A/N: Hope everyone's having a decent Friday. Thank you for the comments on chapter 3. :) Here's some Rolivia babies shenanigans for the weekend.


CHAPTER 4: Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush

. . .

Later that evening, the kids bathed, pajamaed, and more or less winding down from the birthday festivities, Olivia gathered them onto the couch, along with both dogs. Seated beside her on the coffee table, across from their babies—human and fur—was Amanda, her hand on Olivia's knee.

It had been the detective who requested they tell the kids this early; she wanted to get out in front of it before they thought she was just getting old and fat, she said. Olivia had agreed somewhat reluctantly, concerned by how such a major life change would affect the trio, following so closely on the heels of the wedding and all that had gone before it. But as Amanda pointed out, the sooner the children were informed of their new sibling's eventual arrival, the more time they would have to adjust to the idea.

"Us too," Amanda had added, catching Olivia's fidgeting hands and tucking them into her own. Funny how someone so impatient and antsy could have such a calming effect.

Now she was gazing expectantly at Olivia, along with five sets of eyes in varying stages of curiosity and suspicion. The precise moment Olivia opened her mouth to speak, Jesse interrupted in that straightforward manner she had, every bit as eager as her mama to get out in front of things:

"Are we in trouble?"

"Not at all, bug," said Olivia, shaking her head firmly at each of the children. Noah looked concerned for a second, but returned to patting Frannie's head, tilted back at him adoringly, upon his mother's reassurance. Matilda folded her hands in her lap, every bit the well-bred young lady. (Sometimes Olivia thought her youngest had more etiquette than she or Amanda did.)

"Nah. Not in trouble," Amanda agreed, then narrowed her eyes at Jesse. "Unless there's a reason you should be . . . "

Jesse flashed a wide, disarming grin. Oh, that dimple. "Not at all, Mama."

"Uh-huh." Amanda didn't sound terribly convinced, and she kept giving their middle child the stink-eye—and getting it right back—until Olivia finally broke up the showdown that would have them here all night if allowed to continue.

"Okay, guys. So, Mama and I have some big, exciting news for you." Olivia cleared her throat once, then twice, as if that might dislodge the words she felt sticking there. She licked her lips and wondered why she hadn't brought a glass of water to the family meeting. This was more stressful than talking to the brass. "We decided, um— that is to say, your mother and I— I mean Detective Rollins . . . wait, no, Mama—"

Oh God. Her children were staring at her like she was having a stroke. Based on her performance so far, they might be right. Wild-eyed, she turned to Amanda for help!, found her ever-supportive wife snickering, and with that as incentive, finally remembered to breathe.

"Are you all right?" Noah queried, his head cocked to one side, mirroring Frannie's inquisitive pose almost exactly.

"I'm fine, sweetie." Left with nothing else to do but laugh at her own nervous floundering, Olivia gave a light, helpless chuckle and nudged Amanda playfully with her elbow. "You think you can do better, wise guy? Let's hear it."

"Watch me." Amanda tweaked at a pair of imaginary shirt cuffs—her loose athletic top didn't even have sleeves, the little show-off—and flexed her arms like she had just donned a spiffy leather jacket. "Listen here, y'all," she said, and managed to sound as if she were slipping on some dark shades. Hasta la vista, baby. "What Mommy's trying to say is . . . 'member how we moved into this apartment last year because our family got too big for the old one?"

The kids nodded. Unable to suppress a smirk, Olivia folded her hands together over one knee and leaned in to listen with a touch of wryness. She had a feeling this buildup was about to backfire in ways Miss Amanda Jo hadn't stopped to consider.

"Well, it's about to get even bigger." Amanda made the pronouncement like a game show host presenting the contestants with a brand new vehicle. She was met with blank stares and total silence from the peanut gallery.

Then Noah asked, "Are we moving again?"

"But I don't wanna move. I like it here." Jesse frowned, her bottom lip pouting the same way Amanda's did when the detective was saddled with more paperwork or someone else got the last candy bar from the vending machine. "It's big enough for us. We're little." She reached for her sister's hand, encouraging the younger girl to make herself even smaller by scrunching down on the couch.

"We're little," Matilda echoed, huddled against her older sister.

Amanda signaled a time out, hands crossed in a capital T. "We ain't moving. I meant our family is about to get bigger, not the apartment. I'm—"

"Are we getting another dog?" Jesse sprang from her shrunken posture to full capacity with the exuberance of a jack-in-the-box, nearly toppling Matilda sideways when the only support keeping her upright was suddenly taken away. "Can we get a cat instead?"

"I don't want a cat." Noah sat forward too, prepared to argue his case. "Anyway, Mom's allergic. I want a Saint Bernard this time. Like Beethoven. Can we get a Saint Bernard?"

