by M. S. Parker
While I agreed with the sentiment, I doubted the corporal had ever sacrificed anything he'd wanted. He was the sort of man who wore his rank out for everyone to see. A rank that I'd earned the equivalent of while serving my country. I'd never complained about the sacrifices I'd made, knowing that I'd dedicated myself to a cause greater than myself.
“How much combat have you seen, Corporal Axe?” I asked softly. Gracen's fingers flexed against my back, but I ignored the warning. “Were you at any of the battles?”
“My orders have yet to take me into battle,” he said stiffly. “But I assure you that when the time comes, I will do my duty to King and country. I would not expect a woman to understand–”
“You'd think it would be the sights that would stick with you,” I continued.
I was on dangerous ground, but I couldn't stand to be quiet for another second, not when he was talking down to Gracen for not enlisting while I knew he'd never seen any real combat.
“It's the sounds and smells that get you,” I said. “That's what will wake you up in the middle of the night, years from now, drenched in sweat and trying not to scream. You'll hear them, the dying. The pain in their voices when they're calling out for their mothers. The smell of blood and gunpowder...”
“Honor, love.” Gracen's voice was low in my ear. “Come back to me.”
I blinked, surprised to feel the sting of unshed tears in my eyes. I inhaled slowly, then let it out just as slowly. All eyes were on me as I forced a smile.
“Your wife has quite the imagination,” Quincy said. “If she is equally as creative in...other areas, I can see why you took her to bed.”
Gracen took a step forward, but I grabbed his arm.
Quincy looked at the girls. “I have heard that the French are highly inventive. Perhaps that is why you brought these lovely young ladies back with you. After all, with a pregnant wife, a man must fill his needs–”
“You need to leave,” I said. “Or my husband cannot be held responsible for what happens.”
Quincy smirked. “Quite right. I must be going. Clara will be expecting me. I suppose I will see you around the estate.” He let his gaze linger on Alize, and then on Celina. “It was truly a pleasure to meet you both. I hope we will have the opportunity to become better acquainted in the future.”
Gracen let out a sound I could only describe as a growl. Without a backward look, Quincy headed toward the carriage we'd just left.
“Arrogant prick,” I muttered, running my hand over my stomach. Gracen’s reassuring arm around my shoulders cooled the anger burning inside of me considerably.
As we moved inside, I wondered if this was a good time to bring up us finding a place of our own. I didn't want to risk Quincy Axe being anywhere near my baby when it was born. In fact, after today, the only people I trusted besides Gracen were Alize, Celina, and Dye. Those three women would be the only ones I'd let help me when the baby came.
Chapter 14
If I thought it was stressful to be at the estate when we'd first gotten back from France, it was nothing compared to having Quincy around. While Roston had been content to ignore us, Quincy seemed to seek us out. He was always around, lurking in the shadows or hovering in plain sight. Even though he said he'd come to call on Clara, he was only out with her a few hours each day. After that, he lingered around the estate.
He'd toed the line perfectly, restricting himself to innuendos and suggestive comments that he could brush off as a misunderstanding if we chose to complain. Not that we really had anyone to complain to. We were still ultimately guests here, and neither Gracen nor I were entirely certain of what Roston would do. Talking to Quincy's commanding officer wouldn't do any good either.
Alize had rejected my suggestion to hide from him, but I'd been able to see the strain on Celina's face every time the two of them were out of their rooms. I made sure the girls were never alone, but having one of the staff around didn't change the way Quincy spoke to them. Celina had flat-out refused to repeat any of it, but Alize was livid. She'd never been forced to put up with this sort of thing back home. Playful flirting was one thing. Lewd comments and suggestions were something else.
When Quincy asked if I'd watched the two of them having sex with my husband, it'd only been thoughts of the baby that had kept me from challenging the asshole to a duel. Or just punching him. I'd made Alize swear not to mention any specifics to Gracen. I couldn't have him getting into a fight that could end with him dead or in jail. Or conscripted in the British army. Better to leave him in the dark about things he couldn't change.
Fortunately, Gracen had been spending some time with his father and hadn't given Quincy much thought. Out of sight, out of mind, I supposed. That was fine with me. The three of us were tougher than most men would ever think. And it had just been talk. After everything we'd been through, talk was nothing.
The morning of the fifth, however, Dye came rushing into my room. Gracen had already left, needed on some sort of estate business with his father, but I hadn't gotten up with him. I was beginning to think that I'd sleep through half of this last stage of my pregnancy.
“Mistress Lightwood!”
I sat up, immediately awake. “What's wrong?”
“Nothin' wrong. You asked me to let you know as soon as that soldier fella left.”
“He went to see Clara again?” I swung my legs over the side of the bed. At least we could eat breakfast in peace.
“No, ma'am. He said he was going back to the army. Said he be back when he get more time.” Dye came over and offered her arm. “Thought you might want to know that things be goin' back to normal.”
“Thank you.” I let her help pull me up. “And not just for letting me know that slimy bastard's gone. I haven't had a chance to thank you for helping Celina and Alize acclimate here, especially Celina.”
