by Jen Talty
“I am the baby’s father.” Reese took in another long, slow breath, practically counting to ten, but it did nothing to calm his nerves or lower his blood pressure. “It’s not fair to keep a child’s father from him.” Reese ran a shaky hand across his face. His entire body shook. “And I don’t think it’s fair to keep a father from knowing his child.”
“I’m not keeping anything from you,” she said, her voice reassuring, but she stood there, holding the door open, waiting for him to leave. “I’m also not forcing it down your throat. I’ve always accepted who you were, and I respect that. If you want to stick around, then that’s really wonderful. I welcome it. I just don’t want you making any rash decisions. I’ve had a couple of days. You… need time.”
Her calmness and rationale was going to be the end of his already frazzled nerves. Even if she did make valid points, but he chose to ignore them. “I’m not making any rash decisions. We need to think about living together. Maybe buying a house.”
She shook her head. “You’re talking crazy.”
“You’re the one who’s talking crazy.” How could she be so calm? So calm and strong, as if she knew she could do this all without his help? Or wanted to do this without his help.
As if she believed he’d bail. “That’s our baby.” He pointed to her stomach. “Yes?”
She nodded.
“Then we’re going to be a couple. A family.”
“Are you suggesting we get married?”
He cringed. He wasn’t opposed, but it was complicated. Too complicated. She had no idea how complicated.
“I didn’t think so,” Patty said.
“I’m his father.” The word father echoed in his ears like the drum in a marching band. It was just a word, but as he’d learned once before, words could destroy a man.
Jessica had done exactly that to him.
“I think living together would be a good start.” Boy, was that a loaded proposition. He meant it, but the conversation was derailing, and he wasn’t helping matters.
“We don’t love each other, and I will not be in a loveless relationship, much less a marriage. I saw what that did to my parents, and they did me no favors by staying together as long as they did.”
“I’m not asking you to be in a loveless anything.” He strode toward her. “We haven’t even given ourselves the chance to be anything.”
“We both know what this was, and neither of us pretended it to be anything more.”
“We have no idea what we could be together,” he pleaded.
“I don’t need you to be honorable,” she said, handing him his boots. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I weren’t pregnant. You’d be doing your thing, and I’d be doing mine.”
“I don’t know about that,” he admitted. “I thought about us getting back together. I thought about it every day for the last two weeks.”
“You never told me that,” she said. “And resuming a fling,” she said. “Isn’t the same thing.”
“Maybe not, but it would have been a start. You tell me you’re pregnant, and then tell me to leave, without giving me a chance to figure all this out.”
“That’s why I want you to leave. Give you a chance to figure it all out. You need some time to deal with whatever you’re feeling, because frankly, you are all over the map.”
Okay, so he did have to give her that. “So are you. You’re acting like this doesn’t matter at all. No big deal. You’re having our baby, but I don’t have to do anything.”
A single tear rolled down her cheek. “It matters very much. I just don’t want you to feel trapped. I don’t want you to have any regrets. I want you to spend some time with the idea that I am… that we are, having a baby. I’m not shutting you out. I would never do that. But I can’t have ‘this’ conversation while you’re so riled up.”
“So, I go think about this for a few days, then we have a discussion about it all.”
She nodded.
“Okay,” he said. He paused, contemplating kissing her or something, but then opted to heed her advice. He did need time, but not because he needed to think about what he wanted, but more about what he had to do. He went down the stairs, thinking hard. The closer he got to his truck, the more terrified he became. Not about being a father. About being a good father. And how could he even begin to try to build any kind of life with Patty when he was still married to Jessica?
He needed a drink.
Chapter Two
PATTY HADN’T SLEPT well in days. No amount of hemorrhoid cream was going to get rid of the black circles and puffiness under her eyes. Between the shooting and Reese’s totally out-of-character behavior, Patty found herself completely off-balance. Her hormones were out of whack to boot.
She wasn’t sure how she’d expected Reese to act or what he’d say, but suggesting they live together had not been it. Honestly, she’d envisioned two possible outcomes: the “how dare you try to trap me” scenario, or the “you’re on your own, babe” scenario. Not the “I’m going to stick around and be a father, and we’re going to be a family” scenario, though she had dreamed of that. That he’d come home form a long day at work, scoop up his baby, and coddle him or her with words of love and admiration. Then, later, when the baby was asleep, he’d whisper in her ear how much she meant and how grateful he was to have her in his life. Maybe he’d even say those three little words that were almost impossible for him to say, and mean it.
It was a nice dream.
That dream scared her the most. Her father had been head over heels in love with her mother. Her mother didn’t carry the same torch, but for the sake of family, they got married when Patty came around. Patty had no idea why her mother stayed for almost sixteen years, but one morning, out of the blue, she and her dad woke up, and Mom was gone. She’d left a note: Can’t be a wife and a mother. I was never cut out for the job. Patty wasn’t shocked, and neither had her father, but he’d been devastated. He’d done everything under the sun to try to make his wife happy.
