Harlequin Special Edition November 2013 - Bundle 1 of 2

by Lilian Darcy

  “You’ve done a lot in a short time.”

  “I started last year when I was on leave, but I haven’t had much else to do with my days since I retired. Mostly the place needed to be freshened up, but the bathrooms needed redoing, and my next project is the kitchen. It’s a big room but could be a lot more useful.”

  They climbed the stairs together. “That bathroom is going to blow you away,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I went overboard. I don’t have to tell you how important a really good shower can be. I know about conservation and all that, but this I couldn’t resist.”

  Neither could she when she saw it. Her eyes widened with delight. A walk-in shower with several nozzles and even a bench to sit on. Everything gleamed with brand-new beige tiles and brand-new fixtures.

  “Wow! I could live in that shower!”

  He laughed. “So could I. I try not to overdo it, but sometimes I could just sit there with the hot spray beating forever. I always felt a good shower was a great luxury. So it’s my luxury.”

  “I can’t think of a better one. It looks like something out of a magazine.”

  “I think that’s where I stole the idea from.”

  She laughed. “Good steal.”

  “The bedrooms are pretty much just bedrooms, but they have nice big closets. And I put in insulated windows over the summer. That was some job. I’m learning as I go.”

  Downstairs he showed her the kitchen. It was indeed large, and very much underutilized. “Maybe you’ll have some ideas about what I should do with it.”

  “Me? I haven’t cooked since I put on my uniform for the first time.”

  He cocked a brow at her. “Mess hall, huh? Me, too, mostly. But I gotta have a kitchen. It’s not like this town is loaded with restaurants. I can’t keep eating with my family or going to Maude’s diner. She’ll turn me into a blimp.”

  “So you’re going to learn to cook, too?”

  “Absolutely. I expect I’ll get some lessons, too, whether I want them or not. But I still have to figure out the best way to organize this room. And since I don’t cook I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  “Steal another magazine idea.”

  He laughed. “Sure. It might look nice, but what if it doesn’t function well?”

  He had a point. She had to smile. “Are you feeling like a fish out of water?”

  “In more ways than one. It’ll come to me eventually.”

  “So what’s your plan for remodeling today?”

  “I wing it. I was thinking about tearing out some drywall in the back bedroom. From the look of it, it got wet. The roof must have leaked at one time or another. But I don’t want to do that while you’re here. It’ll make dust and I’m not sure that’s safe.”

  “I could be somewhere else.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.” He pulled two chairs over to a minuscule dinette. “How about some lemonade? I practically live on the stuff.”

  She sat gingerly, unsure of the chair, but it seemed safe. He brought her a glass of lemonade, then leaned against the chipped counter as he held his own. “How about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Anything you’d like to do today? See the sights? See the town, such as it is?”

  She hesitated. “Why would I want to see the sights?”

  “Because they’re there?” He grinned. “More time to get to know each other, too. Without pressure, I promise.”

  She could hardly argue with that. She looked down at her cammies, though. “Any place I can buy something else to wear first? I’m tired of walking around in a tent, but so far I’ve refused to buy any maternity clothes. I’d love a pair of jeans again.”

  “We’re a small town but we’ve got Freitag’s. It may not have the biggest selection in the world, but it’s got a little of everything. Unless you’re looking for high fashion, they must have something.”

  After they finished the lemonade, he drove her over to the department store. It reminded her of such stores when she was little in a small town. Not the big modern boxy places, but the kind of store where everything was crammed in and old wooden floors creaked beneath every step.

  She did have some different jeans to choose from, and a few tops that didn’t strike her as too frilly or cutesy, but basically the kind of gear even a pregnant woman could work in if she needed to.

  When she had made a few selections, she came out of the dressing rooms in jeans with an expanding panel and an extra-long shirt that resembled a man’s button-down. Good enough. The cammies were in her bags.

  Seth had waited for her at the front of the store, giving her the time to make her own choices. She appreciated that he hadn’t tried to be part of it. She’d been buying her own clothes for a long time.

  “That looks more comfortable.” He smiled. “I mean, cammies are okay, but an awful lot like wearing a tent, even when they fit. Have you got a jacket? It’s getting chillier here.”

  So she added a jacket at the last minute, something she figured would do for a few days. When she got back to Minot, she was going to have to shop for a brutal winter, but she didn’t need to do it yet. Not for here.

  Outside, they paused beside the car after he tossed her bags in the backseat. “The question,” he said, “is what you’d like to see. I could take you up into the mountains to see the old mining town. It’s picturesque, but it can’t be explored because the old tunnels are collapsing.” Then he faced her. “Or would being in the mountains bring back memories you don’t want?”

  That was a thoughtful question. She half smiled. “I mostly saw them from above.”

  “True. So the mining camp? I should stop at the diner and get us a picnic lunch. In case we get hungry.”