Dye's face sobered. “That girl, she had some bad stuff happen to her. Celina. Not the other one. That Alize, she be from a rich family.”
I nodded as I let Dye help me on with my dress. I felt like I'd gone from only a little awkward to a whale almost overnight. It hadn't happened that way, I knew, but it was hard to argue when I was having trouble seeing my toes.
“Why'd you bring them here? To hide them?”
I paused, giving her a questioning look. “Why would you think that?”
Dye raised an eyebrow, once again looking older than I knew her to be. “I see how they look at each other. People like me know what it be like to be told who they can love.”
It was sad because these thoughts wouldn’t change for many years. Even in my own time, Celina and Alize wouldn't have been able to marry in most places. Even inter-racial marriage would stay illegal in some states well into the twentieth century.
“Alize's father thought it would be best if she came back here with us. Celina, well, she had a whole host of other problems she needed to get away from.”
Dye finished tying the back of my dress up and came back around to stand in front of me. “If you be needin' me, just ask. I'll keep them girls safe.”
Some people might not have been impressed with a teenage servant offering to protect two older girls, but I considered myself to be a good judge of character, and I trusted Dye.
Well, maybe I'd misjudged Alize when I first met her, but in my defense, she had been flirting with my husband.
“Have you and Master Gracen talked about a name for the baby?” Dye changed the subject as she pulled my hair back and up.
Shit. “We have not.”
I frowned. Why hadn't we talked about names? Now that I thought about it, we hadn't talked about a lot of things in anyway other than generalities. It'd always felt like there was something more urgent to talk about, to worry about. But we were running out of time. I didn't want to spend my baby's first few months calling him or her “baby Lightwood.”
When Gracen got home tonight, we needed to buckle down and talk about things.
It was late by the time Gracen returned. Dinn
er was over, and I was back in our bedroom. I wasn't sleeping though. I felt like the two of us had barely spoken since we'd gotten back to America, and Dye's question about baby names had driven the point home.
“Welcome home.” I smiled at him as he closed the bedroom door behind him.
Gracen smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Now that Quincy is gone, I need to visit Washington. I will deliver the last of the gold, and then find out what he wants me to do next.”
Oh.
My eyes flooded with tears even though I understood why Gracen needed to go, and why he had to go alone. I wondered if there would ever be a point where I wouldn’t feel the need to be involved, be active. Hell, I joined the army because I wanted to be in the middle of it all. It was only recently that I decided I was ready to settle down with a nice pediatric practice and a family.
Then I'd gotten thrown back into Revolutionary America, and that idea had gotten flipped completely upside-down. Now, I was facing a different sort of settling down, and I wasn't sure I could handle an eighteenth-century woman's role.
I took a shaky breath and forced my tears back. I couldn't make him feel guilty. Not about this.
“You’re going to leave me here alone?” I gasped with mock-horror. “How could you even consider it?”
Gracen chuckled, his entire body relaxing as I joked. “If Corporal Axe was still here, I would not.”
“I'll be fine. Your father's pretty much ignoring me. It's not great, but it could be worse.”
Gracen nodded. “That it could.”
“I'm just glad you're nothing like him,” I remarked. “Your mother did a good job of diluting the nastiness in him.”
Gracen sat down to take off his boots. “I am hoping you will take out the last of it for our child.”
I reached over to run my hand over his back. “When will you go?”
Even after removing his shoes, Gracen didn't look at me. “Tomorrow. I could not have gone while Quincy was still here, but now that he is gone, I need to go as quickly as possible so I can be back before the baby is born.”
Logically, I knew this was the best thing for all of us. That didn't mean I had to like the idea of us being apart. And I couldn't go with him. I wouldn't even suggest it. Traveling by carriage while nearly eight months pregnant wouldn't be the best idea, nor would it be stealthy. Some women in this time might have been fine with riding a horse in their third trimester, but I wasn't one of them. Aside from the fact that I wasn't nearly confident enough in my horse riding abilities to try, I didn't think it would be safe. Nothing in my medical background had offered a list of unsafe activities at various stages in pregnancy.
After a few moments of silence, Gracen sighed, running a hand over his face. His shoulders slumped, exhaustion written on every line of his body. I sat up, moving next to him so that I was pressed up against his back. I massaged the back of his neck with my fingers, and he leaned into my touch. A flare of desire went through me. As shitty as I felt most of the time, I shouldn't have wanted anything to do with sex, but I wanted him as much as I ever did.
“I'll be fine. You don't need to worry about me or the baby.”
Gracen let his head fall back against the curve of my neck, his hair soft against my skin. “I do not like being apart from you, especially now, with your time so close.”
“We both know that it wouldn't be smart for me to go with you, as much as I hate us not being together. And you have to go. This is too important.”
“You are important.” He turned toward me, expression fierce. “You and our child are everything to me.”
