Baby in the Making

by Elizabeth Bevarly

  Hannah scarcely heard what he said, because she was too busy staring at a half-naked Yeager. And even though she’d seen him half-naked a dozen times before, she’d never seen him as he was now—gilded by starlight and moonbeams and fireflies, looking like a creature of the night, if not the night itself. And then he was going to work on his fly, and she remembered he hadn’t brought any clothes to change into after their swim—or even for their swim. And then she realized his half-naked state was about to become a full-naked state. And then... And then...

  And then she was jumping into the river fully clothed, turning her back on him to feign much interest in the waterfall that was suddenly way more interesting than it should be, even for someone who’d never seen a waterfall in person before. The river was shallow enough here that she could stand with her head out of the water—just barely—but that didn’t keep her knees from shaking. Though she was pretty sure that had nothing to do with the chill of the water. Especially since the water was surprisingly warm.

  When she heard a splash behind her, she knew Yeager had joined her. And when she turned to see hiking boots and a pile of garments on the rock where he had been, she knew he was naked. She also knew that by the way he was grinning at her when he broke the surface of the water, jerking his head to sling back his wet hair.

  And by his tone of voice when he said, “Most people undress before they bathe.”

  She bit back a strangled sound. “I just didn’t want to be a rotten egg.”

  “Right.”

  “And I figured it might be a good idea to rinse out my clothes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, they did get pretty dirty today.”

  He swam toward her, quickly enough that Hannah, growing more panicky by the moment, didn’t have a chance to swim away before he reached her.

  “Well, then, let me help you,” he said.

  She felt his hands at the hem of her T-shirt and, before she could stop him, he was pushing it up over her torso. He took his time, though, opening his palms over her naked skin under the wet fabric, sliding his hands up over her waist and rib cage, halting just below her bra, the L of his index finger and thumb brushing the lower curves of her breasts. Her heart hammered even harder in her chest and heat pooled deep in her belly. His expression remained teasing, though, so she knew he was feeling none of the tumult she did.

  “Lift your arms,” he said softly.

  Automatically she did and he tugged her shirt over her head, tossing it behind him toward the rock, where it landed perfectly alongside his own.

  “Now the shorts,” he said, moving his hand to the button at her waist.

  Deftly, he undid it and the zipper, then tucked his hands inside the garment, settling one on each of her hips. For a moment he only held her in place, the warmth of his palms permeating the cotton of her panties, a sensation that made the heat in her belly spiral outward, kindling fires in every part of her. Then he gripped her shorts and tugged them down, lifting first one leg then the other, until that piece of clothing, too, had been stripped from her and tossed to the riverbank.

  Although she was still in her bra and panties, the equivalent of a bathing suit, the sensations coursing through her made Hannah feel like she was as naked as Yeager was. It didn’t help that his teasing expression had gradually grown into something much more heated. And when he began to dip his head toward hers...

  She quickly turned around and began swimming toward the waterfall with all her might. But she was no match for Yeager, who caught up to her immediately.

  “There,” he said as he drew up alongside her. “After that swim, everything you have on should be totally clean. Time to take it off.”

  Well, golly gee whiz. Nothing like getting right to it. Talk about a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.

  “Are you always this pragmatic when it comes to sex?” she asked.

  “I’m never pragmatic when it comes to sex,” he assured her. “But I’ve never had sex on a timetable. It’s always a lot more spontaneous than this. And the reason for it is never baby-making. It’s always merry-making.”

  “You don’t think sex for making a baby can be fun?” she asked. “You just want to get this thing over with as quickly and cleanly as possible? Am I that unappealing to you?”

  His response was to pull her close and cover her mouth with his, kissing her in a way that assured her he found her very appealing indeed, that he didn’t intend for this thing to be in any way quick—never mind clean—and that he planned to have quite a lot of fun making a baby with her. By the time he pulled away from her, they were both breathing raggedly.

  “Well, okay, then,” Hannah managed to say.

  But she still didn’t take off her underwear. She just wasn’t ready yet. It was a nice night. She was in a beautiful place with a beautiful man. She didn’t feel the need to rush. So she turned onto her back to float on the water and look at the night sky. She heard Yeager emit a sound of reluctant resignation and then turn onto his back, too.

  “Hey, that’s the Big Dipper,” she said, pointing toward a group of stars to the left of the moon. It kept her from looking at a naked Yeager floating on his back, gilded in moonlight.

  “It is,” he told her. “And you can follow the arc—”

  “Follow the arc to Arcturus,” she chorused with then finished for him. “I remember that from ninth-grade science. Isn’t that weird? I don’t think I remember anything else from that class. I’m not sure I even remember much from the rest of ninth grade. I moved around a lot in high school. Even more than when I was in elementary school.”

  He paddled closer to Hannah, so she paddled away. She really wasn’t ready yet for a naked Yeager.

  He growled restlessly, clearly frustrated that she was going to draw this out as long as she could. Despite that, he asked, “Where did you live when you were in ninth grade?”

