My Bad- Lani Lynn Vale

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  He stiffened for all of a half a second, then wrapped those big arms around me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded against his cut. “I’m okay.”

  “Good,” he rumbled.

  When I finally let him go a few seconds later, he looked relieved. Not because he was no longer touching me, though, but because he believed me.

  I was okay.

  Now. Thanks to Hoax.

  He may not be here physically, but he still took care of me nonetheless.

  Chapter 16

  You can’t catch a pregnancy. You can catch shit, though.

  -Text from Piper to Pru

  Pru

  Eight weeks later

  There was no denying it anymore.

  None.

  “You’re pregnant,” Piper declared, staring at me with shock written all over her face.

  I was pregnant.

  There was no doubt about it any longer.

  Although I’d been denying it for quite some time, I wasn’t a complete dumbass.

  Sure, I’d gone out of my way to avoid thinking about the elephant in the room—or the baby in my belly—but it was getting to the point where I had to think about it.

  My pants no longer fit. My mother and father were giving me looks that clearly said they wanted an explanation. My little sister was flat out pointing out that I was pregnant around every turn, jokingly at first, and seriously now.

  I’d already had to go up a pants size in my scrubs, and had to switch over to the ones that were loose on the top instead of hugging my every curve.

  I hated those, but honestly, I wasn’t ready to answer any questions just yet.

  The longer I could keep this a secret, the better.

  I just wanted Hoax to be the first to know, and I wanted him to find out in person.

  He assured me that they were only there for about two more months. Surely, I could keep it a secret from everyone at work, as well as his motorcycle club that had simply forced their way into my life—not that I didn’t like them being there for me.

  “I mean, I know that Phoebe was telling me that you were, but Jesus. You really are. You can tell.” She shook her head. “When are you going to tell him?”

  Piper was currently in uniform, staring at me like I had an alien attached to my chest, and not a baby belly.

  I’d answered her call while I’d been in the shower, so excited to hear from her that I’d hit the button that answered, and accidentally turned on Facetime—apparently, I was good at calling people and showing them my secrets. Because I most certainly wouldn’t have chosen for Hoax to know that Kelley had done what he’d done. I would’ve kept that secret until he’d come home, because I really hated that he felt guilty for being there and not here when I needed him.

  “I’m going to tell him when the time is right,” I told her, shrugging. “I was going to wait until he came home, but then I got a call from him today. He said that he might be there a little longer than expected because of something happening that shouldn’t. I don’t know. I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Make a doctor appointment,” she suggested.

  I nodded. “I did. It’s in three weeks. I had no idea how hard it was to get into an obstetrician. That was their earliest appointment. And I made that three weeks ago.”

  Piper shook her head. “You could come up here, and I could work you into our schedule.”

  I snorted. “Yes, I’ll just get right on that. Germany’s how far away? Twenty-hour flight?”

  Piper shrugged. “I’ll let you know in two weeks.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Piper’s grin grew. “I have leave. I’m coming home for two weeks.”

  I hadn’t seen my sister in a very long time. Much longer than I was used to.

  “What?” I screeched.

  “Two weeks,” she repeated. “My leave was approved today. Which was why I was calling. Can you pick me up at the airport?”

  My grin was so wide that I couldn’t contain myself. “Yes!”

  That was about the time that the shampoo that I still hadn’t washed out of my hair started to fall into my eyes.

  I stepped back in the shower, put the phone on the shower caddy, and rinsed the soap out of my eyes.

  “Yes, yes, fuck me!”

  We both froze.

  “Let me guess, you’re watching porn now in the birds’ presence?” Piper asked, mirth sparkling in her eyes.

  I slicked my hair back and glanced over at the bird that was sitting on the toilet seat. I’d tried to shoo him out before I’d taken my shower, but he’d refused to leave.

  I’d counted it as a win since I’d managed to close the door before Doohickey or Bacon made their way inside.

  “I wasn’t watching porn,” I muttered, reaching for the conditioner. “Stop staring at my boobs.”

  “You have the phone in the shower with you. And your nipples look huge. And dark. What else am I supposed to stare at?” she asked. “Those really should’ve been the first things that were like a big ‘oh shit, I’m pregnant’ to you.”

  I ignored her and turned the phone slightly so she only saw me from the throat up.

  She sat back in a chair, and I saw the sparse room around her. “Are you not going to decorate your space or anything?”

  She glanced around her. “No. What’s the point? I’m just waiting here in limbo until they move me off base. That should be within the next couple of months, they said. Then I’ll actually be able to cook something other than a microwave dinner.”

  I was about to reply when my phone made a weird sound, and an icon saying ‘Hoax is calling’ had me squealing.

  After explaining what was going on, I promised to call Piper back and quickly ended her call and navigated my way into Messenger.

  After accidentally realizing that you could video call through Messenger, we’d done it twice since then.

  Pressing the button that connected me to him, I waited.

  It didn’t take long for his beautiful face to fill up my screen.

