by M. S. Parker
“Are you okay?”
Aline’s concerned question cut through my thoughts, and I realized I’d been heading down a dangerous spiral. I gave myself a mental shake.
“Of course.” I gestured to the bag I’d brought in. “I picked us up some Christmas cookies at a bakery on my way back.”
Her entire face lit up, and she ran over to me, jumping up to wrap her arms around my neck. I caught her automatically, a thrill going through me at the complete trust she had that I’d catch her. She planted a kiss on my cheek and squeezed me tight.
“I love Christmas cookies!”
I chuckled at her enthusiasm and barely managed to resist sliding my hands under her shirt to see if she was as bare as she felt. Instead, I used the opportunity to ask a question. “Does that mean you’re feeling okay?”
She slid down my body, and I sucked in a breath as her feet touched the floor, the shirt riding up to show that, no, she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
Fuck.
“I am,” she said. “In fact, I’m actually hungry. Should we find out if the soup tastes as good as it smells?”
I pressed my lips to her forehead. “That sounds perfect.”
As we moved around each other to fill our own bowls, she nudged me with her elbow. “What did you leave at work?”
“Oh, my health and life insurance stuff.” I waved a hand toward the envelope on the counter. “The way Cain has everything set up, even though we’re not married yet, I can put you on my health insurance because of the baby. I wasn’t sure what sort of coverage you had and figured even if you had insurance, having a secondary policy wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“That’s…yes, thank you.” She frowned.
“Should I have not done that?” I asked, working to keep my voice casual. I was so out of my depth here.
She smiled but still looked distracted. “No, that’s not it. Thank you for thinking of it because I hadn’t. Freedom and I have always had insurance through our parents’ policy because we were both single and in college, but I hadn’t thought about whether or not I was still covered after graduation.”
“Didn’t you need to have insurance to go to Iran? I’d think that Neutral Ground would make that a requirement.”
“And that would be why I’m frustrated with myself,” she said with a sigh. “I went to the hospital right after we got back and then went to see Dr. Rhimes last week. Neither time did I even consider that I might not have insurance.”
She made a frustrated sound, and I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what she was thinking. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up over it. I know what it’s like to suddenly make a major life change when life throws a curveball or two. No one can prepare for everything.”
This time when she smiled, it looked a little happier. “Thanks.”
Since we were on the subject, I figured I might as well stick with it. “I needed the life insurance papers because I’m putting your name on the policy as the beneficiary. While my military benefits won’t cover a girlfriend or a fiancée, the life insurance can go to whoever I pick, and after we’re married, I figured it’d be good to have something extra for you and the baby if something happens to me.”
“I don’t like thinking about that,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “I mean, I understand the reasoning, and I’m grateful for it, but I hate having this discussion, especially when we haven’t been together that long.”
A sliver of panic cut through me. “We don’t have to talk about it now if it bothers you.”
She shook her head. “No, we need to. I just feel like we’re doing all of this backward.”
Trying hard to contain the anxiety twisting up my insides, I explained my reasoning, “Yeah, it’s not exactly typical, but nothing about our relationship has been. I want to be involved in our child’s life from moment one, from before moment one, I guess. You moving in here makes more sense than you finding your own place in L.A. and trying to take care of everything there by yourself just because that’s what would be ‘normal.’” It was my turn to squeeze her hand. “Remember how we talked about not doing things based on everyone else’s opinions? We need to do this for us. For our baby. Our family.”
She was silent for a few seconds, and I worried that I’d pushed too hard, that I was being too intense. Then there was the fact that I hadn’t actually asked her to move in. I’d spoken more like it was an assumption, which might not have been the best way to handle things…but then she nodded.
“You’re right. I’m still processing everything.”
I moved my thumb across her engagement ring and realized I hadn’t asked her if she liked it. I didn’t want her to wear something she hated just because she thought I needed her too.
“I meant to ask if this is what you wanted,” I said, tapping the ring. “We can exchange it if–”
“I love it.” This smile reached all the way to her eyes. “It’s beautiful and exactly what I would’ve picked for myself.”
I didn’t hide my relief. In some ways, we knew each other better than couples who’d been together for years, but in a lot of other ways, we were still mostly strangers. Like the fact that I’d never met her parents and had no idea what they thought about me. Or if they knew anything about me at all.
Which brought me to something else we needed to discuss.
“With everything else going on, we haven’t really talked about Christmas.” I gestured to the still fairly bare room. “I don’t really have a lot in the way of decorations, but I arranged for a tree to be delivered this evening. I wasn’t sure if you already had plans, and it’s okay if you do, but I thought if you didn’t, maybe we could decorate it together.”