Matilda scooted to the edge of the couch, where her short legs still dangled above the floor, but at least she was on level with her siblings. "I want a horsey! Please?"

As the kids went on shouting out the different species of pets they would like to own (among those that made it into the suggestion box, the most plausible was a turtle; the most exotic, a ring-tailed lemur; and the most elusive, a rainbow unicorn), Olivia grinned at her exasperated wife. "So that's how it's done, huh?" she murmured in Amanda's ear, dotting a kiss to the lobe that was pink with frustration. "Gotta say, I'm impressed."

"You try communicating with these savages. It's like reasoning with the crackheads we bring in."

"What's a crackhead?" Jesse called above the din. ("Giraffe!" "Mermaid!" "Tyrannosaurus Rex!") "I want one of those."

Raising a hand in the air, Olivia snapped her fingers loudly for attention. It was time Captain Benson took charge. She commanded a squad and outranked the majority of the nine hundred eighty-plus cops in her precinct, for crying out loud. She could handle three kids hopped up on cake, ice cream, and birthday fumes. Hopefully. "Okay, eyes up here, guys. We are not getting another dog. Or a cat. Or a hippogriff. The new family member is one hundred percent human. Mama's gonna have a baby. Isn't that exciting?"

Nothing. She might as well have announced her plans to reupholster the couch they were seated on, for all the enthusiasm they expressed. They gazed mildly back and forth between Olivia and Amanda, as if still awaiting the big news. Wow. Tough crowd.

"Wait . . . " Jesse zigzagged her index finger from one invisible point to another, mentally connecting the dots. "You mean a real one?"

"No, Jesse, I've decided to give birth to an American Girl Bitty Baby," Amanda said, with a delivery so dry she might have been speaking to a thirty-five-year-old member of the rat squad rather than her five-year-old daughter. She reached over and ruffled the little girl's hair vigorously. "Of course a real one, you nut. There's gonna be real pee and poop and barf all over the place."

"Gross!"

"Are you adopting this one?" Noah asked, earnest as ever.

Inwardly, Olivia cringed. The term "adopted" had gotten bandied around quite a bit lately, since she and her wife had talked to the kids about officially adopting each other and sharing a hyphenated last name; the kids had loved that—the idea that they were adopting their moms, instead of vice versa. For weeks afterward, Jesse had tried to adopt her school chums, informing them their last name was now Rollins-Benson.

If only it were that easy. So far, all efforts to locate Declan Murphy and obtain consent for Olivia to adopt his daughter were for naught. Olivia was reluctant to have his parental rights terminated by the court, despite Amanda's continued insistence that it would be fine. And maybe it would be—Murphy had never met Jesse or made any attempts to contact or support her. Their case for dissolving him from Jesse's birth records, and subsequently her life, was solid. Olivia knew a handful of judges who would push the adoption through, no questions asked. But what happened when Murphy resurfaced, asking about his plucky, precocious little girl, or when Jesse Eileen finally asked after her daddy?

Olivia had wondered far too long about her own father, that missing part of herself which was taken away, as everything had been by Joseph Hollister, without her consent. She couldn't do that to Jesse, even if it meant having legal custody. She'd been Noah's mother—legally—for four years when Sheila Porter came knocking on her front door . . .

She hated for any of her children to think themselves less valid because some slip of paper—not biology—declared them hers. Blood didn't always guarantee love. Sometimes it just tied you to the person who hurt you most. She wished she could explain that to her kids, but it was probably better that they didn't know. And they never would.

"No, baby, Mama's going to carry this one," she said softly, patting Noah's knobby little knee. "Like she did with Jesse. And since we're married now, the baby will automatically be a Rollins-Benson."

"I wish Ma had carried me." Noah cast a searching look at Amanda, his shy smile widening when she responded, "Me too, son," her eyes suddenly damp and glistening.

The sweet exchange made Olivia's eyes tear as well, but just as she was about to point out that Amanda had been present when Olivia and Noah found each other—had in fact been the first to lay eyes on the boy who would become their son (always meant to be, this family, us)—Jesse had to have her say.

"Carried you where? You couldn't walk?" The little girl turned an incredulous look to her mothers. "Why is Mama the only one who can carry the baby? Is your arm hurt again, Mommy? Can't me and Noah hold the baby? Tilly's probably too little, but I can pick up a baby." She demonstrated by hauling Matilda into her lap and cradling the toddler like a swaddled infant. Matilda basked in the attention, snuggling up to her sister without a moment's hesitation.

"Lord, child," Amanda sighed, shaking her head in dismay.

"Not that kind of carry," Noah said, his patience for Jesse's rapid-fire questioning not worn quite as thin as Amanda's. "It means carrying the baby in her belly. That's where it lives until it's big enough to come out. Like the joeys that live in the girl kangaroos' pouches. Right, Mom?"

