For Love of Freedom (Stone Brothers Book 3)

by Samantha Westlake

  "Hey, sorry I'm late." I looked up as a young man barged in through the front door, his attire proclaiming instantly that he was not planning on heading off to work at any place of business. His eyes fell on me, and he smiled broadly. "Sorry, boss."

  I tried to keep any sign of a smile off my own face as I looked back at Tanner McCallister. "I really ought to give you a talking-to for being late," I scolded him. "The morning is one of our busiest times."

  He held up his hands in mock fear. "Please, anything but a stern talking-to!" he begged. "From a business bitch like you? You'll flay me alive!"

  "Calling a pregnant woman a bitch? You're playing with fire, Tanner," I snapped at him, even though I couldn't get any real heat behind those words. I'd come to know Tanner in the months before I found out I was pregnant, when I'd sometimes head back to Sebastian's family house with him. He'd met Seb's older brother, Teddy, though some sort of convoluted chain of random events that I still didn't fully understand. The end result, however, was that Tanner ended up living at the Stone family mansion, helping the family out with odd jobs while working on a huge stack of untidy notes that he claimed would someday become the next great American novel.

  Despite not wanting anything to do with Seb, I realized about a week earlier, as this idea of a morning rush service started to take off, that Vicky and Ellen needed another pair of hands. Vicky refused to hire anyone who was a stranger, so I had to look at my circle of friends. That circle proved to be quite small; Tanner's name made the top of a very, very short list.

  When I offered him the position, Tanner immediately accepted. "Chance to help out a pretty lady like you?" he asked, and I could practically hear him grinning through the telephone. "Wouldn't miss it in the world!"

  I harbored some initial misgivings, but Tanner showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the first week afterwards, and proved capable at the cash register. "One of my previous jobs was working for fast food," he admitted, as he adroitly navigated the new touch-screen interface I'd convinced Vicky to install. "This feels pretty easy."

  Now, Tanner leaned in and gave me a smack on one cheek. I groaned even as I smiled, pushing away his scratchy beard from my cheeks. I'd forced him to trim the wild tangle that originally covered the bottom half of his face, but he refused to give it up completely. "Get to work already, would you?"

  "As you command, boss." He took a couple steps away, spun to give me a salute – using the wrong hand, of course, and with a mocking grin on his face – and then dashed off to help Ellen with ringing up the orders, so she could focus on bringing out completed ones to the customers.

  I sighed, once again picking up my coffee from the table. I hadn't asked Tanner anything about Seb, whether he talked to the youngest of the Stone brothers, what Seb might be doing now that he'd left me behind. I felt the temptation to ask, always lingering at the back of my mind, but I resisted every time. The answer, I knew, would just hurt me.

  Instead, I picked up the iPad that I'd carried downstairs with me, opening it up to the app that tracked all sales and budgeting for the café. Vicky had fought me tooth and claw when I first suggested upgrading the café's ancient cash register to something more modern. I finally managed to convince her after showing her the power of the analytics that came with the newer systems.

  "See?" I'd said to her, showing her the screen of the tablet. "This can let us track how many people order each item, and we can tell which options on the menu are most popular, and which ones aren't pulling their weight. We can even integrate it with our inventory, to figure out how much we need to charge for each item."

  "Seems like a lot of hassle," Vicky had grumbled, but her eyes flicked over the displays, taking it all in. Despite her crusty attitude, I knew that she was smart enough to see the advantages to this newer system. "But fine, I'll give it a try – but only because you keep on pushing me about it."

  "Thanks, Vicky," I said, leaning over to one side to wrap one arm around her and give her a hug. She grunted, her expression still sour. Still, she lifted one hand up to squeeze my shoulders in return.

  Now, looking at the trend in orders over the last week, I felt another little upwelling of almost unbelievable hope inside of me. The café really was doing well, now. We were less than halfway through the current month, and I calculated that we'd already made enough money to cover all the bills and expenses. Everything else on top of that base level would be profit, money to pay Ellen the salary that she'd foregone for many months during the restaurant's leaner times, money to refill Vicky's depleted retirement account so she could someday relax on a beach or at the shore of a lake somewhere.