She finished her soup before responding. “I promised my parents that I’d be over tomorrow around noon.” She glanced at me and licked her lips. “I didn’t tell them that you’d be coming because I wasn’t sure what you had planned.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Some of the tension went out of her body. “I’d really like that.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Then we’ll get your things from Martina’s this afternoon, pick up something for dinner, then come home to eat. After that, we’ll do a video call to my parents, and whoever’s there already with them. Once that’s done, we can have Christmas cookies and decorate the tree, maybe watch a movie.”
“That sounds good.” She stood, her expression slightly dazed. “Do you want more soup?”
I shook my head. “No, thank you. Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll clean up?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just putting things in the dishwasher. And we had a deal about me letting you clean up last night, remember?”
I reluctantly nodded. “All right. Thanks.”
I was going to choose my battles with her. No way would I let her wear herself out, and the closer she got to delivery, the more I’d do for her, but right now, this wasn’t worth an argument. Especially since we had plenty of other things to talk about.
“I’m not sure which of my siblings will be at my parents’ place tonight, but there are so many of them that I don’t think calling each of them to tell them about the baby and the engagement is necessary. We can just tell everyone who’s on the call and then let them pass the news around. That’s usually how we do things like this. It’s hard to get everyone together, even for a holiday.”
“You want to tell them about the baby and being engaged?”
It was my turn to frown. Did she want to keep this a secret because she wasn’t sure about it? About the baby or about us?
I didn’t like the idea of hiding something like this. Did she think we wouldn’t last long enough to get married? “Do you not want to?”
As I waited for her answer, I wondered what I could do to change her mind. I couldn’t lose her or the baby. Not when I was so close to being able to keep them both safe.
Thirty
Aline
I’d wanted
to talk over lunch, discuss with Eoin what we were going to do. The nitty-gritty details, since the basic ‘keeping the baby’ and ‘getting married’ part of things was already settled.
I’d thought he’d be in the same place I was. That his grand gesture of making over his new home to accommodate a baby and then proposing had been all he’d had on his mind. Not that they had been unimportant because they both meant a lot to me, but I’d still thought we would be on the same level when we had this discussion.
But he’d been taking charge and doing things that needed to be done while I’d been sitting around, talking to myself. He’d figured out health insurance that I hadn’t even thought about and had even made provisions in case something happened to him before we married. He’d pretty much assumed that I was moving in right now, and we’d be moving forward together from here on out, so he’d started to work on what shape that future would take.
I was upset with him for how he’d responded when I first told him I might be pregnant, but since then, he’d adjusted better and faster than I had. He was ready to announce our engagement and tell people about the baby too. I hadn’t even had the guts to ask Eoin to go with me tomorrow. I’d waited for him to offer.
Now, I had a question to answer and absolutely no idea what to say.
“Hey, talk to me.” Eoin’s concern was written all over his face. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
He meant it. I had no doubts about his sincerity. With the exception of me putting us in actual life-or-death danger, he always respected my choices, and I could excuse those prior moments of manhandling me without my consent since he’d done it to save our lives.
“I’m fine with telling your family that we’re engaged. It’s the pregnancy part I’m a little…leery of sharing.” I sat back down across from him. “I just think that we might consider holding off until I’m a little farther along.”
His finger traced a pattern on the back of my hand, and I had a feeling that he wasn’t even truly aware of the movement, focused more instead on what I’d said. “Is something wrong? With the baby?”
“No,” I assured him. “It’s just…my mom had so many issues getting pregnant, staying pregnant…I just don’t want to jinx it.”
He came around the table and knelt in front of me, taking my hands in his. “Everything is going to be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you or our baby.”
I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have control over enough of the world to make that type of promise, but I knew that he already understood that. He wasn’t making that vow because he was naïve or a dreamer. He was making it because he was just as scared as I was.
“It’s okay,” he said. “We don’t have to tell anyone that you’re pregnant. I just thought that it would make sense when we told them about the engagement. Either way, people are going to think we’re moving fast, but I thought it might make things easier.” He kissed my hands. “We won’t say anything you don’t want to. We don’t even have to tell anyone about being engaged. You can just be my girlfriend, and we stayed in L.A. because we wanted to spend our first Christmas here together.”
He’d do it. He’d let me hide our engagement and our child, like I was ashamed of them both. And how long would the deception really last? Even if we got married tomorrow, people would still be able to do the math and figure out that the baby had come before the ring. It wasn’t as if the two of us had even known each other long enough for anyone to speculate that we’d gotten engaged because it was the next logical step in our relationship.
I was scared that something would go wrong, and that came from my mother’s medical history, but if I was being truly honest, if the conception had happened at a later point in my life, after a slightly longer relationship, I wouldn’t have been leery of telling our families. I’d never had the health issues that my mom had always had from years of trying to stay thin enough for her career. I was also younger than she was when she’d started trying to get pregnant.
