Soldier's Pregnancy Protocol

by Beth Cornelison

  “It wasn’t a letter. It was a map,” Alec said a few minutes later. “Other than telling me he’s alive, I’ve got no idea what Daniel’s reasoning was for sending it. It’s got to have some significance, but as yet, I’ve not come up with much.”

  Erin saw the morsel of information for what it was. A gift. A show of faith. A proffered truce. Perhaps even a request for help.

  She shoveled a carrot in her mouth and licked the gravy from the spoon before carrying her bowl to the table to join Alec. “What kind of map?”

  “A treasure map. Like a kid might get as a souvenir at the pirate ride at the fair.”

  Erin’s brain began processing, clicking through what pieces of information she knew. “A pirate map. And didn’t you say you call him Lafitte? Wasn’t Lafitte a pirate who lived near New Orleans around 1812?”

  Alec nodded. “I called Daniel Lafitte because he was from Louisiana. He called me Blackbeard.”

  “Blackbeard.” She smiled. “Why?”

  He scratched the dark stubble on his chin. “I’d think that was obvious.”

  “Oh. Right.” She felt somehow disappointed there wasn’t a more intriguing reason behind Alec’s nickname. She took another bite of stew, then, mouth full, she asked, “Why pirate names?”

  Alec pushed his empty bowl away and rubbed a hand on his flat stomach. “Because that’s how we saw ourselves. The rogue element—tempting fate, flirting with disaster, answering only to ourselves.” His mesmerizing blue eyes locked on her. “Often operating outside the law.”

  An uneasy itch inched down her spine. “You’re criminals?”

  He rocked his head from one side to the other and rubbed the muscles at the base of his neck. “Not exactly. We work for Uncle Sam, protecting U.S. interests, but our modus operandi sometimes crosses into a…gray area.”

  Erin met his level gaze, and the stew in her stomach suddenly felt like rocks. “I’ve read about so called ‘black ops’ that the government conducts. Highly classified operations with no formal budget, no paper or electronic record, no particular departmental jurisdiction. Operations conducted in a way that they can be completely denied, no proof available of their existence.” She swallowed hard. “Is that what you do? What I’m in the middle of?”

  Alec didn’t so much as blink. But his silence spoke volumes.

  “Oh God,” she mumbled, feeling the contents of her stomach roil and rebel. She dashed to the sink and lost her dinner down the drain. Drawing a slow breath, she battled for her composure, struggled to make sense of the bizarre twist her life had taken today. With shaking hands, she turned on the water to rinse her mouth and splash her face.

  Cool fingers brushed her cheek, pulling her hair back from her face. She peeked up at Alec, who stared at her with a furrow of concern puckering his brow. “You sure you don’t have a virus?”

  She closed her eyes, weak, weary and more than a little frightened of the mess she was in. “I’m sure. Just a case of black-op-induced indigestion, complicated by morning sickness that, in fact, lasts all day.”

  His hand tightened slightly at her nape, and she lifted her head to meet his puzzled frown.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you all day, but there always seemed to be a thug to chase or a plane to jump out of at just the wrong moment.”

  She watched as some of the color leached from Alec’s face. He could jump from the top of a moving truck, parachute into mountainous terrain and cross a rickety rope bridge without flinching, but this had him blanching. She almost laughed.

  But she didn’t. She took her baby’s life very seriously.

  “You’re pregnant?” he rasped.

  Erin raised her chin a notch and slipped a hand over her belly. “Fourteen weeks.”

  Chapter 4

  P regnant.

  Alec dragged a hand down his jaw and studied the woman asleep on one of the two twin-size Murphy beds. In sleep, Erin Bauer seemed all the more vulnerable. Especially with the blue-black knot near her hairline.

  An uncomfortable prick of conscience arrowed through him. His responsibility to protect her was all the greater knowing her condition, knowing he was protecting two lives rather than just one. Knowing the arduous paces he’d put her through to get to the hideout. He’d made a pregnant woman jump from an airplane, for crying out loud! He shifted restlessly in his chair and tried to tamp the rising guilt. He hadn’t known. How could he have known?

