by Lilian Darcy
Thing was, he was beginning to realize that while that might sound like a good reason, things weren’t apt to be so easy in the doing. Why? Because he was still as attracted as hell to the woman, and the more time he spent with her, the better he liked her and the more he wanted her.
If she didn’t feel the same, marriage could be a disaster, for him anyway. He’d meant what he said, though, and if she decided to give it a shot, he’d give it his best one.
But he didn’t really want what he’d offered. He wasn’t sure he wanted to risk marriage again. Both of his had ended so painfully, though in different ways, that he’d pretty much made up his mind never to do that again. When you could avoid that kind of pain, it only made sense to do so.
But this was a whole different equation, one that involved a baby. Every fiber of his being rebelled at the thought of letting that child grow up with an absentee father. No child should have to do that, and even though many did, his was not about to be among them as long as he had breath in his body.
As short a time as Edie had been here, he’d begun to see a change in her. He guessed she was starting to trust him a bit. Certainly the very determined, hard-edged pilot was lowering her defenses a bit, showing less resistance to the idea of him as a father to her child and even for a few minutes here and there letting him see she had a softer side.
That was good. It meant they could deal, and they were going to be dealing, one way or another, for decades to come. He’d seen enough with his own family to know you didn’t raise a kid to eighteen or twenty-two and then quit being a parent. No, that never quit, and not always because it was habit. They’d been there for him after both his marriages. They’d been there for him every single time he’d needed something. Parenting was a lifetime commitment.
But Edie wasn’t looking that far down the road. He honestly couldn’t imagine the devils and demons she must have been dealing with, facing a pregnancy all alone in a career field where such things still weren’t exactly accepted. Oh, if she hadn’t been a pilot, it wouldn’t have been as difficult, but given her career track, given where she had wanted to go, it must have been hell. In some respects, the military hadn’t caught up with itself. It had broadened the role for women, then didn’t seem to know what to do when women did what women did, other than let them resign.
Not that he objected to the option, because he didn’t. Children mattered. But for someone like Edie... Oh, he could easily imagine the subtle pressure to get rid of the baby or resign. Yeah, he could envision it quite clearly.
She’d withstood all of that, though, which showed a lot of backbone because he was familiar with the kinds of pressure senior officers could bring to bear, all without crossing any lines of proper conduct. Then, once she’d worked most of it through in her own mind, making a great many sacrifices, she’d hauled herself out here to do what she considered the honorable thing, planning to turn right around and continue dealing with all of this on her own.
She was one admirable woman in a lot of ways.
But he had to admit he liked the softer side of her, too. Just as he’d loved their tumble in the hay in Afghanistan, he was discovering his admiration extended beyond her fantastic piloting skills and her sexiness to the whole way she approached life. Duty and honor first. Facing tough situations and dealing with them.
Yet he sensed all of this was taking a serious toll on her. Well, why wouldn’t it? He was grateful she had let him hold her this morning, little enough on his part. She needed to know she could turn to at least someone, and if he was it, so much the better for all of them. It’d make him feel like less of an ass, it might give the baby a father who was around and it might lighten her burden.
Right now, he seriously wanted to lighten her burden.
But he also had to be sure of himself, and he wasn’t sure about some things. He hadn’t been kidding her when he told her he still had a hair trigger. Twenty years in special ops, often on dangerous, deniable and redacted missions, hadn’t left him a standard model male. He was different in ways that might be extremely important when raising a child. A part of him had necessarily become hardened. Other parts tended toward authoritarian. He was used to being obeyed. He could deal with messiness and things blowing up in his face, but those weren’t ordinary situations. He knew exactly what he was capable of, some of it stuff other people never had to deal with in an entire lifetime.
On the other hand, training, experience and the years had taught him an extraordinary amount of self-control. He could clamp down on his emotions faster than a rattlesnake could strike. Become an automaton. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing in a situation like this.
Look at him. His hair trigger had caused him to get angry with her. He hadn’t clamped down fast enough that time. He guessed it was all situational, and this was a whole new situation.
In fact the side of himself he was showing Edie was like wearing an unfamiliar suit: careful, compromising, reasonable. He was walking on eggshells and it wasn’t comfortable or natural. Unlike his two wives, Edie had probably met enough SEALs in her job to have some idea of what lay beneath the surface, but most of the civilized stuff about him was a veneer. At his core rested a highly trained barbarian, one to be unleashed only when needed. But what if it slipped the leash?
Back to that whole control thing. Control was everything on a mission, and if you had to, you flipped the switch of your emotions. On and off like some kind of light.
What the hell kind of father would that make him?
He pulled into the parking lot at the grocery and dialed his cell, calling his dad on his cell, the only sure way he wouldn’t get his mother. It was not Marge he needed to talk to.
“What’s up?” Nate asked his son.
“I’m transitioning.”
“Got it.”
“So how the hell do you do it? How do you go from being what I’ve been to being a decent father?”
