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  “Get back up in the tube,” I gestured to the tube with my chin. “I’ll help you.”

  Louis floated away back to his tube and I held Reggie’s still for her.

  “This was really hard the first time,” she admitted. “Can you give me a boost?”

  I hooked my arm around the tube and nodded at her in an ‘okay go’ kind of way.

  She went, and I boosted her up by her ass.

  My fingers curled around the inside of her thigh, and I swear that I heard her moan as I pushed her into the tube.

  She flopped and flipped, and I held on to make sure that she didn’t fall right back out. Which only ended up with me having my hand in her crotch—or what it appeared like—while she came to a stop.

  When she was through flopping around I let her go—reluctantly—and she smiled at me in thanks.

  I nodded once and went back to my tube.

  Once I was back in, Sammy handed me his beer, but all the while he watched me with a frown.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What was that back there?” he asked curiously.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  I was treating Reggie like she was mine, and for my own sanity I had to freakin’ stop.

  Chapter 8

  Better grab a dumbrella. It’s really stupid out there today.

  -Text from Reggie to Nathan

  Reggie

  “What’s going on?” I asked quietly.

  “Baby Stanley had a turn for the worse through the night,” my charge nurse, Peyton, said as she read off the paperwork above Eerie’s child’s bed. “All hands on deck today, girl. We don’t care if Eerie’s a dumbass. We’re going to need you today.”

  I walked over to the baby’s bedside and looked at him.

  For a twenty-nine weeker, he was big. He looked like one hell of a fighter.

  After one last glance at the little boy to make sure everything was okay, I went about my work.

  Sierra floated in about an hour later looking frazzled.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked curiously.

  She pointed to her stomach. “I had a doctor appointment.”

  It was her eyes gleaming that gave it away. She was pregnant. The turkey basting had worked.

  “Congrats, darlin’,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and squeezing her tight.

  Sierra returned the gesture and stepped away, her eyes taking everything in.

  “Okay, where am I needed?” she asked.

  I went about telling her everything that happened, ending with Baby Stanley.

  “They think he might have an infection, but we’re not sure just yet. His temp is slightly elevated, and we need to keep a close watch on his jaundice levels.” I spouted off the information and looked at her. “I have been informed that it’s all hands on deck, so I don’t have to keep my distance today. If you need anything, holler.”

  Sierra nodded and reached for a pair of gloves that were on the pillar beside her head.

  Just as she did, Baby Stanley’s stats started to drop, and I rushed over there while pulling on my own new set of gloves.

  Just as I did, the doors to the NICU whooshed open, spitting out Eerie who rushed to our sides.

  I started to move everything from around the baby—the blankets that held him propped up to one side so that he wouldn’t be lying in one spot all the time—and was just about to move the baby onto his back when Eerie shoved me aside.

  “Don’t touch my kid!”

  This would be the very first time that I would not feel bad about checking a mother to get her out of my way.

  “Move, or I’ll move you.” I shoved her right back, pushing her skinny ass out of my way.

  Eerie went to retaliate but Sierra was there, pushing her back as well.

  “Listen, ma’am,” Sierra said, not nicely, but definitely not mean like I would have. “Your son is fighting for his life right now. His stats are dangerously low. We need you to back up and let us work.”

  For once, Eerie listened.

  Imagine that.

  ***

  “I’m going to take my lunch,” I said as I gathered up some papers. “I need to get you those papers out of my car anyway.”

  I gestured at the parking lot that we could see from our window out of the NICU.

  “Okay,” Peyton paused. “If you see Eerie, you can tell her that she’s allowed to come back in.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I’ll just do that.”

  I’d rather eat dirt than talk to Eerie.

  But I would do it anyway, because at the root of what she’d done today, it was just because she was scared for her baby.

  I could understand that.

  Mostly.

  “That’s exactly who I want to talk to,” I muttered as I made my way out of the NICU.

  Thankfully I didn’t see her anywhere, so I thought I was home free.

  I made it all the way out to my car, gathered my paperwork that I needed for my insurance, and headed back inside with my head down as I scanned the papers.

  A gust of wind sent a chill down my spine and I looked up. As I looked up, I didn’t see the curb, which meant that I almost face-planted into the bushes that separated the entrance from the exit.

  “Shit.” I laughed, looking down at the roses that I nearly took a nose dive into. “That would’ve been bad.”

  I maneuvered myself around it just in time for another gust of wind to slap me in the face.

  The top paper blew out of my hand and I cursed, ducking down to pick it up, but just as I was about to reach for it, the wind blew again, pushing the paper out of my reach.

  This happened four more times before I finally pinned it to the wall of the hospital.

  As I was about to stand up straight, furious whispering had me freezing.

  “I don’t care what you have to fucking do, Dr. Messings. This is a big fucking deal. She’s working with my child. A child that I’m not supposed to have, and she knows it.” Eerie growled angrily. “No, I don’t care if you don’t work on the NICU floor. You do work at this hospital, and likely have more pull than you realize. Do something!”

