Baby Fever

by Landish, Lauren

  Most important, though, is the man standing under the arch. I see him swallow, his eyes looking up and down my simple spaghetti-strap white dress that swirls around my calves. My hair is pulled up, creating a wispy free style with little flowers woven in, and I do feel natural and beautiful right now, like a forest fairy, Nic’s outdoorsy nature girl dream come to life.

  He’s brought that out in me, the carefree girl I once was, climbing trees and staying outside as much as possible, the one I was before I grew up and felt like I had such serious responsibilities. It’s been great for my ‘baby recovery’ too. While I put in my time with Trey, more for friendship than anything else, I enjoy packing Amelia in her baby backpack and hiking the trails around the Mountain Spirit resort more.

  It’s been freeing to rediscover that girl with him leading the way, showing me and Amelia the beauty of the world and having some great adventures. His eyes shine with happy tears, and I know that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with this man, my happily ever after.

  I walk slowly, carrying my bouquet of sunflowers to meet him as we’re surrounded by Brad and Trey, who’s holding Amelia, Ana, McKayla and her husband, Evan, Devon, and Wes with his wife, whom I just met recently. These are our people, all we need to witness this moment.

  We’d decided to not have an officiant, instead doing our own vows. Brad did some online course that means he can file our certificate for us and make it official, but no matter how many times he begged, we just want to say our own thoughts and promises to one another. Still, we did agree to let him stamp and sign the form. I’m sure that’s going to be fabulous, but I’ve been keeping my eyes out for a huge feather-plumed pen just in case.

  After I walk the aisle, Nic takes my hands, going first. “Rose, when we first met, there was no denying our connection. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and leaving you then was hard. Later, when fate conspired to bring us back together, you challenged everything I’d ever thought about myself and my future. And it was just what I needed. You and Amelia were just what I needed. There is no place I would rather be than by your side. Where you go, I go. Always and forever. This is my promise. I love you.”

  I vaguely hear sniffles from the friends encircling us, but my attention is solely focused on Nic and my words, which flow from my heart. “I had a dream, a vision of what I thought my life would be like. When I thought that dream was never going to come true, I made other plans. And then I met you, and my plan came true in the wildest of ways. I am so grateful. I never thought I’d be here like this, never thought we would be here like this, but somehow, by making my plan come true, you did something much more magical. You made my dream come true, and now, I am happier than I’d ever imagined. I’m in love . . . with you and with our family. Where you go, I go. Always and forever. This is my promise. I love you.”

  We both lean in for a kiss, and I hear the applause, along with some hoots and cheers from our ragtag group of people. Pulling apart, I hold up my sunflowers in victory and I hear Evan call out in a deep voice, “Nice job, now let’s eat!”

  Laughingly, we all head to the single table set up to hold our small group for a wedding version of a picnic. I smile at the simple white cotton tablecloth and set my bouquet in the middle as a centerpiece.

  Ana pulls out a huge cooler and starts to pass around bowls of delicious chicken salad, fruit, and tomato-mozzarella salad. It might still be a picnic, but we aimed for a slightly fancy one.

  Devon hands out small glass flutes and Nic pops the cork on a bottle of sparkling cider amid cheers. We thought of champagne, but this way, Amelia can have some too, carefully given to her from her still uncertain sippy cup.

  Once everyone’s glass is full, we raise a toast, Brad leading. “To Nicolas and Rose Broadmoor. I’m going to make at least a thousand jokes about her unfortunate choice of last name.”

  “He’s being honest,” McKayla says. “It took me three months to get him to shut up about McKayla Hardwick.”

  “Hardwick, that’s just too easy.” Brad snorts, and I’m glad he hasn’t taken a sip of his cider yet or it might shoot out of his nose. He sees Evan giving him a dirty look, obviously not too pleased with anyone making fun of his name, and Brad smirks back, happy to poke at the still occasionally grumpy man. “Anyway, to Nic and Rose!”