  His beard was poofier, his hair longer, and his face was dirty.

  But he looked good.

  So good.

  Too good.

  I grinned. “Hoax.”

  He didn’t say a word while he took me in.

  I was thankful that I’d positioned the phone so that the only thing that could be seen was my head and part of my neck.

  “Showering?” he rumbled.

  His voice sent shivers down my spine. “Yes.”

  His lips spread into a mouthwatering smile.

  “I…”

  “Yes, yes! Fuck, yes!”

  He froze mid-sentence.

  “Uhhh,” he said. “What was that?”

  I sighed. “Bluebird decided to join me in the bathroom today. Apparently, I might’ve allowed them to watch something that they shouldn’t have watched, and now he’s giving me a play by play of a soft porn.”

  He snickered. That snicker turned into a guffaw moments later.

  I loved watching him laugh. He was beautiful all the time, but when he laughed? It was like looking at pure happiness.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, his eyes studying me hard.

  I smiled, feeling a twinge of shame that I didn’t immediately blurt out that I was pregnant.

  “Good,” I told him. “I haven’t seen Kelley at work in well over two weeks. They moved his office to the third floor, and I think they changed his times that he’s there. Oh! My sister is coming home in two weeks!”

  His eyes lit up. “She’s in Germany, right?”

  I nodded. “Yes. How far of a flight is it from here?”

  Surely, as a military person, and a man, he’d know that…right?

  He shrugged. “No idea. Long, though. Why do you ask?”

  I sighed.

  “She told me that I should come visit her,” I told him, going w
ith a half-truth.

  His eyes narrowed. “A visit to Germany? You don’t just ‘visit’ Germany.”

  I felt my lips twitch at his concern. “I could ‘visit’ Germany.”

  He growled, and I felt my lips tip up at the corners as I tried to stifle the laughter.

  “You’re not going to Germany any time soon, are you?” he wondered.

  “I’ll wait for a couple of months,” I hedged.

  At least another eight. Hell, probably even more.

  I couldn’t be traveling to fuckin’ Germany with a newborn, and there was no way in hell I’d be able to travel that far and long while I was pregnant.

  I really needed to figure out how far along I was.

  It was a minimum of fourteen weeks.

  My hand automatically went to my belly as I cupped the obviously there bump.

  My eyes went to the bump’s father, and I felt a twinge of guilt at not telling him.

  “You’re not playing with yourself, are you?” he teased. “Your hands have been down there for a while.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’s your friend right there, isn’t it?”

  He looked over his shoulder to find his friend, Carl, eating a piece of the beef jerky I’d sent them in the last care package. His eyes were on his phone, but the grin told me that he’d heard exactly what Hoax had said.

  “Maybe,” Hoax lied. “If you weren’t doing that, what were you doing?”

  I shook my head.

  I should tell him. I really, really should.

  But shit. I was scared. We were so fucking new, and I wanted him to love me and not leave. He might leave. He might decide that I was too much—that we were too much—and high-knee it straight the hell out the door.

  But, if I was being truthful, I wasn’t giving Hoax enough credit.

  Though we’d never discussed children before, I knew that he liked them. He held Rome’s daughter, Astrid, at the party that’d been thrown in his honor. He’d looked like he’d adored the hell out of her.

  I wasn’t giving him the credit he was due.

  He wouldn’t leave.

  Which might’ve also been a part of my hesitation in telling him.

  I wanted him to want me for me, not for the baby that was inside of me.

  He’d told me he loved me, but we’d discussed nothing of our future other than the fact that I’d wait for him to get back.

  He hadn’t asked to move into my house. He hadn’t offered up anything more than what he’d said at the airport before he’d left.

  I was also overthinking the hell out of everything.

  I could tell him right now, and he’d probably be ecstatic.

  An idea struck me then.

  I’d tell him…and he’d have to put the clues together to figure out what it was that I was telling him. That way, I wasn’t lying, but I also wasn’t straight out telling him, either.

  That could work, couldn’t it?

  “I was soaping myself up,” I lied.

  “Let me see your hands,” he ordered.

  I held them up. There wasn’t a soap bubble in sight.

  His eyes narrowed. “You’re so full of…shit. I gotta go.” He looked at something over his shoulder that wasn’t his friend. “Love you, baby.”

  Then he was gone.

  I sighed and rinsed out my hair, soaped up really fast, and tried not to think about whatever it was that’d taken him away from me so abruptly.

  The moment I was out of the shower, I called my sister back.

  She frowned when she saw my face. “What’s wrong?”

  I turned to the side and examined myself in the mirror.

  “I’m not going to be able to keep this a secret for much longer,” I told her. “I’m going to have to tell him.”

  “How?” she asked. “Just blurt it out?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  I walked into my bedroom, ignoring the bird and the pig that were pissed that they’d been locked out, and headed to my desktop computer.

  “What are you doing?” my sister asked.

