by Anna Lowe
True love, his bear whispered. That’s why it feels so right.
Soren chewed on that thought for a little while. Maybe the bear did understand the concept better than he did. Maybe true love was more about forgiveness than pride. Looking forward, not looking back.
He stroked a thumb over her skin, and his bear nodded.
Mine.
He didn’t dare wonder if the bear meant more than Sarah by that.
The baby kicked as if in response.
Stubborn little thing, his bear smiled.
Soren took a deep breath. No need to get carried away on crazy thoughts when he was this exhausted, this confused. All that mattered was letting Sarah sleep.
Shh, he tried telling the baby. Let Mommy rest.
The baby went right on jumping like a little bean, so Soren tried humming. A really low, deep hum that was more vibration than sound, traveling through his chest and over to Sarah and the baby. He hummed a long, low note, took a deep breath, and did it all over again.
It took a while, but the bumping action calmed down and finally stopped. Which probably had more to do with the baby falling asleep than him humming, but still, it felt good. His dad used to hum to him like that at bedtime when he was a kid. Or maybe his mom? He couldn’t tell any more, the memories were so dim. But it felt right. Like a bridge from the past extending into the future, in a way.
A really crazy, unreasonable way, because it wasn’t his baby.
What if we make it ours? his bear tried.
A ridiculous suggestion, really. But he didn’t care any more. He let himself imagine what that might be like. Actually holding a baby and not just touching it under its mother’s skin. Seeing its eyes open, or better yet, watching it smile.
Getting to sleep was usually a matter of tossing and turning for an hour for him, but tonight…tonight was different. Peaceful. Serene. He counted the beats of Sarah’s heart, hummed a little more, and before he knew it, he wasn’t fighting a hundred invisible enemies but drifting gently away on a fluffy cloud of sleep.
Chapter Eleven
Sarah clutched at her sweet dreams the way a shipwrecked sailor might clutch a piece of wood. It seemed as if the storm surge of nightmares she’d endured over the past months were finally easing up and the sun was breaking through, because finally — finally! — here was a good dream.
Calm. Peaceful. Serene. She’d almost forgotten what that felt like.
She dreamed she was back in the cabin up in the hills, curled up with Soren. They’d gone up one winter weekend, a long time ago. Soren had built a big fire in the hearth, and they’d cuddled up under several blankets on the mattress. He’d spooned her good and close to his chest, strummed a thumb over her skin, and fallen asleep.
God, the things she used to dream of back then. Adventures. Passionate nights. Boundless horizons. But the past months had changed everything, and now this was her version of heaven. A peaceful morning in bed with nowhere to run to and no one to run from. None of the usual feet-mired-in-quicksand helpless dreams or the kind filled with silent screams nobody heard. Just a quiet, laze-around-in-bed kind of dream. Even the baby seemed to be snoozing peacefully away.
She sighed, stretched, and pulled the sheets closer. The cotton was so soft, it barely rustled. Then she went straight back to the dream and stroked Soren’s fingers where they lay curled around hers. They were thick and callused and full of little nicks and scars, so she tugged his hand to her lips and kissed it.
Behind her, Soren stirred and kissed her shoulder, making her hum with pleasure.
Her nose twitched as a thought struck her. She ought to have felt his kiss on bare skin, but it was a kiss through a layer of clothing. A flawed dream, she supposed.
Then he kissed her again, and her eyes flew open.
Half the morning sunlight in Arizona seemed to be trying to slant through the arched window, and the thin curtain was barely fighting it back. The room was filled with a rosy glow. Birds were singing outside, and she was awake.
Awake, not dreaming.
Soren really was curled up along her back. Soren really had kissed her shoulder. Soren really was holding her hand in the perfect position above the baby bump.
She stiffened, and her heart raced off in triple time as she lay perfectly still. What should she do? What would she say?
Soren’s thumb started to move over her fingers, gently sweeping back and forth, back and forth. He was awake, all right. So what to do?
She did nothing for a while, until, whoa — she realized that her fingers were stroking Soren’s in return and that his chest expanded in a sigh. Those big hands clasped around hers, dwarfing them.
And the crazy thing was, it felt good. Calming. Right. Her soul sang, and her body did, too.
Which might have been why she eventually wiggled slowly around to face him. A stupid move, really, because facing him meant facing reality.
To her surprise, though, Soren’s eyes were calm and blue as a summer sky, his expression somewhere between sad and wistful. Without saying anything, he reached over and rubbed a thumb across her lips. Over and back, over and back.
She almost said something, but what could she say? So she bit her lip instead and let tiny gestures do the talking. Her fingers stroked the fold of his ear, saying, I miss you so much. Her eyes welled up. I want to explain.
He smoothed his hand over her cheek, and that spoke volumes, too.
Then the baby shifted in a way that he had to feel, too, and she closed her eyes, waiting for him to recoil.
She waited a good, long minute, but Soren was still there. His body didn’t stiffen with tension, and his eyes didn’t blaze with jealousy. When his gaze dropped to her stomach, the corners of his mouth curled up a tiny little bit.
His face grew sad again when their eyes met, and his lips pursed as they did when he considered a problem.
