Midwife's Longed-for Baby & the Prince's Cinderella Bride & Bride for the Single Dad (9781488022142)

by Anderson, Caroline; Berlin, Amalie; Taylor, Jennifer

  “I knew he would’ve, but I wasn’t so wounded as to be incapable of service. Leaving would’ve been selfish.”

  Dangerous word…

  He stared at the ceiling but there weren’t any answers there, just an expanse of white. And a tiny spider, which he could probably point out and distract her from this conversation…

  “Why would that hurt me?” she asked, not raising her voice—still calm, but too perceptive to be dodged. “What aren’t you saying?”

  His head throbbed behind one eye and he mashed his palm against it.

  Didn’t help.

  Touching her would help. He caught her closest hand again and worked his thick, clumsy-feeling fingers between her slender digits. Her thumb stroked his skin, helping more with that connective current still buzzing between them.

  “Because it felt like I’d be abandoning them. Him. It wasn’t some kind of respect for duty or the honor for service that got me back in a forward area. When my grandfather sent me into the military I had to make a new family, and I couldn’t abandon them.”

  Like everyone here abandoned me.

  He didn’t need to say the words; he could already hear them echoing in her mind.

  Her thumb stopped stroking and silence fell as she digested it. Even without looking at her, he felt her staring at his hand, and impulse confirmed it as he gave in to the need to see her.

  But it was the distinct lack of yelling that spoke the loudest. She was taking it onto herself.

  “It wasn’t just you,” he said softly. “It felt that way with my family too.”

  “Because of me.”

  “Because of me.” He leaned on the word. “If it had just been a failed marriage, everything would’ve gone differently. Seven years of service has given me a different perspective. I know I was spoiled—I always thought of my wants first. I wanted you—I made it happen. Like everything else in my life. I don’t begrudge them my military service—I came to love it pretty quickly. I would’ve easily been a lifer if I hadn’t been called home.”

  She nodded at appropriate intervals, assuring him that she’d at least heard him, but when she slipped her hand free and roughly shoved the rolled cuff up to bare his left arm—specifically the scar peeking below the cuff at his elbow—he wondered if she’d heard him after all.

  “You went through another attack?”

  Redirects were better than wallowing in what he’d laid out.

  “That happens in a war zone, but I’m going to assume you’re asking if I was wounded in another attack. And, yes, I’ve picked up a few non-life-threatening wounds here and there.”

  “A few?” Her voice rose sharply and she climbed over to straddle his lap while her fingers tore through the buttons on his shirt, her face a picture of such horror he was almost afraid to say anything else.

  “Non-lethal,” he said slowly, but leaned forward as she shoved the shirt off his shoulders, then attacked the tee shirt beneath.

  The word hadn’t penetrated; she searched him as if he carried live explosives.

  “No one reported other wounds. It wasn’t in the news or in the papers. Mom would’ve told me if she’d heard anything like that, and I had alerts. I had alerts, Quinn. I had Internet alerts to tell me when anything happened with you. There wasn’t anything reported!” She leaned back enough to look at his chest, and found both scars at once.

  “I didn’t report them. They were nothing…”

  “Dammit, Quinton Corlow! What else?”

  “Should I just list any wound I’ve had since I saw you? These are nothing.”

  “Was this another bullet?”

  “No,” he answered as her gentle fingers stroked over a puckered scar on his right flank. “That was a little piece of shrapnel. Again, it was nothing. It barely got past the body armor.”

  “And this?” She gingerly touched a three-inch slice of a scar on his other side.

  “That was a bullet. Grazed me.”

  “Any other places hidden by your clothes?”

  He tried not to look at the scar on his left arm, the one she’d initially spotted but had gotten so carried away in searching she seemed to have forgotten. He’d like her to keep forgetting it; he’d like her to forget anything to do with that injury. “Just what you’ve seen.”

  Nothing more to see. Move along…

  “None of these required surgical intervention?” She caught his face and those gorgeous blue-green eyes drilled into him.

  He wanted to be annoyed, but he had a seven-year void to fill where he would’ve killed for her attention and concern. “The bullet didn’t lodge in me. The shrapnel was so shallow I grabbed it with tweezers. Only needed antibiotics and butterfly strips.”

  “And this one?” She let go of his cheek and reached for his left arm, his heart plummeting as she lifted it to examine the scar. “A fourth attack?”

  “No.”

  “Two at once?”

  He nodded and, for all his talk of openness and learning to discuss painful things, he let instinct take over—to protect her from further gory details as he protected family. She was family again. Gripping her hips, he tugged her forward until that hot little mound of flesh between her thighs ground into him.

  Pressed against him, it wasn’t even a stretch to trace kisses along the side of her neck, to nose into the strawberry locks she’d let down when she’d gone upstairs to change.

  * * *

  Anais’s breath caught at the pressure of his rapidly responding body between her legs. The treacherously light brush of his lips along the tender, sensitive skin below her ear brought a melting heaviness that demanded more.