  Alec sighed and spun his chair back toward the computer screen, where he searched the internet for venues that sold souvenir maps like the one Daniel had sent him.

  You should have figured it out.

  Erin had tried to tell him she was pregnant, but he’d been so single-minded in his determination to get to the safe house, he’d not listened to her. Hadn’t paid attention to the signs, the warning flags—Erin’s ready tears and testiness, her voracious appetite and disproportionate fatigue.

  And the odd tightness of her slightly rounded belly when he’d held her in place to fasten her tandem jump harness to his.

  Warmth flooded his veins remembering the soft crush of her backside against him, the vanilla scent that clung to her, and how her shudder of fear had ricocheted through his body and shaken his heart. Simply remembering made his body tighten and his pulse quake.

  What was happening to him? Every crumb of his training seemed to fly out the window when he was around Erin—a fact he needed to correct if he intended to keep her and her baby alive. Even now a niggle of something plucked at his brain. Something about her pregnancy that didn’t add up. Something she’d told him…but what?

  Alec puffed out a staccato breath and concentrated on the list of retailers on the monitor. The companies that sold the pirate’s map were spread across the country. Daniel could have gotten the map from any of these places, could have even ordered one of the silly maps from the internet. Not a lot of help there. Alec hit Print, and with a click and a whir, a hard copy of the retailers’ addresses slid out of the machine beside him.

  “What’s that?” Erin asked.

  He spun his chair around and found her blinking groggily at the monitor. Wearing one of his T-shirts and rumpled from sleep, she shouldn’t have looked so damn sexy. But she did.

  Alec squeezed the armrests of his computer chair and forcibly reined in his libido. “Just a little research on where this map may have come from. I’m sorry if the light woke you.”

  She raked loose caramel-colored curls off her forehead and yawned. “Naw. I had to go.” She flashed him a wry grin. “Seems all I do nowadays is eat and pee.” She shrugged. “Not that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I gave my decision to get pregnant plenty of thought.”

  As she staggered toward the bathroom, her comment tugged at his brain, prodding him. Her decision? What about the father’s say? But she’d said her husband had died… .

  Two years ago.

  Alec sat straighter in his chair. He’d just assumed her late husband was the father, but obviously Erin had someone else in her life as recently as three months ago. Alec watched Erin emerge from the bathroom and drop limply to the bed, refusing to give in to the bite of jealousy when he thought of Erin in some other man’s arms. “Your boyfriend is bound to miss you before long, maybe report your disappearance to the police.”

  Alec grimaced. Not too subtle, Kincaid.

  Erin’s brow puckered. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  Oh? A pathetically juvenile elation flared inside him.

  “I, uh…just assumed the baby’s father might be—”

  “Bradley is my baby’s father.” She squared her shoulders and pressed a hand to her belly. “No one is going to miss me, I’m afraid.” She yawned again. “Welcome to twenty-first-century medicine, Mr. Kincaid. I got pregnant in a doctor’s office with Bradley’s wedding present to me.”

  Alec lifted an eyebrow. “His wedding present?”

  Erin slid off the bed and padded across the floor. She pulled up the computer chair Daniel us
ed when the two of them stayed at the safe house together. Tucking her bare foot under her, she gave Alec a sleepy smile. “Yeah. I asked him to make a deposit, as it were, to a sperm bank before we married. I knew I wanted children, lots of them, and I was afraid…” She stopped and wrapped her arms around her chest, a self-defensive gesture that stirred Alec’s protective instincts.

  “When I was three, my dad was in a car wreck that left him paralyzed and…unable to father any more children. My parents were crushed. They’d planned on a big family and couldn’t have it.” She rubbed the goose bumps that dotted her arms, and Alec had to grip the edge of his chair to stop himself from pulling her into his lap and rubbing warmth into her himself.