  And money for my still-unborn child, so that he, or she, could afford whatever the future had in the cards.

  At first, when Vicky tried to press a salary on me, I'd refused. I told her that I still had plenty of money left over from selling the house that Seb bought for me. If anything, she could take the money, since she was letting me live with her for next to nothing in rent. But Vicky insisted – and when I kept on refusing, she played her trump card.

  "Then don't take it for me," she said over the dinner table in her apartment. Ellen sat between the two of us, wisely keeping her mouth shut and focusing on eating her dinner instead of getting caught up in the argument. "Take it for the baby."

  "What?" I hadn't been expecting that.

  "Set up a trust fund, or an education fund, for the baby," Vicky repeated. "That way, the little that I'm offering you can grow for eighteen years, maybe longer, and hopefully become enough to help him achieve his dreams."

  "Or her," I muttered, although somewhere along the way, Vicky had made up her mind that I was definitely going to have a boy. I didn't know how she'd reached this conclusion, but she treated it like fact, referred to my unborn child only in the masculine tense.

  Vicky pretended not to hear my under-the-breath comment, as she always did. "So take the money for the baby, if not for yourself."

  I knew she wasn't going to drop the issue until I admitted defeat. "Fine," I gave in. "But only for the baby."

  Back in the present, I set the iPad aside, focused on sipping at the hot coffee. It might not contain caffeine, but it still hit that need inside of me for something warm and slightly bitter, with just a little splash of cream for body and flavor. The sale of the house had finalized, and I'd talked to a manager at the local branch of my bank to discuss putting some of that money to work for me in investment accounts. Now, I had an account for myself, right alongside the baby's account.

  Things really had turned around for me, better than I could have hoped. I kept on telling myself that, ignoring the ache inside of me that I stubbornly kept trying to ignore.

  I picked up the half-finished book that I'd brought downstairs with me, opened it to the bookmark's spot. When I put the house up for sale, I'd stolen a handful of Seb's baby books. He bought them to help me, after all, and he certainly wasn't going to need them for his hedonistic party lifestyle. I told myself that I was taking them for purely pragmatic reasons – I was the one with a baby growing inside of me, after all. I certainly didn't need them as a reminder of Seb. The baby was reminder enough.

  But although I knew that I needed to get through the content, I couldn't seem to cover more than half a dozen pages at a time before my head ached, before I had to set the book aside. I'd read a paragraph or two on how to properly swaddle an infant, or which kinds of cribs were best to purchase, and my mind would wander off. I'd find myself remembering seeing Seb reading one of these books on the white sofa in our old house, his long legs stretched out carelessly in front of him and propped up on the living room table. I'd remember thinking how gorgeous he looked. Sometimes, I'd pause at the entrance to the living room and just gaze at him, astounded that he could look equally sexy while reclining and reading a book as he appeared when shirtless and sweaty.

  I missed him. I hated to admit it, even to myself, but I still thought about him at night, wished that he would come back. Not
that I'd take him back, even if he did come crawling back to me on his knees to beg forgiveness – but my body remembered his touch, the way he looked at me during the few good times we'd had together.

  Ellen kept telling me that I needed to get over Seb by finding someone new to date. In answer, however, I just pointed down at my swollen belly. Between the aching feet, the strange cravings that hit me in the middle of the night, the sudden mood swings, and my concern for an uncertain future, I couldn't bring myself to consider dating at the moment.

  After the baby was born... maybe then? I didn't know.

  I did know, however, that I'd never be able to move on if I kept on letting thoughts of Seb distract me. Gritting my teeth, I forced my mind to clear itself, picking the book back up again.