Nate was silent for a long time. Seth began to wonder if anyone had an answer to that. Finally... “I’m not sure there’s any one way. We all have our devils to deal with. But when your oldest sister was born, I held her in my arms and knew one thing for sure.”
“Which was?”
“That I had a new mission and was going to give it my all. It wasn’t so different from other missions, where your buddies are more important than you are. Where getting them out safely is your primary concern. You have the skills, son. They just need some fine-tuning. You also have a couple of dads as examples. Play the part until it fits.”
Play the part until it fits. As he walked into the grocery, Seth guessed that was what he was doing. Playing a part because he didn’t want to lose a son. Amazing how important that had become, how central to his life in such a short amount of time.
But was that fair, to play a part? Maybe it would be to the kid until it became comfortable, but what about Edie?
Still unsettled, he forced his attention to shopping. When he got home, he put the teddy bear in a closet.
* * *
In the morning, he and Edie settled on some navy blue sheets for the bed and a few pillows. Well, he pretty much settled and she went along. He sensed in her once again the resistance to thinking herself part of his life for the long term. He was going to have to find a way around that.
Her eyes grew huge, though, as she realized he was buying king-size sheets. He even thought he saw a little apprehension in her expression.
“King-size?” she said as they hit the street again.
“Well, the twin bed is really too short for me. I was just putting off getting the king-size until later. It didn’t strike me as especially useful to buy another twin bed I’ll never want, at least not in the near future.”
“Oh.”
Was she relieved? He couldn’t tell. The damn eggshells again. Looking at his purchase of a bed as...what?
An intent to jump her bones? Hell, he wouldn’t mind that at all, but he sure wasn’t going to do it unless she invited it in some way.
But dang, if he’d wanted her that night in Afghanistan, he wanted her even more now. Continued exposure to her wasn’t inoculating him. Far from it. With each passing hour she looked increasingly pretty and increasingly sexy. He’d blown it for them out there, making an assumption he should never have made about her experience, and he didn’t want to blow it again.
“You don’t talk much,” she remarked. “What are you thinking about?”
Damn, he was getting tired of eggshells, so he just told her flat out, “I’m thinking how sexy you are, and wishing we’d met under different circumstances.”
He heard her gasp, but didn’t look at her.
“You wouldn’t have even noticed me under other circumstances,” she said finally.
“I don’t know where you get an idea like that. I’d have noticed you under any circumstances. You may not have guys buzzing around you like bees, but that’s because you have some pretty good off-limits signs on your perimeter. You even tried to get rid of me when I came over to talk to you. Unfortunately for you, I don’t heed those signs. I take them as a challenge.”
They walked another half block in silence.
“You saw me as a challenge?”
He didn’t know if he liked her tone of voice, but he took it on anyway. “To a point, yeah. But I’ll tell you something, on my honor it would never have gone as far as it did except I saw the signs come down that morning when we woke. I never intended to take advantage of you.”
He looked at her, saw her cheeks color faintly, but from the side he couldn’t tell if it was anger or embarrassment.
“Am I still a challenge?”
“You’re carrying my son inside of you. How could you not be a challenge? But you’re still sexy as hell.”
She swore quietly.
“Sorry,” he said. “If you don’t like peeks inside my head, don’t ask.”
She faced him then. “You know, Seth Hardin, you’re driving me nuts. We can’t have a discussion like this on a public street.”
He pointed. “Half a block that way.”
She started marching quick time, looking for all the world as if she were on parade, back stiff, strides even and firm. He kept up without difficulty.
“Don’t get breathless,” he said.
“Oh, shut up.”
He almost grinned. No more eggshells, at least for now. The gloves were off.
She could barely stand still while he unlocked the front door. As soon as it closed behind him, she faced him, her hands clenched. “How dare you make this about us? This is supposed to be about the baby. That’s it.”
“Oh, no, lady, it’s about us, too.” He pointed at her belly, which still hardly showed. “That kid we made makes it about us.”
“Only if you insist.”
“Oh, I insist.”
She glared at him. “You freaking SEALs have the world’s biggest egos! Everything is about you.”
“I didn’t say this was about me, I said it was about us.”
Her fists clenched even tighter. “You said it was about you when you said I was sexy. That’s off the table.”
“Sure, if you want.”
“Big talk about a marriage of convenience,” she spat. “Just friends. Hah! You just want to get into my pants again.”
“Yes,” he said frankly, “I do. But I won’t as long as those signs are up. Believe it or not, I’ve always understood that no means no. But you’re just going to have to live with the fact that I want you. Once will never be enough for me. Now I can put it on ice, if that’s the way you want it, but you might as well know. I’m going to have evil, wicked, salacious thoughts about you at times. Damn it, I’m a man. What is it? Six times a minute?”
“Oh, hell.” She threw up a hand. “Here I thought we were working toward some kind of agreement, so of course you throw a wrench in the works.”
