Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2)

by Hope Hitchens

  We had discussed personal, very personal things, but this was a different relationship level entirely. She was showing me her uterine adhesions. I squinted trying to make sense of what I was looking at. The thing she was referring too, looked like just a band of... something, guts or whatever.

  I had spent every day over at Bart’s house during her recovery. The incisions had been small, but she had had three of them and they hurt because cutting the scar tissue out was just the doctor butchering her alive, if you thought about it. We were on the couch. We had just gotten back from her checkup, and everything looked good. The few hours after lunch and before picking the kids up, in her mind were going to be best spent doing this.

  “So, they took all that shit out?”

  “All gone,” she said, showing me the next picture.

  Her recovery had gone great. I had had to pick up the slack for a bit after the surgery while she was in pain, but it was no big deal. The thing that had me chopped, that was a big deal was the three-to-four-week duration that I would have to wait before we could have sex again. That little gem had been kept from me till after the surgery.

  “This isn’t too gross for you, is it?” she asked.

  “No, that’s where our kid is going to live,” I said lightheartedly. It wasn’t gross; it was just weird.

  “There’s always IVF if it doesn’t work out,” she said.

  There was, but the thing about IVF was the kid was going to be cooked up in a lab. I didn’t like thinking about it. They could keep their IVF; I could handle my business.

  “Last resort. We won’t need it.”

  “Just saying. If you don’t want to... the sperm can come from a donor.”

  “Veronica, that’s like letting some Joe Schmo you don’t know nut inside of you.”

  “Ugh, Thaddeus, that’s gross. Please.”

  “I’m serious. I want that kid.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I was.

  I was.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew what having a kid meant. It meant money and responsibility and sacrifice. It also meant making Veronica the happiest woman in the world. I loved her. It was enough that I loved her because I was going to do whatever I had to to make her happy. I could be a dad if she was the kid’s mom.

  I had been a SEAL, I’d been shot at, and I’d jumped from helicopters. I had grit. I was tough. I’d nearly died more times than I could count, and now, I’d fallen in love. None of the combat training I had undergone in my life could have prepared me for that. BUD/s didn’t teach me how to love unconditionally, Veronica had. I had fallen in love, and I had someone I needed to take care of. You didn’t get medals or honor or money for being a good partner.

  It was the first time in my life I wasn’t working for a reward, and for the first time, it felt right.

  Epilogue

  Veronica

  Three months isn’t that much time. It isn’t. It’s like ninety days, no time at all. Time doesn’t seem to matter until you look at it in context—for instance, the context of pregnancy. Three months is one-third of the way through a pregnancy. The whole nine months is important, but the first three months and the last three months are the most important. Those collective six months are the most critical for the fetus, the time when the more unfortunate things can occur.

  Three months do nothing but painfully drag by when you have to spend them on bedrest.

  I was losing my mind. I felt like I was in prison, counting the days as they went by and there was still a month to go. Thad had worked some magic and moved the downstairs television to my room, doing something to it so I could watch Netflix on the big screen. I had rewatched all of FRIENDS and was working my way through Futurama with the kids when they got back home from school and on the weekends.

  I tried to see the positive side of what was happening. For one thing, a whole two months had gone by with no complications. That was eight weeks, already longer than my last pregnancy. This was a good thing.

  I didn’t know if it was because of the bedrest, or the fact that this baby wasn’t Michael’s, but things were looking up. Bedrest, rumor had it, doesn’t even work. Doctors just prescribed it because you had nothing to lose by going on bedrest so why not? Whether or not that was what it was, something was going right because I still had the baby. Every time the sun came up and I didn’t wake up in a pool of blood was another day closer to carrying the baby full term. My doctor was shocked as shit when she found out. I was, more than her, and Thad more than all of us.

  I don’t know why he was; he had been essentially threatening to put a baby in me, and he had finally done it. Maybe he wasn’t as sure of his virility as he had led me to believe and was just talking a big game to help me relax. Whatever it was, I was pregnant now. He had done it.