  He’d survived—the living heat of him rocked beneath her, urging her fully against him, compelling her arms to slide around the wide breadth of his shoulders. He was safe now. It might feel urgent to know, but so did the desire to be closer.

  His arms around her, his hands beneath her pants squeezing bare flesh as he ground her purposefully against him…made his intentions completely clear.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he murmured against her ear between kisses, and the words somehow brought their situation back into hazy focus.

  He’d said no on Tuesday. Not without words from her.

  Slowly, understanding began to seep back in.

  They’d been talking and he’d suddenly shifted direction.

  She knew that pattern.

  She pushed against his shoulders to open enough space to look at him.

  “Why now? You’ve changed your mind about sleeping with me?”

  The sigh that burst from him accompanied by those previously heavily lidded eyes snapping closed answered even before he flopped his head back against the cushioned seatback.

  No words. No denial. No agreement.

  He was distracting her.

  “You ass!” She shoved herself off his lap hard and didn’t stop until she was a good meter away.

  “See? I knew this would lead to a fight.”

  “You tell me about that scar right now!” She ran back through the conversation. He thought knowing would hurt her. “That happened when your hand was shot? A second bullet?”

  He hadn’t lifted his head or opened his eyes. She’d have wondered if he’d fallen asleep if not for the vein pulsing wildly in his throat.

  “No.”

  “Shrapnel?”

  “Yes.”

  His flat answers made it worse—as if she was going to hear he’d been injured by friendly fire, or while hammering on a live bullet in some suicide attempt.

  The ring…

  “I thought you said it was stuck into your palm.” She meant to shout. She meant to scream. But the words were just above a whisper.

  Enough to hear her, he opened his eyes but there
still was no life in his words. “Not the ring.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head and a pleading look descended over him.

  “Worse than the ring?”

  What could be worse than the ring?

  “Any additional information about that is going to make it worse. Just let it go.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “Bone.”

  One word dropped and her body went haywire, like every possible sensation fighting for control of the nerves in her skin. Cold. Burning. Tingling. Jolting pain. Her hands flew to cover her face, as if that could protect her from it.

  The darkness behind her eyes filled with terrible visuals to accompany the words. A slow motion track of a bullet striking his hand, then a spray of flesh, bone and platinum.

  The first time her mind had conjured the images of what had happened, his fingers had come off intact…after dangling by skin. Now they exploded, flesh, blood, and pieces of his own bone lodging in distant parts of his body.

  By the time heavy rolling nausea replaced the sensation short-circuit Quinn’s hands closed on her shoulders to shake her out of it.

  “This is why I didn’t want to tell you.” He demanded, “Are you sick?”

  Demanded.

  “Yes!” she barked in return, flinging her hands free of her face and his off her in a spike of adrenalin she’d never been so thankful for.

  Anger with herself wasn’t the only emotion she had a right to in this moment. He’d earned her anger too. “What else are you hiding about that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You know what? I don’t care. I don’t care. You have to go now. I want you to go. You go home.” She knew she was muttering. She knew she was ranting. She became aware she was also ripping through the closet when she snatched up his jacket and slammed the door. “Clothes. You have clothes. Put on your clothes.”

  He took the jacket, but eyed her with such calm she wanted to hit him.

  “Clothes in case the cameras followed us home. And I hope the car waited so you don’t have to call a cab or hitchhike!”

  “Anais…” The way he said her name proclaimed her the unreasonable one. “I didn’t want to make it worse. I was cruel when I told you about it the first time.”

  Grabbing both shirts from the sofa, she pushed them into his arms too. “No, rather than just telling me, you did what you always do. Distracting me with sex from something you didn’t want to talk about. You said we’d do better this time, but you’re still doing it.”

  The difference was she wouldn’t let him get away with it this time.

  “We have done better. It’s a process. You don’t fix things overnight. Yeah, okay, maybe I screwed up, but you didn’t see your face at dinner when you talked about my hand. And when I told you the first time…”

  When he started pulling his shirts on, she pushed past him to head up the stairs.

  “This isn’t done. Be angry. That’s fine. I’m not exactly happy either right now, but we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Rolling her eyes, she called over her shoulder to lock the door behind him, too weary from the dreadfully long day to even keep fighting about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  QUINN GAVE ANAIS three days to get over being angry with him. No calling. No texting. No standing outside her house with a stereo blaring some sappy love song…

  He tried to wait and be patient, and that lasted until Wednesday. The Sip was coming up and he needed this sorted out before they had to make their biggest public appearance before the wedding the following weekend.

  Which was how he found himself knocking at her office door after Ben had alerted him to her presence at the facility for the first time since their divorce failure had been made public.

  This time, he didn’t wait or second guess, just knocked and went inside.

  She sat at her desk, dressed in her uniform, a prosthetic limb on the desk and a pair of calipers in hand, checking measurements. When he closed the door, she looked up as if she’d expected him. “Hi.”

