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.“Now, Mrs.Wyatt, if you’ll just lie down here, we’ll get started,” Whitney instructed.“Adam, you can sit down there—” Dr.Meyers indicated a folding chair beside the examining table “—and hold Blythe’s hand while you two get the first look at your son or daughter.Now, you did tell me that you want to know the sex of the child, if we can determine it, didn’t you?”“Yes,” Blythe and Adam replied in unison.Dr.Meyers smiled.“Hoping for a girl or a boy?” he asked.“A girl,” Blythe said.“It doesn’t matter,” Adam said.Whitney Lawrence lifted Blythe’s blouse and lowered her skirt, exposing the rounded swell of her stomach.Adam watched in utter fascination as his wife’s belly was revealed.He hadn’t seen this much of Blythe since the night they made love.“This gel will be a tad on the cool side,” Whitney said as she lathered Blythe’s stomach.“Using this gel will improve the conduction of the sound.”“What we’re doing here today is a Level Two ultrasound.This will be a transabdominal exam,” Dr.Meyers told them.“We’ll be checking to see if the due date we’ve calculated correlates with the baby’s size.This will let us know how your child is developing and if there’s more than one baby.”“More than one baby?” Blythe tried to sit up, but Whitney patted her shoulders and eased her back down onto the examining table.“This won’t take more than five or ten minutes,” Whitney said.“And it’s totally painless.”Totally painless, huh? For whom? Blythe wondered.For someone who hadn’t drunk a gallon of water? For someone who hadn’t just realized she could be carrying twins? For someone who wasn’t trapped in a phony marriage?“Now, I’m going to run this transducer over your abdomen.See it?” Whitney held the object up for Blythe and Adam’s inspection.“And y’all can watch that monitor over there.”Adam sat down beside Blythe, but did not take her hand.She hadn’t offered it to him, and he certainly wasn’t going to just grab it.He had known there was a good chance she’d be upset when he hired two employees to work at Petals Plus without consulting her on the matter.But she kept putting off hiring any help, when she knew she needed it.He’d done the only sensible thing he could do—what any husband who wanted to take care of his wife would have done.Blythe gasped.“Oh, look at that.”Dr.Meyers patted Blythe on the shoulder.“You can see the little heart beating, can’t you?”Blythe stared at the black-and-white images of the tiny fetus.The tiny baby.Her baby.Adam’s baby.Adam glanced at the monitor and for one split second he couldn’t breathe.Dr.Meyers pointed out their child’s head, arms, legs and the curve of its spine.“Looks like we’ve got a thumb sucker here,” Whitney Lawrence said.“What?” Adam stared at the screen until he saw exactly what the technician meant.His child actually was sucking its thumb.“Would you look at that?”“How precious,” Blythe said.Tears misted her eyes.Happy tears.Tears she didn’t even try to conceal.She glanced at Adam and her heart skipped a beat.He stared at the monitor with a look of awe in his dark eyes.She reached out and clasped his hand.He stared down at their hands, then over at her.“She’s real, Adam.Look at her.” Blythe glanced back at the monitor.Dr.Meyers chuckled.Whitney Lawrence cleared her throat and smiled.“What is it?” Blythe asked, her gaze moving from one person to another.“Well, from what I can detect,” Whitney said, “I wouldn’t suggest rushing out to buy any frilly pink dresses.”“Look very closely, right here—” Dr.Meyers pointed to the baby’s genital area “—and you can tell this baby’s a boy.”“A boy?” Adam swallowed hard.A son.His son.He stared at the monitor for several seconds longer, then glanced at Blythe’s shocked face.“My baby is a boy?” Blythe asked.“Not a little girl?”“We can’t be one hundred percent certain, but in most cases we can be over ninety percent certain when we predict a boy,” Dr.Meyers said.“I don’t think there’s too much doubt about it.Your baby is a boy.”“We’re almost finished here,” Whitney said.“I’ll have your videotape and some black-and-white stills for y’all to take home.”Dr.Meyers grasped Adam’s shoulder.“You can frame the first picture of your son and put it on your desk”“The first picture of my son.” Adam grinned.“Yeah, I suppose that’s exactly what it is, isn’t it?” Pictures of his son.Before birth.As a newborn.At two weeks.Two months.Two years.Images of the child flashed through Adam’s mind.A plump, laughing baby with Blythe’s bright hazel eyes and tufts of black hair.But then, maybe their son would have Blythe’s copper hair and freckles, and his brown eyes.He squeezed Blythe’s hand.“Are you terribly disappointed? I know you were hoping for a girl.”“I’m not disappointed,” she told him.“Surprised, but—” She could not erase the image of a black-eyed, blackhaired little toddler holding up his plump arms to her and calling her Mama.The child was the very image of Adam.“But what?”“Nothing.I’ll just have to start thinking of her as a him.” Suddenly the baby moved.Blythe gasped loudly.“What’s wrong?” Adam gripped her hand.“Haven’t you gotten used to the baby’s movements yet, Mrs.Wyatt?” Whitney asked.“I imagine he’s been making his presence known for a couple of weeks now, hasn’t he?”“The baby’s moving?” Adam released Blythe’s hand abruptly, shot straight up out of his chair and stared down at her exposed belly.“You felt it move just then?”“Yes,” Blythe admitted, then looked at Whitney.“I felt her—him—move for the first time about ten days ago.Just a tiny little fluttering at first.”“Ten days ago,” Adam muttered quietly.She had been feeling the baby move for ten damn days and she’d never said a word to him.Not one word! Why wouldn’t she have told him? She had agreed that they would share everything.Blythe and Adam left Dr.Meyers’s office that day with a videotape, a stack of black-and-white stills and the image in their minds of their baby boy sucking his thumb
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