Olivia nodded gravely, though her eyes shone with laughter and maybe a little pride at the impromptu lecture. She hadn't given him the baby talk in well over a year, and she was impressed he'd retained the information and added to it on his own with the joey comparison. "Yep, you're on the right track. Mama's pouch is inside her tummy, though. And if she starts hopping around like a kangaroo, I'm gonna ship her off to the Central Park Zoo."

"You're so dang funny I forgot to laugh," Amanda deadpanned, but she winked at Olivia while the kids rolled around on the couch giggling uproariously at the image of their mama sproinging through the park.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" Noah asked, once he and his sisters recovered from the merriment and the ecstatic licks from both dogs. Frannie plopped her hindquarters onto his lap, engulfing nearly everything but his curly head and dancing feet.

"We don't know for sure yet. She's— the baby is only this big." Olivia spaced her thumb and index finger apart at roughly the size of an apple seed, one eye scrunched shut as if she were trying to view the seed through a microscope. "We have to wait a couple more months to find out the sex."

Noah contemplated the answer for a moment, then declared, "I hope it's a girl."

"Seriously? Another one?"

"Amanda!"

Unfazed by either reaction, Noah nodded. His interest in the feminine had continued to grow in recent months, especially since the wedding. He requested hairstyles from Amanda when she was braiding the girls'—and often Olivia's—hair, and a couple weeks ago he'd clomped into the living room alongside his sisters, each child teetering on a pair of Olivia's high heels. Olivia didn't read too much into it; three months shy of eight years old, it didn't necessarily mean anything. And so what if it did?

"Yeah, girls are funner than boys," he said.

"Well, I can't argue with you there." Amanda smirked, draping an arm over Olivia's knee and clapping the inside briskly, but affectionately. "I'm pretty partial to girls myself. One in particular."

"I want a boy," said Jesse, who needed no encouragement to elaborate. "Boys don't mind getting dirty like Sissy does. Can we name him Mowgli? Or Shere Khan?"

Olivia and Amanda shared a look—no more Jungle Book for Jesse Eileen until after the pregnancy, otherwise they would end up naming the kid Baloo or something—and responded with sounds of noncommittal ("Huh," "Hm"), as if giving the suggestions serious thought.

"How 'bout you, Tilly girl?" Amanda asked, easing the discussion away from Rudyard Kipling with the most finesse she could muster. "What kind of baby do you want?"

Finding all eyes focused on her, Matilda bunched up her shoulders and giggled, a sound like tinkling chimes, butterfly wings, and the sun after a light summer rain. She had defused many a stressful situation with that sweet fairy-magic laughter. It was Olivia's favorite sound in the world, never failing to put a smile on her face.

The little girl slid down from the couch, her bloomerlike pajama shorts riding up in the back before her feet touched solid ground. She stepped closer to examine Amanda thoughtfully, her tiny elbows propped on the blonde's knees. "Baby's in here?" she queried, pointing to her mama's belly, brow crinkled as she tried to work out the connection between the body part and this so-called infant everyone was talking about.

"Yeah, punkin." Amanda raked her fingers lightly through Matilda's curls, sweeping them back to kiss her forehead.

The child was now the same age Olivia had been when she fell and gashed her head open on the bathroom mirror, incurring the zigzag scar over her right eyebrow. Had her mother kissed her like that before the scar? she wondered briefly, then pushed the thought away. All that mattered now was that her children got those kinds of kisses daily, often multiple times, from her and from Amanda.

"Mama's got a baby in there," the detective confirmed. She patted Matilda on the bottom, indulging the little girl's gentle poking and prodding of her abdomen for a while longer. There would probably be a lot of it in the coming months.

"For my birfday?" Matilda gazed up hopefully, from Amanda to Olivia and back again. "My baby?"

Nestling her cheek into Matilda's strawberry patch of curls, Amanda turned a soft, contented smile on Olivia. When she got a nod of assent, she repeated it for their daughter. "I reckon so, Tilly-billy. You got a little wait, though. Gimme about seven more months, then you can have your baby. As long as you promise to take real good care of it, okay?"

"'Kay, Mama." Matilda wrapped her slender arms around Amanda's middle and pressed her face to the flat—for the time being—stretch of belly below. She opened her mouth with a loud smack when she withdrew, imitating the noisy kisses Amanda always gave the kids. Her three-year-old lips hadn't quite mastered the art of puckering just yet. "I yuve you, Baby."

Well. She might not be able to pucker up, but she sure knew how to break hearts. Olivia's eyes welled again, first with emotion and then with laughter, as the older children (and dogs) advanced on her and Amanda, not to be left out of the cuddles—or their responsibilities as caregivers to little Baby Pip.

It was like being inundated by a wave of sheer joy and love. Yuve.

Olivia let it carry her away, making no attempts to resist the powerful current. The most beautiful way to drown.

. . .