by Rachel Lee
He laughed. “No, actually. Your call.”
The words acted like a balm. “Hell, let’s go for it. I can always find a tree.” It wasn’t as if she hadn’t faced these things before. Survival training had taught her a lot.
As they headed toward the looming mountains that looked so different in the morning light than they had yesterday afternoon, she had an uncustomary fanciful thought that it was almost as if they had personalities. Moods. Like her.
She prided herself on being hardheaded and practical. Thinking mountains had personalities and moods lay far off the beaten path for her. More changes?
“Tell me about yourself,” she said to Seth, desperate to keep from wandering into crazy places. A dangerous question since she wasn’t sure how well she wanted to know him. The physical attraction she felt was already dangerous enough.
“Where do you want me to start? We pretty much covered that I was adopted, and didn’t find my birth parents until later. I’ve got a big family now, but you know that. Or are you looking for career details?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s the outline and then there’s other stuff.”
“Yeah, the other stuff. The hard stuff to talk about.” He shook his head a little. The car bumped slightly in a small rut as they started to climb. Her hand flew to her belly.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine. Holding my stomach seems to be turning into an unconscious habit.”
“It did with my sisters. One used to make fun of how she could set a cup of coffee on what she called her shelf.”
Edie smiled. “I haven’t gotten there yet.”
“Clearly. Okay, about me. Well, I don’t know that I’m the most interesting guy in the world. I did a job and I can’t talk about any of it. That’s really helpful. Just over twenty years in the SEALs and it’s almost all redacted in heavy black ink.”
Now she laughed. “That’s true for a lot of my background, too. How much trouble are you having returning to civilian life?”
“Not as much as I expected. Maybe more than I hoped. When you’re regimented most of the time, it’s weird to have to get up every day and figure out what you’re going to do with it. There’s something else, too.”
“What?”
“I had a strong sense of purpose before. It’s gone now, and I miss it. But maybe that’s changing.”
She stiffened a little. “Don’t make me or this baby your mission.”
Now his voice hardened. “You can’t stop me from making my son my mission. Let’s be clear on that right now. You may be able to set limits, but you can’t walk away with my son as if I never existed.”
Anger seethed in her. “Are you threatening me? Take me back right now!”
“Why? So you can do the combat search and rescue thing? Fast in, fast out?”
“Damn you, Seth Hardin!”
He pulled the car off the road under some tall pines, jammed it into Park and swiveled to face her. She saw then the SEAL, the man who went into impossible situations, did impossibly difficult things and never backed down. He could have been carved from steel.
“This is my child, too,” he said sternly. “The sooner you get really used to that idea, the sooner we can work things out amicably. But you are not, I repeat not, going to carry on as if that child isn’t mine, too.”
“I don’t need you!”
“But that child does. That boy is entitled to whatever I can give him. Because I helped make him, Edie! Like it or not, I am his father.”
“You didn’t want this baby!”
“Neither did you. And while it’s all good and well for you to come out here and tell me about it because you felt a duty, it remains I have a duty and I’m not going to shirk it. Period. All that talk about how you can handle it on your own? It was nice, I believe you could, but as long as I’m breathing, you’re not going to have to and that boy isn’t going to be fatherless. That’s my bottom line. Deal with it.”
She glared at him. How dare he? It was her body, her child, her life, and he had no right, absolutely no right, to come in and make demands on her or give her orders. Or threaten her.
Seth faced forward but he didn’t put the car in Drive. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and blew a long breath between his lips. “I shouldn’t have blown up. There’s something you need to understand about me. When I’m attacked or threatened, I’m trained to go on the attack. I guess I need to work on that.”
“Threatened? How did I threaten or attack you?”
He turned to look at her and his eyes were almost haunted. “You keep talking about leaving. How you’re capable of handling this by yourself. How you don’t need or want anything from me. You’re threatening the possibility of not allowing me to be part of my child’s life every time you do that.”
She caught her breath. What the hell? Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. He’d had a wife leave him because she couldn’t take life as a SEAL wife. How many scars must that have left? And every time she said she wanted to leave, he must be hearing echoes of that.
Every time she said she could handle this on her own, every time she said she didn’t want anything from him, every time she suggested just going back to work...God, he must have heard a version of all this before, when his first marriage ended. She was just trying to be reasonable and take responsibility for her own life, but he must be hearing a string of rejections: I don’t want you. I don’t need you.
She looked down at her tightly clenched hands, resting, as usual, now right over the baby. Her attempts to be responsible and independent made perfect sense—until she turned it around and looked at it from his perspective. How many times could you tell a man you didn’t need him, even as a father to his own child?
Not many. She averted her face and looked out the window into the shadows beneath the pines. Almost without realizing it, she began to speak quietly.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at my life in a shattered mirror.”
“Shattered mirror?” he prompted quietly.