  Erin’s brow puckered in thought. “Bradley was an adrenaline junkie. He loved to test his limits, try new things, live on the edge. I knew that going into our marriage, but I worried about him suffering an injury that would keep us from having the children we wanted. Like what happened to my dad.” Moisture sparkled in her eyes, and an answering sympathy grabbed Alec by the throat. “So I asked Bradley to…insure our future as a gift to me before we married. And he did. I used his wedding present, which had been in deep freeze at a clinic, to get pregnant. It took three tries—” she pushed out of Daniel’s chair and paced past him, leaving her vanilla scent in her wake “—but I’m having Bradley’s baby.”

  Alec cleared his throat. “It takes a lot of courage to raise a child alone.”

  She pivoted on her toes to face him. “Courage? I don’t know. I just knew how much I wanted a child to hold, to nurture. To love.”

  An uneasy prickle chased through his chest. He’d spent the better part of the past twelve hours lusting after a woman who was carrying her dead husband’s child. And while that fact should have dumped ice water on the fire licking his veins, instead the confounding pull she had with him merely shifted, kicking harder. The mysterious power Erin had to distract him from his training and his duty burrowed deeper and left him struggling for a breath. Not good.

  As she yawned again, her gaze drifted to the computer printout. “Can I help with that?”

  Alec shoved out of his chair and took her by the elbow, directing her back to the bed. “I’m almost finished for the night. Get some sleep.”

  “If you change your mind, I don’t mind helping.”

  “I’ll remember that.” He walked back over to the computer and powered it down for the night, then carried the list of retailers to the sofa. He stretched his legs out and glanced through the addresses once more before clicking off the light and closing his eyes.

  The gentle sough of Erin’s breathing reached through the darkness. The subtle intimacy of listening to her sigh softly in sleep wrapped around him, made his body buzz with restrained desire. Sharing these cramped quarters with Erin, a woman he had no right wanting, a distraction he couldn’t afford indulging, would likely drive him insane, one vanilla-scented sigh at a time.

  * * *

  “Did you know that at fourteen weeks, a fetus has already developed his own unique fingerprint?” Erin asked the next morning as she restlessly paced the bunker. She glanced to the computer console where Alec had worked all morning, ignoring her attempts at conversation, his fingers flying across the keyboard. She remembered the tenderness of those same hands when he’d checked her pulse, swept the hair from her face when she got sick, and held her chin as he examined her pupils. Skilled hands that had, in all likelihood, been used for all sorts of shadowy, questionable deeds. Had he ever killed anyone in his secretive line of work? She hated thinking of Alec pulling the trigger on the gun he’d produced yesterday or using his strength to snap a neck. She shoved the thought aside for more pleasant topics. “My baby already has eyelashes, toenails, ears—”

  Alec lifted his hands from the keyboard, and the mesmerizing clickity-clack, that for hours had been his only response to her questions, fell silent. “Would you please stop pacing? It’s making me crazy.”

  “I could, but then boredom would make me nuts,” she returned. “Oh, wait! It already is.”

  He turned toward her for the first time in hours. Judging from the creases that crinkled around his eyes and his generally sullen mood, she guessed he hadn’t slept well. “Entertainment isn’t a priority when Daniel or I come up here. Doing our job is about all we have time for.”

  Compunction for her sarcasm bit Erin hard, and her shoulders sagged. “Sorry. I’m just not used to having so much time on my hands. Can’t I help with anything you’re doing?”

  Alec glanced over his shoulder at the computer monitor and pursed his lips. “You know how to hack into Interpol’s database?”

  Erin scoffed. “No.”

  “Then I don’t think you’ll be any help to me.” He spun his chair back to the computer and resumed tapping the keyboard.

  Ridiculous. She was cooped up here with Mr. Dour Spy Guy while a man who’d threatened to slit her throat waltzed around free as a bird. A circumstance she refused to accept.

  She marched over to Alec and braced her hands on her hips. “Do you at least have a blank piece of paper and a pencil?”

  He gave her his one-raised-eyebrow look, which she’d already learned meant What’s going on in your head?

  “If I do, does it mean you’ll stop prattling about low-carbohydrate recipes and fetal development, and let me work in peace?”

  She huffed. “I’m not prattling!”