No, if I asked him to keep a secret like this from his family, I would be doing it for selfish reasons, concerned about what people would think about me and the choices I’d made in my life. They were going to be my family too, and I didn’t want the first time I met them to be looked back on as me hiding things from them. I also didn’t want Eoin to think that I was in any way ashamed of being with him. My own issues needed to take a back seat here.
Honestly, I was beginning to think that I should follow his lead in all of this. He clearly knew better than I did about what needed to be done or how to do it. I was in so far over my head that if I didn’t take his hand, I’d drown.
“No,” I said with a smile. “This isn’t just about me. This is our engagement. Our baby. I want you to be able to tell who you want when you want.”
“Are you sure?”
The joy I saw in his eyes told me that I’d made the right choice. After an awful year, he deserved to be able to share some good news with the people he loved. And unexpected as all of this had been, it was indeed good news.
Thirty-One
Eoin
If I didn’t quit sneaking looks at Aline, she was going to catch me and want to know what the hell I was doing. Then I’d be put in the very awkward position of either lying to her and her figuring it out or telling the truth and pissing her off. Neither scenario ended well for me.
She’d agreed to tell my parents about our engagement and the baby, and I was going with her tomorrow to spend Christmas Day with her family. Both of those were things that I wanted, but I kept feeling like some other shoe was going to drop and ruin it. That she’d suddenly recognize the fact that she could do so much better than me and decide that, while she might want the baby, she didn’t want me along with it. Or she’d think about how pissed Freedom was going to be when she saw me and realize I wasn’t worth the headache.
Death wasn’t the only thing that could take someone away.
So, I kept watching her, paying close attention to every expression, to every shift in body language.
I’d been worried at Martina’s that I’d have to talk Aline into letting me carry everything, but she actually hadn’t had that much stuff, so it’d been easy to take the heavier bag and leave her with the smaller bag that held her laptop and other electronic stuff.
When we picked up things from her parents’ house tomorrow, I expected a little more push-back, and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to what would happen when we went to Stanford to move everything from the apartment she shared with Freedom. But that was the future, and I had enough to think about just for today and tomorrow.
On the way home, we picked up some Italian food from a restaurant run by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who explained to us that since they didn’t celebrate holidays, they made a killing staying open when everyone else was closed. They were reasonably priced, and the food was really good, so I didn’t mind that they’d included a couple copies of The Watchtower in the bag with our food.
Now, as I finished cleaning up after our meal, Aline went to clean up and put on a nice sweater even though I’d told her that no one would care what she was wearing. I got it, though. I’d already planned on telling her to pick out my clothes for tomorrow because I wanted to make a good impression on her parents. Freedom already didn’t like me, so I had that strike against me before we even got there. Who knew the shit she’d told them about me?
“How does this look?” Aline asked as she came into the kitchen.
A deep, festive green, her sweater was just clingy enough to show off her figure but not so tight that it was inappropriate for a family engagement. It made her eyes appear even greener, and as I stepped closer, I reached out to see if it was as soft as it looked. Sliding my arms around her waist, I found that it was even softer than I’d thought.
“You look amazing.” I kissed her forehead. “We do these sorts of calls all the time, and the only thing we care about is that everyone’s wearing pants.”
She laug
hed, the sound edged with some nerves. “I shouldn’t think that would be a difficult rule to follow.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said with a laugh of my own. “My little brother, Sean, was visiting his twin, Xander, in England a couple years ago for their birthday, and Xander was on a video call with me and Leo. Sean walked behind Xander, stark naked and scratching his b–”
I cut off the last word as heat flooded my face. Talking to my fiancée about my brother being naked was bad enough. I really didn’t need to mention the whole ball scratching part of the story, especially if that meant she’d be thinking about his balls when she met him.
It took me a moment to realize that what I was feeling wasn’t only jealousy, though that was bad enough. It was insecurity. A little voice in the back of my head wondering if Aline might find one of my brothers more attractive. Hell, it could be all of them. More than one person had commented over the years how unfair it was for one family to have so many good-looking people in it, and it wasn’t an exaggeration.
“Why was your brother in England?” she asked. “Xander, I mean. I understand why Sean was there.”
“Oh, he plays football there.” When she gave me a confused look, I laughed. “Sorry. I forgot you’re American. Xander plays soccer for the Tottenham Hotspurs.”
“Aren’t you American too?” Before I could respond, it looked like something clicked in her mind. “Wait, when you first spoke to me, I remember thinking that you had an accent. Very faint.”
“I was born in Scotland. All of my full-biological siblings were. I was about five or so when we moved to the States, so I lost most of whatever accent I had. Alec’s the only one that really kept it. When we get stressed or something like that, you can still hear it with certain words since we grew up hearing Da’s accent.”
I didn’t need to add any more explanation about why she would’ve heard it in Iran. The situation wouldn’t have been easy at any point in time, but the fact that it’d been the first time I’d been in a firefight since the ambush had amped it up even more.