Season for Love

by Marie Force

  Joe brushed away her tears and kissed her. “Easy—you’ll manage school, and I’ll manage the baby.”

  “How do you already have this all figured out?”

  “I’ve had a couple of days to process the possibility. I told my mom the other day that you’ve been really tired, and she suggested you might be pregnant.”

  “How is it that she knew and I didn’t?” Janey asked, piqued by the thought.

  Joe laughed at the face she made. How could he not? She was so damned cute.

  She scowled at him. “Hell of a vet I’m going to be when I can’t even figure out that I’m pregnant without the help of my mother-in-law who lives a thousand miles from me.”

  “You’re going to be the best vet ever, and I hate to tell you, we don’t know for sure that you’re pregnant.”

  “We need to get a test.”

  “I got three of them the other day. I was waiting for you to get through your exams before I mentioned it.”

  “Thank you for waiting. This would’ve taken me right over the edge this week, which, of course, you knew.”

  “So,” he asked, his heart pounding with anticipation and excitement and more love than he’d ever felt in his life, “do you want to take one of the tests?”

  New tears flooded her eyes as she nodded. “Is this why I’ve been crying over everything lately?”

  He took her by the hand and led her into the bathroom. Under the sink, he retrieved one of the tests he’d stashed there. “Maybe so.”

  “I suppose it’s better to be pregnant than to be having a nervous breakdown over school.”

  “Much better,” he said, laughing. He took the test out of the box and handed it to her. “Pee goes here.” When he started to leave the room to give her some privacy, she called him back.

  “Stay. We did the rest of it together, why not this part, too?”

  He smiled at her logic and leaned against the wall while she took care of business.

  She placed the innocuous plastic stick on the sink, and they watched in stunned amazement as a blue plus sign appeared a few minutes later.

  “Well,” she said, “your mother was right.” She turned to him, looked up and met his gaze. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more careful.”

  “Please don’t say that. Everything happens for a reason, and when you think about it, this might be the perfect time for us to have a baby.”

  She raised a brow in the skeptical expression that was so Janey. “How do you figure?”

  “If we wait until you finish school, I’ll be almost forty. That’s getting sort of late if I want to have any energy left for Little League coaching and football playing and wrestling, not to mention tea parties and fashion shows and Girl Scouts.”

  Janey laughed through her tears and hugged him.

  “It’s all going to be fine,” he whispered into the silky softness of her blonde hair. “I promise. It might not be how we planned it, but life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

  “Or when you’re busy making love like sex-starved lunatics.”

  “That too,” he said with a laugh. He slid his hands down her back to cup her bottom, lifting her into his arms.

  She curled her arms and legs around him as he carried her to their bedroom. The menagerie collected around their feet, and Joe nearly tripped over them.

  “Goddamn it,” he said when he’d recovered his footing. “I’m carrying very precious cargo here, people.”

  “Don’t swear in front of the baby.”

  He was relieved she’d taken the news better than he’d expected and so excited to be a father, a thought that suddenly filled him with fear.

  “What?” she asked. “Why did your brows go all furrowy?”

  He deposited her on the bed and crawled in next to her.

  She snuggled up to him as she did every night.

  “I barely remember what it’s like to have a dad. What if I’m no good at it?”

  “Oh, Joe! You’ll be a great dad! This baby will be so lucky to have you. You’re already thinking about tea parties and football practice.”

  “You’re awfully sure I’ll be good at it.”

  “I’m positive.” She kissed his neck and then his jaw before finding his lips in a kiss that quickly spiraled into passionate need. Her arms tightened around him as her tongue flirted with his, making him crazy with desire.

  “Love me, Joe,” she whispered.

  “I love you love you more than anything, Janey Cantrell.” Joe added the second “love you” as they always did and peppered her face with kisses before taking her mouth again. Without breaking the kiss, he tugged at their clothes until all the important parts were revealed. He entered her carefully, without the usual abandon that marked their lovemaking.

  “Joe,” she moaned in protest. “Come on.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you—or the baby.” Everything was different now that he knew their child lay between them, precious and fragile.

  “You won’t.” She arched into his thrust and clutched his backside, keeping him buried deep inside her.

  He drew her nipple into his mouth, sucking and tugging, sending her into a powerful orgasm that finished him off in record time. “Sorry,” he said, panting in the aftermath of the explosive climax.

  Her hands were soothing on his back. “For what?”

  “For not lasting longer.”

  “You lasted just long enough. I can barely keep my eyes open, and what if I fell asleep in the middle of, you know…”

  “You’d better not fall asleep in the middle of that.”

  Janey chuckled and held him close enough that he could hear her heart beating fast beneath his ear.

  After a long moment of contented silence, he said, “I promised my mother I’d tell her as soon as we knew for sure.”

  “Can it be our little secret for tonight? We can tell her and my parents tomorrow.”

  Joe closed his eyes against the rush of emotion. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been happier. “Sure, baby. Whatever you want.”

  “I have everything I want.” She tightened her arms around him. “Everything I could ever want.”