  “For the first three months, I was in Mott Haven,” she told him. “Then they moved me to Vinegar Hill. After school broke for summer vacation, I went to Bed-Stuy for a while.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then softly he said, “You lived in some pretty rough neighborhoods.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t find too many people taking in foster kids on the Upper East Side. Go figure.”

  He was silent again.

  “It wasn’t all bad, Yeager,” she told him. “I lived with a handful of families who were truly good people, and I still have friends I made while I was in the system. You only hear the horror stories about foster care in the news. But a lot of kids ended up way better off there than they were with their birth families.”

  “Did you ever wonder about your real family?”

  “Sure. There were times when I would fantasize that someone must have made a mistake somewhere, and I really did have a mom and dad out there somewhere. Like I was mistakenly switched with another baby at the hospital. Or the woman who died that they thought was my mom was actually misidentified and my mom was still out there in the world somewhere, looking for me.” She sighed. “But I knew it wasn’t true. I knew I was right where I was supposed to be. It’s just a weird irony that I actually wasn’t.”

  “Sounds like little-kid Hannah was as down-to-earth as grown-up Hannah,” Yeager said.

  She didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not. From his tone of voice, he seemed to respect down-to-earth people. On the other hand, he didn’t spend much time in one place on the earth himself.

  “How about you?” she asked, still gazing up at the sky. “Where were you in ninth grade?”

  He hesitated for a telling moment. Then he said, so quietly that Hannah almost didn’t hear him, “Peoria, Illinois.”

  His response surprised her enough that she forgot about his nakedness and glanced over at him. Fortunately—or not—it was dark enough now that the wat
er had turned inky, hiding most of him. Of all the places she could have imagined Yeager being from, Peoria, Illinois, would never have made the cut.

  “You actually grew up in the city that’s an icon of Midwestern conservatism?”

  “I actually did.”

  It occurred to her then how little she really knew of Yeager. Sure, he’d revealed snippets of his life from time to time during their conversations at Cathcart and Quinn, but she knew nothing about what had made him Yeager Novak, global adventurer. And suddenly, for some reason, she wanted to know that very badly.

  “Did you live your whole life there?” she asked.

  “I did until I was eighteen.”

  “What brought you to New York?”

  “A full-ride hockey scholarship to Clarkson University in Potsdam.”

  “You play hockey?”

  “I used to.”

  “What do your mom and dad do for a living?”

  He sighed in a way that made her think he really, really, really didn’t want to talk about this. Despite that, he replied, “My mom managed a bookstore and my dad was an accountant.”

  The son of a bookstore manager and an accountant had grown up to be one of the world’s greatest risk-takers? How the hell had that happened?

  “So how did you wind up—”

  Before she could finish her question, he righted himself in the water and strode toward her. Hannah straightened, too. She thought he just wanted to get closer to continue their conversation. Instead, the moment he was within reaching distance, he wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her toward him until she was flush against him and kissed her.

  As he did, he reached behind her to unfasten her bra, slipping it over her arms and releasing it into the flow of the river. Hannah started to object at the loss of the garment, but Yeager moved his hands to her breasts, covering both with sure fingers, and anything she might have said got caught in her throat. He brushed the pad of one thumb over her sensitive nipple. When she gasped, he took advantage of her reaction to taste her more deeply. She opened her mouth wider to accommodate him, splaying one hand wide over the ropes of muscle on his torso, threading the fingers of the other through his silky, wet hair.

  He growled something unintelligible against her mouth, then dragged soft, butterfly kisses along her jaw, her neck and her shoulder. The hand at her waist moved to her back, skimming until he gripped the wet cotton of her panties and pulled them down. Then he was caressing her naked bottom, curving his fingers over the swells of her soft flesh, guiding his fingers into its elegant cleft, penetrating her with the tip of one.

  When Hannah cried out loud at the sensation, he moved again, pulling down her panties in the front to push his hand between her legs. She felt his fingers against her, moving through the folds of flesh made damp by her reaction to him, furrowing slowly at first, teasing her with gentle pressure. Hastily, she shed her panties completely, then opened her legs wider, silently inviting more. But instead of escalating his attentions, Yeager only continued with his slow and steady cadence, gliding his fingers over her until she felt as though she would burst into flame.

  “Please, Yeager,” she whispered. But those two words were the only ones she could manage.

  He seemed to understand, though, because he slipped a finger closer to the feminine core of her, drawing languid circles before venturing inside. He entered her with one long finger, once, twice, three times, four, each with a single, long stroke to her clitoris that sent tremors of need shuddering through her. Before she could climax, though, he moved his hand away. She was about to beg him to touch her again, but he circled her wrist and guided her hand toward him instead, wrapping her fingers around his long length.

  She opened her eyes to find him watching her intently, his blue eyes dark with wanting. So she enclosed his shaft at its base and stroked upward, curving her palm over its head before moving back down again. This time Yeager was the one to close his eyes, and this time it was his breath that hitched in his chest. When Hannah pulled her hand up and down him again, he reached for her, aligning her body against his, covering her mouth with his, tucking his hand between her legs once more.