To this day, Patty barely heard from her mother, though Debbie Cantell’s Facebook page showed her living large and enjoying every minute of it. Her father spent a decade being drunk and depressed. Only in the recent year had he been trying to clean up his life.
Forcing a child on Reese would only continue the loveless cycle. All Patty wanted was an honest life. She could handle anything with an honest life.
Patty walked into the local greasy spoon, looking forward to a late breakfast with Lacy. She also looked forward to a big order of their soaked French toast with crispy bacon. What she hadn’t looked forward to were the questions from everyone in the restaurant about her experience at gunpoint, and the fact that the smell of grease and bacon made her stomach flip and flop.
“You must have been terrified,” the waitress said. “Is it true what they say? That your life flashes before your eyes.”
“Not really.” Patty didn’t feel bad at all about bursting this young girl’s fantasy. “But you do think about life.”
The waitress frowned, but then followed up with, “Bet you’re glad you didn’t get shot like that poor other guy.”
“I’m not glad anyone got shot,” Patty said.
“Can we order?” Lacy interjected.
The waitress frowned again, but took their order and stopped asking questions.
Finally, when their food was brought, people in the restaurant seemed to get the hint that she didn’t want to talk about it. “This the best French Toast ever.” Patty had shoved the bacon to the side, unable to even look at it with feeling as though she might loose her appetite.
“I know,” Lacy said. “Every time I come here, I gain five pounds.”
“It’s not too cold out. We could go for a walk,” Patty said.
“Your idea of cold and mine are two different things.” Lacy had lived in Vegas, and it had most definitely thinned her blood for the cold, as they say, though April in Lake George could be thirty and snowing, or fifty and sunny.
Today it was forty-two and partly sunny, but it was a push in the right direction.
“Saw Reese at your place yesterday. What’s up with that?”
“Well, now that’s an interesting story.” Patty took a few more bites, then pushed aside her plate. “Seems I’m pregnant.”
“Holy shit,” Lacy said, dropping her fork in her plate.
Patty nodded.
“And how do you feel about it?”
“I’m scared, but happy.” Patty let a smile spread across her face. Even with all the chaos, she was happy.
“How’d Reese take that news?”
“Better than I excepted.” She believed, one hundred percent, that he was happy to be a father, but not that he wanted any kind of relationship with her. He didn’t seem to understand that being a father didn’t mean they had to be a couple.
“Does that mean you’re back together?” Lacy used to be a cynic and certainly didn’t believe in a happily-ever-after. A lot has changed over the course of a year.
“We were never really together to begin with, so that would be a no.”
“But he didn’t run out on you.”
The man that left her apartment yesterday wasn’t the man she thought knew. When he’d first come to town, there had been a bit of gossip about him. Patty knew quite a few women who’d tried to bed him with the intent of landing him. They had all failed.
Reese was discreet. Their relationship—and she decided it was something of a relationship—had never been on public display. “Nope. He suggested we move in together.”
Lacy laughed. “I’m kind of surprised he didn’t offer to marry you. He is the noble type.”
“When he said we needed to be a family, I asked him if he meant marriage. Should have seen the look on his face. It was like I’d kicked him where it counts.”
“But does he want to be a father?”
“I believe he does, but he seems to think being a couple is going to make or break a child’s happiness.”
“And you believe differently?”
Patty nodded. “I don’t want to be with a man who only wants to be with me because I’m carrying his child. I can’t live my life that way.”
“Have you really given him a chance?”
Lacy proposed a valid question, one that Patty wasn’t sure she could be totally honest about because she wasn’t sure if giving him a chance meant having her heart ripped to shreds, or having her kids heart broken. The former she could live with. The latter was a deal breaker. “I’m giving him a chance now.”
“No,” Lacy said. “You’ve given him the opportunity to run.”
“That is not...” Patty knew Lacy was right. Patty had set up the entire conversation so that Reese could walk away and not feel guilty. She let out a long sigh. “When he didn’t high tail it out of my apartment, I did tell him to go think about things. That’s something of a chance.”
“Yeah. A chance to run. It sounds like that is what you want. Or maybe expect and the idea he’d do anything different freaks you out.”
“Could you take my side on this?” Patty let out a puff of air.
“I am,” Lacy said. “Perhaps its time for you to take a risk and let him in.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Patty admitted.
“I think you owe that to your baby.”
Patty wanted a happy, healthy environment for her child. From the second she found out she was pregnant, she loved the baby more than anything in the world. “I don’t want my child to feel like I did when my mother ran out. It took years of very expensive therapy to get over that one.”
“You have no idea what things will be like in twenty years. If I had continued to live my life with that kind of thinking, I wouldn’t be here right now. There are no guarantees in life.”
“I understand, but I’m not making the same mistakes my parents made.”
“All right,” Lacy said. “Tell me. How do you really feel about Reese?”