  He grimaced and lifted a hand to forestall her argument. “I just work better if I don’t have someone…talking to me all the time. I need quiet.”

  “Not a multitasker, eh?”

  He cocked his head slightly and narrowed his eyes. “I’ll show you later how well I multitask when it’s called for. As for paper and pencils, try that drawer under the scanner. Now can I please finish what I’m doing?”

  With an exasperated sigh, she twisted her fingers over her lips as if locking them and tossing away the key. After retrieving the supplies she needed, she curled her feet under her on the sofa and began sketching from memory the face of the man who’d threatened her life yesterday. For close to an hour, she smudged lines with her thumb here and erased there, shaping, shading and retracing until she had a good likeness.

  Satisfied with her efforts, she carried her drawing over to Alec, who had finished pounding the keyboard several minutes earlier. Now he simply stared at the treasure map Daniel had sent him as if the paper would eventually yield all the secrets of the universe.

  “Here.” She extended her sketch of Knife to him and squared her shoulders. “I don’t know if this will help catch him or not, but I was tired of sitting back doing nothing after the terror he put me through.”

  Alec took the proffered sheet and held it at arm’s length to study it. The hard lines in his face softened in surprise, and he raised his gaze to her. “Not bad. You’re no police department sketch artist, but for an amateur, this is good.”

  Erin folded her arms over her chest and scowled at his backhanded compliment while he examined the drawing some more. Setting the picture aside, he rocked his computer chair back and faced her. “Where’d you learn to sketch like that?”

  “No lessons. Just naturally talented.” She cocked one hip out and presented him with a smug grin. “Of course, I got lots of practice drawing faces in college when I worked a couple summers as the official sketch artist for my hometown sheriff’s department.”

  Alec opened and closed his mouth like a fish, then frowned. “Touché.”

  Erin pulled the other chair closer and dropped on the edge of the seat. “Can you use it with all your spy stuff to at least find out who he is?”

  “Let’s see.” He snatched the sketch up, and with a shove of his feet, he rolled his chair to another counter, where a flatbed scanner and printer sat. He slapped the drawing into the scanner, punched a few buttons, then rolled back to his keyboard. A minute later, Erin’s drawing of Knife was on Alec’s computer screen and rapid-fire images scrolled next to it.
/>   “What’s happening?”

  “I’ve asked the computer to compare the drawing to images of known criminals from police files around the world.”

  “How long will this take?”

  “Well, we could cut the time considerably if we cross-referenced with a few other variables.” Alec hit a button, and the images stopped scrolling. “We know his weapon of choice was a Bowie hunting knife with a nine-inch blade,” he said as he typed this information in.

  Erin leaned closer, an eager excitement pumping through her blood. “The driver called him Manny a couple times, and I remember him having a scar on his arm.” She paused and mentally recreated the position with which Knife had held her. “On his left arm, the one he held me with.”

  “Good,” Alec said as he entered this information, as well. “This is good. What else?”

  “Well, if he used his right hand to hold the knife, wouldn’t that make him right-handed? Does that help?”

  The corner of Alec’s mouth twitched, hinting at a grin. “Everything helps. You never know what piece of information will help you snag your target. I caught a guy in Australia once simply because I knew what brand of socks he wore.”

  He sent every bit of information the two of them could remember about Knife and his partner to the computer database and clicked Search. Scooting away from the desk, Alec stood and stretched his arms and back.

  Erin watched the play of muscle and sinew as Alec worked the stiffness from his body and couldn’t stop the flip-flop sensation in her chest. For a man whose body left no secret to his strength and deadly potential, Alec had shown her decided gentleness in the past twenty-four hours. His careful touch when he checked her vitals spoke of a man who could be as tender as he could be rough.

  Alec strolled toward the kitchen. “While the program runs through all the files, how about lunch? You hungry?”

  “Did yesterday teach you nothing?” A heady sense of accomplishment for their shared efforts that morning flowed through Erin, energizing her, and she reclaimed her stool at the kitchen counter. “I need to eat a little something every couple hours or I get sick to my stomach. My doctor said it’s because the baby is growing so fast.”