The Army Doc's Baby Secret

‘Show me, Zeke.’

‘No. It’s too jarring,’ he vacillated. ‘Hardly... romantic.’

She smiled. A soft teasing smile that she could see twisted inside him.

‘So now we’re being romantic?’

‘Aren’t we?’ he challenged playfully, and the shimmering hope inside her grew incandescent.

‘I guess we are.’

‘Then how is showing you my prosthetic, or even my stump, romantic?’

She placed her hand on his thigh where it touched hers, trailing a path down to his knee.

‘You still don’t see it, do you, Zeke? It’s romantic to me.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ He shook his head.

‘I know. And that’s what makes you an idiot,’ but there was no rancour in her words. ‘But, for the first time in my life, I would feel like it made you my idiot. That you were finally letting me in. That, at last, there were no barriers built between us.’

Tia had no idea what it was—whether her words, or her touch, or maybe just the way she was looking at him—but suddenly everything simply...changed. It was as though he had finally decided to try trusting her and all the tension, all the pain of the last few weeks just dropped away.

It didn’t matter any more.

There was just her, and Zeke. And she knew he wanted to be with her in the way she’d been dreaming of for years. As long as he knew that she wanted to just accept him for all that he was, in a way that no one else ever had done in the past.

More importantly, he would need to want her to.

She waited, her breathing choppy, loaded. For a long time she couldn’t be sure it was even going to happen. And then abruptly he pressed his forehead to hers, deliberately, roughly, as though, if they could merge as one, she could understand for herself all the things he couldn’t easily articulate.

She didn’t know what had changed, but she rejoiced that it had.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘DO YOU KNOW that these last few weeks have been the first time you’ve ever really begun to talk to me about your mother, Tia?’

‘I’m not sure that’s true.’ She frowned, knowing that it was.

‘It is,’ Zeke confirmed. ‘You have talked about me shutting you out, but it hasn’t just been me. I think that was why we were first drawn to each other all those years ago. We each saw a dark void in the other that we pretended being together could fix. We were both running from our pasts but being together allowed us to act as though we were running towards something.’

‘Maybe we were.’

‘We weren’t. You would never have married me if you hadn’t been desperate to plug the hole your mother’s death had left. Just as I wouldn’t have talked you into eloping if I hadn’t been trying to prove to myself that someone could want me. Love me.’

She wanted to deny it, but deep down she knew he was right.

‘So we did it for the wrong reasons, and we messed things up in the middle. But it brought us Seth. There can be nothing more perfect than our son, surely.

‘Tia, I’m trying to say...’

But she didn’t want to know what he was trying to say. She couldn’t overcome the unsettling suspicion that it was going to be something she didn’t want to hear. Something that might threaten the possibility of them becoming a family, at last.

Grasping his waist with her hands, she angled her head until their lips just brushed, praying that he would meet her halfway. If she couldn’t talk him into trusting her, then she was just going to have to show him in the most primal way she could.

For a long moment, he didn’t respond. She could feel his warm, ragged breath, tickling her lips, but they were both frozen there. Paralysed.

And then, just as she thought he was going to move away, he kissed her. A kiss to launch a rocket booster into space. And Tia poured everything she was into that kiss. A long, slow burn that unfurled right through her and scorched her from the inside out. Delicious and destructive all at once. She should stop it. But she didn’t want to even try. So, instead, she wound her arms around his neck and pressed her entire body against his. Her breasts splayed against his chest, her thighs nestled between his, and Zeke pushing against her belly, so sinfully hard where she was achingly soft.