by Rachel Lee
“Well,” he said slowly. “I think I had an average childhood, mostly. I was raised by a lovely older couple. Well, they seemed older to me than most of my friends’ parents, let me put it that way. But they were super. They never concealed the fact that I was adopted and told me they were luckier than most parents because they got to choose me.”
“That’s really nice.”
He shrugged. “For the times it was unusual. I guess it’s more common now, but I’m not exactly in tune with that part of the world. I’ve been spending too much time being redacted.”
That drew a laugh from her. She drank more water and took another bite of her sandwich.
“Even though I knew I was adopted, it didn’t seem like a big deal until after they were gone. Then I got this compulsion to find my birth parents.” He cocked a brow at her. “That could have been a big mistake. I was lucky.”
Edie nodded. “They seem like wonderful people.”
“Not only wonderful, but despite the fact that my appearance damn near shattered their marriage, they were very welcoming to me. The thing is, getting to know them seemed to fill in parts of me that I hadn’t realized were missing. I don’t know exactly how to explain it. It’s like you suddenly understand something about why you are who you are. I’m not saying it’s all genetics, because it’s not, but it answers some deep need of some kind. Best I can do.”
She thought about it for a few minutes. “I guess I can understand a little. I sometimes wonder how much I’m like my mother, and how much I’m like whoever my father was. My grandmother was able to tell me a lot about my mom, but telling and experiencing aren’t the same. And of course, my dad could have been anyone.”
“So you became a very self-reliant person.”
She tilted her head. “Maybe so. I don’t know how much that absence had to do with my choices. I don’t know how much my genetics played into it. How could I?”
“But I get the feeling you’re determined not to rely on anyone.”
She glanced down. “That’s true,” she admitted. “No more than I have to anyway. I like being in control.”
“I get that part. Totally.”
She gave him a small smile. “I seem to be a bit out of control now.”
He shook his head. “You made decisions. Nobody else made them. Now, unfortunately maybe, I’m mucking up the works for you.”
“I don’t know about that,” she admitted. Oddly, she was losing her appetite, but it had been a large sandwich. She began to wrap the remains. “I guess part of what played into my decision to tell you was not knowing who my father was. I didn’t want that to happen to this baby. If nothing else, I had to at least be able to tell him something about you. About the kind of person you are. And I sure didn’t ever want to look at him and admit I’d never told you about him.”
He surprised her by reaching for her hand and squeezing it. His skin was warm, dry, callused. She wished he’d keep on holding her, but he let go almost immediately. “I’m glad you made those decisions.”
“Me, too,” she admitted. “I don’t know how this is going to work, or even if it will, but I could just imagine the anger from him if I never even told you. He’d be right to get angry. Furious. I would have cheated him.”
“So now it’s up to me to decide how much he gets cheated?”
She flushed a little. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Maybe not, but that’s what it comes down to.” He must have read something in her face because he said quickly, “Don’t get mad. It’s just the bottom line. You were right to tell me. Now it’s my decision, at least to some extent. Inevitable. I’ve already told you I want to be part of the baby’s life. We’ll have to work it out, but we have to work it out for him.”
She looked off toward the mining camp, releasing the annoyance that had started to rise in her. He was right, she had thrown a responsibility directly on his shoulders. Would it have been easier to tell this child his dad wanted no part of him? Would it have caused fewer problems? Not likely.
She sighed and put the wrapped sandwich aside. “Whatever brought me to the decision, I did it.”
Her back ached a little, as it sometimes did now, and she stretched out on the blanket with her knees up, staring into pine boughs overhead, catching glimpses of a deep blue sky. It was so peaceful here she wished she could capture it in a bottle and take it with her.
“As for more about me,” he said, as if their conversation had become interrupted, “well, you know I’ve been married twice. The first time I should have listened to my reservations.”
“Reservations?”
“Darlene grew up here. She’d never been away from here. I tried to tell her how hard a navy marriage can be. I warned her she’d be in a strange place and I’d be gone for long stretches, that I couldn’t even tell her where I’d be or what I’d done when I got back. We actually argued about it more than once.”
“So what happened?”
“She told me she could handle it and that I had no right to make her decision for her.”
“Hard to argue with that.”
“Yeah. Too bad I was right. We didn’t make it quite two years. Nobody can imagine it until they’ve done it. I’d get a call, or get orders that I couldn’t even show her, and I’d be gone. I couldn’t even tell her when I’d be back. That’s a lot to ask of anyone.”
She nodded, feeling her eyelids droop a little. “So she couldn’t take it.”
“She wasn’t built that way. I don’t know about the air force, but I know navy marriages are tough, even when you know your sailor will only be at sea for six months. With me it was worse. No real information of any kind. It might be a week or two, it might be months, depending. The only things I could tell her had to do with when I’d be training. The only times I could promise to be home for dinner. That’s a lot to ask of anyone. But instead of listening to my common sense, I listened to my heart. I loved her.”