A big problem, because even if it wasn’t a brick wall standing between them any more, there was still an abyss.
She was the one who pulled away in the end, and he was the one watching her go.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she whispered, though what she really needed was a graceful exit. Some space to think.
She stared into the bathroom mirror for a long time before going back to the room where Soren lay right where she’d left him.
She stooped down to cup his cheek, and he leaned into her touch.
“Thanks,” she whispered.
One word could never express all the emotions wrestling inside her, but anything else would have ruined the moment. She didn’t have it in her to talk. And kissing or cuddling — much as her body yearned for it, she wasn’t ready for more. She needed to quit while she was ahead. To hang on to the beauty of this morning exactly as it was. Nothing more and nothing less.
When she drew away, Soren sighed, but he didn’t protest. Not even when she padded silently out the door and down the stairs. Maybe he needed to hang on to the dream a little longer, too.
No one was up yet, because it was Monday, and both the saloon and the café were closed. Not even Jessica, the only early bird among them. Sarah made herself a cup of tea, sat at Soren’s desk, and sipped quietly for a while.
A delivery truck rolled down the back alley. A cat yowled, and a blue jay fluttered in the bird bath the neighbor had set up out back. Judging by the sounds filtering over from the street, the town was slowly waking up and getting to work.
So she did, too. Picking up where she left off, she leafed through the paperwork, organizing it into piles. A task just involved enough to keep the rest of her mind blissfully blank.
A half hour later, the stairs creaked, and a shadow filled the office doorway. She looked up to find Soren, wearing a pair of sweatpants and nothing else. Leaning against the doorframe, rubbing his shoulder against it like he had an insatiable itch, just like he used to do at that old cabin up on Cooper’s Hill. He’d stand there and rub his shoulder and look at her like he wanted to rub her the same way, whi
ch, of course, he eventually would do once they got naked and—
“Sarah,” he said. His voice padded into the room like a sleepy old cat. It was that quiet, that soft.
She was terrified he’d say something like, We need to talk. Something that would break this beautiful little make-believe world she was determined to hide in as long as she could.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She looked over the desk, trying to formulate a nice way of saying, Fixing this mess.
She answered his question with a question. Safer that way. “Have you and Simon been keeping the books on your own here?”
Soren scratched his stomach at a point where one row of his chiseled six-pack abs met another, and she got sidetracked for a moment.
She shook her head and forced her eyes higher. “Um… Say again?”
“Just me,” he grumbled, looking sullen.
Soren, huddled over numbers in this tiny space, she had a hard time picturing.
“Simon tends the bar,” he said. “I smoke the ribs. Neither one of us is much good at bookkeeping, so we tossed a coin.”
She could imagine her business-minded mother shrieking at that. You did what?
“What job did Simon get?”
It was good to have something to talk about other than the past. Something relatively safe.
Soren jerked his thumb toward the framed certificate on the wall. “Simon deals with city hall. Gets the licenses we need.”
She bit her lip. Only the Voss brothers would run a business on the basis of a coin toss. But heck, it seemed to work. The brothers managed the bar, and Jessica and Janna handled customer relations. All in all, the business seemed to be on the path to success. But the books…
Looking back at the paperwork littering the desk, she held back a pained sigh. Soren had never been any good at numbers. She’d had to help him with math all through school. In fact, she was the one who’d taught him how to write his sevens the right way and not to flip around his threes. Soren was plenty smart, but he was a little dyslexic, and it showed in his ledgers.
Soren sighed, seeing her pained look. “Let me get some coffee.”
She figured that was man-code for, I’m out of here, but three minutes later, Soren was back with a plate of muffins in one hand and two mugs clutched in the other. One coffee for him and a refill on tea for her.
She smelled the mug. Peppermint tea, just the way she liked it, with a spot of milk.
“Yesterday’s muffins,” he apologized, pulling up a chair. He opened up a ledger and grimaced at it.
Sarah watched him out of the corner of her eye. He’d grown up a lot in the past year. Hell, they both had. And though Soren had always been the quiet, serious type, she’d never seen him like this. So focused. So unhappy, yet so determined. So resolved to make the best of what he had.
He took a bite of muffin — which meant half the muffin disappeared — and ran his finger down the page. “I keep all the expenses here, and the income here…”
She blinked at the lined sheet filled with scratchy pencil marks. Even her technophobe father had finally given in and gotten a PC. Was Soren really keeping the books by hand?
“At the end of the week, I tally them here…”
She watched his thick finger run over thin lines of text, marveling at the self-discipline it took for a man like him to sit down and complete a chore like that. Soren belonged out in the woods. He belonged in a woodshed. A lumber mill, like the one his family had run. He didn’t belong behind a desk.
He pulled out a slightly less worn notebook. “At the end of the month, I carry that over to here…”
She squinted at the crooked columns, the scrawly script. “This is your POS system, huh?”
He frowned. “PO-what?”
“Point of sa—” She clamped her mouth shut. “Never mind.” Judging by his furrowed brow, he probably wasn’t familiar with COGS percentages, either. She’d thought the bookkeeping system Jessica used in the café was a little basic until now. Poor Soren was using Stone-Age tools.