  I froze.

  Literally, I tried to stand up, but my knees were frozen in my half-bent position, which actually put me behind a bush that was partially blocking me from Eerie’s view.

  “This baby belongs to a man that doesn’t know I had his child,” she hissed. “You helped me, and if we don’t figure this out, you’re going down right along with me.” She shuffled, causing dirt to fly in my direction. Still, I held still. “What about getting him moved to a different hospital? There’s only a matter of time before he starts to look like him, and someone’s going to notice. The man’s too damn distinctive. He already has his goddamn cleft chin.”

  Nausea burned in my belly as things started to make a sick sort of sense.

  I moved, keeping low, until I reached the hospital doors, papers all but forgotten.

  Then I ran to the elevators and tried to calm myself down.

  It wasn’t working.

  I felt bile rise into my throat as I went over the words I’d heard her speak.

  Almost on autopilot, I went back to the NICU floor and scrubbed myself down.

  Donning my gown, I walked into the NICU and placed my papers on the charge nurse’s counter.

  Then I wandered over to Stanley’s incubator and stared.

  He has his cleft chin.

  Chapter 9

  Always give 100%. Unless you’re donating blood.

  -Text from Reggie to Nathan

  Nathan

  I shuffled slowly to the door, so fuckin’ sore that I could barely see.

  We had a SWAT call last night that turned into a goddamn three-ring circus shit show.

  The call had started out fine. A routine—if one can say holding his wife at gunpoint was ro
utine—man who’d walked in on his woman cheating on him and had decided it would be better to kill her than try to make sense of her cheating.

  We’d talked him down, gotten the gun into our possession, and had been walking the dumbass man to the squad car when he’d decided he would rather be dead than go to jail. So what had he done? He’d run out in front of a fuckin’ train.

  A. Fucking. Train.

  He’d been only seconds away from getting the life knocked right out of his body when I hit him and took him down onto the other side of the tracks.

  Sadly, the tracks had been raised up to go through a marsh—luckily that marsh was down thanks to a drought over the summer—and all we ended up doing was falling ass over tea kettle down a rather large hill.

  Needless to say, I’d saved the guy, but I also wasn’t a young whipper snapper eighteen-year-old anymore. I was a grown ass adult that didn’t seem to take the hits as well as I used to.

  Opening the door, I was half expecting to see one of the boys off the SWAT team or my dad. It wasn’t either, even though my dad was supposed to be here over an hour ago.

  I instead opened the door to Reggie’s non-smiling face.

  I blinked at her, staring hard, and said, “What?”

  She looked… pissed.

  Pissed and haunted and nauseous all at the same time.

  Then a niggle of worry started to roll through me. Reggie being here could only mean one of a few things. And one of those was that she had news about my dad.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said, jumping to the likeliest of conclusions. “Is my dad okay?”

  Reggie’s face instantly went soft.

  “No, this isn’t about your dad. This is about something else.” She ran her hands down over her face, groaning into them. “I don’t even want to tell you this. I’m sure it’s going to make you lose your shit.”

  So I may or may not be notorious for losing my shit. I was always a hot-head. I’d been one since I was old enough to breathe. At least, that was what my father liked to tell me.

  When I’d grown into my six-foot-four body, he’d said that I finally filled out enough to be able to handle being a hot-head.

  Apparently, talking shit when you were tiny was frowned upon unless you could back it up.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  If it wasn’t my dad, could it be hers?

  “Fuck!” she shouted.

  I glanced over Reggie’s head to see three of my fellow SWAT team members outside. We had all of their attention.

  Dax was washing his truck shirtless. Ford and Ashe looked to be installing a car seat into Ford’s truck. Then there was Saint who was sitting on his front porch drinking a Gatorade, looking to have just come from a run.

  They were all now staring at Reggie and me.

  “Babe.” I wrapped my hand around Reggie’s wrist and tugged it free from her face. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She looked sick.

  Like she was about to throw up any second.

  “Fuck me.” She blew out a shaky, steadying breath then said, “You remember seeing Eerie at the hospital?”

  My stomach immediately soured upon hearing Eerie’s name.

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “Why?”

  She looked at my eyes hard and then blurted out everything.

  “So here’s what happened…” She went on to explain what she’d heard Eerie say this afternoon. Followed up by her suspicions, and ending with, “…and he has your cleft chin.”

  I sat there, on my front porch, and stared at her as something foreign started to slide through my body.

  “Why is it,” I asked slowly, “that every fuckin’ time that I think that I’m away from Eerie, she just seems to keep coming back?”

  A kid.

  I might have a fucking kid.

  That was just… insane.

  I always wanted kids.

  The only problem was, I’d never wanted kids with Eerie.

  I’d always wanted them with the woman standing in front of me.

  I’d daydreamed about a whole fucking houseful of kids.

  Boys that acted like her. Girls that looked like her. A ton of them that loved their mother unconditionally like I did.

  Yet, there I was having them with Eerie.