  Everyone parrots it back happily before sipping their cider, Amelia’s reaction earning her a round of laughs as she sputters at first in surprise before grabbing at the cup and giggling madly while downing more. “Whoo, you’d better watch that child,” Ana jokes. “She’s going to be a handful when she figures out what the good stuff is.”

  Everyone chats and celebrates and enjoys the rustic picnic, knowing that the celebration isn’t over yet. McKayla, who’s looking a bit extra glowy, seemingly more from within than from a highlighter blush, comes over at one point, and I wonder if she might have a little secret too. “Where are you going for your honeymoon again? Getting lost in some forest like we are now?”

  I laugh, shaking my head. “Not exactly. Nic has clients—friends, really, Sam and Susan who live way out in the woods in Oregon, off-grid. We’re going out there for a few weeks. Nic will get to check on their equipment, Devon is gonna take care of the shop for me here, and Nic’s parents are driving their RV out to meet us for a little bit, too. We’ll get to stay in a small cabin on the property and they said they’d happily watch Amelia for us so we can hike, ride ATVs, or uh. . . whatever.”

  She smirks at me, obviously knowing what ‘whatever’ means. I know that a lot of times when she and Evan go rolling past the boutique on his Harley, her hair streaming out behind her, they’re going off to do ‘whatever’. “ATVs. Interesting.”

  “But they’ll be close by so we can take care of Amelia,” I continue with a roll of my eyes, “feed her and even take her with us out to the woods a bit. It sounds perfect . . . active, outdoors, and remote. Fun for all of us.”

  She wrinkles her nose at me, probably imagining the forest funk of what we’re going to smell like in a week. “Ew, better you than me, but whatever floats your boat, gets your motor running, and turns your crank.”

  “Speaking of turning cranks—”

  Before I can ask, Nic stands up, pulling me up beside him and wrapping an arm around my shoulder. McKayla, I think, knows what I want to ask her, and she knows I won’t forget.

  Nic raises his glass for a final toast. “To each and every one of you, thank you for coming. This has been a wild and unexpected journey but one I wouldn’t change for anything. You are all a part of how we got here and I’m proud to call you all friends.” Everyone claps, raising their glass, as he continues, “And on that note, Trey, my current favorite person, has offered to watch Amelia for a few hours till her dinnertime, so if you don’t mind, I’m taking my bride home.”

  Before I can say a thing, he swoops me up and moves quickly down the path to the cars. Behind me, I hear laughter and applause and Trey yelling a promise to knock before he comes in with Amelia. Yeah, he’s definitely gonna need to knock, because looking at Nic right now, his eyes flashing with fire as he looks at me and my dress already creeping up my thighs from the hold he has on me, we’re gonna need every minute to celebrate . . . as husband and wife.

  Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it!

  Have you read all the current books in this series?

  Irresistible Bachelor Series (Interconnecting standalones):

  Anaconda || Mr. Fiance || Heartstopper

  Stud Muffin || Mr. Fixit || Matchmaker

  Motorhead || Baby Daddy || Untamed

  Duty

  Chapter 1: Aaron

  I'm sweating, even though it's cool and clear outside the classroom. Stress can do that to you, and for me, physics is stress-inducing to the extreme. I just can't quite wrap my head around some of the equations, and I'm the type of guy who needs to understand why before I can really get a good grasp on how to do something.

  It's got nothing to do with t
he weather. Summer this year was hot as fuck, and most of us sweated our asses off out at Camp Buckner, but fall has finally started to come to the Hudson River valley. Thank God. Another long ride in the blistering afternoon sun wasn’t something I was looking forward to. Maybe that's why I spent most of my training time working on swimming the first half of the semester. Now though, the fall has finally come, and I can get some damn work in on the weak points of my game.

  Up front, Major Thompson, our Physics instructor, is tapping at the board, trying to get us to understand the slope problem that he's got up there. Of course, to try and make it seem 'interesting', the vehicle isn't just any car, but it’s a Stryker armored vehicle. Leave it to the United States Military Academy. They'll jam something military-based into every little nook and cranny they can.