He looked so glum, she smoothed her hand over his. She didn’t realize what she was doing until she’d touched down, and by then, it felt so nice, she couldn’t stop.
“You did a great job restoring the bar,” she said, trying to balance things out.
His downturned lips curved up a tiny little bit. “The bar, huh?”
Yeah, he knew she was trying to pep him up. He liked it, too.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“How’d you know that was me?”
She smiled. “I figured it had to be you, so I asked Simon. Three weeks, huh?”
According to Simon, Soren had spent two solid weeks sanding, removing paint, and filling in the dings before he’d put another long week into varnishing all those square feet of intricately carved wood and that smooth expanse of the bartop. Six layers of varnish, which meant sanding between layers, meticulous cleaning, a careful hand. No wonder the bar gleamed the way it did.
“Um…thereabouts.” His eyes were bright with pride.
“It’s amazing,” she said.
He shrugged. “It came out okay.”
“It came out great.”
They sat there for another quiet minute or two, gently rubbing fingers, half holding their breath. Enough for her hopes to rise that maybe the magic of the morning might last a little longer into the day.
But then Janna came bouncing down the stairs, and Sarah ruined everything by snatching her hand away from Soren’s like she didn’t want to be seen touching him.
Why the hell not? her soul screamed as Soren’s shoulders drooped.
“Morning!” Janna waved, oblivious to the tension that had suddenly sliced back into the room.
“Morning,” Sarah whispered, fighting tears that welled up out of nowhere.
God, she hated the emotional roller coaster of pregnancy. She hated tiptoeing around Soren when what she really wanted was to launch herself into his arms. She hated—
Her hand gripped the edge of the desk as she took in the mountains of unexplored paperwork. Bills, receipts, reminder notes. Soren must hate every minute he had to spend in that chair. Soren must have hated a lot of things he’d had to do to make a new start in life. If he could accept them, so could she.
“Listen,” she said to Soren, trying to bridge the gap she could already feel opening up between them again. “Why don’t you let me help you out in the office?”
“Don’t need help,” Soren muttered, getting to his feet.
Janna popped her head back in the doorway. “Oh my God, does he need help.”
“Janna,” Soren warned.
“Seriously, you need help,” Janna insisted.
Sarah could see the color rise in Soren’s face, but Janna plowed right on. Somehow, she managed the tightwire act of pushing Soren without actually making him blow up.
“Hey, I know you do your best,” Janna said. “But Sarah’s a total pro. You should see how fast she does the books for the café.” She rolled a wrist and snapped her fingers. “Like that. She’s amazing.”
Soren glared at Janna, but she didn’t seem to notice. She just pointed at his chest and tapped once or twice. “Just think. Lots more time for you to spend in the woodshop.”
Soren squeezed his lips, but Sarah caught the wistful glance he shot in that direction.
“Lots more time hiking or running or whatever it is you bear—” Janna coughed and sputtered on quickly. “Brothers! Whatever you brothers do out there in the woods.”
Sarah followed Soren’s gaze out the upper edge of the windowpane, where he’d be able to see the green blanket of the national forest that started not too far from town.
“I’m happy to help,” Sarah said.
“You’re doing enough.” He shook his head.
“A couple of hours sitting in a chair working a cash register hardly seems like enough.”
“Believe me, it’s enough,” he shot back. “Especially when you’re…yo
u’re…” He waved his hand in the air, not quite able to produce the word.
Janna arched an eyebrow and filled in what neither of them was ready to say. “Pregnant?”
Soren opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. His eyes churned and filled with pain.
God, there it was again. The one thing standing between them. The abyss.
“Which reminds me,” Janna said brightly, either ignoring or completely oblivious to the tension in the air. “Your appointment is at ten.”
“Appointment?” Sarah and Soren asked at the same time.
“Sure. With the obstetrician. Remember? Jessica made it for you.”
Sarah groaned. She’d been putting off a checkup, not ready to face those details of reality just yet, but Jessica had insisted.
“Oh!” Janna’s face fell as she remembered something. “We need to find you a ride.”
“A ride?”
“Jessica was going to take you, but the inspector is coming for a follow-up visit to the café today. Which reminds me, I need to get cleaning…” Janna trailed off. “Damn! That means I can’t take you, either.”
“No problem.” Sarah flapped her hands quickly. “I’ll take a cab.” She’d do anything to end the subject now, before Soren looked any more pained.
“Don’t be silly. Oh!” Janna announced. “Soren can take you.”
Sarah froze. Soren drew back.
“Um…” they both mumbled at the same time.
“Why not?” Janna insisted. “You’ve got the day off, boss.” She lifted an eyebrow at Soren.
“So does Simon,” he tried.
“Ha,” Janna said. “Do you really want him to take her to this appointment?”
Sarah worked up the nerve to drag her eyes from the carpet to Soren’s face, which was twisted with a look that said, Do you really want me to take her?
But Janna insisted, and when Jess came down, she insisted, too.
“It’s not like you need to go in, Soren. Just drive her, for goodness’ sake.”
The sisters goaded them through the next hour and right into the car at a quarter to ten.