“I hate to tell you, but the wrench is already there. Two of them, actually. And you get to set the limits because there’s a baby hostage here.”
“Hostage?” She almost shouted the word. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
“Aren’t you, in a way? First you insist you want nothing from me. Then you keep threatening to leave when you don’t like something. Okay, you haven’t threatened that yet today, but I suspect you’ll be doing it in a minute or two after this round. So I told you you’re sexy. Most women would be flattered. They wouldn’t be yelling at me about some rule I haven’t broken yet.”
“We haven’t even established any rules yet. What are you talking about?”
“We might not have made any, but I keep running into them when I talk to you. You’ve got all kinds of rules in your mind. How much Seth can do. How much Seth can be a father. You expect things of me and I don’t even know what they are. And hanging over all this is a baby I intend to be a father to no matter what it takes. Now we can make this all-out war, or we can start talking about some of the important stuff, like how you and I are going to build a life together that will work for this child.”
“Sex isn’t part of that!”
He stepped closer. “Really?” he asked softly. “Really? Because I’ve seen how you look at me sometimes. You feel it, too.”
“You can’t build a relationship on that.”
“But you can start one.”
He fully expected her to stomp away, go pack her duffel and try to leave. That seemed to be the pattern. And he’d be here right by the door to stand in her way. Argue with her. Because he was getting to the point where something had to be settled, even if it was only that he’d be a weekend father, visiting once a month. Something. A starting point, instead of all this edging around.
But she didn’t run. Instead her face twisted a bit and her hand flew to her belly. “Seth?” she gasped.
He didn’t ask any questions. He shoved his hand in his pocket to verify that he had his keys, picked her up and swept her to his car to head to the hospital. He didn’t even lock up behind them.
* * *
The next couple of hours proved to be among the longest in his life. Edie had her wallet on her, so he was able to fill out all the paperwork, but they wouldn’t let him near her. Not family.
No, but one of the patients was family. He argued that and got nowhere, of course. He didn’t call anyone, but word seeped out anyway. Soon there was a gathering of the Tate clan, those still in town, except for Mary, who was on duty elsewhere in the hospital. That didn’t prevent her husband, a doctor, from coming down, though, and it was from him that Seth finally got a modicum of information.
“There’s nothing wrong. Nothing,” David told him. “They’re checking her thoroughly, but the baby is fine, the pregnancy is stable. You’ll have to wait until they get the lab work back, though.”
“I want to see her.”
David shook his head. “Not right now. Soon. I’ll make sure you get in there soon.”
He ignored his parents and Wendy, pacing tight circles around the waiting room, mentally kicking himself in the butt repeatedly. He shouldn’t have argued with her. The fight must have caused some kind of problem. What would he know?
“Seth, sit down,” Marge implored finally. “I’m getting dizzy watching you, and it’s not helping anything.”
He dropped into a chair beside his mother. “We were having a fight. A disagreement. Suddenly she grabbed her stomach. Could a fight cause a problem?”
Marge took his hand. “No. When I was pregnant I tended to get irritable sometimes. Your dad and I had some real toe-to-toes. A pregnant woman isn’t fragile unless there’s a problem, and they’d have most likely noticed that by now.”
He took what comfort he
could from that, and the fact that David had said nothing appeared to be wrong with the pregnancy. But something was wrong, and it gnawed at him.
He shouldn’t have fought with her. His own need to start clearing the air between them should not have driven him to that. But damn it, he did feel as if there were a hostage in this situation. Maybe she wasn’t using the baby that way, but maybe it was him being held hostage.
God, he should have just shut his yap. He’d promised her time and space and then had come on like gangbusters. He needed a good knock in the head to drive sense into him.
This was a foreign situation. His usual methods of dealing with challenges were clearly the wrong ones. Bulling into a fight because you felt you needed to make some things clearer might work with one of his team members, but Edie wasn’t one of them. He knew she was a capable, fearless pilot, a career woman, strong and determined, but he knew absolutely nothing about whether getting into an argument was something she avoided or something she was willing to do. Not really. Not yet.
And that was the whole damn problem.
“Seth?”
He looked up. David stood there. “Edie wants you.”
Well, thank God for that. Maybe she didn’t hate him yet. Or maybe she just wanted to tell him she never wanted to lay eyes on him again. God, he needed to learn to pussyfoot better.
But he still didn’t pussyfoot. He walked into the cubicle. Her eyes opened and found him standing just inside the curtain. “So,” he said, “am I about to be banished forever?”
“What?” Her eyes widened.
“I was an ass. A bull. An idiot.”
To his amazement, she sighed, then smiled faintly. “Everything’s fine. It was probably a gas bubble, or the baby kicking the wrong place. I’m fine.”
“You still didn’t answer me.”
She stared at him. “Well, unless you have a problem with the idea, would you please take me home?”
His heart skittered uncomfortably. “Home. Which home?”
“Your place.”
He kicked into high gear as the weight lifted. “Absolutely. Do you want some help dressing?”