I put my hand on his cheek. “And that's why this is so important. Our child deserves to grow up in a free country. No, it won't be perfect, but America will be a great country. It will do a lot of good in this world, and our family deserves to be a part of that.”
Gracen closed his eyes as he rested his forehead against mine. “I do not know if I could survive losing you.”
I wanted to tell him that he wouldn't, but we’d both know that it would be a lie. We lived in a country at war, and the two of us were walking a dangerous line. I was pregnant in a time where the mortality rate for both mother and child was frightening. And then there was the other unknown. How I'd gotten here, and if I'd be taken back.
I moved farther back, drawing Gracen back with me until he rested with his head on my lap. I couldn't give him false reassurances, but I could offer a distraction. “You know, we haven't talked about names yet. Some couples have baby names picked out years in advance.”
“It is a mystery to me how you can select a name for a person you do not yet know,” he said, allowing himself to be distracted. “What if the name chosen does not suit him or her at all?”
“All right,” I said, brushing dark hair from Gracen’s brow. “We’ll wait until they're nineteen or twenty, and choose a name then. Twenty-one if we’re still not sure. We can just call them 'hey, you' until then.”
A growl issued from Gracen’s throat as he pulled my head down to claim my lips. His fingers tangled in my hair as his mouth devoured mine until we were both gasping for air.
“If it is a girl,” he said a few moments later. “We shall need a beautiful, gentle name since she will be just like her mother.”
I laughed as I caught his hand and pressed my lips against his palm. “Gentle? Do you even know me at all?”
He chuckled. “Perhaps not gentle. Spirited and strong-willed.”
“Those are very different adjectives from gentle,” I pointed out. “Pretty much polar opposites.”
“How do people choose names in your time?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Lots of different ways. There are always family names. Like my mom's name's Marcy, and she was named after her grandmother. My father got his name from the Bible. Peter. Some people choose names from books or movies or other pop culture.”
“Pop culture?”
“Stuff that's popular. Musicians. Celebrities.” I laughed as I added, “Though I'd stay away from naming kids the same thing as celebrities name theirs. Those can get weird.”
“What about your brother and you?”
“Ennis was named after a man who saved our father's life in a training exercise that went bad. Mom was pregnant, so when they found out it was a boy, they decided to name him after my dad's friend.”
I didn't add that neither Ennis nor I had ever met the man because, a year later, while visiting family in Pennsylvania, a tornado swept through the town, and he died trying to get an elderly woman to safety. Ennis always said it was hard, having all of that to live up to.
I'd told him that it was nothing compared to having a name like mine.
“And yours?” Gracen asked.
I laughed softly. “It was a joke, actually. When my mother went into labor with me, my dad was speaking to a bunch of seniors at a nearby high school. Instead of rushing off when he got the call, he finished the speech and ended up missing my birth. When Mom started to yell at him for being late, he gave her this look that said he really didn't understand why she was upset. He told her that he needed to make sure those kids knew that honor was the most important thing in a man's life.”
“So they named you Honor to remind him that you were more important.”
I laughed. “Yes. And my mom telling the nurse to write it on the birth certificate was enough to make my dad figure out that he needed to start thinking about his family a bit more.”
Gracen sat up and put his hand on my belly. “I do not need the reminder that you two are far more precious than something so paltry as honor.”
“Good to know.” I put my hand over his. “What about you? Where's your name from?”
Some of the light on his face faded. “Gracen was my mother's surname before she married my father. With no brothers to carry on the family name, she asked that I be given it as my first name.”
“What was her name?” I ran my thumb across his bottom lip.
“Eliza.”
His eyes shone as he looked at me. “I would like that very much.”
“Now that we've found a girl's name, I think there's something else we need to do before you leave tomorrow. Something very important.”
He gave me a puzzled look that vanished the moment I reached down and cupped him through his breeches.
I gave him reassurance before he could protest. “As long as we're careful, it won't hurt the baby.”
He nodded as he hooked his finger in the neck of my shift. “I can be careful.”
I gave him a skeptical look but didn't argue when he tugged down one side and lightly kissed my shoulder. A simple touch. Almost chaste. But there wasn't anything platonic about the heat that spread through my body, or the throbbing between my legs.
“You are so beautiful.” His breath was hot against my skin as he spoke. “I could spend all day looking at you.”
I shivered as he untied the top of my shift and let it fall until it pooled at my waist. Well, more accurately, rested on my stomach, but it didn't really matter. Gracen wanted something a little higher than my stomach.
I'd always had an athletic build, my breasts basically average size. I'd never minded, though Bruce had been an ass about it more than once. Now, however, my belly wasn't the only thing on me that had gotten bigger.
Gracen flicked his tongue against the tip of my nipple, and I let out a shaky breath. My body had always responded to his, even back when I wished it hadn't, but now, every inch of me was so sensitive that a single gentle touch sent sensations racing along my nerves.
I ran my fingers through his silky hair, digging my nails into his scalp as his lips closed around my nipple. I moaned as he applied just the right amount of suction, hard enough to make my eyes cross.