  "A good baby room needs to have an elevated location for a baby monitor, so it can adequately capture sounds," I read, holding the book up in front of my face so I couldn't look away and get distracted. "Often, a changing table provides a handy location..."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  TORI

  *

  "You don't have to come in with me, you know," I said to Ellen as she helped me out of her car.

  She shrugged, and for a second, I felt a stab of ridiculous, illogical envy towards her for how lightly she bounced on her feet. She didn't have to lug along an eight-month-old fetus that made me feel like my belly was about to explode from the tension at any second. She didn't have to deal with constantly aching feet, weird sensations, all the damn problems that seemed to be hitting me all at once, ganging up on me in my last month of pregnancy...

  "You okay?" Ellen asked, pausing and looking concerned as I squeezed my eyes tightly shut.

  "Yeah. Just dealing with a mood swing." I breathed deeply, forcing myself to relax. "But really, you could go walk around the block, go out shopping for something and just come back to pick me up."

  "That's okay – I'm here to support you, girlfriend!" Ellen punched me lightly in the shoulder. "Or maybe I should go get you a wheelchair, so that you don't need to wobble your way through the hospital all the way up to the doctor's office."

  A wheelchair actually sounded pretty nice to me right now, but I told myself that I didn't need it. Wasn't walking good for the baby? "I can make it," I said, trying to sound more optimistic than I truly felt.

  "Right. Then let's get you up to what might be your last checkup before the baby comes!" Ellen once again took my arm, helping me head towards the hospital's entrance.

  In a roomy, well-lit room towards the back of the second floor of the hospital, I hauled myself up into the examination chair and waited for my doctor to arrive. Ellen had been on the verge of coming into the examination room with me, but I finally convinced her to stay out in the waiting area. She might be my best friend, but I still wasn't quite ready for her to see anything that might become inadvertently exposed during the examination process. There were some boundaries that a friendship just wasn't meant to cross.

  "Ah, Mrs. Victoria Lilly!" The door to the examination room opened, and Dr. Rick Daniels came striding in, his hair perfect and a broad smile in place on his face. He beamed at me, and I couldn't help but smile back.

  Dr. Rick Daniels, I thought rather distantly to myself, was the kind of man who could play himself in a telenovela production of a medical soap opera. He had the kind of rakish good looks that I generally associated more with Chippendales dancers than with medical doctors. Thick, curly brown hair gleamed brightly on top of his head, cropped into some semblance of order but still spilling down to end enticingly at the nape of his neck. He always seemed to have a few days' growth of reddish-brown beard on his cheeks, but this just gave him a rugged appearance, as if he'd come marching in from chopping down trees in a lumber forest so that he could personally examine my vagina.

  The man didn't need to duck his head to enter the examination room, but he came close. He stood just as tall as Seb, maybe even an inch or so taller – somewhere north of six feet, closer to almost six and a half, I guessed. He'd told me on an earlier visit that he played lacrosse during his college days, and he still carried his well-muscled body like an active athlete. Broad-shouldered, devastatingly handsome, and with the light-hearted confidence that came from expertise in his field, I wondered how many pregnant women started doubting their husbands more after a visit to their gynecologist's office.

  "And how are we doing today, Victoria?" Dr. Daniels asked, crossing the examination room in a few broad strides and dropping lightly into his chair. He tapped a couple keys at his computer to warm it up and then turned to me, giving me his full attention.

  "It's Tori, as I've told you before," I replied, smiling at him. "And things are going okay, I guess. I'm more than ready for this baby to get out of me!"

  "I'll call you Tori when you start calling me Rick," Dr. Daniels – Rick – answered. The wink that accompanied these words would have made a lesser woman swoon. I only resisted by reminding myself fiercely that I was eight months pregnant, and in no condition to be flirting with devastatingly handsome doctors.

  Especially when they were about to get a look at my vagina – and would be watching as a baby came out of it in less than a month from now, probably destroying it completely in the process.

  Ergh.

  "Rick, then," I said, and the doctor's smile broadened. "Anyway, I'm just here for my last checkup."

