“Are you sure you’re up to this?” I looked at Laurie’s swollen ankles with concern. It also hadn’t escaped my notice the way he’d been holding his lower back all morning. “I can handle the grocery shopping, I swear. What if we get you an eclair from the bakery and let you wait in the car while I grab whatever’s on the list?”

Laurie rolled his eyes at my worries, but before he could answer, I heard a high-pitched shriek followed by a nasally voice coming from somewhere behind me.

“Dean MacIntosh, as I live and breathe. It really is true! I actually turned you gay?”

Laurie’s face darkened as he stared at my ex-girlfriend, Juliet. She was almost as pregnant as Laurie, but still carrying high where his own belly had already dropped—a sign that the baby would be arriving any time.

Her new husband stood awkwardly behind her, holding an overfull basket of gourmet grocery items while Juliet proceeded to throw her arms around my neck and plant a kiss on my cheek as though she hadn’t ever cheated on me and taken off with that other guy.

“I mean, really, Dean. Maybe that’s why you never cared one way or the other about having sex. You know,” she paused thoughtfully and gave what she probably thought was a pretty pout. “I might not ever have given Romeo a shot if you’d shown any interest in seeing me naked. But then, I guess maybe I didn’t have the right parts.”

Ignoring her cattiness, I turned to introduce Laurie. “Juliet, I’d like you to meet my husband, Laurie. You moved to town after he’d moved away, otherwise you’d have known him a long time ago. We were best friends growing up.”

Juliet favored Laurie with a cold once over, then completely ignored him without even saying hello as she pointedly turned her attention back to me. She leaned closer and walked two fingers up my chest.

“You know, if you really wanted to try it with a guy, Romeo and I would’ve been happy to party with you. Romeo is what you call bi–sexy.”

I’m not sure if I was more shocked by her casually inviting me to have a threesome with her and her husband—a guy she’d cheated on me with—or by the fact that I’d ever wasted time dating such a rude bitch.

I grabbed her wrist and pushed her fingers away from my chest before dropping it. I reached out blindly for Laurie’s hand, relieved to feel it immediately slip into the mine. I flashed an apologetic smile to Romeo, then turned my attention back to Juliet.

“Actually, I don’t blame you for cheating on me. I mean, come on. With a name like Juliet? If you meet someone named Romeo, it’s a given that you’d have to try and hook up. But as far as threesomes go?” I made a point to look her up and down with a curled lip. “Sweetheart, I wouldn’t touch you if my dick was about to rot off. Which now that I think about that, it probably would if I touched you. I mean, who the hell knows where you’ve been?”

I held up my free hand to Romeo, with my palm out. “Sorry, wasn’t aiming that at you, buddy. You’ve got your own cross to bear being married to this one.”

Juliet gasped, gaping at me like a river bass with her mouth in a rounded O-shape as her jaw moved up and down as though she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite find the words.

Finally, she stumbled back against her husband and glared at me, still completely ignoring Laurie’s presence.

“I cannot believe how rude you’re acting, Dean. I mean, I never—“

“And you never will, darlin’,” Laurie drawled as he laid his head on my shoulder possessively. I bit back a laugh as Juliet spun around and walked away, flouncing off about as well as someone in her advanced stage of pregnancy possibly could, while her husband followed meekly in her wake.

“So that’s the kind of person you used to date, huh?” Laurie said dryly as we push the cart down the aisle.

“What can I say? I mean, there’s no defense for that one.”

Laurie snickered. “There really isn’t. But, please… tell me that the whole Romeo and Juliet thing isn’t for real. One of them is using a fake name, right?”

“Not as far as I know,” I laughed. “I’m pretty sure that was her entire attraction to him.”

“How come the dude just stood there and didn’t say a word though? Shit, that’s weird, right? Especially when his wife is trying to pimp them out for a three-way? I mean…” Laurie’s voice trailed off as he stopped to grab a box of Kiki’s favorite cereal.

“I’m pretty sure that he’s learned by now to let her say whatever the hell she wants to say, because unless he wants to get a divorce, he’s kind of stuck with her now. Either that, or he likes her pimping them out.”

