The Marine's Baby, Maybe

by Rogenna Brewer

  She held out a twenty-dollar bill. “This is my treat.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He set the pizza box down on the breakfast counter. She laid the twenty down on top of it, making it clear she didn’t want anything from him. Except his Calhoun DNA.

  “Are we going to go a round about money again?” he asked. Their bout had started when he’d begun paying her rent.

  “I can take care of myself, Calhoun.”

  He shrugged. “I just paid for a pizza.”

  “That’s not how this works.”

  Lucky knew when a man was itching to pick a fight. And he knew when a woman was itching to pick a fight with a man. He preferred a good barroom brawl.

  This wasn’t about a damn pizza. This was about boundaries.

  He sat down on a stool, which brought them eye level. “So how does this work?”

  She looked away first.

  “You know,” she said, getting the pizza cutter out of the drawer, “when your husband dies they don’t just cut you a check. I went from being part of a two-income couple to a no-income widow in a heartbeat.”

  She reached for the pizza box. The twenty-dollar bill dropped to the counter. “We knew each other all of three weeks before we were married. Money wasn’t exactly the topic of conversation. We just spent it like we had it.” She opened the box and slashed through the pizza slices. “The honeymoon, the move…furniture for the house on officers’ row.” She stopped cutting to look him in the eye. “Half our married life was spent apart. But those forty-five days together were the happiest of my life. Those memories are priceless to me now.”

  She ended on a quieter note. “I’ve taken fiscal responsibility. Everything is under control. Will you please let me pay for the pizza?”

  Lucky picked up the twenty. “I’ll add it to Peanut’s scholarship fund.”

  Cait sighed heavily as she reached for the paper plates to divvy up the pizza. “That’s what you did with the rent money I paid back? Has anyone ever mentioned you have a real machismo thing going on when it comes to money?”

  She pulled out the other stool and sat down.

  “If you’re not going to let me pay child support, then it’s going to the kid’s college education. Besides, I’ll get every dime back when I take CryoBank to court.” He was only half joking.

  “I can’t believe you’re still going through with that.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Why would you?” She stopped midbite. “They’ve offered to settle.”

  “Until they can tell me what happened to my—” he cleared his throat “—then I’m going through with the lawsuit.”

  He took a bite out of his meat-lovers’ pizza. They couldn’t even agree on simple pizza toppings—how were they ever going to agree on anything as complicated as a wrongful paternity suit?

  He really wished she’d been more aggressive with CryoBank from the start. Or that he’d been there to be her aggressor. She really didn’t seem to have it in her nature.

  “I can tell you what happened to your semen. They washed it and inserted it with a catheter through the cervix and into the uterus. The sperm passed into the fallopian tubes, where fertilization took place.”

  He’d stopped chewing. “More information than I needed to know, Cait.”

  “What? You asked. The procedure is called intrauterine insemination, IUI. You can take the prescribed drug clomiphene citrate or a follicle-stimulating hormone, FSH, to increase the chances of getting pregnant. Well, you can’t. But I took an FSH because Luke only had the two samples in storage.”

  “I meant, I wanted to know why my specimen wasn’t destroyed when I’d ordered it to be.”

  She scrunched her brow. “Why would you put your sperm in storage, then order it destroyed?”

  His cell phone rang.

  “Excuse me.” Lucky got up to answer it.

  “Why is Cait calling me upset?” Bruce demanded from the other end of the line.

  “Cait, now, is it?” he asked his brother. It was the same question his brother had once asked him. She heard her name and turned to listen openly. “I don’t know. Why is Cait calling you all upset?” He directed the question at Cait.

  She looked embarrassed.

  Bruce sounded annoyed. “Are you repeating everything because she’s listening?”

  “Yup.”

  His brother cursed under his breath. “Put Cait on.”

  Lucky handed over his cell phone.

  “Hi,” she said into it. “No, we’re good.” She passed the phone back. “He wants to talk to you again.”

  “So, you’re at Cait’s…”

  “She picked me up at the airport.”

  “How was the flight?” Bruce asked.

  “Long.”

  “Did you want to get together tomorrow and do some thing, just the two of us? And maybe we should take Cait out to dinner this weekend.”

  “I won’t be here this weekend.”

  “That figures. I don’t know why, but she’s been waiting all these months to meet you. Could you just think about sticking around before pulling your hi/goodbye routine?”

  This time Lucky had a very good reason for wanting to get the hell out of Dodge. “I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.” He hung up.

  “SO, BACK TO CRYOBANK…” Caitlin said as soon as Calhoun came back to sit down.

  “Cait, it’s my first night back. Enough CryoBank. Why don’t we eat and go walk off dinner?”

  After they’d finished, Cait grabbed a black bolero sweater and they walked those few blocks to the beach. He’d buttoned into a camouflage shirt over his T-shirt, with his sleeves rolled up. And he put on his cap as soon as they stepped outside.

  He wore combat boots while she’d taken off her flip-flops as soon as they reached the sand. “I cut through this way all the time,” she said when he would have bypassed the private access. He took her arm and helped her over a low chain between posts that lined the sidewalk, more decorative than an actual deterrent.