  One thing I've learned so far from my semester of physics . . . when it comes time to pick my mandatory engineering track, I sure as hell am not choosing something physics-based. I don't care how cool the catapults and little robots the mech engineers make are, or how impressive the juice guys are, getting to play around with real electrical generators. I'm staying as far away from this shit as I can.

  Thankfully, before the Major can ask any of us twenty-four slightly stupefied and totally wasted-out cadets what the answers are to the problem he's jamming on the board, class time is up. “Okay, everyone, if you want more explanation, check on page eighty-seven of your textbooks. Remember, you have a test on this next week, and I guarantee you, there will be something like this problem on the quiz. Section leader.”

  Classes at West Point are run military-fashion, which means at the beginning of each class, everyone stands at attention and the so-called 'section leader' reports to the instructor the status of everyone. All I can say is, thank God I'm not in the Old Corps. They had to march together from class to class sometimes.

  Fuck that.

  Leaving the classroom, I hurry out of Bartlett Hall, ignoring the few folks who give me a wave. If I'm going to catch the best of the weather, I've got to rush, although I've been rushing for a year and a half now. Firmly into the thick of my yuk year, the year most regular people at regular colleges call sophomore year, I'm just used to hauling ass from place to place.

  The main problem is that my barracks is far from where I need to go next. I hurry up to the third floor, where I find my roomie, Matt Cho, already changing for intramurals. He's got on the ugly yellow pants that DPE issues for those crazy enough to play intramural football along with his pads and helmet, which are sitting at the foot of his bed. “Yo, Cho.”

  “How was Phys-yuks?” he asks, fiddling with the retention strap on his glasses. It slips off the right bow again, and he slams his hand down on his desk in frustration. “Fucking hate these things. Strap keeps getting fucked up.”

  “Why not just buy a decent strap instead of fucking with that 550 cord that you keep insisting on using? Or better yet, you're playing football. Just go hit the motherfucker not wearing a black jersey,” I say, yanking my tie loose. Gotta hand it to West Point. The rest of the Army might be catching on to the fact that people have modernized and that the military is now a ninety-nine-percent field uniform service, but West Point keeps its traditions. Whether it's the twenty-seven pound, all-wool long overcoat we wear for the Army-Navy game, the parade uniforms that date back to the 1800s, or the 'as for class' uniform that I'm pulling off now with its black nylon shirt, black tie for fall and winter, polyester blend gray pants that come straight from the seventies, and black dress shoes, we keep our damn traditions.

  Unfortunately for me, I keep another one of my personal traditions as I yank my tie off. My name tag, the same black plastic that officers use, catches on my tie and rips away from the metal pin backing, flying across my desk to bounce off my bookshelf. “Goddammit! That's four times this semester!”

  “At least there are only two months of classes left this semester,” Cho notes, chuckling. “You spend more money on supergluing those damn name tags of yours together than you would if you just took the extra two seconds to take your tie off right.”

  Cho and I have been roomies before, back when we were plebes. We tolerate each other, so at least I don't have it as bad as the girls on the floor below. The Corps of Cadets always tries to room people together in the same year group, and a few of the women in my company just hate each other. Seriously, I've thought of going downstairs a few times and telling them to shut the fuck up. Sarah and Jordan go at it like an old married couple, and the only thing stopping me is that Sarah's my squad leader, a year ahead of me in rank. I don’t need her on my dick. But you try concentrating when shit's being thrown at the walls downstairs.

  “Nah, I'll just put in another order online,” I say. I go over to my footlocker and pull out my clothes for sports. Being on the triathlon team has its advantages, the main one being that I don't have to dress like everyone else does. Instead of the loose jogging pants or standard shorts that everyone else wears, I pull on the full-length padded cycling tights that make sure I don't snag any fabric in a sprocket or chain. “By the way, you got any glue?”

  “Yeah, you can use it when you get back,” Cho bitches before pulling on his glasses. “How do the BCGs look?”

  Cho insists on calling the glasses by their nickname, BCGs, or birth control glasses, because nobody has ever, ever gotten laid wearing a pair of them. I bet you could put one of those Instagram girls in the middle of Washington Plain buck ass naked except for the glasses, and she'd get no play at all.

