Her Baby's Bodyguard

Eva lifted her chin. She wasn’t going to allow herself to be uncomfortable over this. She hadn’t been deliberately exposing herself. She certainly hadn’t been trying to entice him. Under the circumstances, that would have been absurd.

Therefore, it was also absurd for her pulse to be accelerating. And for her blush to be deepening. She was no innocent young girl, she was a thirty-year-old woman, a mother. She had nothing to blush about. Above all, she certainly shouldn’t be studying Jack’s large, long-fingered hands and thinking about how before tonight it had been almost a year since she’d felt a man’s touch.

She shouldn’t be thinking of him as Jack either. He was Sergeant Norton.

The door swung open behind her to the sound of men’s voices and the stamping of boots. Flames crackled and shot up the chimney as cold air swirled along the floor. In one swift motion, Sergeant Norton got to his feet and placed himself between her and the other men. “Hang on for a minute, Kurt,” he said. “We’re not done.”

“Come on, Jack. You said you already slapped on a Band-Aid. What more do you need to do?”

“Do I tell you how to drive?”

“All the time.”

While the men spoke, Eva laid Katya on her lap and hurried to fasten her bra and straighten her clothes, a task made more difficult because her hands were trembling. The sergeant was using his body to shield her and Katya again, only this time he wasn’t trying to protect them from bullets. He was blocking them from the view of the other soldiers.

His gallantry only made her feel worse. He was doing his best to act respectfully. She really shouldn’t be thinking about his touch on her body.

“Leave the firewood by the door, junior.”

“We’ll need more before the night’s over,” Matheson said, moving toward the fireplace. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I left Wyoming.”

Sergeant Norton shot out his arm to stop him from going farther. “I said wait.”