  Some part of her wanted to take over and make some of the decisions, not just become a passenger on this tour. Yet, she reminded herself, he was asking her. He had given her every opportunity to say no, or change the plans. Including agreeing when she said she wanted to get some clothes.

  Maybe he was being too amenable, she thought as she waited in the vehicle while he ran into the City Diner. And maybe she was just making up reasons to be irritated. None of this was turning out as she had anticipated. She ought to know by now how little of life actually followed the plan.

  The thought eased the niggling irritation she had begun to feel for no good reason. One of the things about her pregnancy that still surprised her was the rapidity with which her moods could change. She’d never been a moody person, but now she could sometimes swing as fast as a pendulum. She had to keep catching herself, and she was rapidly discovering that when she felt something, her mind quickly tried to serve up a reason for it.

  It had been easier at work, though. Much easier. There the sheer predictability and patterns had made it possible to remain fairly stable. Now she was out of her element, and it was exposing things in herself she hadn’t faced before.

  On the way out of town, Seth said, “If you need to stop for any reason, let me know. I’m not exactly a vet at pregnancy, but I can remember my sisters talking about things like not being in the car for too long. As for bathroom facilities, we’ll have to rough it out there.”

  Oh, great, she thought. “Do you know how hard that is for a woman?”

  He slowed down. “Then maybe we shouldn’t go so far.”

  “Is there any place to go around here that isn’t far?” She managed to sound wry.

  He laughed. “No, actually. Your call.”

  The words acted like a balm. “Hell, let’s go for it. I can always find a tree.” It wasn’t as if she hadn’t faced these things before. Survival training had taught her a lot.

  As they headed toward the looming mountains that looked so different in the morning light than they had yesterday
afternoon, she had an uncustomary fanciful thought that it was almost as if they had personalities. Moods. Like her.

  She prided herself on being hardheaded and practical. Thinking mountains had personalities and moods lay far off the beaten path for her. More changes?

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said to Seth, desperate to keep from wandering into crazy places. A dangerous question since she wasn’t sure how well she wanted to know him. The physical attraction she felt was already dangerous enough.

  “Where do you want me to start? We pretty much covered that I was adopted, and didn’t find my birth parents until later. I’ve got a big family now, but you know that. Or are you looking for career details?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s the outline and then there’s other stuff.”

  “Yeah, the other stuff. The hard stuff to talk about.” He shook his head a little. The car bumped slightly in a small rut as they started to climb. Her hand flew to her belly.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine. Holding my stomach seems to be turning into an unconscious habit.”

  “It did with my sisters. One used to make fun of how she could set a cup of coffee on what she called her shelf.”

  Edie smiled. “I haven’t gotten there yet.”

  “Clearly. Okay, about me. Well, I don’t know that I’m the most interesting guy in the world. I did a job and I can’t talk about any of it. That’s really helpful. Just over twenty years in the SEALs and it’s almost all redacted in heavy black ink.”

  Now she laughed. “That’s true for a lot of my background, too. How much trouble are you having returning to civilian life?”

  “Not as much as I expected. Maybe more than I hoped. When you’re regimented most of the time, it’s weird to have to get up every day and figure out what you’re going to do with it. There’s something else, too.”

  “What?”

  “I had a strong sense of purpose before. It’s gone now, and I miss it. But maybe that’s changing.”

  She stiffened a little. “Don’t make me or this baby your mission.”

  Now his voice hardened. “You can’t stop me from making my son my mission. Let’s be clear on that right now. You may be able to set limits, but you can’t walk away with my son as if I never existed.”

  Anger seethed in her. “Are you threatening me? Take me back right now!”

  “Why? So you can do the combat search and rescue thing? Fast in, fast out?”

  “Damn you, Seth Hardin!”

  He pulled the car off the road under some tall pines, jammed it into Park and swiveled to face her. She saw then the SEAL, the man who went into impossible situations, did impossibly difficult things and never backed down. He could have been carved from steel.

  “This is my child, too,” he said sternly. “The sooner you get really used to that idea, the sooner we can work things out amicably. But you are not, I repeat not, going to carry on as if that child isn’t mine, too.”

  “I don’t need you!”

  “But that child does. That boy is entitled to whatever I can give him. Because I helped make him, Edie! Like it or not, I am his father.”

  “You didn’t want this baby!”

  “Neither did you. And while it’s all good and well for you to come out here and tell me about it because you felt a duty, it remains I have a duty and I’m not going to shirk it. Period. All that talk about how you can handle it on your own? It was nice, I believe you could, but as long as I’m breathing, you’re not going to have to and that boy isn’t going to be fatherless. That’s my bottom line. Deal with it.”

  She glared at him. How dare he? It was her body, her child, her life, and he had no right, absolutely no right, to come in and make demands on her or give her orders. Or threaten her.

