Having The Soldier's Baby (Parent Portal 1)

Emily drove home Friday night, still energized by Wednesday’s after-dinner conversation with Winston. She wasn’t going to just sit back and wait for him to come to her.

He’d expressed interest in the baby. More than that. He’d insisted on being a day-to-day, minute-to-minute part of things.

So what if his delivery had been odd. His word choices and body language standoffish. He was there. It was a key she’d been missing. He was there. He was asking.

He was trying to find his way back to her. He needed her to lead the way. She got it now.

She had to engage him.

“Now that we’re having weekends to ourselves, I thought we’d start on the nursery tomorrow,” she said as they worked together in the kitchen that night, chopping on separate counters while they prepared the stir-fry they’d decided on for dinner.

She was doing all of the grocery shopping, just as she had through all of their years of living together, and cooking together was just as it had always been, too. The activity was part of life. Normal life. Great life.

She chopped onion. He did the peppers and leftover grilled chicken breasts.

“The nursery.”

“We’ll need to turn the spare bedroom into a nursery,” she explained. “Obviously we can’t give up the office.”

She reminded herself that his silence then didn’t mean what it would have meant two years before—that he wasn’t on board.

“Where will guests stay when they come to visit?”

“For now, we can keep the double bed set up in there against one wall. Maybe the baby can use it later. We can put a pack-and-play in our room, for the first few months, and keep it afterward, packed away, for the baby to use when we have guests.”

“You plan to sleep in the same room as the child for the first few months?”

He didn’t like the idea? She could reconsider. But... “I figured with breastfeeding, it would just be easier. We’ve already got Grandma’s rocker in the corner.” She could move that to the nursery, though.

The onions were ready. He’d stopped chopping.

“Emily...”

His look was firm. “Yeah?” She looked right back.

“This is important to you?”

It should be important to him, too. She had to believe it would be. “Yes.”

“Then I’ll help you.”

She didn’t want his “help.” She wanted his involvement, his input. She wanted him to care.

She was being a selfish twit.

He was there.

And that was enough.

* * *

Chauffeuring Emily around on Saturday wasn’t such a bad deal. Time was passing, bringing him closer to the culmination of the plan, and he wasn’t forced to spend full days alone with her in the intimacy of her home.

The whole intimacy thing in general... His body hadn’t changed as much as the rest of him had. It wanted to sink itself inside the woman who’d first shown it carnal delights. The only woman it was ever supposed to know.

That night she’d come on to him, when he’d willed himself not to respond, he’d been fairly certain that his body was as enlightened as he was.

A miscalculation on his part.