  For a long time they only kissed and caressed, their gestures growing bolder and more invasive, until both were close to climax. Then Yeager lifted Hannah by her waist and wrapped her legs around his middle to enter her. Up and down he moved her body, going deeper inside her with every thrust. Gently he curved his hands under her bottom to lift her higher, bringing her down harder, entering her as deeply as he could.

  The hot coil inside Hannah cinched tighter with every thrust, until she knew she was close to crashing. Then she felt his finger behind her again, pushing softly inside her, and she came apart at the seams.

  Yeager held on for a few more moments then climaxed hard, spilling himself hot and deep inside her. He held her in place for a long time afterward, as if he wanted to ensure every drop of his essence found its way to her center.

  Hannah lay her head against his shoulder and clung to him, shivering, though not from the soft circles of water eddying around them.

  “Are you cold?” he whispered against her ear.

  Somehow she managed to murmur, “No. I’m good.”

  She stopped herself before saying she was better than good, better than she’d ever been in her life, because she knew she must be imagining that. She’d just never had a lover like Yeager, that was all. He really was larger than life. A part of her was thrilled by that, but a part of her was sobered by it, too. She might never have another experience—another adventure—like Yeager Novak again. And she just wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  Seven

  Yeager was working in his office in the Flatiron Building, his tie loosened, the top two buttons of his dress shirt unfastened, when his assistant, Amira, texted him from her desk in End of the Earth’s reception area. She only did that when she was trying to be discreet about something. In this case, it was that there was a Hannah Robinson, who didn’t have an appointment, here to see him. Should she just show her the door the way she usually did with the women who came to see Yeager at the office without an appointment, or should she tell her to wait until he had a free moment, which would probably be in a couple of hours—maybe—and hope Hannah left on her own after sitting in the waiting room for a while?

  Instead of texting back that she should do neither, Yeager headed out to the reception area himself and ignored Amira’s astonished expression when he got there.

  Hannah was standing with her back to him, studying an enlarged photo of the Sinabung volcano on Sumatra that he’d taken five years ago. The first thing he noticed was that her clothes matched the photo, her shirt the same rich blue as the sky, her skirt printed in the same variegated yellows as the sulfur. The second thing he noticed was that she didn’t look pregnant.

  He mentally slapped himself. Of course she didn’t look pregnant. She could only be a couple of weeks along, at most, since it had only been eleven days since he’d last seen her and twelve since he’d made love to her. But she must be pregnant. Otherwise, why would she have come to his office? If their first effort had failed, she could have just texted him to say, Sorry, see you next month.

  “Hey,” he said by way of a greeting, his heart racing at the prospect of good news, way more than he expected it would in these circumstances.

  She spun around, her gaze connecting immediately with his. That was when something cool and unpleasant settled in Yeager’s midsection. Because he could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t pregnant.

  “Come on back to my office,” he said. Then, to Amira, he added, “I’m unavailable for the rest of the morning. Maybe the afternoon, too.”

  “Sure thing, Yeager,” Amira said, sounding even more shocked than she looked.

  Hannah threw a soft but obvious
ly manufactured smile at his assistant and murmured a quiet, “Thanks.” Then she crossed her arms over her midsection and followed him silently to his office.

  He closed the door behind them and directed her to one of two leather chairs in front of his massive Victorian desk. His office, like the rest of Ends of the Earth, was cluttered with antique furniture and vintage maps and artifacts. A deliberate effort to replicate a time when world travel was full of intrigue and danger, attempted by only the most intrepid explorers. He pulled the second chair closer to Hannah’s and sat.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” he asked. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  Even though he’d already known that was what she was going to say, he was surprised by the depth of his disappointment. He really had thought they’d be successful the first time they tried. They were healthy adults with even healthier libidos, and when they’d made love in North Carolina, it had been with exuberance and passion and a very long finish. In the days in between, they’d bungee jumped from an abandoned train trestle and zip-lined through the mountains. He still smiled when he remembered Hannah’s expression and half-baked objections both times as he cinched her safety harness to his, followed by her unmitigated elation at the end of each adventure.

  But his disappointment wasn’t just for a failed effort after his confidence that they would succeed. He felt genuine sadness that there wasn’t a tiny Yeager or Hannah growing inside her at this very moment. And it wasn’t until now that he understood how very much he wanted to have this child with her.

  “It’s okay,” he said. Even if it didn’t really feel okay at the moment. “We’ll try again.”

  Hannah nodded but she didn’t look convinced. Not sure why he did it, Yeager lifted a hand and cupped her cheek in his palm. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips lightly to hers. It was a quick, chaste kiss. One intended to reassure. But the moment his mouth touched hers, desire erupted inside him. It was all he could do not to swoop in for a second, more demanding kiss. Instead he dropped his hand to hers and wove their fingers together.