  Being pregnant wasn’t a new state for me, staying pregnant was and that was what I had been doing, for eight weeks, and nothing had happened. Everything was fine. I was doing great, and the baby was doing great. I never really understood what bedrest meant until I was put on it.

  I had a history of failed pregnancies and an incompetent uterus, but I was still young. That meant that the general chances of the pregnancy working out were higher than if I was older. That was what the doctor said. Bedrest, like everything else, came in degrees. She told me I had to stay home, but I could still walk around, do housework and things like that, as long as it wasn’t too strenuous, and I spent time in bed when I wasn’t doing anything else.

  Thad, in his expert medical opinion, believed nothing short of the strictest bedrest would do. We compromised, however, but he still got really mad when I walked up and down the stairs. He, however, bless him, was doing everything in and out of his power to make me feel better. He had even modeled his old white Navy dress uniform, complete with the hat and Trident pin for me.

  God, I loved him. I swear, how did I get so lucky?

  I heard him coming up the stairs. He had basically moved in since the bedrest began. He was spending more time at the house than he was at his own. He walked in with a McFlurry for me that he had so kindly picked up when I told him I was craving something sweet.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, handing me the treat and kissing me.

  “Another day down,” I said. “It’s still in there.” He sat on the bed.

  “Mm. You’re welcome,” he said.

  “I’m welcome? For what?”

  “It’s clear what the problem was now. Obviously, there was nothing wrong with you; there was something wrong with your ex’s bum spunk.”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” I said, smiling. “But it is working.”

  Seeing the way he was with Nikki and Christopher was one thing. He obviously loved them, and they did too. He had completely taken over taking them to school and bringing them back to the house. He was also going grocery shopping and running errands that he thought I couldn’t do. I didn’t want to tease him about it because I didn’t want him to stop.

  The way it had eventually happened was pretty organic, in Thad’s reckoning but I thought it was pretty intentional. After the laparoscopy, the doctor told us—me—but since Thad was there too, us that we could start trying for a baby if we wanted to, but our best bet was to wait until I was on hormone therapy.

  Whether or not Thad will admit it, I think he just wanted to be the one who would do it for me. He wanted to be the one who finally made me a mother. Making me a mom would make him a dad at the same time, and if he didn’t want that, he hadn’t told me, and he hadn’t ditched me either.

  “When I finally get off bedrest, I can start taking the kids to and from school again,” I told him.

  “I can do that; you need to start getting ready for the baby.”

  “Once he or she is born I could always ask my mom to come help out or something.”

  “Help out with what?”

  “The baby, or Nikki and Chris. All of them.”

  “Am I going to disappear when the baby’s bor
n?”

  I was quiet because I hadn’t puzzled out a way to say, yeah, man, I think you might, or if you do, I wouldn’t be mad or try to stop you.

  “I don’t know, are you?”

  “Only if you want me to. Even then I probably wouldn’t. I planted that seed; I demand bragging rights.”

  I rolled my eyes. Bragging rights.

  “What about, like, your job? At some point you’re going to want to deploy again, right?”

  “Veronica. Stop pushing me away. It won’t work.”

  “I don’t want you to feel trapped.”

  “I don’t. I love you, and I’m not going anywhere. Get used to it.”

  I looked up at him. He held my face and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Your turn, Buttercup. Now you tell me that you love me too and you couldn’t bear to think about being apart.”

  I laughed and kissed him.

  “I love you,” I said to him. “With any luck, the baby will look like you.”

  “I don’t care what they look like. All I want is a person who I can raise to be exactly like me.”

  I laughed.

  In a lot of ways, so did I.

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  The subsequent novel in the Heartbreakers & Troublemakers series. Available on Amazon.

  About the Author

  Hope Hitchens is a rising star author who exploded onto the scene in 2018 with her debut series of scorching hot contemporary romance novels entitled Heartbreakers & Troublemakers. You can find her work exclusively on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback formats.

  www.hopehitchens.com