“Which is why you had the last laugh on that one,” Laurie said pointedly. “Yeah, you definitely dodged a bullet there.”

“Anyway… Enough about Juliet. She doesn’t deserve this much free rent in our heads. Let’s talk about something a little more exciting—like what we’re going to name our daughter.”

Laurie rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why you keep insisting that we’re having a girl. What are you going to do if a boy pops out?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Love him just as much? As for the girl thing, I don’t know. I kinda thought it would be nice to have another girl in the family though. Tanya and Kiki are all we have.”

“Don’t let your grandmothers hear you say that,” Laurie grinned.

“Dude, my grandmothers aren’t girls. They’re forces of nature—get it right.” I slipped a package of Oreos into the cart when he wasn’t looking, then covered them with a couple boxes of graham crackers. “So, what do you think about the name Cynthia? We could call her Cindy.”

Laurie pointedly stood up the boxes of graham crackers, and waved the package of Oreos at me before silently putting it back in the cart with an amused grunt. “Cindy is a lovely name—for someone else’s kid. If it’s a girl, I was thinking of something more unique. Not weird, or hard to spell, but not completely average. What do you think about something like Amber, Dawn, or even April?”

“No, none of those will work—those are all stripper names.”

“Seriously, Dean? Stripper names? Why don’t you admit that they’re probably the names of a few ex-girlfriend’s?” Laurie winked to show me that he was teasing, but I ducked my head down as I shrugged my shoulders with embarrassment.

“Nooo… are you kidding me?” Laurie started giggling. He was laughing super hard, but then he bent forward and grabbed his belly all of a sudden with a wince of pain. “Don’t make me laugh like that, dude. The baby didn’t like it.”

“Are you okay? We can leave if you need to sit down. Wait, you’re not going into labor are you?” My heart began to race as I realized that this could be it.

Laurie gave me a dirty look and flipped me off right before he started walking away with the cart. “I told you I was fine—and I am. Trust me, you’ll know when I go into labor, babe. Now keep up, we’ve got a few more items on our list.”

Knowing better by now than to argue with my pregnant husband, I sprang into gear and helped finish the shopping. We checked out a short while later, and were walking through the parking lot to our car, when Laurie doubled over the cart handle again.

But this time, liquid gushed down his inner thighs, soaking his jeans and forming a puddle between his feet. My heart jumped into my throat as I realized what was happening.

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit! This is it, Laurie. Your water just broke! Do you realize that your water just broke? Holy shit—your water just broke. What should we do?”

“I’m not a doctor or anything, but I’m pretty sure that this is the point where you take him to the hospital,” Kade said as he and Tanya came striding across the parking lot.

Laurie winced with pain as he looked up to see them with what was definitely a smile of relief.

“Thank heavens, it’s you two. I swear, if he’d said holy shit one more time, I probably would have rammed my fist down his throat.”

“Hey, now,” Kade protested as he held his palms up toward us. “I don’t need to know about your kinky sex practices. Tanya and I saw you guys through the window of the dance studio and figured that you could use a hand. My brother’s pretty awesome, but not when it comes to emergency situations.”

“Don’t make me laugh, unless you want to play catcher for this baby that’s trying to push its way out of me,” Laurie said.

“Okay, you win. We both know that I don’t want that to happen. So listen, here’s how we’ll play it,” Kade took charge and began bossing everyone around.

“Tanya, take their cart to your car, load the groceries up and go back to the farm. You take over for whatever sitter they have there—who am I kidding, it’s probably our grandmothers—and you take charge on the home front while I get these two to the hospital.”

While Tanya took off with the cart, my brother and I each took one of Laurie’s arms and helped him to the car. Kade silently held his palm out for the keys, knowing full well that I didn’t need to be driving right now. He wasn’t lying when he said that I wasn’t good in an emergency, not when it came to my loved ones anyway—I freaked out every time.

“Okay, everybody sit down, shut up, and hang on,” Kade sang out as he backed out of the parking space. “Next stop—the baby retrieval center.”

“Baby what? Where exactly are we going?” I asked stupidly.

Kade rolled his eyes. “I made a joke too lame to repeat or explain. So I’ll say this instead—we’re going to the hospital, doofus.”

Now that I understood.