  “You’re back at work?”

  “I’m here two days this week only. They needed me to fill a couple shifts while they’re scrambling to hire someone to cover my patient list until we know whether I’ll be able to come back full-time.” She gestured to a chair opposite her desk. “I was going to call later.”

  “You were?” He sat. It all seemed too easy. There wasn’t that fizzing crackle about her that announced her anger today and, with the transparency of emotion in her eyes these days, that was something to take comfort in.

  She gestured again with the calipers to a newspaper on the corner of her desk. “Story about the embassy party and The Sip.”

  “I’ve seen a few photos of us from that night, but no articles yet.” He opened it where she directed him to read the story while she finished up with the prosthetic.

  “It’s pretty positive,” she said and began packing up the limb.

  The writer reported mundane facts about the party and general impressions of those in attendance, but finished with a quote from an unnamed source about the royal couple.

  “‘Princess Anais choked up when describing the harrowing days after the Prince Captain’s injury and how it changed her heart…’” Quinn read out loud, then looked at her, the words leaving a bad taste in his mouth. “That’s not exactly accurate. You said it changed your specialty, but this makes it sound like you heard I was hurt, realized you loved me and then magically became a good person.”

  For once when talking about the media, she chuckled, rising to round the desk so she could lean against it before him. “But it doesn’t say I did something bad.”

  “You think it’s positive?” He chucked the paper onto the floor and wiped his hands on his trousers, just to get that slick newspaper feel off his skin.

  “It’s more positive than anything else they ever wrote about me. About us.”

  Hearing her say us after a tense few post-fighting days helped a little. “I suppose. But I still don’t like it. Someone putting it like that when it was personal and heartfelt. It wasn’t a show. I don’t like the way it’s being twisted.”

  He was so turned inward, trying to match the words he’d read with the speaking voices of those who’d been sitting near them, he didn’t notice her moving until she filled his vision and just sat across his lap.

  That simple move summoned a smile he couldn’t contain as their eyes met.

  “You’re not angry with me anymore?” he asked, holding off on wrapping his arms around her, on kissing her, until he was certain.

  “I got over it last night. But I was still dreading this conversation. Be happy. The article did something else good for us besides not painting me as a horrible wretch.” She wrapped one arm around his shoulders and leaned in, giving him an unspoken green light to do what his arms ached for.

  “What’s that?”

  “Gave you the chance to say something wonderful, and complain about the press with enough heat to rival my old tirades.”

  He couldn’t help pressing his luck. “If I write a strongly worded letter, you think you might feel moved to kiss me?”

  Her answer was to press her soft lips to his, warm, lingering and loving. One kiss that lasted long enough to imprint the feel of her long after it ended and she’d leaned her forehead against his.

  Cheekiness aside, he felt the words coming out before he even knew what they were going to be. “Are we okay?”

  She nodded subtly. “Just don’t do it again. I’d rather you hurt me than sweep everything under the rug. I get that you don’t mean it that way, but it makes me feel like you don’t care enough to make the effort.”

  “That’s not—”

  “I know.”

  He should tell her about the v
ideo. The one he hadn’t watched. The one he really knew too little about to drop on her now.

  She tilted her head to his shoulder and, instead of speaking, he held her closer.

  He’d tell her.

  After the wedding.

  * * *

  A wide valley ringed the base of Palace Peak, the land long devoted to sport or merrymaking related to various holidays and festivals.

  In honor of The Sip—the big, traditional party given before royal weddings—massive colorful tents littered the valley in a zigzagging path toward the palace, each representing a different brand of mead made by his countrymen.

  Quinn watched as, far below, people prowled from tent tavern to tent tavern, sampling each brand’s mead en route to the large white pavilion at the back, where the revelers would cast their vote on the gender of their future child and await their King and his family.

  He couldn’t see the details from the high vantage point at the rear of the palace, but from a distance it looked like fun, like organized, colorful chaos.

  Due to the popularity of the event, in his grandfather’s time—when travel became much easier—it had been changed to an invitation only event rather than the free-for-all the old festival valley took years to recover from. For three generations now, a select few thousand guests were invited personally by the royal family, and a lottery system bestowed the remaining five thousand plus-one invitations, resulting in ten thousand more guests from the citizenry. Nearly fifteen thousand people waited for them below.

  One big, ironically named open bar.

  “Did the organizers provide safe, free transportation for our guests and extra security as I asked?”

  Quinn turned at Anais’s voice and felt a huge smile steal across his face. She hated the title, but in that dress…she was a princess. A princess dressed in a color he would never tire of. One sexy bared shoulder, then some manner of short, sheer blue and green ruffled silk that blended together but still hugged her slight curves.

  “And food to lessen the possible drunken debauchery, Your Gorgeous Highness.”

  She scrunched her face at the title. “Don’t forget lessening the extent of the probable poor decision-making.”