The mother of his child, the woman he wanted to marry. It wasn’t just for the child, God help him.
Her slickness on his hand, the puffy swelling there, it was as long as he could wait. The denim of his jeans already pinched, he’d grown so desperate for her. Wrestling the fasteners open, he shoved the material down, but before he got where he needed to be if he was going to keep breathing, Penny seemed to regain enough of her senses to do something besides squirm and make those pleading little mewls that all but assured he’d never be able to go slowly with her again. She focused enough to grab his head and drag it to hers.
Still no words, but she made her need for his kisses known through a series of throaty cries that only stopped when he covered her mouth with his own, and angled his head to stroke his tongue deeply into her mouth.
But he needed to be inside more than just her mouth.
Condom. The word habit he’d drilled into himself years ago rolled through the fog of need that had become his mind, but there was enough functioning there to discard it. No need.
Self-control slipping, he gripped her hips just to stop her squirming long enough to slide in. First damned night, and he’d said they had to wait...
Looking at her, her swollen lips open for gasping breaths, and feeling her hot around him, it hadn’t been like this before. It had been hot and sexy and, God, fun, but this ache driving him...he felt it in spiky jabs straight down to the arches of his feet.
“Gabriel?”
She whispered his name and he held himself still, eyes closed, trying to breathe, trying not to buck against her the way he knew would if he didn’t get hold of himself.
“Give me a second...” He pulled words together from somewhere.
* * *
Something was wrong. Penny searched his pained features, took in the violence of the shaking that had taken hold of him, and began to come back to herself. Yes, something was wrong, and she had no idea what it was.
“Is it too much?” she asked, feeling the need to soothe him, now that she had a second to think without drowning in sensation.
He nodded, eyes still clenched shut, breaths harsh, labored, fighting for something.
“Want me on top?”
The question hung there for several seconds before he nodded, pushed an arm under her back, and rolled them over.
It was her turn to slow them down, for him. Kiss his neck, kiss his face, stroke her hands over his magnificent, glittery chest as she sat up, straddling him.
When he finally opened his eyes again, the look he gave her was full of such longing she couldn’t look away. Not even when his hands firmed on her hips, urging her to move. Not even when she grew jerky and uncoordinated from the sizzling jolts of pleasure that pulsed through her. Not even when he sat up, put his strong arms around her, and kissed her.
Not even when she reached that dizzying height and had to fight to keep her eyes open while every other muscle in her body seized and jerked. Or when she felt him pulsing inside her.
He laid them back down among the pillows, hearts thundering, Christmas tree toppled nearby, and a fire beside them.
But the last thing she felt before she closed her eyes was the certainty that she loved this man.
* * *
Penny stretched in the big comforter, feeling the crisp cotton slide against her skin, then spiraled through the last things she remembered to decide what was going on.
In her bed. That was wrong. She’d gone to sleep downstairs. With Gabriel.
She didn’t even need to look beside her to know he wasn’t there. The room felt empty, like always. Just like last time.
She knuckled the sleep from her eyes and sat up, taking further inventory. She was still nude, wrapped in the blanket from downstairs, and she hadn’t climbed the stairs swaddled in the thing.
The sinking in her middle set off her inner nausea warning system, but when the retching didn’t follow, she made herself examine it. Pounding heart, heightened awareness of every inch of her skin, of the amplified sound of her breathing. More dread. And bigger, sharper than that.
Fear. That was fear...that something bad was going on with Gabriel and she didn’t know enough of how relationships should go to fix it. Or that it was something unfixable.
A look at the other side of the bed confirmed it: blankets entirely unrumpled. Once again, he hadn’t wanted to sleep with her. And she didn’t know what to do with that.
Right.
She took a breath and dragged herself out of bed. Find him, look for reasons to support this fear, and don’t give in to it until there’s a good reason to.
Go downstairs, and if he’s just somewhere else asleep, kick him in the happy place.
Ignoring her shaking insides, she dressed and brushed her hair to look her most presentable, and headed downstairs.
The scent of bacon hit her first, and she found him at the range. To the right, the Christmas tree they’d toppled sat upright again, but looked a little worse for wear, as she was, all evidence of their love nest missing entirely.
* * *
Gabriel stood at the range, making breakfast, but at the first sound of her feet on the stairs, what had been hunger gnawing at his belly turned into a slow, uneasy roll.
“Hey,” he called, looking over his shoulder at her, silently praying for another calm, easy breakfast together, but knew how useless that prayer was. He’d been downstairs since dawn, having slept in the guest room, fitfully.
With a knot in his gut he scanned her face. The anxious drawing of her mouth confirmed she was upset. That, and her complete lack of greeting in return.
Upset and calm, which made him as uneasy as she looked. Energetic, loud Penny he knew how to deal with, not this version with sad eyes that shot right through his guilt center.