That was a loaded question, one Patty wasn’t sure she could answer honestly, and not just to Lacy, but to herself. “He’s a good man but no one is close to him,” Patty said. “I once asked him about his family, and he said he didn’t have a family. I asked him what happened, because everyone has parents, and he just shrugged and changed the subject. He’s more than a private person. He’s downright secretive.” That worried Patty more than anything else. Having a child with him, without knowing about all of him, scared Patty. Secrets hurt people. She didn’t want her child to be hurt by his or her own father.
“Why didn’t you push him to tell you?” Lacy asked.
“Honestly, I didn’t want to know. It was supposed to be a fling.”
“But you have feelings for him.”
She might feel something for Reese, as the father of her baby, but she couldn’t risk her heart, or their baby’s on a man who not only had secrets, but didn’t want to ever have a family to begin with. People don’t change that quickly.
If at all.
* * *
Reese wondered what was worse, the hangover or waking up in his boss’s house, at noon, with no recollection of how he got there.
He opted for the latter, based on Jared’s expression at the lunch table.
They didn’t speak much while Jared’s wife and three children ate their lunches. Reese politely answered questions from Caitlyn, Jared’s inquisitive daughter while distracting the twins, who constantly tried to get Reese’s attention and played peek-a-boo with each other. He thanked Ryan, Jared’s wife, for her hospitality, then tried to explain hospitality to Caitlyn while his pounding headache continued to wreck havoc on his ability to think straight. Lucky for him, the television in the family room seemed more interesting to the children than the still-drunk man in the kitchen, and they quickly left to watch their favorite movie.
Reese held his head high, though he wanted to drop it in shame. Rarely did he ever drink to the point of no return. Not only did he dislike being out of control, but it brought back certain childhood memories that he would rather forget.
“You need to drink that water,” Ryan said. “If you can stomach it, you should really eat that insanely greasy egg, sausage, bacon, and cheese sandwich I made. Instant hangover cure.”
“I can attest to that,” Jared said. “She used to have to make me those all the time, before we got together.”
Reese wanted to ask why, since Jared wasn’t the biggest drinker on the planet, but between cotton-mouth and the fear of losing his cookies, he opted for another sip of water then forced down a small bite of the greasy sandwich. Odd how that worked; it did ease the cramping and gurgling of his intestines, but nothing could ease his mind about the woman that carried his child. He’d acted liked a stupid teenager when she’d told him, reverting back into the dark place he’d lived for so long until he took the job as a State Trooper and met Patty.
She had changed so much of his life. He thought about other people in a way he hadn’t done so in years. The timber of her laugh made his heart sore. Her smile made it skip a beat. Everything about her made him want to be a better man. Only, he fought it every step of the way. Truth be told, he was still fighting. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “It was a rough night.”
“What do you remember?” Jared asked. He’d pushed his plate aside and was now leaning back in his chair, swirling the cup of hot coffee his wife had poured, acting like some father dealing with a teenager who’d gotten drunk for the first time. “I remember being at the Mason Jug, drinking heavily, but that’s about it.” Stupid way to react to being a father, but it wasn’t being a father that scared him.
Being without Patty was what screwed with his mind. He hadn’t been prepared to face that, much less deal with it before being transferred.
Ryan excused herself, then left the kitchen, closing the old-fashioned swinging door to the family room.
“My brother-in-law owns the bar. He called me when you picked a fight with him when he took your car keys.”
&nb
sp; “I kind of remember that,” Reese said, embarrassed. “I wasn’t going to drive. I wanted to sleep it off.”
“Not the point,” Jared said. “He takes it personally when someone, especially one of my troopers, calls him a few choice names.”
“I will make sure I apologize,” Reese said, trying to recall as many of the evening’s events as he could, but most memories came to him in a drugged, dreamlike state, making it impossible for him to trust any single one.
“The incident at Conrad’s office?”
Reese nodded, though that wasn’t really the truth, and he wondered if he would have acted differently during the crisis if he’d known about the baby before the kill shot. The baby changed everything. “I suspect the shooting isn’t what has you so twisted inside.”
Reese took another small bite of the sandwich, keeping his gaze on the plate. Jared was only fifteen years older, tops, but a million years wiser. He was like the old man down the street that knew everything, loved everyone, and was loved by all. A long silence passed. Reese wasn’t sure what to say, or how to say it. Jared didn’t let him off the hook, either.
“I know you and Patty were somewhat of an item, but you broke up?” Jared phrased it as a question, as if he didn’t know the details, and Reese knew damn sure knew he did. Jared knew things about people because Jared was in tune with the world around him. A people whisperer. Reese had enjoyed working under Jared, but it was also unnerving. Jared didn’t pry often, but when he did, he was always on the mark.
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s a cop-out,” Jared said. “And what you did yesterday is more powerful because you care about her.”
“Been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt,” Reese said. He knew it was a flippant response, but until he found Jessica and properly divorced her, it was the only response anyone would get. He couldn’t expect Patty to start a life with him when he was already married, and he didn’t see the point in upsetting her any more, considering all she’d been through. Until he had his ducks in a row, he would take things one-step at a time.
