee going as well, strong enough to wake the dead, which was pretty much how he felt.
For a moment he clung to the counter and tried to steady himself. It was going to be okay, he vowed. He’d delivered foals and calves. How much different could delivering a baby be? Of course, mares and cows had a pretty good notion of what they were doing. They didn’t need a lot of assistance from him unless they got into trouble.
Jessie, on the other hand, seemed even more bemused by this state of affairs than he was. She’d obviously been counting on a doctor, a team of comforting nurses, a nice, sterile delivery room and plenty of high-tech equipment. A shot of some kind of painkiller, too, more than likely. What she was getting was a drunken amateur in an isolated ranch house. It hardly seemed fair after all she’d already been through. After all he’d put her through, he amended.
An agonized scream cut through the air and sent panic slicing through him. He tore down the hall to the bedroom. He found her panting, her face scrunched up with pain, sweat beading up on her brow and pouring down her cheeks. Damned if he didn’t think she looked beautiful, anyway. The door to that place in hell gaped wider.
“You okay?” he asked, then shook himself. “Sorry. Dumb question. Of course, you’re not okay.”
He grabbed a clean washcloth from the linen closet, dashed into the bathroom to soak it with cool water, then wiped her brow. He might not be exactly sober yet, but his brain was beginning to function and his limbs were following orders. For the first time, he honestly believed they could get through this without calamity striking.
“You’re doing fine,” he soothed. “This is one hell of a pickle, but nothing we can’t manage.”
“Did…you…call…a doctor?” she asked.
A doctor? Why hadn’t he acted on that thought back when he’d had it himself? Maybe because he’d figured it would be futile. More likely, because his brain cells had shut down hours ago just the way he’d wanted them to.
“Next thing on my list,” he assured her.
She eyed him doubtfully. “You…have…a list?”
“Of course I have a list,” he said, injecting a confident note into his voice. “The water’s boiling. The coffee’s on.”
“Coffee?”
“For me. You don’t want me falling asleep in the middle of all the fun, do you?”
“I doubt there’s much chance of that,” she said, sighing as the pain visibly eased.
Her gaze traveled over him from head to toe, examining him so intently that it was all Luke could do not