At work he knew how to speak with her, mostly without things getting fraught. Here, he didn’t know which way to step. Apologizing for leaving her, as he truly wanted to do, was the wrong move. Pretending nothing was wrong at least made clear he didn’t want to talk about things.
“How are you feeling?”
Her shoulders popped up, and she looked him over in a way that increased the feeling of dread. “You’ve already had your shower and fixed the tree.”
Tree. Quasi-safe subject. As long as he didn’t mention how it had got knocked down.
“It still needs ornaments, but no damage done. I thought we could do that after breakfast. Do you think you can handle bacon?”
He could tell by the look of utter bafflement that damage had been done between them. This was a mess. Last night shouldn’t have happened, it had been too much too soon. It had changed things too much, too quickly, and he’d already been having a hard time figuring out what was going on. She’d said she wanted to take things slowly too...
“You carried me up to bed last night?”
“Thought it was better than sleeping on the floor.”
She was feeling her way too, he could see it in the pauses. Normally she spoke quickly, her excited babbling actually one of the things he enjoyed most about being with her. These heavy pauses made it worse. Not just the lack of excitement, which was the wrong direction for them to be traveling, but the fact that she was so carefully weighing all her words before uttering them.
“Where did you sleep?”
“In my room.” He turned off the burner and moved the pan of bacon back so that he could give her all his attention.
“You didn’t want to sleep with me?”
Still working through it. He should jump to the explanation, not leave her feeling her way. Wiping his hands, he went to stand across the island counter from her, where she’d eased onto a stool.
He kept his voice gentle and looked her in the eye, though she was having trouble maintaining eye contact with him,
which ratcheted up the urge to reach for her. “We were taking things slowly, and then we didn’t take things slowly. I was trying to put us back on course.”
“What course?”
“Slower, more meaningful intimacy. You wanted it to flow naturally.”
She gestured with one hand toward the fireplace, and finally looked him in the eye again. “Sleeping beside me in the bed is more intimate than that was?”
“It is, or you wouldn’t be upset now.”
“I’m upset because I went to sleep in your arms and woke up alone in a different room on a different floor of my home...” She stopped abruptly, holding up her hands and breathing so deeply that dread started to twist at him. Was she going to cry? Not sleeping beside her, not waking up tangled in her sheets with her, was supposed to make this easier.
“We have to stop getting swept up in the physical stuff.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s just the way it is. Don’t you think about how messy this can get if we’re not clear and careful about what we’re doing?”
“I thought we agreed that this was a relationship.”
“We did, and we have very different ideas about relationships and needs. The surest way to make this end in a formal custody battle is to be sloppy and irresponsible now.”
Her fists squeezed and released, flexing with the tension she had rolling off her.
“Fine. Rule Number One: if you sleep with a woman, the civil thing to do is wake her up before you leave her.”
“Fine.”
“Rule Number Two: I’m feeling better, and going back in the air tomorrow.”
“That’s not a rule.” Again it was turning into a fight. “And you’re not well enough. You don’t even know if it will manifest once you’re in the air, like motion sickness.”
“I guess we’ll find out.” She stood up and moved into the kitchen, no longer looking at him, like that could switch off the conversation as easily as she switched on the kettle.
“Penny...”
She rubbed both hands over her face, then waved a hand, like she was trying to dispel the tension. “Tomorrow, at work, if I feel bad I’ll go home.”
A concession. A compromise of sorts. Except... “You won’t. You never admit you’re sick until you’re forced to.”
“I called off the other day.”
He took a breath and then nodded. She had him there. “And you know if you don’t, I’ll send you home.”
“I know it if anyone knows it,” she muttered, grabbing the cider from the fridge and pouring it into a mug before sticking it in the microwave.
Touching her always helped, she took comfort in it as much as he did when they were at an impasse. He stepped over to her, but didn’t touch her until she looked up at him.
Not moving away from him. Gabriel took that as permission, and brushed his hand over her hair and pressed his lips to her forehead.
She leaned in for the barest second, then pulled back. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t kiss my head.”
Head kissing was innocuous. “Why?”
“It makes me feel like you really care.”
“I do care.”
“Kind of. You proved wanting me, the sexual connection. But you didn’t want to sleep with me. That’s twice now. First, you wanted to sleep in the same bed as me, and then you left in the night. Then last night I went to sleep with you, after all that, and you left again. Actually, you took me somewhere else and left me there.”
“That’s stretching what happened. I took you to your bed, not to Dubuque.”
“You said it was because of not wanting too much intimacy. That’s all I’m asking for. Because as much as you hate that I won’t just marry you, I’m the one who keeps ending up being rejected by you. Let’s just leave it at that. I won’t ask you to sleep in the bed with me, you don’t kiss my head like I’m some sweet thing you can’t get enough of. Because clearly I’m not.”
Denials were rushing to his lips as soon as the words began to make sense to him, but he clamped his mouth shut. She believed that. The only thing clear to him was that his attempt to reset the situation had made things worse, not better.