“You know how it looks? Fragmented, jumbled, not recognizable. I’ve been fighting to put those pieces together in some way that produces a recognizable image. It hasn’t worked very well in some ways. In fact, I’m getting a whole different image, but it’s still broken up a bit.”
“I guess so.”
“Anyway, I’d worked out as much as I could on my own, and like I always do, I took the bit between my teeth. I was going to do it, and was going to do it my way.” She sighed and looked at him. “I wasn’t really thinking, I guess. At least not about you.”
Something in his face softened a bit. “Why should you have thought about me? You don’t know me. You didn’t know how I’d react. Maybe I wouldn’t want any part of this. You couldn’t know. But I do want a part of this, and we need to start from there. So if you’ll quit making me feel like the thing you want most is for me to turn my back on this baby, I’ll hang on to my temper and be as reasonable as I can.”
He put the car in Drive and pulled back onto the road. “The mountain aspens are starting to be threatened by climate change. We’re losing a lot of them. But I know a place where they look beautiful right now. Why don’t we check that out before we go to the mining town? Okay?”
“Sounds good to me.” Looking at trees sounded peaceful, and right then she wanted some peace. She had some new things to consider, mainly what she had learned and realized about Seth. Somewhere in her mind, she had clearly been fitting him into a stereotype of some kind.
A man who naturally wouldn’t want a kid, especially with a woman he wasn’t married to. Yeah, that was one stereotype she’d been applying. She’d come out here because of a sense of duty to the child, and she’d been almost convinced that he’d shrug it off, maybe demand she prove it was his, maybe off
er a token monthly check.
Well, he had certainly shattered that stereotype. One which probably wouldn’t be accurate about a lot of men if she were to be fair. How would she know? She knew men at work and men in battle, and very little else about them. She knew some of them had kids they loved but they were married. Certainly she had never met anyone who’d fathered a child in a one-night stand. At least no one who admitted to it.
But Seth was a unique case any way she looked at him. Given up for adoption. Now back with his birth family. He probably had more reasons than most to want to be a part of this child’s life.
She couldn’t have known any of that before coming here, but she knew it now, and she needed to take it into consideration, along with the wounds from his first wife leaving him.
“I wonder,” she said, “how much of all that determination to do this myself had to do with my parents.”
“I think you’re just naturally a doer and a problem solver. Look what you do for a living, after all. But what exactly do you mean about your parents?”
“I told you I never knew who my father was and that my mother died of an overdose. Maybe I’m just determined to ensure that doesn’t happen to this baby.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he agreed. “We’re the sum of our experiences, all of us. Whatever is behind it, I’m damn glad you made the choice you did. Even if I didn’t look like it yesterday. Seriously, Edie, I was mad at myself, not you. I didn’t advance in the SEALs because I was careless of other people, and my first reaction was that I’d been stupid and made your life hell and that at my age I should know better.”
“We both should have known better.” She sighed, then smiled faintly. “But I still don’t regret it.”
He laughed then, and the very air seemed to lighten. “Neither do I,” he said. “Neither do I.”
Feeling considerably better and unwilling to analyze the feeling, she laid her head back against the headrest and watched the countryside go by. They were definitely climbing into the mountains, and even inside the car she could feel the change in the air as it became cooler, thinner. Pine scented the world and the freshness delighted her.
Up and down they drove, slowly through valleys, only to climb again, around hairpin bends. The buttery autumn light cast the woods in gold and made the shadows even more mysterious. This stand of aspens, she thought, must really be out of the way.
Then they emerged over a rise and she gasped with pleasure. A valley appeared to be filled with gold. Brilliant yellow leaves quaked in the breeze, seeming to shimmer and almost emit a light of their own.
“Wow!” No word could adequately describe her reaction to the beauty nestled in this valley. “Just wow!”
“I used to love to take leave in the autumn when I could just to come up here and see this. Want to get out and walk a bit?”
“Absolutely.”
Surrounded by the darker green of the firs, the valley made her think of a guarded treasure chest. It was as if the firs coiled around it, like a dragon protecting its hoard.
Fanciful thoughts, strangers to her usually, danced through her mind as they parked near the edge of the aspens then started strolling among them.
The breeze ruffled the leaves, and it almost sounded as if the trees whispered a conversation. She drew deep breaths of the fresh air and felt a smile start to grow throughout her entire body.
“This is incredible,” she said.
“Will you be offended if I take your arm? The ground is so uneven.”
She gave it a moment’s thought. “I don’t want to fall,” she admitted. “That could be catastrophic.”
So he slipped his arm through hers and hugged it to his side. A warm, hard side. Truth to tell, she doubted there was a human on the planet who was any harder physically than a SEAL. All planes, angles and well-honed muscles.
“Do you still work out?” she asked.
“I have to. After all these years, I feel awful if I don’t. You?”
