The Baby Gamble (Texas Hold'em)

“The only way Cole would agree to stop trying to talk me out of this was if I asked you to be the father.”

THE COOL AIR WAS SUPPOSED to have cleared his mind. But Blake’s thoughts were fuzzy, and there was a very loud humming in his brain.

“So…you aren’t pregnant?” He could feel a headache coming on.“Not yet.”

There was no reason for him to be relieved at the news. No need to care.

The cords at the base of his neck loosened just a little, and he tried to think.

“But you plan to be.”

“I’m determined to have a child, yes.”

Blake eyed his ex-wife as well as he could in the darkness. Was Cole right? Had she lost her mind?

Thoughts of the baby she’d lost surfaced. The child that for four long years, Blake had imagined himself raising. Along with the thoughts came the sharp pain that lived in his chest most of the time. While he’d grown somewhat used to the discomfort, its sting was much worse when he thought about Annie suffering from it, too.

“You can’t bring back what’s been taken from you, Annie.”

“I have absolutely no plan to try.” Her words were tough enough. The vigor in her tone gave him a hint of the determination she was holding in check.

Life should never have done this to her. She didn’t deserve it.

He was to blame.

“I don’t want to spend my life alone, Blake. I’m lonely, and I’m missing something important. I want to be a mother, and I believe I can be a good one.”

“Of course you’d be a good mother.” Blake was scrambling to make sense of all of this—to be a good friend to Cole, and to extricate himself as rapidly as possible. “You more or less became Cole’s mother when you were barely thirteen, and he turned out great.”

She blinked and looked up at Blake, as if he’d surprised her. Her curly hair was longer than it had been when they were married, longer than it had been when she’d met his flight in San Antonio two years ago.

Had she expected him to tear her to ribbons? To hate her for choosing to stay with the hu

sband she’d married two years after Blake’s disappearance when he’d been presumed dead, instead of coming back home with him?

“I’ve had the magic.” Her words were soft, but her gaze was steady as she continued to look him in the eye. He felt as if he’d been kicked when he realized she was speaking of him. “I took the risk and trusted that marrying the love of my life would be enough, and then I crashed so hard I was afraid I wouldn’t ever recover.”

This was why he couldn’t be around her. Couldn’t even see her. Did she think he didn’t know all this? That he didn’t torture himself with the same knowledge every time he thought about her? Four years of captivity had been a cakewalk compared to the pain he had suffered daily since his return home.

“And I’ve played it safe, too,” she continued, as if completely unaware of the hell going on inside of him. “After you, I married a man I’d known all my life—one who’d loved me for most of it. I chose security and reliability over passion. And I not only ended up still just as unhappy, but I hurt someone else horribly. I’ll live with that for the rest of my life.”

They had that in common.

“I’m not going for strike three, Blake. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a family of my own.”

She’d clearly given her future a lot of thought. And she made a good point.

Her idea might be crazy, but Annie was not.

“So…will you be the father?” She was good for her word. She’d told Cole she’d pose the question and she had.

“What do you plan to do when I say no?”

“I’ve already started looking around.”

“For a sperm bank?” Was that how these things were done?

Annie’s head dropped—something that had happened a little too often during their time together. And always when she was suffering from the low self-esteem, the doubts, that had plagued her since her father’s death.