* * *
The next morning was gray and frigid. Overnight, rain had arrived in the city, and then the temperature dropped. She could tell how nasty it was by the coating of ice on her bedroom windows.
A day for thermals beneath her flight suit. Maybe two layers. And two pairs of socks.
Had Gabriel thought to bring a set with him for their temporary trial run? She’d been ignoring the temporary part of the arrangement before yesterday, but it truly felt temporary today. Yes, she’d wanted to let things unfold naturally, but nothing, prior to waking up alone, had felt unnatural. She couldn’t decide if he was doing this on purpose, or if he truly thought he was helping their situation, and her relationship IQ was practically nil.
Snatching a second set of thermals from her bureau, she stuffed them into the messenger bag she preferred to handbags, then dragged on baggy jeans and sweater to tide her over until she got to the hospital and a fresh, clean flight suit. She’d decide on the commute if she needed the second set, though hers would never fit him anyway.
“Pen?” he called from downstairs, sounding as tense as she’d felt since yesterday.
It was that tension more than anything else that prompted her to hurry. Snatching a brush and hairband on the way out, she went to meet him.
He stood by the door, ready to go, keys and bag in hand. “Everything okay?”
Nope.
“I’m not feeling sick.”
He had his keys out, he could lock it up. She stepped on out and went to ring for the elevator, and ignored a disgruntled sigh behind her.
They lapsed into silence for the whole ride to the hospital, with him tucking his nose into his phone and her braiding her hair.
In the locker room, which she realized she hadn’t seen him in for weeks, she noted a set of thermals when he changed into his flight suit, and she added her second set because she got colder than he did. But the silence was like a hulking thing in the room with them.
“I’m going to get the pre-flight done.”
“I’ll come with you.”
She knew she winced when he looked at her in a way that said he’d seen it.
With one step, he blocked her exit from the otherwise empty locker room. “We have to get it together. It was a fight. Or a disagreement, or a whatever you want to call it, not the end of the world. If you can’t be alone with me in the chopper, we’re in serious trouble.”
“I can be alone with you in the chopper.”
“You wouldn’t stay in a room with me yesterday.”
“You hurt me. Do you get that?”
Just coming out with it seemed to make the situation register with him, she saw it in the way his jaw clenched and he looked away briefly before nodding and looking back to her. One simple acknowledgment shifted what had been feeling like blame to a more neutral footing.
“I know.” He said the words she needed to hear, shoving his hands into the pockets of his suit with stiff arms that pulled at the material and showed his discomfort. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, and I should’ve said it yesterday.”
An apology was the last thing she’d expected. Acknowledgment would’ve been enough to satisfy her, but the gruffly spoken apology left her feeling more vulnerable than admitting he’d hurt her. “I get it. It’s hard to talk about this stuff, especially if you don’t trust me to handle it right.”
His silence confirmed the mistrust still there.
“I need to go do the pre-flight before we get any calls. The way things are going out there, you know as soon as we’re on duty, calls are coming,�
� she said, letting him off the hook, if for no other reason than because she needed her wits about her if she was going to get through her first day back, without him thinking that she was incapable of performing her duties.
He nodded again, but didn’t immediately move out of the doorway. A long silence followed, when he clearly wrestled with whether to say something else, then apparently decided against it as he moved out of the way, then fell into step behind her as she hit the stairs for the roof.
The less he talked, the more certain she got that this wasn’t going to work. She should just go to the lawyer tomorrow and have documents started to acknowledge Gabriel as father and begin a joint custody arrangement. It couldn’t hurt, and at this point it might be the only thing to save them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AS SOON AS his butt hit the seat, Gabriel switched on the radio. Seconds later, a call came from Dispatch for them.
While Penny went through the pre-flight as fast as she could, he answered.
“I know you’re not on shift for another ten, but are you ready to fly yet? Massive pileup on the turnpike at the tunnel toll gates. They’re calling in all flight crews.”
Gabriel looked at her for confirmation they were ready.
She nodded. “Thirty to flight.”
“We’re go in thirty.”
Grabbing her headset, Penny put it on, buckled in, and he did the same. After she’d checked a couple more things, they lifted off.
“Told you it’d be a busy morning,” she said into the comm, “but we’re about ten minutes away. I hope they have some ground crews doing triage.”
He knew what she was doing, she was trying to make things easier between them, and he appreciated it. Since yesterday morning Penny didn’t feel quite so much like the stumbling block to their relationship. He could see she was trying, and the extent of her honesty on any situation cleared up his confusion. He didn’t trust her, she said it again and again, but he was starting to wonder if it was her he didn’t trust. He trusted her on the job, at least when she wasn’t ill as she claimed to not be today, but nothing in their history said he couldn’t trust her. Maybe he didn’t trust himself.
The Rescue Doc's Christmas Miracle Page 11