  And that, Joe decided as he followed her into sleep, was all that mattered to him.

  Chapter 12

  Grant spent two days hoping he would hear from Stephanie before his friend Dan Torrington clued him in.

  “She’s not coming back,” Dan said.

  “How do you know that?” Grant asked Dan, who was visiting for the weekend and thinking about spending the winter on the island to pen the book he’d been planning to write for years. He’d fallen in love with the island on an earlier visit.

  “Grant, my friend, let me tell you something about women.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this,” Grant muttered.

  “They are sensitive, delicate creatures.”

  Grant didn’t want to be around when Stephanie heard herself described as a sensitive, delicate creature.

  “They require tremendous amounts of attention.”

  “I give her tremendous amounts of attention. Hell, she has practically all my attention.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. You’re spending too much time together.”

  Grant, who used to go months between visits when he was dating Abby, now couldn’t imagine a day without Stephanie in it. He couldn’t picture his life without her front and center, irritating him and loving him. The pain he’d carried in his breastbone since she stormed out of their house two mornings ago had intensified when he began to fear that he might’ve lost her for good this time.

  “You could be right,” Grant said.

  “I usually am.”

  Grant rolled his eyes at his friend’s arrogance.

  Dan gestured for Chelsea, the bartender at the Beachcomber, to bring them two more beers.

  The pretty young bartender set down the bottles with a friendly smile for Dan.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said.


  “My pleasure. I have to ask you—are you related to the Baldwin brothers?”

  “Nope,” Dan said. “I get that a lot, though. People think I look like Billy Baldwin.”

  “You really do.” Based on the dreamy look on her face, Chelsea was quite fond of Billy Baldwin.

  Dan flashed her the dimpled grin that had made him famous. “Thanks for the beers.”

  “You’re going to get sued calling women ‘sweetheart,’” Grant said when Chelsea moved on to other customers.

  Dan scoffed. “Puleeze. She loved it. You heard what she said. ‘My pleasure.’ Would she have said that if she were offended? Hell, she thought I was Billy Baldwin! Maybe he can play me in your movie.”

  Grant rolled his eyes. “You’re more famous than he is, not that she knows that.”

  Dan brushed off the reference to his fame, as he always did. He’d made a career out of freeing prisoners who’d been wrongly convicted. Stephanie’s stepfather was the latest in a long string of successes. “Take it from me. Chicks like to be charmed. They need to be wooed.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing with Steph, and look at where it’s gotten me.”

  Dan had the audacity to laugh at that. “You haven’t been wooing her. You’ve been driving her crazy with your vision of her story. So take a step back from the screenplay for a while, work out the relationship issues and see where you are.”

  “What do you know about relationship issues anyway? Your idea of a relationship is dinner and a hotel room.”

  “And that’s bad how, exactly? You don’t see me mooning around for two days because my girlfriend told me to screw and moved out.”

  “She hasn’t moved out. Yet.” The thought that maybe she had struck another note of fear in Grant’s chest. He wondered if he might be having a heart attack. “You’re not helping.”

  “What happened anyway?”

  “I have no idea. We were arguing about this one part of the screenplay we’ve gone over a hundred times and she got all pissed and left.”

  “Grant.” Dan waited until Grant spared him a glance to continue. “She’s not coming back. If you want to fix this, you have to go to her.”

  “I’m not the one who left. Why do I have to do the chasing?”

  Dan shook his head with dismay. “I have so much to teach you, my friend.”

  While Grant wanted to object to that statement, he couldn’t. Stephanie was his second serious girlfriend, and he’d screwed up the first one rather royally. As much as he’d cared for Abby, he truly loved Stephanie. If he had to beg and grovel, he would. After two days without her, he’d discovered he had no pride where she was concerned.

  He tossed a twenty on the bar and stood.

  “Where’re you going?” Dan asked.

  “You know where I’m going.”

  Dan turned to face him, brushed a hand over Grant’s jacket and adjusted the collar, patting him on the shoulder when he was satisfied. “There. Now you can go.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Call me tomorrow. Let me know how it goes.”

  Grant’s stomach hurt when he imagined the many ways this could go wrong. “I will. You’re here for a few more days, right?”

  “At least. I’m due in court in LA next Friday, and then my schedule is clear until after the first of the year.”

  “It’ll be nice to have you around this winter.”

  “It’ll be nice to be here, if you’re not pouting the whole time.” Before Grant could respond to that, Dan gave him a gentle push. “Go get your girl, and don’t screw it up.”

  “I’ll try not to.” As Grant made his way to Mac’s motorcycle in the parking lot, he thought of the many ways it was possible to screw this up. Maybe he already had by waiting two days to go after her. His stomach started to hurt in earnest at that thought. He’d never wanted anything more than he wanted to be with her, but nothing had ever been more difficult. How was that possible?

  On the way to Charlie’s place, where he’d heard she was staying, Grant tried to remember what had caused the fight. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall the specific exchange. There had been many of them over the last couple of months, since they’d begun to collaborate on the screenplay about Charlie’s unjust incarceration and Stephanie’s relentless campaign to free him.