  “I…” I shook my head. “I just… I can’t.”

  That was when Reggie slapped her hands on either side of my cheeks and forced me to look at her.

  “I know you didn’t ask for this. I know that you didn’t want this for yourself. I know that you would’ve gone about this differently if you could. But you can’t. This is out of your hands now. You have a child. At least, I’m fairly sure that you do.” I scrunched up my nose. “Though, they’ll need your DNA to prove it. But Nathan…”

  My eyes focused on hers. My mind cleared of all the motherfuckers that were going through it. And I focused solely on the girl in front of me.

  Her eyes were a beautiful shade of aquamarine. They’d changed since she was a kid, become more beautiful.

  More stunning.

  She was so fucking pretty.

  “Okay.” I shook my head, hoping it would clear it. “What do I do?”

  I brought her in after that. Together we made plans for what was to happen next.

  First off, I needed to talk to a lawyer.

  Which was about the time that my father came in and listened to us explain what was going on.

  After processing that bit of news, he pulled out a number from his phone and gave it to us.

  “Call this number,” Dad said. “That’s a criminal defense attorney. She’s the best I know. She doesn’t usually do this side of the tracks, but she’s good. The best that I’ve ever run up against in my career.”

  After making an appointment with her for an hour from now—which would just barely give me time to change and get there—I looked at my dad and Reggie.

  “Reggie,” I said. “I need you to go back to work. Tell me everything.”

  She winced. “I’m on-call today. Which means I’ll likely be called in. But I am going to take this up to the lab. I’ll stop by. Ask around. I think that Sierra is working. I can ask her to keep an ear out as long as you’re okay with her knowing everything.”

  I immediately gave a nod then looked toward my dad. “You’ll go with me?”

  Dad wasn’t my biological father. He was my adoptive father and he was as real as it gets.

  Years ago, when I was just a toddler, my real father, who happened to be a cop, was killed. As was my mother and unborn sibling.

  I’d been shot in the head and left for dead, too.

  But I’d survived. And Wolf had adopted me.

  From then on, I’d been his.

  And I knew without a doubt that he’d come with me today.

  There was no way that I’d get rid of him.

  “Fuck yeah,” Dad said. “I’m going. You couldn’t stop me even if you tried.”

  I found my first half smile since Reggie had walked up to my door.

  “There’s something else you should know,” she said softly, drawing my attention once again toward her.

  I swallowed hard. “What?”

  She fidgeted with her fingers, her eyes worried.

  “She named the baby Stanley Jones Foster.”

  Chapter 10

  Nathan

  “You’d have better luck getting sole custody of this child if you were married,” the lawyer pointed out.

  The lawyer, Swayze Jensen, was a little bit of a thing.

  She came to about my collarbone, but you wouldn’t be able to tell with her sitting behind her desk looking professional and serious as fuck.

  Her blonde hair was pinned back into a severe bun at the base of her neck, and her bright eyes were hard and shrewd.

  When I’d been recommended to a criminal defense attorney known as ‘The Bulldog’ I’d already had my doubts. But now? I was havin
g even more.

  She was the best I could find, and cost a whack.

  She also was very, very open with my odds at winning this case.

  She’d already said that the mother had quite a few ticks in the win column. Being the child’s mother being a really big one.

  “Turns out, I already am,” I told her bluntly, not bothering to look over at my father who was likely wearing a look of surprise. “Been married for years.”

  “And your wife?” she asked. “Where is she?”

  I paused, wondering how much I should disclose.

  “Just tell me it all.” She waved her hand. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t know how to work with this.”

  She had a point.

  So I laid out everything, starting at the very beginning.

  Not once did I glance over at my father.

  “When I was in high school, I was dating Eerie,” I explained. “We dated on and off for a year, but our relationship was always toxic. She hated that I was ‘friends’ with Reggie—that’s my wife—and always went out of her way to be a complete and total asshole to Reggie. I got pissed about it, and we broke up. But, like I said, our relationship was always toxic. So we were back on and off quite a few times. Throughout, Reggie—I have to stress here that Reggie and I fight like cats and dogs. Ever since we were young. We continued to have a problem being in the same room together without verbal sparring.”

  The lawyer nodded and waved her hand at me to continue.

  “Reggie and Eerie fought like cats and dogs, too. But worse. Way worse. Then one day, it really just was enough for me. I said I was done, and meant it. Only, about a year later Eerie came to me telling me that she had an aggressive form of cancer, and that she needed to harvest her eggs.” I winced. “For some stupid reason, I fell for it. Though she did have cancer, she could’ve just as easily gotten a sperm donor through a sperm bank. Except I was dumb and gave in. It was about six months later that she was presumed cancer free, and I decided that those eggs that she had fertilized with my sperm and frozen wasn’t a good idea. So I asked the sperm bank what to do, and they said that with the contract that Eerie and I signed, if one person wasn’t comfortable with the agreement anymore, then there was no legal leg for Eerie to stand on. She couldn’t use the eggs. And they would be destroyed.”