“I can still do most everything. No warnings. I’ve stopped running, though.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t seem to have the lung capacity I used to.” She laughed quietly. “My friends say I’m carrying high. Which I guess means Junior is taking up some lung space. So I take brisk walks instead. But I’ve known some women who keep right on running.”
“Some of my sisters did. A couple of them gave it up, though. I don’t know why. Maybe for the same reason you did.” Then he asked, “You call him Junior?”
“That was the first time. Why?”
“I don’t know. All I’ve heard you call him is the baby and the kid.”
She flushed faintly. “I guess I’ve been objectifying him.”
“It takes some getting used to” was all he said.
She availed herself of a tree, while he headed back to the car to get some bottled water. “I don’t need to tell you about staying hydrated at altitude. We’re about eight thousand feet here. I’ll be right back.”
She had just finished straightening her clothes when he returned carrying a couple of liter bottles. He passed her one and she was surprised to realize that she was truly thirsty. She drained most of it in one draft.
When she lowered the bottle, she found his smiling green-brown eyes on her. “I’m glad I thought of that.”
“So am I.” She dabbed her lips with her sleeve. “That was good.”
“There’s plenty more.”
They continued their walk, her arm tucked through his, then came to a place where a brook tumbled down a rock face and carved its way back through the forest. There were a couple of good-sized boulders and he suggested a brief rest.
Eight thousand feet, she thought as she perched on one of the rocks. She was feeling it, too. She wondered if that was good. “Could I get altitude sickness here?”
“Not usually at this height, but it can happen. Just don’t overexert and keep drinking.” He passed her his unopened bottle.
She finished hers and then started on his. “What about you?”
“I’m acclimated. I spent a lot of time hiking up here over the summer. The mining town is lower, so I’d recommend lunching there.”
She nodded and looked around at this little piece of heaven. “The aspens are gorgeous. Like bottled sunlight. They’re going away?”
“Unfortunately. Each year more die, and they’re not spreading. We never had that many to begin with because the climate here is more suited to firs, but I hear they’re losing them in Colorado, too.”
“And the maples in New England,” she added. “I read about that somewhere.”
He acknowledged her words with a moment of silence. “Let’s get you back to the car. While the altitude isn’t that dangerous, I’d feel better about you if we were lower.”
So would she, when she thought about it. Seth kept them to a slow pace, but even so she was aware that she was beginning to feel as if she’d run more than a few miles.
She was growing amazingly sleepy again. It happened more often now, and she was resigned to not having her normal level of energy until after the baby was born, but every so often it chafed her. She was used to being active physically, and these new limitations irritated her.
They drove back down winding, hilly roads until at last Seth pulled off onto a narrow, rutted track. “We can’t get too close. We had to rope the area off a few years back because some of the old mining tunnels are collapsing. The worst of it is, we’re not sure where all the tunnels run.”
“What about a ground-penetrating radar?”
He cocked an amused eye at her. “Costs money and the county budget is tight. We’re asking the forest service to take over the place, but so far they don’t seem eager. Understandable since a decade or so ago they took over a big chunk of ground on and aroun
d Thunder Mountain. They’re overtaxed. So in the meantime, we just have to be careful and not get too close.”
The tumbledown mining site interested her with its echoes of a distant and different past. She would have loved to get close to some of those sagging buildings, to look inside and imagine the kinds of lives people had lived here, but the barriers were up all around, the warning signs plain to see...as were the collapsed mine tunnels, deep pits in the earth. Having the ground give way would have been a dangerous, if not deadly, experience.
They walked around outside the barriers and Seth told her this had once been a favorite place for teens to come. “They could get out of the wind, away from parents. Or, a lot apparently came to get spooked at night. Stories of ghosts abound.”
She glanced at him. “You would have liked to grow up here, wouldn’t you?”
He shrugged. “I liked where I grew up. No point missing something that wasn’t there.”
He was right, of course, but she was sure he had to sometimes wonder how different his childhood would have been.
He found a place soft with pine needles a safe distance away and spread out a blanket. A few moments later he returned from the car with some big bags and more water bottles.
She still felt parched and drank thirstily before she even looked at the sandwiches he unwrapped.
After months of telling herself she didn’t care about him, didn’t care what he did, that she was going ahead with her life alone with a baby, she discovered she was full of questions. Questions she wasn’t sure she could ask. But getting to know him seemed important, especially when he’d made it plain that he intended to be part of their child’s future.
“I need to know you better,” she said lamely, leaving the questions alone for now. She decided to see how forthcoming he would be.
He crossed his legs, put his sandwich on the wrapper and wiped his mouth. “That’s reasonable, given the circumstances. What would you like to know?”
“Anything that hasn’t been redacted.”
He gave her one of those charming smiles that invariably made her heart skip a beat. How the hell did he do that? She supposed that was one question that would never have an answer.