  They walked along the water line, where the sand was packed firm by the tide and the water was cool on her bare feet. The sound of the waves lulled them into an easy rhythm as the sun sank low in the sky. It was a while before either of them spoke.

  “So what have I done to upset you?” He strolled with his hands behind his back, letting her smaller steps set the pace.

  Busted. But then she knew that already.

  “It’s not anything you’ve done. I just thought with you back from Iraq, we’d—” she gestured toward her baby “—have some time to get to know you.”

  “Bruce thinks the three of us should go out to dinner this weekend. How about I stick around until then?”

  Five days.

  “I’d like that, but I meant real time, Calhoun. Most women know more about their anonymous donors than I know about my own brother-in-law.”

  He scanned the distance. “The only thing you need to know about me, Cait, is that I’m remorseless.”

  Merciless. Persistent. Relentless.

  “Remorseless.” She rolled the word, and all that it implied, around on her tongue. The opposite was remorse, a sense of guilt for past wrongs.

  “It’s the one trait required to be a sniper.”

  She pictured him on a rooftop in the desert, sighting down the barrel of his weapon and pulling the trigger. She shivered.

  “No regrets? Ever?”

  “Just one.”

  He met her eyes. But she still couldn’t fathom what that one regret was. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “Does it involve shooting someone?”

  He offered a wry smile at her attempt to play Twenty Questions. “No, I only take out enemy targets.”

  Their game went no further than the first question.

  “What is it you’re going to do when you’re no longer a Marine? Aside from that motorcycle rally in Sturgis. Which, by the way, Bruce informed me is only
one week every year in August.”

  “For starters, I’m not going to think about the future.”

  She folded her arms above her stomach, under her bustline, and looked at the serious set to his mouth. “You have to think about it. You have to have some kind of plan for your future.”

  “My plan is to take a year off.”

  “Then there’s really no reason why you couldn’t stay longer than five days,” she urged, hopeful.

  “There are a lot of reasons, Cait.”

  This time when he looked at her, he looked her up and down with that telltale pause in the middle. She’d bet money all those “reasons” had to do with her and CryoBank. She gave herself and Peanut a little hug. Peanut, who had been content to sleep through their walk, kicked back.

  “Would you like to feel the baby move?” she asked the stranger beside her. Her brother-in-law. Her donor.

  Peanut’s father…

  “Cait.” He stopped walking to face her. “Are you cold?” he asked as she stood hugging herself in those last few rays of light.

  He was already unbuttoning his shirt by the time she answered. “A bit.”

  She couldn’t meet those sharpshooter eyes as he wrapped her in camouflage, so she stared at the dog tags dangling against his T-shirt.

  “Cait,” he started again and she felt compelled to look him in the eye because he’d removed his cap. “I can’t be this baby’s uncle. Not the kind of uncle you want me to be, anyway. Don’t expect more from me than to breeze in and out again with presents on birthdays and at Christmases.”

  “What happened to being an involved uncle?”

  A very involved uncle were his exact words that first phone call.

  “It’s not in anyone’s best interest for me to become too involved in this pregnancy. Or with this baby,” he said.

  “I see.” She didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t even know what she wanted. Only that she’d set out to prove she could do this alone. That she didn’t need him. She’d been the one to push for boundaries.

  She took a hesitant step back in the direction they’d come and he followed. No longer able to meet his gaze, she kept her eyes averted to the sand, retracing their footprints until the rising tide erased their tracks.

  Careful what you wish for.

  “YOU SURE I CAN’T TALK YOU INTO the bedroom?” Lucky groaned, remembering their earlier conversation.

  Okay, that hadn’t come out exactly as he’d intended. Cait had insisted he take the bed while she slept on the couch. The only reason he’d agreed was because she’d convinced him she couldn’t sleep in her bed.

  He punched the pillow a couple more times, trying to get comfortable. He hadn’t slept in a bed in forever. The mattress was too soft. The pillow was too soft.

  And he was too damn hard.

  He’d heard voices coming from the living room earlier. By the time he’d realized it was the television, she’d muted the sound. It was now well after 0200 hours, and from what he could see through the partially cracked door, light and shadow still played across the living room walls.

  He kicked aside the girlie covers. The color pink made him itch worse than a government-issued wool blanket. He may as well watch TV if he wasn’t going to be sleeping. Or doing something that might put him to sleep.

  If Cait hadn’t shanghaied him at the airport he’d be with an old girlfriend right about now. One who didn’t care about commitments.

  Only those were getting fewer, and harder to come by.

  Every time he came back from deployment it seemed like another old flame had gotten married while he was gone.

  He sat on the edge of the bed.

  Pitching a tent in his boxers wasn’t exactly perfect houseguest behavior. But one flash of light from the lighthouse in the distance across all those unopened wedding gifts solved that problem.

  Cait wanted more from him than he could give.

  He just couldn’t give her any more of himself than he already had. She was trying to create a family unit of extended relatives for Peanut. And he didn’t want any part of that. Peanut would grow up calling him Uncle Lucky.

