by Maisey Yates
“Every major traumatic event in my life I’ve done my damnedest to handle alone,” Jacob said. “My thought always was that if you didn’t talk about it maybe you wouldn’t have to deal with it.”
She huffed out a laugh. “I tried that. It didn’t go very well.” She took a breath. “Okay. Now...sometimes I’m not really sure. If everyone left me to handle my pain by myself or if...I hid it too well.”
“You’re not that good of a liar, Vanessa,” he said. “I’m not sure how you could have hidden things that well.”
“How do you know?”
“Just a feeling that I have.” He didn’t know how he knew. She hid things, but he could see when she was hiding something. He couldn’t imagine anyone...not seeing it.
You’d have to be looking the other way.
Her family had clearly been focused on anything but her. And that pissed him off, even all these years after her trauma.
He was just a dumbass guy. He didn’t know much of anything about the finer points of emotion or the finer points of women, and even he recognized all that.
A baby.
He didn’t think any of it had fully sunk in yet.
He had agreed to being a father. Because he was going to be one. And from his point of view, that meant there was no debate on how he’d handle it.
But...he didn’t think he was going to be able to grasp the enormity of it for a while.
Right now, it didn’t look like anything. Her stomach looked flat, her body still slender. Because of course it wasn’t like he was going to be able to see it now. He knew nothing at all about babies or any kind of development. But he knew enough to know the thing was the size of a BB right now. That it was barely much of anything.
The absurdity of it all hit him, standing there with the edge of a cliff behind both of them. That either their lives would change, or they wouldn’t. That everything they knew about themselves, about their futures, would either be altered irrevocably, or everything would go back to normal.
And it all depended on the fragility of what they’d created between them.
On how everything progressed over the next weeks. Or didn’t.
How did people choose to do this? He couldn’t even fathom it.
It all felt way too big to wrap his mind around.
He looked behind himself then, at the cabin. Dilapidated and run-down. When he bought it initially, of course his plan had been to build a new place on the property. Because he loved this spot.
He suddenly imagined a child toddling close to the edge of that cliff and he nearly doubled over.
Would he be able to make this spot safe?
Fences.
He would need a lot of fences. And he would have to teach his child everything he knew about safety out in the wilderness. Everything he knew about safety in the world.
Because that trail he and Gavin had been on as boys hadn’t been anywhere near their houses, it had just been a bad situation with a couple of stupid kids who hadn’t known what can happen out there.
Everything in the world was dangerous. It was so damn dangerous. And he...he had never managed to protect people when it mattered.
He would just have to. He had to protect Vanessa. He had to protect the baby.
That meant making a safe space for both of them. And it would not be on the edge of this cliff face, no matter how much he liked the view.
Thankfully, the property sat on several acres, and he imagined he could get a pad dug out back farther. On a safer spot.
He would need something completely different than what he’d been thinking.
Yeah, you said you didn’t want to marry her, and you’re planning on making a house.
Well, his kid would need a house. It had nothing to do with Vanessa. Although, Vanessa felt like his.
She had already, and this only made it more so.
Co-parenting. She had talked about co-parenting.
Well, he wanted something more than that. And he wanted it to be complete. Right now, they lived close to each other, with nothing but a stretch of dirt road between them. But maybe there was something better.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What?” He looked back at her.
“You’re staring at your house.”
“Thinking.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If you’re making plans, it’s too soon.”
“It’s not too soon. I have to figure out where I’m going to put a baby.”
“What makes you think you’re putting a baby anywhere? I’m the one having the baby.”
“It’s not going to stay a baby. It’s going to grow up. And if you think I’m going to have him toddling around up here...”
“Him? It could be a girl.”
For some reason that scared him even more. “Whatever. The point is, I have to figure out my living situation. Because this doesn’t work.”
She looked behind them. “Okay. Agreed.”
“I bought this place because of the view,” he said, looking behind her.
There was a whole lot of “but now” buried in that sentence. He’d bought it for the view...but now it wouldn’t work. Now it was different.
Now everything had changed.
“But it makes you nervous,” she said.
Yeah, he had certainly betrayed some of his feelings about places like this to her a few moments ago when he grabbed her arm like she was going to somehow stumble and fall twenty feet behind her.
“Yeah,” he said. “It does. I figured I would buy a house that sat right on the edge of something that bothered me a little bit.”
She cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I know what to say to that.”
“Does that scare you?” It scared him a little bit.
“I don’t know. We’re all different kinds of messed up, Jacob. I guess it’s not really my place to comment on your particular brand of it.”
They stood facing each other for a moment, and the largeness of it all seemed to expand between them. “We really can’t be sleeping together anymore,” she said.
