Her Baby's Hero

He didn’t answer, his gaze fixing for a moment on her face before it dropped again to her six-months-pregnant belly. Under his scrutiny, a nausea kicked up that rivaled her eight weeks of morning sickness. She had to resist the urge to shut the door in his face.

His perfect patrician brow furrowed. “We used a condom.”

She tried to smile, but her face felt too stiff. “Best-laid plans.”

His gaze locked with hers. “Why did it take so damn long to tell me?”

“Everything about that night was a mistake. I wasn’t keen to revisit it.”

His jaw worked. “I still had a right to know.”

She should have called him the moment the test stick turned blue. But sometimes she could hardly believe that night had actually happened, that two near strangers—barely friends—had burned for each other that way. Then, after the ultrasound and Dr. Karpoor’s startling news, she’d needed time to wrap her mind around her predicament, time to get past the panic. It had taken her this long to get up the courage to call.

Even now she was reluctant to share the miracle inside her. “How do you know it’s yours?”

He didn’t even blink. “It’s mine.”

She dug her heels in at his arrogance. “How can you be sure? I wasn’t a virgin.”

He fixed her with his dark eyes. “You might as well have been.”

While she reeled at that bald assessment, he looked past her into the house. “Can I come in?”

Again the impulse surged inside her to shut the door. If she ignored him, maybe he’d leave, then she could pack everything up in her bug and disappear. She certainly had enough experience disappearing.

But things were different now. She started teaching at Hart Valley Elementary in another week, had a classroom full of second-graders to educate. It was what she’d trained for these past several years at Berkeley. Not to mention Sara and her new baby. How could she leave her sister and nephew behind?

He put a foot up on the threshold. “We need to talk about this, Ashley.”

She imagined Jason stepping inside, the small space filled with his presence. Back at Berkeley—until that night—she’d never entertained the least lascivious thought about Jason. But now memories crowded her mind, his skin against hers, his mouth everywhere. The images overwhelmed her. She would be an idiot to allow him into the close quarters of her quirky octagonal house.

She needed a chance to get her head on straight again, to reestablish Jason as the prickly, straitlaced man she recalled from school. Anything else she might be feeling was just hormones and not worth crediting.

Pulling the door shut behind her, she squeezed past him onto the deck of the front porch. “Let’s take a walk.”

He followed her down the porch steps and toward the pasture and paddocks where the horses dozed. As they passed the tack room, she grabbed the brand-new bucket of treats Sara had left there. Before she’d gone more than a step, Jason plucked it out of her hand. “You shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy.”

She tried to take it back. “It can’t be more than five pounds.”

He pulled it out of her reach and read the label. “Five point five.”

She would have wrested it from him, but the last thing she needed was a tug-of-war. Giving up the battle, she continued toward the paddocks. He gestured for her to go first when the walkway narrowed around the corner of the covered arena, and she made sure to keep her distance. Up the hill, the horses had noticed their approach and stood at attention in their paddocks.

In early September, the Sierra foothills still shimmered with heat. The grass on the rolling pasture that had glowed a vivid green in the spring lay drooping and yellowed now. September’s shorter day was a relief, but at four in the afternoon, sunset was still a few hours away.

They arrived at the first gate to the pasture area. He put a hand out to stop her as she reached for the latch. “How far along?”

She bit back her irritation. “You can count as well as I can.”

He pushed open the gate before she could. “Six months, then.” He studied her swollen belly. “You’re pretty big.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

When she reached to shut and latch the gate again, he stood in her way to do it for her. The temptation to give him a poke rose up inside her, but that would mean touching him. She wasn’t touching him. “I’m not an invalid, for heaven’s sake.”

“I know.” His gaze moved from her face down the length of her, and despite her swollen body, she felt a trace of heat in the wake of his scrutiny. She’d heard sometimes women were more easily aroused during pregnancy, but she hadn’t believed it, until now. Maybe rampant prenatal hormones explained the baffling attraction she felt for him.

Not that he wasn’t easy on the eyes. He was as close to beautiful as a man could be, lean but muscular, with high cheekbones and deep brown eyes that had always fascinated her. There were lines bracketing his full mouth that hadn’t been there back at school and a new burden on those broad shoulders. She suspected she knew what weighed him down but wanted to see if he’d bring it up on his own.

One of the horses nickered, then the other five joined in. “They’re waiting,” she said, hand outstretched for the treats.

He pulled them out of reach. “I’ve got them.”

Resolute, she grabbed the handle and tugged, but he wouldn’t relinquish the bucket. They might as well have been a couple of two-year-olds fighting over a toy.

“I can carry it,” she said through gritted teeth.

With his free hand, he loosened her grip. As she lost her purchase on the handle, she tried to hold on to her irritation, but his warm touch distracted her. His fingers enfolded hers and his thumb traced one slow circle on her palm. She felt his arm tense as if he intended to pull her closer.

Then one of the horses called again and he dropped her hand. “Sorry.” Turning on his heel, he strode toward the paddocks. Her heart hammering, Ashley headed up the hill after him.

Once he had the bucket open, she gathered up a handful of treats and walked along the line of horses. As the white pony neatly lifted a treat from her palm, the question that had been burning inside her worked its way out. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

His dark gaze fixed on her. “Tell you what?”

She wanted to pound her fists on his chest. “About your father.”

Not a speck of emotion in his face. “What would it have mattered?”

“We were friends.”

“We were barely that.”

It was true, wasn’t it? But it cut so deeply. Especially considering the life growing inside her. “But you just left without a word.”

His gaze drifted to the trees beyond the paddocks. “You left first.” He said it matter-of-factly.

“I left your bed that night,” she conceded. “But you left school.”

He pinned her with his gaze, his expression opaque. “I had business to attend to.”

“I had to find out in the newspapers that your father died.” Shock enough that he had left without a word, doubly painful that he hadn’t shared the reason. “If I’d known—”

“What? You might have stayed until morning?”

If she didn’t know better, she’d think it mattered to him. But she knew nothing scratched very deeply beneath Jason’s surface.

Typical Jason to put her on the defensive. “I needed to think things through. We had one kind of relationship and then…” Their passion that night had completely knocked their casual friendship off its tracks. “I thought I’d have time to find you, to talk to you.”