  It wasn’t just that she wanted to name the baby after Luke. Or that Big Luke would treat this kid as Luke’s—the kid was probably better off that way. Cait was young, not to mention beautiful. And someday soon her heart would be whole again. When that day came she’d find some guy who’d be a husband to her and a father to Peanut.

  Lucky didn’t want to be standing on the sidelines while his son called some other man Dad. So, while he owed it to Luke to look after the widow his brother had left behind, he owed it to himself to do it from a distance.

  The thing about living a life of no regrets, you had to keep moving. Or all those regrets started to catch up with you.

  Lucky scrubbed a hand over his tired face and pushed up from the bed. He pulled on his running shorts and padded barefoot to the living room. Cait was sound asleep.

  Curled up on her side, with her leg flung over the covers, she looked tempting.

  Over his shoulder, Luke sliced through their wedding cake with his sword. Show-off.

  Lucky picked up the remote from the coffee table and clicked off the DVD player. Then he picked up Cait and carried her to the bedroom.

  She settled against his tattooed right side with a sigh, looking all the more innocent against the tribal art.

  Her breath on his neck. Cinnamon.

  The smell of her hair. Apples.

  The softness of her skin.

  The rightness of their child against his heart.

  Carrying her tensed his muscles in a good way. The hard part was letting her go as he laid her gently on her bed. On that too-soft pillow. And that too-soft mattress.

  His body ached to bury himself in all that softness. To experience the act of creation with the mother of his child the way it was meant to be between a man and a woman.

  Lucky took control of his baser instincts and pulled the hem of her ratty old T-shirt down over her panties to cover her.

  One of Luke’s T-shirts?

  He reached across her body for the sheet, wishing he’d felt the baby move when she’d given him the chance. A chance like that wasn’t likely to come his way again. Not after he’d disappointed her.

  Cait rolled from her side to her back and opened her eyes. “Luke?”

  “Just settling the argument of who’s sleeping where tonight.”

  “Oh,” she said on a dreamy sigh and fell back asleep.

  CAITLIN HAD HAD THE DREAM WHERE Luke was standing over her bed again. She’d slept better than she had since her first trimester, but how she’d wound up in her bed she could only imagine.

  “Oh,” she groaned into her pillow as the reality sank in. Could she have embarrassed herself any more than if she’d drooled on him? Had she actually snuggled against her brother-in-law’s bare chest?

  What business did he have carrying her, anyway? Just because he was strong enough to pick her up didn’t mean he could take control in her home and change their sleeping arrangements.

  By the time she got out of bed she was good and mad. By the time she got to the living room she realized he was good and gone.

  The pillow and blanket were neatly folded on one end of the couch. His seabag wasn’t by her bed or next to the door, the last two places she remembered seeing it. She should feel relieved. But she didn’t.

  When she stepped into her kitchen, she noticed he’d moved the bud vase with the yellow rose to the center of her breakfast bar, next to a bakery bag. She calmed down some. The sight of a bagel and cream cheese could do that to a pregnant gal.

  He’d stuck a Post-it note to the bag. Eat Me.

  On a glass of milk in her fridge, another Post-it note read Drink Me. She felt like a regular Alice In Wonderland.

  Sitting at the breakfast counter with her bagel and cream cheese and her glass of milk, she opened her laptop to read her e-mail and grabbed the stack of unopened snail mail from yesterday
.

  She managed all her money online these days. She paid a couple of bills that were due while she opened her mail, but most of it was junk, which went straight to the recycle bin. On the bottom of the stack was a padded manila envelope with a return address of Colorado. She didn’t recognize it as Nora Jean’s or Dottie’s addresses, and the handwriting was different.

  She opened it and a key fell out. She dug out the enclosed letter and photo of a small cottage house. The letter, a note really, was from Big Luke.

  What did you want to do with the house? It’s been on the market for six months now. Congratulations on the pregnancy, by the way. I hope to see you and my grandbaby soon.

  Big Luke

  Big Luke had given them the house as a belated wedding present, and after Luke died had offered to put it on the market for her. She hadn’t really thought about it since then.

  The street address was on the back of the photo. She’d never been to Colorado and didn’t even know where Englewood was on a map. She went to MapQuest and found out it was a small city in the shadow of Denver.

  “Hmm.” She put everything back in the envelope, feeling a little guilty. She’d never thought to tell Big Luke about the pregnancy. They hadn’t been in touch since the flowers he’d sent following Luke’s funeral and her thank-you note.

  Obviously, he’d found out.

  Not that it was a big secret or anything. The only family she’d told was her mother-in-law. And her father, who was slowly coming around. He was just worried about her being out here all by herself.

  The closer she got to her due date in June the more she worried about that, too. She gave Peanut a pat. “Not to worry. Mrs. Pèna can drive us to the hospital.”

  As long as the baby didn’t decide to come between eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon they’d be fine. She broke off a piece of bagel and stuffed it in her mouth. Who would drive her to the hospital?

  Bruce wasn’t driving yet.

  Pam’s husband was getting his own command and they’d be transferring soon. Jill’s husband retired last month, and they’d moved back to the Midwest somewhere. Marilyn had fallen out of touch after getting the number to Cait’s fertility specialist and one unsuccessful attempt to get pregnant.