A simple, straightforward declaration that touched her. “But you did it again.”
He snorted. “Yeah, I did it again. Maria was much more mature, and retirement wasn’t that far away. Unfortunately...” He didn’t finish.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I lost her, but I’m not sorry we had the time we did. I wouldn’t exchange those memories for anything.”
She closed her eyes, for some reason feeling close to tears. “That’s beautiful.”
“It just is. The truth.”
She’d never really wished for love before. Career was everything in her life until lately. But just then she wished someone would say that about her someday.
She realized she was hovering on the edge of sleep, her breathing growing slower and steadier. She tried to open her eyes, but her lids felt weighted.
“Take a nap,” Seth said quietly. “It’s the perfect time and place.”
As if she could have done anything else.
Chapter Five
Seth stretched out, too, although he didn’t feel the least sleepy, and watched over Edie. Not that there was much here to protect her from, but it made him feel good.
He wondered if he were about to make another big mistake. He couldn’t deny that he still felt the same attraction to her that had led him to her table in the ramshackle officers club at the air base in Afghanistan. He’d told himself it was just because he wanted to thank her—that had been some flying job—but even now he could remember other things pulling him her way.
She sat alone, for one thing, as if she didn’t want to get into the sometimes juvenile hijinks that occurred when people were blowing off steam and adrenaline. She appeared to have surrounded herself in a cocoon of composure, the same composure she had displayed in the cockpit. As if she wanted nothing to touch her or ruffle her calm.
He could
get that part, and that wasn’t what had pulled him. No, what had pulled him was simple sexual attraction. Gut male urges that he honestly hadn’t expected to act on. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy a beautiful woman’s company for the evening.
And she was beautiful, for all she tried to hide it with that ridiculously short haircut and behind cammies. Beautiful to him at any rate.
And she still pulled him in the same basic way. He wanted her again. Remembering how much fun she’d been beforehand...well, he could understand why she wasn’t feeling like a whole lot of fun right now. That didn’t matter. So far he liked her well enough. And he wanted her like hell. Still.
Wow.
He’d made love to her five months ago, yet he could still remember how she looked naked, how her warm skin had felt beneath his hands, how responsive she had been. He felt a twinge of guilt even now that he had been her first. Surely a woman deserved better than a hurried mating for her first time. But she had said she hadn’t regretted it. He couldn’t help wondering if she still felt that way. Really felt that way.
One thing for sure, he’d been the one with the greater experience and he should have known better than to indulge. However much he had wanted her, he had known exactly what it might be: a one-night stand. Yeah, he’d hoped she’d get in touch, but he hadn’t expected it. And while that was okay for some people, it wasn’t okay for all of them. He should never have given in to his hunger for her.
He felt a little ashamed of his own lack of control—after all, that was something he prided himself on—but he’d lost control because of a red-haired, blue-eyed witch.
He laughed silently as he folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the trees and sky. He somehow suspected she would hate him for thinking of her as a witch. But he meant that in the best way possible. She’d cast a spell of some kind over him, and he’d misbehaved.
Now there were consequences to deal with. Just how he was going to deal with them he couldn’t imagine. She probably didn’t want him to become a permanent fixture in her life, so he guessed he was going to be doing a lot of traveling to see his son, because he wasn’t going to allow that boy to grow up without him. No way on earth.
While he had no experience of being a father, he had been blessed with two good fathers as examples. And he supposed he’d get plenty of advice from Marge...and Nate, come to that, if Marge pressed him. Or if he asked.
He could do this. Everybody had to ease into having a first baby, so he’d have time to learn. And he had always wanted a kid or two. With Maria, they’d wanted two. They’d never gotten to the point of actually doing it, but they had talked about it.
Now it was on the way and he needed to think about things like how much he could be there, and even how to change a diaper. Damn, to think that at his age he’d never done that. When his sisters came home, he was allowed to hold the babies, but the minute one needed changing or feeding, it was swiped from his arms. He guessed he’d been judged inadequate, being childless. Amusement twisted his mouth. That was about to change.
Of course, what he might discover was that the major force in his family—the women—might take over for him. They’d certainly try, and he’d have more advice than a single man could use. Assuming, of course, that Edie allowed him to actually care for the child.
Thinking about it, though, daunting as parts seemed, he felt a true longing for this child. An unexpected gift when he’d about given up on the whole idea. When he’d envisioned the rest of his life as solitary and self-contained except for his family.
Damn, the truth was, he still wasn’t a civilian. Not completely. He was getting better at acting the part, but long years of training and dangerous experience had made him into something that didn’t quite fit with what most people considered ordinary life.
But he could probably say the same for the woman napping beside him. They were both about to embark on the unknown, something for which neither of them had any training or experience to guide them.