  When Grant pulled into the driveway, Charlie was washing his pickup truck. He stopped what he was doing and gave Grant that blank look he did so well as Grant parked the bike and walked over to him.

  “Is Stephanie around?” Grant asked, discovering in that moment he had a shred of pride left, and it was seriously dented by having to ask her stepfather where she was.

  “Yep.”

  “Could I see her?”

  “I’d say that’s up to her.” Charlie studied him for a long, uncomfortable moment.

  Grant resisted the urge to squirm under the heat of the other man’s stare.

  “I take it you never got around to asking her the question we talked about the other day?”

  Grant shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest, his left hand resting on the ring box in his coat pocket. He’d carried it with him for weeks, hoping for the right chance to ask her.

  “What happened?” Charlie asked.

  “I think maybe it was one spat too many for her.”

  “So what’s your plan, hotshot?” This was asked with a hint of amusement that was so shocking coming from the normally stoic Charlie that Grant was temporarily rendered speechless. “I, um, was thinking I’d apologize for whatever I did that made her so mad.”

  “Good place to start.” Charlie pointed his chin toward the path that led to the beach. “She went for a walk a little while ago. You might catch her on the way back.”

  Grant’s heart lurched at the thought of seeing her. Two days was too damned long. “Thanks.”

  “Good luck,” Charlie called after him.

  Grant waved to let the other man know he’d heard him and headed down the well-worn path. As he got closer to the bluffs, the smell of the ocean assailed him, reminding him, as it always did, of home. But now that he’d met Stephanie, fallen in love with her, lived with her… She was his home, and he’d be positively lost without her. “You should probably tell her that,” he grumbled to himself. “For a guy who’s supposed to be rather good with words, you need to find the right ones, and you need to do it fast.”

  He traveled about a half mile down the path before he found her sitting on a rock that overlooked the Atlantic. Her arms were stretched out behind her, and her face was tilted into the late afternoon sun.

  His heart contracted painfully at the sight of her. He ached for her but was reluctant to say or do anything that would make things worse.

  She must’ve sensed him there because she turned and met his gaze. Surprise registered on her expressive face before she shuttered herself, the way she had so often lately. He hated when she did that. It left him feeling closed out and closed off from her, two places he never wanted to be where she was concerned.

  Grant walked the final thirty feet to her, feeling as if his entire life would come down to whatever transpired here. “You look like a sun goddess sitting on your stage waiting for the gods to show up to worship you.”

  “Looks like it worked,” she said with a small smile that warmed the cold places inside him. She held out a hand. “Now come worship me.”

  Grant took her hand and joined her on the rock. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to her sun-warmed face. “Steph, I—”

  “Shhh. Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”

  Because there was nothing he’d rather do, he did as she asked. He had no idea how long they sat there, wrapped up in each other as the sun dipped lower toward the horizon.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said, softly so as not to break the magical spell.

  “So am I.” She ran her hand over his hair and down to cup his face.

  Her touch sent a shiver of longing through him.

/>   “I’ve had some time to think,” she said.

  That quickly, the longing turned to dread. Something about the way she said the simple sentence terrified him. “And?”

  “This…” She took a moment to compose herself, which only added to his growing anxiety. “This isn’t working.”

  The words and the pain he heard in her voice as she said them hit Grant like an arrow straight to the heart. “That’s not true.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Hear me out.”

  “I don’t want to hear you say you’re leaving me. I can’t hear that.”

  “You can’t possibly be happy with the way things have been.”

  “In our worst moment, I’m happier with you than I’ve ever been before.”

  “Grant…” Tears rolled down her face, every one of them breaking his heart. “I love you so much. You know I do. But after the way I grew up, the constant upheaval, the fighting, the sick feeling in my stomach, always worrying when the bottom was going to fall out… I simply can’t live like that anymore.”

  Every one of her words hit him like poison arrows filled with pain serum. It occurred to him all at once that he’d done a terrible thing to her by letting the passion they shared in bed spill over into the other areas of their life together. She was absolutely right. After her tumultuous childhood, she needed calm stability, not high drama.

  “You’re right.” Grant bit back the tidal wave of panic and focused on what he needed to do to fix this, because losing her was not an option he was willing to consider. “You’re absolutely right, and I understand that the way it’s been between us doesn’t work for you—and I get why. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make some changes to make it work better in the future.”

  She eyed him warily. “What kind of changes?”

  “For one thing, we’ll no longer work together. That’s not good for us.”

  “No,” she said, “it really isn’t.”

  “The screenplay is my job. I bought the rights from you and Charlie, and I’m asking you to trust me to do justice to your story.”

  “No pun intended,” she said with a smile that gave him the first shred of hope that they might get through this crisis.

  “No,” he said, amused, “no pun intended.” He took her hand and linked their fingers. “Do you trust me to tell your story with dignity and grace and courage and humility and all the other words that come to mind when I think of what you went through alone for so many years?”