  Seth faced forward but he didn’t put the car in Drive. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and blew a long breath between his lips. “I shouldn’t have blown up. There’s something you need to understand about me. When I’m attacked or threatened, I’m trained to go on the attack. I guess I need to work on that.”

  “Threatened? How did I threaten or attack you?”

  He turned to look at her and his eyes were almost haunted. “You keep talking about leaving. How you’re capable of handling this by yourself. How you don’t need or want anything from me. You’re threatening the possibility of not allowing me to be part of my child’s life every time you do that.”

  She caught her breath. What the hell? Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. He’d had a wife leave him because she couldn’t take life as a SEAL wife. How many scars must that have left? And every time she said she wanted to leave, he must be hearing echoes of that.

  Every time she said she could handle this on her own, every time she said she didn’t want anything from him, every time she suggested just going back to work...God, he must have heard a version of all this before, when his first marriage ended. She was just trying to be reasonable and take responsibility for her own life, but he must be hearing a string of rejections: I don’t want you. I don’t need you.

  She looked down at her tightly clenched hands, resting, as usual, now right over the baby. Her attempts to be responsible and independent made perfect sense—until she turned it around and looked at it from his perspective. How many times could you tell a man you didn’t need him, even as a father to his own child?

  Not many. She averted her face and looked out the window into the shadows beneath the pines. Almost without realizing it, she began to speak quietly.

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at my life in a shattered mirror.”

  “Shattered mirror?” he prompted quietly.

  “You know how it looks? Fragmented, jumbled, not recognizable. I’ve been fighting to put those pieces together in some way that produces a recognizable image. It hasn’t worked very well in some ways. In fact, I’m getting a whole different image, but it’s still broken up a bit.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Anyway, I’d worked out as much as I could on my own, and like I always do, I took the bit between my teeth. I was going to do it, and was going to do it my way.” She sighed and looked at him. “I wasn’t really thinking, I guess. At least not about you.”

  Something in his face softened a bit. “Why should you have thought about me? You don’t know me. You didn’t know how I’d react. Maybe I wouldn’t want any part of this. You couldn’t know. But I do want a part of this, and we need to start from there. So if you’ll quit making me feel like the thing you want most is for me to turn my back on this baby, I’ll hang on to my temper and be as reasonable as I can.”

  He put the car in Drive and pulled back onto the road. “The mountain aspens are starting to be threatened by climate change. We’re losing a lot of them. But I know a place where they look beautiful right now. Why don’t we check that out before we go to the mining town? Okay?”

  “Sounds good to me.” Looking at trees sounded peaceful, and right then she wanted some peace. She had some new things to consider, mainly what she had learned and realized about Seth. Somewhere in her mind, she had clearly been fitting him into a stereotype of some kind.

  A man who naturally wouldn’t want a kid, especially with a woman he wasn’t married to. Yeah, that was one stereotype she’d been applying. She’d come out here because of a sense of duty to the child, and she’d been almost convinced that he’d shrug it off, maybe demand she prove it was his, maybe offer a token monthly check.

  Well, he had certainly shattered that stereotype. One which probably wouldn’t be accurate about a lot of men if she were to be fair. How would she know? She knew men at work and men in battle, and very little else about them. She knew some of them had kids they loved but they were married. Certainly she had never met anyone who’d fathered a child in a one
-night stand. At least no one who admitted to it.

  But Seth was a unique case any way she looked at him. Given up for adoption. Now back with his birth family. He probably had more reasons than most to want to be a part of this child’s life.

  She couldn’t have known any of that before coming here, but she knew it now, and she needed to take it into consideration, along with the wounds from his first wife leaving him.

  “I wonder,” she said, “how much of all that determination to do this myself had to do with my parents.”

  “I think you’re just naturally a doer and a problem solver. Look what you do for a living, after all. But what exactly do you mean about your parents?”

  “I told you I never knew who my father was and that my mother died of an overdose. Maybe I’m just determined to ensure that doesn’t happen to this baby.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he agreed. “We’re the sum of our experiences, all of us. Whatever is behind it, I’m damn glad you made the choice you did. Even if I didn’t look like it yesterday. Seriously, Edie, I was mad at myself, not you. I didn’t advance in the SEALs because I was careless of other people, and my first reaction was that I’d been stupid and made your life hell and that at my age I should know better.”

  “We both should have known better.” She sighed, then smiled faintly. “But I still don’t regret it.”

  He laughed then, and the very air seemed to lighten. “Neither do I,” he said. “Neither do I.”

  Feeling considerably better and unwilling to analyze the feeling, she laid her head back against the headrest and watched the countryside go by. They were definitely climbing into the mountains, and even inside the car she could feel the change in the air as it became cooler, thinner. Pine scented the world and the freshness delighted her.

  Up and down they drove, slowly through valleys, only to climb again, around hairpin bends. The buttery autumn light cast the woods in gold and made the shadows even more mysterious. This stand of aspens, she thought, must really be out of the way.