  “I’m going to order some fortune cookies that have what I want them to say inside them. Then I’m going to send them to Hoax…and if he happens to guess, then I’ll confirm my pregnancy with him. If he doesn’t…then at least I kind of told him.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.” She paused. “What did Mom and Dad say?”

  “They haven’t,” I admitted. “They both know, of course, but I haven’t flat out told them that I was pregnant yet. I think they’re both trying to deny the fact that they’re going to be grandparents.”

  She snickered. “Mom said that she was too young for grandkids when Janie had hers. She’s in denial just like you are, I’m sure.”

  Speaking of… “Are you going to tell them that you’re coming?”

  She grinned. “No. That’s why I asked you to pick me up at the airport.”

  Chapter 17

  You need to get in shape. If you were murdered right now, your chalk outline would be a circle.

  -Things you shouldn’t tell your pregnant sister

  Hoax

  Two weeks later

  “Yo,” Carl called.

  I looked up just in time to see a box the size of a twin-size mattress coming directly at my face. Okay, technically it wasn’t really all that big. More the size of a shoebox, but it was still pretty big when it was coming directly at your head.

  I caught it and managed not to get hit, but barely.

  “Thanks,” I said dryly.

  “Welcome,” he sat down next to me. “What’d we get?”

  I laughed.

  In the sixteen weeks that we’d been here, the men of my team had come to love mail day almost as much as I did.

  Pru sent each of the men a little something, learning their likes and dislikes almost as easily as she’d learned mine.

  I handed out the boxes as fast as I could, and each man ripped into them.

  “Why is my woman having to send us stuff when y’all have women at home?” I accused, looking at both Treat, who didn’t give a single damn, and Carl.

  Carl shrugged. “My wife only sends me letters. They’re sweet and all, but damn I wish she’d send me some fuckin’ food.”

  I grunted in reply and pulled the box closer to me. The rest of the stuff was mine.

  Grinning, I reached for the fortune cookies first.

  Lately, I’d had one in each box.

  They were getting increasingly weird.

  Last time I’d gotten one, it’d said ‘soon to be three peas in our crazy pod.’

  This week’s was no different.

  “And then there were three,” I read aloud. “Boring.”

  I tossed the fortune into the box and reached for the sticks of beef jerky that she always sent that I only ever got one or two pieces of if I wasn’t fast enough.

  “What’s up with those fortunes?” Carl mumbled around a mouth full of powdered donuts.

  I leaned back in my chair and popped the top on the hot Dr. Pepper.

  It wasn’t cold, but goddamn was it still good.

  “I have no fuckin’ clue,” I admitted. “I’ll have to ask her next time I talk to her if she’s started going to a different Chinese restaurant.”

  “Maybe we’ll get to go home soon and you can ask the Chinese place if they started buying from a new supplier.” Treat popped a handful of M&Ms into his mouth.

  “Fuck you,” I grumbled.

  I was sitting down on my ass when we should be doing something, and honestly, there were about five thousand things that I could think of to do instead of sitting here twiddling my thumbs.

  If we’d just get our shit together, we could get the fuck out of here, and I could get home to where I needed to be.

  Unfortunately, we were playing a hurry up and wait game, and that game was one that couldn’t be
rushed—at least according to the commander.

  “If the surveillance comes back tonight indicating our target is in the area, we’ll move on him,” Treat said. “I know y’all are getting restless, but hopefully the end is in sight.”

  The end was in sight.

  Goddamn, but that had been the exact same thing on the fortune cookie Pru had sent me in her package of random shit that she thought I might like.

  Grinning when I thought about it and how accurate that fortune was, I found myself thinking about the other fortunes I’d gotten while I’d been home with her.

  The first one: A short stranger will soon enter your life with many blessings to share.

  That one, at least, wasn’t true. Not unless a ‘short stranger’ was indicating Pru, but I’d already met her at the time.

  The second fortune that I’d gotten: Patience may not be your virtue, but you must learn to embrace it or you’ll kill your friends.

  That one, I hoped, was one I was following.

  Patience was indeed a virtue. One that I very rarely possessed.

  “All right, y’all have until eighteen hundred hours. I want you back in here not a minute late.” Treat stood up and started to shut down his computer.

  We all stood with him and started to file out of the room.

  Unfortunately, I hadn’t made it more than a step toward the door before Treat stopped me.

  “Not you, Hoax. I have someone that wants to speak with you.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “Someone that wants to speak with you,” he repeated. “That was what that call was about. Take a seat right there and I’ll give him a call back.”

  What I hadn’t expected was for the ‘call’ to actually be a video chat through Skype.

  What else I didn’t expect? Pru’s father’s face to fill up the screen.

  Oh, and his next words? Definitely never saw those coming, either.

  “I have some information for you that you might find interesting.” He paused. “I’m also fairly positive that what I say won’t leave this room. My contacts know that I’m retired, but from time to time they still come to me with problems hoping that I’ll pass them along to the correct people.”

  Sam went on to blow our worlds, spouting out top-secret information even Treat hadn’t been privy to.