  "And it looks like things are coming along well," he said smoothly, although I saw him smile at my use of his first name. He flipped open my chart, consulted it for a second. "Eight months – just a few more weeks, and you'll be in here delivering!"

  I nodded, caught between anticipation and concern. I really wanted to get this kid out of me – but at the same time, the more I heard about the birthing process, the less excited I felt for it. "There's no way that you could just put me under for the whole process of giving birth, is there? Or, even better, could you just knock me out now, wake me up in a month when everything's done?"

  Rick chuckled. "Some women would probably want me to knock them out for the next eighteen years, if they could," he said. "But I'm afraid that you'll have to suffer through things, at least for a little while longer. I assume that you haven't changed your mind about the anesthetic during the birthing process?"

  "Nope. Dope me up, doc." I'd talked to several other women about this point, and they all agreed that the drugs made giving birth far, far easier.

  Another chuckle from the good doctor. He leaned in, winking. "Personally, I think you're making the right choice," he confided. "Not that I have any personal experience, but it is reported to be quite painful."

  "And pain isn't really my thing," I said back. A little, crazy part of me almost added "except for in the bedroom," but I bit down on the words. It was Rick's fault, really, for being so handsome that I wanted to say dirty things around him.

  Still, his eyes lingered on me and his smile broadened, as if he was reading my unspoken thoughts. "Well, let's take a look, shall we?" he said, setting the chart aside. "How about you lift up that shirt, and we'll get some gel on your belly?"

  "And to think, usually a guy has to buy me dinner first," I blurted out before I could bite down on the words.

  Instantly, I felt myself blushing, barely able to believe I'd just said that out loud. Rick, however, threw back his head and laughed heartily.

  "That's a good one," he admitted, and I tried my best to ignore the little surge of butterflies fluttering in my stomach. This was full-on flirting! I couldn't remember the last time I'd done anything like this. Not since well before Seb and I made that baby, that was for certain. I'd worried that I'd be totally rusty at it, but if Rick's reaction was any judge, I remembered more than I'd feared. "I'd offer to treat you to the hospital cafeteria, but I don't think it would do much for your opinion of me."

  "That bad, huh?" I winced as he applied a squirt of icy, cold gel to my tautly protruding belly.

  He mirrored my wince. "Afraid so. I think the c
afeteria thinks that, if the food tastes bad enough, the patients will spontaneously recover just so that they can get out and find something better to eat."

  The gel on my bare skin felt cold, but Rick placed his hand down gently on it, spreading it out with sure motions of his fingers. Those, on the other hand, felt wonderfully warm and strong, and I tried to block out how good they felt against me. Given that I was already fighting hard to ignore his handsome face, leaning in towards me, I had quite a lot on my mind in the "block it out" category.

  "There we go," he murmured, and withdrew his hand. After wiping off his fingers on a tissue, he picked up the ultrasound monitor and placed it gently against my gelled-up stomach. "Now, you still don't want to know the sex of the baby, is that right?"

  I nodded, trying not to squirm as he moved the wand across my skin. I'd made up my mind much earlier on that I'd find out when the baby was born. No reason to know ahead of time, not when I couldn't change it if I didn't like the answer.

  And besides, boy or girl, I knew I'd love this baby with all my heart.

  Rick spent a few more minutes examining the black-and-white ultrasound image of the infant, while I squirmed and tried to ignore his handsome face, just a foot or so away from me. Finally, with a nod, he turned the machine off and pulled a paper towel so I could wipe off my belly.

  "Well, I have to say that everything looks great, as far as I can tell!" he proclaimed, standing up and smiling. "A few more weeks, and it looks like you'll be delivering a healthy baby into this world." He offered me my hand. "Should I walk you back out to the waiting area to rejoin your friend?"

  I accepted his hand, letting him guide me out through the hospital corridor to the waiting area. I couldn't help noticing that his hand felt nice as it wrapped around my own, strong but gentle, as if he feared that he might crush my finer bones.