The Soldier's Baby Bargain (3 page)

“Oh. It’s my maiden name. I plan to use it again, I just haven’t gotten around to having it legally changed yet.”

He looked up, his eyelids narrowing on her. She felt x-rayed. “I see,” he said quietly, resuming petting Topsy.

“Do you?” Faith asked cautiously.

He didn’t answer for a moment as he stroked the wriggling puppy. “I think I do. That’s what you wanted to talk to me about tonight, isn’t it?”

Faith swallowed thickly. A heavy sensation pressed down on her chest. Ryan knew that Jesse had been unfaithful to her. How else to explain his shuttered gaze and apparent discomfort? She experienced a wilting sensation. It was illogical and stupid, she knew, but it shamed her, to suspect he knew of Jesse’s infidelities. No matter how much she rationally knew that Jesse had been in the wrong, she still felt vaguely substandard as a female, knowing he’d found other women more exciting than her, that she hadn’t been sufficiently worth it for him to deny temptation and remain faithful.

“Yes, it is what I wanted to discuss with you. Among other things,” she admitted, glancing away from his stare.

He nodded once and stood. “I guess we better get going, then.”

She agreed. He helped her to put the squirming puppy into the crate.

“Topsy may not be ferocious, but you were right. She’s the cutest thing I’ve ever laid eyes on,” he observed a moment later as he opened the front door for her. Faith damned her pounding heart when he casually touched her waist as they walked together to his car.

“What are you hungry for?” she asked a few seconds later when he backed out of her driveway onto the rural road.

“I’ve already made reservations for dinner at Butch’s Dry Dock, downtown.” He glanced in her direction when she didn’t immediately respond. “Is that all right?”

“Oh...yes,” she said, flustered. “I love Butch’s.”

She couldn’t tell him his response had set her off guard because he’d planned dinner with her at one of the nicest restaurants in the area. Despite her self-admonishments to remember that this was an opportunity to settle business with the father of her baby, the evening was, indeed, starting to feel more and more like a date.

* * *

An hour later Faith watched as Ryan leaned against the high-backed booth at Butch’s, the remains of their delicious meal still on the table. Ryan had seemed intent on making her comfortable during their dinner, and his efforts were paying off. Her nervousness had slowly faded as the meal progressed and Ryan regaled her with some inevitable funny mistakes he’d made in starting up his business from scratch. It suddenly struck her that they hadn’t yet landed on the topic of Jesse. She wondered if Ryan was avoiding the issue purposefully.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Ryan asked, his eyes warm on her.

“It depends,” she said, a smile flickering across her mouth.

“What’s it been like for you? Being pregnant?”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes going wide. “It’s been...nice.”

“You haven’t been getting sick or anything?”

She nodded. “Yes, I got nauseous almost every day around the seven week mark, but believe it or not, I never threw up. It usually faded when I ate some crackers. I just had to make sure I didn’t let my stomach get empty. It’s gotten much better in the past week.”

“And fatigue?”

Again, she nodded, this time more emphatically. She paused while a busboy came to clear their table. “That was probably the worst of it.” She resumed when they were alone again. “Once I figured out why I felt like taking a nap by ten o’clock every morning, it seemed to help things, though.”

“When did you find out? That you were pregnant?” he asked.

“When I was about five weeks along.”

“I wish you would have called me.”

The back of her neck prickled with awareness at the sound of his low, resonant voice.

“I meant to tell you all along, Ryan. Please believe that. I was going to tell you at the same time I told my parents.”

“I believe you. You’re much too honest to make me think otherwise.”

She gave him a thankful smile. “I just wanted to get through my first trimester safely.”

“I understand,” he said. She searched his face. Seeing not a hint of anger, she sighed in relief.

“Ryan, there’s something I want us to be on the same page about,” she approached the topic cautiously after the waiter brought them coffee and tea. She sensed the tension that flew into his muscles.

“About Jesse?” he asked.

She nodded, took a deep breath for courage and blurted out the details of discovering Jesse’s infidelities. She was learning to read him, she realized after a minute or two of talking almost nonstop. Most people would have called his flat expression impassive, but that slight widening of his eyes meant all-out shock on Ryan’s face.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Melanie Shane
contacted
you, and told you about her affair with your husband?”