He nodded slowly. He didn’t have to ask why. Because they didn’t need any kind of volatility in their relationship. They didn’t need to have a relationship that had anything to do with each other.
He was not going to be in a Hank and Tammy Dalton situation, which was all fighting and drama, and didn’t do anything for the kids.
And he imagined she had all of her reasoning too.
But the fundamental one was they couldn’t guarantee that a relationship between them would be anything other than toxic.
They had to have a relationship based on that kid.
Anything else...anything else probably wouldn’t last.
He had been the man who lived in the moment. Who did what he had to to make himself comfortable. He wouldn’t do that. Not anymore.
All of this, this was about the kid.
And it was the strangest thing, suddenly he wasn’t irritated or even afraid. Suddenly, he felt like he might just have something worth focusing on other than himself.
Clint couldn’t be here with his baby girl. Amelia could never have her father.
But his child could. He might as well dig his own grave and march right into it if he didn’t take hold of this with both hands because it would be the damn sorriest use of his time on earth.
If he didn’t take responsibility for his kid when his friend never could.
It was so clear to him. It burned in his chest like fire.
And after four years of sitting in a whole lot of guilt and grief, he felt a weight on his chest shift for the first time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
OVER THE NEXT four weeks Vanessa’s relationship with Jacob developed into a cautious pattern.
They would see each other—only at the ranch—and he would inquire politely about how she felt.
When she made a doctor’s appointment, she gave him the date.
They otherwise didn’t speak much about their poten
tial future. And really, what was the point? Things would either progress or they wouldn’t.
And Vanessa felt like everything was a little bit in a holding pattern until they got confirmation that everything was all right. She hadn’t even told Ellie yet that Jacob was the father, and she knew her friend was dying for her to name names.
Her relationship with Ellie was different than any she’d had in a long time. She was a solid, steady presence, but she didn’t demand Vanessa behave in a way that made her comfortable. When all her friends had been into drugs, so much of the lifestyle had been about the behavior of the person around you supporting your own.
It all felt normal because they all did it.
Which in hindsight of course said a lot.
But Ellie was content to let Vanessa sort things out the way it worked best for her. This friendship was such an unexpected and interesting gift.
She hadn’t come here for friendship. But she’d found it.
Still, Vanessa was in no hurry to confess that Jacob was the father of her baby, and she really didn’t know why.
Control, maybe?
No.
Maybe if she didn’t have that history of losing a pregnancy at an advanced stage, she wouldn’t feel quite so cautious. But she did.
And if she was cautious with Jacob, then she was completely noncommunicative with Olivia and the rest of her family. And she knew that would have to end too. Especially when they figured out if the pregnancy was viable.
It was likely she would still want to wait awhile to tell anyone.
Today, she had an appointment.
And she had thought long and hard about whether or not she was going to have that appointment in Gold Valley, or if she would go farther afield to Copper Ridge or maybe to Tolowa to ensure a little bit of anonymity.
But the doctor she’d chosen was a gynecologist as well as an obstetrician, so she figured it was fair enough that she might be there for a regular old exam.
She also wasn’t going to hide.
But when she pulled up to the parking lot and saw Jacob’s oversize truck spilling out of one of the narrow spaces—clearly not designed for men and their man vehicles—she thought differently about it.
If there was anyone they knew present in the building, and it was entirely likely between the two of them, it was not going to look like an innocuous visit.
It was connecting the two of them in that way, if nothing else.
So what? What does it matter?
She didn’t know. It was just that she was so entrenched in the idea of hiding herself when she was here.
It didn’t matter. None of it did. If she had to explain the situation to someone, it would be fine. They would be explaining the situation over the next nine months...hell, the next eighteen years.
If everything went well, then there would be no hiding any of this ever.
Still, she hadn’t realized he was going to come to the appointment.
She had given him all the information, but had just assumed he would wait for her to call him when she was finished.
But no. Her cowboy had come down from the mountain because he clearly needed to be there.
And he was there before her. Which just...
She sighed and got out of the car, then walked into the office.
She checked in, giving her name to a smiling woman sitting behind the marble counter, and then walked into the waiting area, which was made to look like a living room. Plush and welcoming and warm. There were two women sitting with chairs between them reading magazines, and thankfully, Vanessa didn’t know either of them.
And there was Jacob. Sitting on a love seat with his boots kicked out in front of him. He was not reading a magazine.
“You came,” she said.
“You thought that I wouldn’t?”
“I figured you might wait and see what the results were.”
“No,” he said. “I figured I would come and see what the results were.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Sit down,” he said.
“I don’t have to do what you tell me,” she said, but she took a seat beside him. “You really don’t have to be here.”
“This is how it is,” he said. “I’m showing up.”
