My Bad (Bear Bottom Guardians MC 4)

“How about I tell you what I know?” I paused. “And then you tell me what you know.”

He crossed his arms, mimicking my gesture.

“Go.”

I scrunched up my nose at him.

“You’re Delta Force or something equivalent,” I started.

He jerked, his eyes going wide in surprise. “How did you know?”

I pointed at my face, indicating his beard with a jerk of my head in his direction. “No Army person I know besides very few would be able to have a beard. You have no distinguishing tattoos other than one that’s easily covered up. You don’t talk about your job. No Facebook page. No pictures ever without a long-winded explanation about how I can’t share the photos on any social media platform. You’re very secretive. Hell, even my father had a hard time finding anything out on you at first, but Jack and Winter are wizards at their craft and know how to find stuff. Not that my father ever told me anything. He kept it all to himself. Everything that I’ve found so far is just conjecture on my part.”

“You’re right,” he said, looking relieved. “I’m Delta.”

I smiled. “My dad has a lot of business dabblings that I stay way the heck away from. I’m not sure I want to know more than I already do. I was going to tell you.”

He flowed with the change of subject just as I did.

“When?” he asked. “When you had the baby—babies?” he choked that last part out. “Which is it?”

I brought up the sonogram pictures, feeling my heart pounding for a completely different reason now, and started to sift through them.

My eyes moved toward where the camera sat, and I saw that I’d never get close enough to show him the photos close up, so I brought my phone out. Opening the Messenger app, I took photos of all the sonogram pictures and sent them.

“I had the pictures sealed into an envelope,” I told him. “My only instruction to the doctor when I went yesterday was for him to make sure the baby was okay and healthy. Everything else? He kept it quiet so I could share that with you for the first time when you got home.”

“So why were you looking at them when you walked in?” he questioned.

He wasn’t mad. He was just curious.

“Piper made a comment that had me freaking out,” I told him.

“A comment that had you questioning whether it was twins or not?” he asked as the sound of his phone dinging momentarily stole his attention away from me.

He looked down at his phone, and he brought his hand up to scrub over his face.

“Are you looking at the first picture?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

I looked at the first picture, too.

It was a close-up shot of a cute little face in profile. There was a small nose, a tiny set of lips, and an eye socket.

“It looks like an alien,” he muttered.

“It’s the eye socket that makes it look weird,” I told him.

His thumb swiped, and he swallowed thickly.

This was the one that made me want to freak out.

“Fuck.”

Yeah, fuck.

“I have twins that run in my family,” I told him something he already knew.

“Fuck.”

“I was on birth control,” I told him.

He laughed. “Shit.”

“Do you only have cuss words rattling around in your brain right now?” I questioned.

His eyes flicked up to me. “Yes.”

I rolled my eyes and studied my own photo. The picture was a zoomed out shot of both babies. They were in the fetal position facing each other. Actually, they looked like they were cuddling.

It was actually really cute.

One had ‘Baby A’ above it and the other had ‘Baby B’ below it.

“How far along?” he rasped.

“Eighteen weeks and two days as of this morning,” I answered. “You can see that on the photo at the top. It says ‘18w2d’ on it.”

He lifted his wrist and looked at his watch. “So you roughly have what, twenty-two more weeks?”

I nodded, then shook my head. “Maybe. Maybe not. Likely I’ll have twenty. A multiple pregnancy isn’t something that usually goes full term, but it can.”

He looked like he was calculating it all up in his head. “Possibly around Christmas?”

I nodded once. “My due date is officially Christmas Eve.”

His eyes went pained for a few long seconds before he looked down. I watched his throat bob once.

“My parents died on Christmas Eve.”

I remembered him telling me that once.

He didn’t talk about them all that often, but when he did, I listened.

The date was definitely significant.

“I’ve never really had a good reason to celebrate since they died.” His eyes looked up from the photo. “And now you’ve just given me two.”

I felt tears start to sting my eyes at that comment.

“How could you not tell me?” he asked, sounding hurt.

I dashed the back of my hand across my eye and caught the tear that’d fallen before answering.