Faith nodded and poured hot water over her tea bag. The pain that went through her at the vivid memory was lessening now, altering from the stab of betrayal to the ache of regret. Mostly she was mad at herself for not facing the truth earlier. Jesse was charming and funny and dynamic, but he was
not
a one-woman man.

Nor a two-woman man, for that matter.

Sometimes it was just easier to be blind to the obvious.

“It was a few months before the crash. She found me through my veterinary practice’s website,” she said. She set down her spoon and met Ryan’s stare. “I’m just thankful that I happened to open the emails that morning. Often, Jane does it before me.”

Ryan shut his eyes briefly. Pain flickered across his hard face and was gone. “They had the most volatile relationship. Jesse and Melanie were either fighting like cats and dogs or they were—”

He stopped abruptly. Their stares held as she finished his sentence in her mind.

“When Melanie first wrote me, she was in quite a state,” Faith said after a long pause. “Apparently she’d discovered that Jesse had slept with a lieutenant who trained airmen on computers at the airport. Melanie was pretty upset by it.”

Ryan grimaced. “Damn. I can’t believe Melanie did that.” He exhaled heavily. “Strike that. I can. She’d get herself into a real state at times, when it came to Jesse. I suppose she had herself convinced she was doing you a favor by pouncing on you with the news?”

Faith nodded. “Bingo. You’d think we were blood sisters, both betrayed by the devil.”

Ryan grunted. “When in reality, Melanie was feeling furious and rejected by what Jesse had done. She ran blabbing to you because she knew it would hurt Jesse. She never gave a thought or care about what she was doing to you. I’m sorry, Faith.”

“It’s not your fault. You have nothing to apologize for.”

A muscle flickered subtly in his cheek. She shook her head sadly.

“You are
not
responsible for Jesse’s actions,” she stated the obvious.

“I’m responsible for my own.”

Faith swallowed uneasily. Is that how he thought of her and the baby? A responsibility? A burden?

“What was Melanie like?” she asked shakily after a moment, trying to divert his attention.

Ryan shrugged and poured some cream into his coffee. “A good chopper pilot. Volatile. Bit of a daredevil. Feisty exterior with a vulnerable core,” he mumbled succinctly.

“She was...pretty?”

He glanced up, pausing in the action of setting down the small pitcher. “Some men might have found her attractive,” he said with what struck Faith as forced neutrality.

She stared at the snowy-white tablecloth. Much to her surprise, given the topic, she wasn’t that upset. She’d suspected all along she wasn’t as devastated by the news as she should have been that Jesse was unfaithful. She’d been hurt. Jesse had been her husband, after all, and she’d planned to spend the rest of her life with him—before she’d discovered his infidelities.

But deep down she knew that if Jessie’d been the love of her life, that email from Melanie—and Jesse’s eventual admission that Melanie’s accusations were valid—wouldn’t have just been an unpleasant shock. It would have been a lancing, debilitating blow to her spirit.

Jesse had been so full of life. She’d often reflected after she’d learned of his infidelity that she didn’t want to be Jesse’s wife anymore, but she would have wished him well. Always. It hurt, to think of him not out there in the world somewhere...raising hell, warming someone with his smile and his jokes, hopefully finding the happiness she couldn’t give him.

She became aware of Ryan’s gaze on her—warm, concerned, wary. So, he
had
known all along about Jesse’s womanizing. How did that knowledge factor into their impulsive, impassioned tryst on Christmas Eve? How would it play into the fact that they were going to have a baby together? It was becoming increasingly clear that Ryan felt some sort of misguided responsibility toward her.

“Don’t pity me,” she said.

“I don’t pity you,” he said, his eyebrows pinching together in apparent bewilderment at her quiet forcefulness.

“No?” she asked, calmly removing the chamomile teabag from her cup. “You don’t have some kind of knight in shining armor syndrome going on for the scorned wife? You said that you visited me last Christmas Eve because you wanted to make sure I was okay...safe. Now that I’m pregnant, I don’t want you feeling regretful, Ryan. I need a father for my baby, not a guilty lover. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”

The spoon he’d been using to stir his coffee fell several inches to the saucer with a loud clinking sound. “That’s insulting.”