Maybe the most important thing they would ever do, when you came right down to it.
She stirred beside him, but before he could look to see if she had awakened, she rolled over, murmuring softly, and threw her arm across him. The next thing he knew, her head was resting in the hollow of his shoulder.
He almost held his breath, afraid of waking her. It had been so long since a woman had turned to him this way in her sleep and he didn’t want to lose these fragile moments. They could get back to distrusting, arguing, hammering things out later.
For now he just wanted to enjoy the illusion created by a woman’s arm around him and a woman’s head on his shoulder.
The illusion that he really wasn’t alone.
* * *
A chill down her back slowly woke Edie. She felt as if she were emerging from some deep, dark place that she couldn’t quite climb out of. But the chill wouldn’t leave her alone, and then she noticed that while her neck and back were cold, her front wasn’t.
Huh?
She jerked awake and realized she had wrapped herself around Seth. At once her cheeks flamed. “Oh! I’m sorry!”
“I didn’t mind,” he said quietly.
When she raised her head, she saw no smile there, no amusement, simply a kind of quietude.
“I’m getting a little cold,” she said, resisting the ridiculous urge to just burrow into him again. He might be warm, but her back wasn’t, and how much more trouble did she want anyway?
“Let’s get you home, then.”
Home? she thought as she stood up. She didn’t have a home. He probably meant his house or his parents’ house, but either way it was not her home. For years now her home had been a series of rooms in various air bases, like moving motel to motel. It had been a long time since she had called any place home in a meaningful sense.
She looked down at her stomach, rested her hand on her growing child and wondered why she hadn’t thought of that before. Did she want him to grow up rootless, moving from base to base, housing unit to housing unit? At least she’d had the stability of her grandmother’s house. The stability of never moving from the time she turned three until she left high school.
That had to mean something.
“Everything okay?” Seth asked. He had put the remains of lunch away in the bags and now folded the blanket. The shadows had grown long while she slept and the air had taken on a distinct chill.
“No,” she said slowly. “Just thinking.”
His expression was questioning, but she didn’t answer. She’d left a big piece out of this puzzle and she couldn’t ignore its absence any longer. Damn, did she need to leave her job, too?
The thought didn’t cheer her at all. But, she reminded herself, there were plenty of military brats, after all. Apparently it wasn’t all bad.
But still...
The thought plagued her all the way back to town, and she realized that part of her wasn’t going to leave it alone. She had to think and make a decision, a decent decision. The best one she could for the baby.
This whole pregnancy thing was eating her alive. But there it was. Real, growing, and soon to be a very-much-present baby with needs that couldn’t be provided through an umbilical cord.
She kept her face averted, watching the countryside pass, watching the night creep over the world. What in the world had ever made her think she could be a good mother?
Her emotions had roamed nearly the entire compass over the past few months, but now they had headed in an entirely different direction. After convincing herself she could do this, now uncertainty filled her.
She lived like a gypsy and had since the day she left for officer training. She basically lived out of a duffel. She knew nothing about raising a child. Hell, she’d only changed a few diapers in her life, back in high school the few times she had babysat.
“What exactly am I offering a child?” She didn’t realize the words had emerged until she heard Seth’s response.
“A dedicated mother.”
She swung her head around, aware that her eyes had grown hot—damn tears, always so near the surface now—and looked at him. “That’s not enough. Do I have to tell you how I live? Is that good for a kid? Is it?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and with each passing second she felt as if another stone dropped into her heart. “I know military couples with kids. The love moves with them even if the place changes. And you know it’s basically a small community at heart. You change bases and meet up with people you knew from a base or two ago.”
“Maybe. How would I know? I’m not living the family life. I’m not even sure I’m capable of it.”
Another pause, then he said, “Like I said, everybody starts out utterly inexperienced. There’s no real preparation for being a parent. I think you know that. All the advice in the world isn’t the same as reality. So what’s really worrying you?”
“That I’m rootless. You said you’d take me home, and I realized I haven’t had a home in a long time. Not a real home. Now I have to figure out how to make one. I’m not sure I know how.”
“I could hand you some clichés, but that won’t work. I can totally get where you’re coming from. I tried a couple of times to make my own home, but I was gone more than I was there. After Maria, I even thought it might be a damn good thing that we hadn’t made a baby yet.”
“And now look.” Her laugh was harsh. “You’re getting a baby ready or not. I thought I had it all settled. Damn it, Seth, there are a million things I didn’t even think about. Like not living out of my duffel anymore. That just won’t work. And even if I stay stateside, I can’t guarantee I won’t be bouncing around every couple of years. You know how that goes. Training squadron? Yeah, they’re based at one place now. That could change. And even so, there’d be temporary assignments, refreshers to take at other bases. Plenty of temporary duty assignments.”