  “You look ready to go fuck shit up. Who are you guys playing today?”

  “H company today, man. We win, we go to the playoffs. We lose, season's over. We get to the playoffs, and Captain Larson said he's giving the intramural team a week of PMI. Fuck, I could use a week of relaxed room inspections,” Cho says with more passion than he normally does. He catches a lot of flak from the Tac Department about his cleanliness, which I don't think is all that bad. He just seems to have the worst luck in the world of having that one item left out or that one thing out of place when the TAC comes by. “Still, some of the smacks are bitching, saying they're getting too busy for football. Except for Yeager. That guy's a goddamn psycho. God help whoever the fuck he goes against when boxing comes around.”

  “Well, good luck,” I say, grabbing my clip-in riding shoes and heading out the door. I jog down the stairs and out the door, clearing the last three steps to the quad in a jump and taking off. While every member of the triathlon team has an assigned bike, I want to catch the good weather and be well on my way before five o'clock, when the cannon sounds retreat and you're supposed to stop, face the direction of the flag, and salute. I don't really have a problem with it except that it can fuck up a good training ride.

  I get to the room and check in with Captain White, our Officer-in-Charge, and grab my bike. “Where you headed today, Aaron?” Captain White asks. That's a good thing about him—he's willing to treat us cadets like regular people. “Remember, you've got your race in April and that lead-up sprint tri next month.”

  “I'm going to go out to Bear Mountain Bridge today, sir,” I reply. “Figure it'll be a good ride, and then on the way back in, I'll do some hill laps from Gillis around Michie and back a few times.”

  Captain White nods. “Do those hills in as high a gear as you can. You need to work on your anaerobic power. All that hockey muscle hasn't transferred to the bike as well as I'd like. And if you need more time than that, I've got the static rig ready here for you, too.”

  That's Captain White. He knows our times and splits like the back of his hand. I pull my running shoes off and do the Velcro on my bike shoes, borrowed this semester, but I'm hoping to get my own pair next semester. “Hooah, sir. I'm off.”

  Snapping my helmet on and putting my sunglasses on top of that, I start off, doing an easy ride toward the Point gates. It finishes my warmups, and by the time I hit the gates and ride out toward the Bear Mountain Bridge, I'm leaning over my handlebars, cra
nking. I take the course that lets me avoid most of downtown Highland Falls, the town that exists right outside the main gates, which is just too much a pain in the ass with traffic. Instead, I stick to the less crowded route. Up ahead, I see another bike, and I wonder if another of my teammates decided to do the same route I did.

  As I get closer, I see that the bike's not one of the Corps' bikes. We ride Diamondbacks, mainly because they're cheap and long-lasting, according to some of the firsties. Not a bad bike, a hell of a lot better than what I rode back home in Michigan, but then again, I took a while to get used to the racing handlebars too. This person though, they're riding a Specialized rig, a bit more expensive than what the US Army is willing to pay for its triathlete cadets.

  I pull even and glance over, cracking an easygoing grin. “Hi.”

  The other rider barely glances my way. “Hi.”

  I can tell from the sticker on the seat post that it's a USMA registered bike. Whoever it is lives here, and it's a she. Still, we're both going a good speed, and the words are ripped from our lips nearly as soon as we speak. “Where you headed?” I say loudly.

  “Don't know, just out for fun,” she yells. “You?”

  “Bear Mountain Bridge,” I reply, pointing. “You down for pairing up?”

  “Sure,” she shouts, taking the lead. She's got good form. That Specialized bike is a lot lighter than mine, and she pulls away quickly. Grinning, I click down a gear and pedal, letting myself get into it. The burn starts in my quads, and I'm loving the feel of it, but sadly, the Bear Mountain Bridge isn't all that far, only eight miles even if I include the long lap around the parade ground, and we're soon watching the bridge approach. In the last quarter-mile, I pull up next to her and keep pace until we reach the limits of the bridge. Since it's a toll bridge, it's a good place to turn around.