She met his stare levelly, difficult though it was. His eyes blazed like black fire. “Then why did you act so guilty about Christmas Eve? I’m not the fragile victim you’re imagining. If that was part of the appeal that night, you were misguided,” she said quietly.

He placed his forearms on the table and leaned toward her, his nostrils slightly flared. “I didn’t
know
whether or not you knew about Jesse and Melanie on Christmas Eve. For all I knew, you were still grieving the love of your life. I wanted you so much, I went ahead and did what I did anyway. So much for the idea that I’m
pitying
you.”

The anger clinging thickly to Ryan’s words didn’t have quite the effect on her that she would have thought. For some reason, the memory of their fevered joining chose that moment to bombard her consciousness like rapid-fire bullets—Ryan’s hands moving over her in carnal worship, his mouth closing over the tip of her breast and the answering sharp pain of longing in her womb, the feeling of him filling her until she was inundated by him, ready to burst with her desire.

By slow degrees she became aware that the blend of voices and clanking cutlery and china had become a distant buzz in her ears. Ryan blinked as if awakening from a trance and sat back in the booth.

“I am far from thinking that you’re a weak victim.” His gaze flickered up to meet hers. “I like you. I have from the first time Jesse ever read me one of your letters. I liked you even more when I finally met you. I respect the way you’ve built up your business and your life, even though you were a military wife and alone a lot of the time. I admired how you always managed to be so cheerful...convey so much warmth. I used to get resentful when Jesse didn’t return your letters regularly. I used to get resentful toward Jesse for a lot of things,” he mumbled under his breath, looking angry...
torn.

“Can I bring you any dessert?”

Both of them blinked and stared at the waiter like he was an alien.

“Faith?” Ryan asked.

“No, nothing for me,” Faith said.

Ryan also declined and the waiter left. Faith took a long drink of her ice water.

“That all still sounds like you’re feeling sorry for me, Ryan,” she said shakily.

“I don’t pity you, but I do feel bad about some things that have happened,” he said quietly. “I feel like a heel for barging in on you and laying you down on a couch and having unprotected sex with you after I’d been in your house for all of a half hour.”

Her mouth fell open at his blunt words. Once again the remembered images and sensations swamped her awareness.

“Let me get this straight,” she said slowly. “You like me, and you respect me, but because you wanted to have sex with me that night, that’s a problem. Is that because you usually don’t like and respect the women you sleep with? Attraction and respect don’t go together in your mind?”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

“Jesse used to imply that you liked female companionship, but weren’t much for a serious relationship with one woman.”

Realization subtly settled on his features. His eyelids narrowed. Faith caught an edge of the diamond-hard focus that had made him such a valuable officer and pilot. “Are you implying I’m like Jesse?”

She tilted her chin up, refusing to be intimidated. “Maybe.”

“Well I’m not,” he stated flatly. “I’m not saying Christmas Eve was a mistake because I’m a womanizer. I’m saying it was a mistake because it was so abrupt...strange...irrational...”

Mind-blowing,
Faith added in her private thoughts. His gaze flickered up to meet hers, as if she’d spoken aloud.

After a tense moment she exhaled and sagged in the seat. “I’m sorry. It’s not my place to judge you one way or another. That part of your life is none of my business.”

She glanced up in surprise when he reached across the table and grasped her hand.

“Just because I haven’t found the right woman yet doesn’t mean I haven’t been looking. I don’t thrive on conquest. Christmas Eve was
not
about that.”

She couldn’t look away from his eyes. His hand tightened on hers, his fingers brushing her wrist. She wondered distantly if he could feel the throb of her pulse.

“What was it about then?” she whispered.

Something flickered across his rugged features she couldn’t quite identify. “I’m not entirely sure. It just felt...unstoppable. Like I said that night, all that emotion must have been building.”

“You do hear about it happening after a tragic death,” Faith admitted. “Stuff builds up and then...bang. A lightening strike.”