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“You’re not doing this doula thing, right?”
“Maybe.” Ivy didn’t look up from my phone as her fingers flew.
The windshield washers squeaked against the incessant rain and it took me a moment to find my voice. My knuckles went white on the steering wheel. “What?”
She shot me a look. “Relax, Rory. I’m all about the drugs and doctors. No home births for this girl.”
“Sweet Jesus.” Blood began to circulate in my fingers again as I relaxed my grip. “Don’t scare me like that.”
She giggled and curled deeper into her sweater. I was roasting my balls off, but I’d sit on hot coals before I asked her to turn the heat down. She was the mother of my child and she’d been wet to the skin. Whatever she wanted, she got.
Finally, the sign for the orchard came into view. “Where are we going?”
“She’s set up in the barn it says.”
“What is she Mother Mary, for feck’s sake?”
“Is there going to be a manger?” She glanced at me and snorted. “I’m kidding, Rory.”
“I don’t know how this works. But the barn has some significance for them, that I do know.” I was pretty sure they had actually lived in it at one time, but it sounded almost too ridiculous to say that out loud.
“Barn it is.” She pointed to the far building close to the taproom we’d been to in the spring. “I think that’s the barn. Zoe mentioned she uses it as a studio most of the time.”
“Fecking baby in a goddamn art barn,” I muttered as I parked.
“Your Irish is intense today.”
I arched my eyebrow. “I’m Irish every day.”
“As well as intense at times.” She laughed. “It’s not a bad thing. I’m just saying your accent is thicker.”
“Welcome to me and stress, ginger fairy.”
“Well, let’s go see our friends.”
It warmed me that she called them her friends too. I came around and opened the door for her and we both trudged through the canopy of trees to the large structure.
Three men paced outside. Her brothers. Beckett, the eldest one I knew the least, was smoking a cigarette as he paced. A motorcycle helmet was clutched in his other hand like an extension of him. And quite possibly a pseudo club.
A shout from inside made us both pick up the pace.
“Go in there at your own risk.” Hayes held up a flask, then took a long drink. The fact that he swayed a little freaked me out. Firstly, Hayes had the tolerance of an eighty-seven-year-old career drinker with an eighteen-year-old liver, so that was alarming in its own right. And second, he wasn’t one to imbibe in the middle of the day.
“Magic, you’re doing amazing.” Ian’s voice floated out into the rain.
“Shove your amazing up your ass!” Zoe screeched.
I turned to Ivy, backing up a few steps. She spun me back around, put both hands on my back, and shoved me forward. “Nope. In you go.”
“I don’t—”
“You do need to go inside. All the way, there you go.”
The barn doors were wide open and there was a section along the back draped in a rainbow of colored sheets. Wall-sized canvases peeked from the sheets. Her studio?
Well, if that didn’t suit them, I wasn’t sure what did.
In the middle of it was Zoe and another woman who reminded me of a darker-haired version of her. A little more wizened, less frazzled than the mother-to-be, and holding a cup of ice chips.