She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You’re going to be overbearing about this, aren’t you?”
“Hell yes,” he said.
“You have a thing about showing up,” she said.
“Yeah, we both have some issues. And I imagine they’re going to clash a little bit.”
“Welcome to the next eighteen years of our lives?”
The question seemed to hit them both with equal force and settled between them like an overfed barn owl. She took a breath, ready to say something, and he was about to do the same when the door opened. “Vanessa?”
The girl standing at the door, dressed in scrubs, now, she looked vaguely familiar.
Probably from school. That was unfortunate.
“Right here,” Vanessa said, standing up.
If the other woman knew who she was, she didn’t give any indicator. Her smile was carefully bland, comfortably so. And Vanessa decided she didn’t want to do any deep investigation on a potential connection here.
“Height and weight,” the woman said.
Vanessa toed her shoes off and stepped onto the scale, keeping her eyes fixed on Jacob, who wisely didn’t look at the scale at all.
“If we can get a urine sample first,” the woman said, stopping outside the bathroom door.
“Sure,” Vanessa said.
She looked at Jacob, who took a meaningful step back.
Vanessa sighed. This was going to be nothing but a long string of personal situations that she would rather not have Jacob witness.
But you slept with him.
Yes, she had slept with him. That was different. They’d had great sex. The kind of sex where they probably had both looked great too. It had been intimate, but it had been glorious.
There was nothing glorious about having to pee into a cup.
Then she vanished inside the bathroom and took care of that particular necessary evil before coming back out.
After that, they were led into a small room where Vanessa had her blood pressure taken and had to answer a few questions.
Including the date of her last period and last sexual intercourse.
She looked over at Jacob. “What day was that?”
He looked startled. “The twentieth.”
She looked back at the nurse. “I figured he would know.”
If a man was going to remember a date, she imagined it would be the date when he’d had an orgasm with another person.
If the woman thought it was strange it had been more than a month since Vanessa and her apparent partner had had sex, she didn’t say anything.
She just took the information down. And again, Vanessa was grateful.
“If you can go ahead and get undressed and put this on, the doctor will be in shortly.”
Then she left, leaving Jacob and Vanessa sitting there.
He stood up and turned his back.
She thought about telling him that gesture was a little bit ridiculous at this point, but decided against it. He was keeping boundaries in place, and for that she should be grateful.
For that she was grateful.
She undressed slowly, keeping her eyes on his broad shoulders, and couldn’t help but admire the way that tight black T-shirt of his tapered to his muscles, the way it highlighted his narrow waist. Lean hips. And his Wrangler butt.
She was very much into that.
She had never really considered herself a fan of cowboys.
But she was a big fan of this one.
He made her understand the fantasy. Wild and rough, raw, somewhat untamed. But...
At the end of the day the man who would show up for a doctor’s appointment.
Her heart clenched slightly. She put her clothes carefully on one of the
chairs, put the gown on and sat up on the table, the paper crinkling underneath her butt. She wiggled, trying to smooth it all out.
“Are you done?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He turned to face her. “Nice,” he said. “Hospital-gown gray is definitely your color.”
“I like the socks,” she said, holding her feet up and displaying the white cotton footwear she hadn’t taken off. “I think it really adds something to it.”
“Definitely.” He reached out and took hold of her toe, squeezing gently before releasing, as if he’d remembered belatedly he probably shouldn’t touch her without permission.
She would love to be mad at him for it. But really, she had liked it.
The connection that made her feel like he was there. Like she wasn’t alone in this.
Her throat got tight.
She knew how to power through things alone. She wasn’t sure she knew how to do it with another person.
A part of her really, really wanted to.
Another part of her, though, wanted to throw him out of the room and handle it all herself because having this big broad-shouldered variable in her life made things feel all a bit precarious.
The door opened and the doctor came in. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Dr. Grant.”
“Nice to meet you,” Vanessa said.
Jacob held his hand out gravely, and the doctor shook it.
“Everything going well?” Dr. Grant asked. “No cramping or anything like that?”
“No,” Vanessa said, shaking her head. “But I wanted to come and check viability. I had a miscarriage ten years ago. But I had never been to a doctor. So I’m not totally sure if the problem is me or...”
“Of course,” the doctor said. “We can check for a heartbeat today.”
With a sheet over Vanessa’s lap, she had her lie back and lift the bottom of the gown before she put gel over her stomach.
“We’ll try this way first,” the doctor said.
“This way? What other way is there?” Vanessa asked.
“Transvaginal,” the doctor said.
Jacob frowned. “That doesn’t sound pleasant.”
“A great many things about this process aren’t pleasant,” the doctor said, smiling. “But modern medicine is helpful, even when it isn’t comfortable.”