Hold Me Close (Bridgewater County 4)

“She’s obviously going to raise it on her own since there’s no men in her life.” Yeah, we’d been vigilant about watching Rachel. Unless she snuck dates into her house, she had no guy in her life. Besides us.

I knew I was overreacting but I couldn’t help it. Fear had taken over. Rachel was ours. Her babies would be ours. Now, I had no objection to raising another man’s child, but there was no way I wanted Rachel to raise a child alone.

I’d been the product of a fatherless home and I hated to think of Rachel’s child not having a daddy. Not when there were two men standing in this room who wanted nothing more than to claim her and do it with her every step of the way.

“She’s at the damn doctor’s office now. No, not doctor’s office. Sperm bank.”

I filled him in on the fact that Rachel had asked for the entire day off for some sort of doctor’s appointment.

“You’re telling me our girl is getting knocked up while we’re standing here with our thumbs up our asses?”

“Yup.”

“Why is she rushing?”

“Because she’s too impatient to wait for the right man to come along.”

“Men,” Matt countered. “And we’re right fucking here.”

“At least we know there isn’t someone else.”

Matt narrowed his eyes, probably thinking about a dick like Bob getting his hands on her.

I groaned, paced. “Goddammit, if she just gave us a chance we could give her everything she ever wanted. It would be our honor and privilege to make her dreams come true. If that meant a houseful of babies then it’s our fucking job to give them to her. Not a damn test tube.”

As I was working myself into a state, Matt leaned down, powered up her computer and started doing some research. He glanced up at me, his expression abnormally grim. “I doubt she went to Seattle, so that one’s out. That first clinic is in Helena. I’m sure that’s where she’ll be.”

I grabbed the keys for my truck from the end table in the hallway. “Let’s go.”

I tried to calm down on the drive to Helena but it seemed the closer we got the more my frustration grew and the faster my foot pressed on the gas pedal. She’d never even given us a chance. We’d waited too long.

I was angry at myself for not acting sooner and pissed at Matt for making such a mess of things with our woman during their first meeting. Considering my heightened emotions, I probably should have stopped for a moment and thought through what I was about to say and do. But I was driven by an urgency to stop Rachel before she made a mistake. Matt seemed just as impatient as he raced to the front door of the clinic beside me. We’d barely spoken on the drive, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

Yeah, we may have looked like lunatics going in, but I didn’t care. It was time to stake our claim because she was making a serious, life changing decision without knowing how we felt—we could end up losing her for good.

Now was the time for action, for better or for worse. That was what I was thinking as we stormed into the clinic and it was what gave me the nerve to walk right past the reception desk and the startled doctors and nurses in the hallway.

We stopped ha

lfway down. On both sides of us there were multiple closed doors.

“Where the hell is she?” I whispered. I had no idea how we were going to find our girl.

“I guess we could just start opening doors,” Matt countered. “That seems a little extreme, even for us right now, and sure to get us kicked out before we could find her.”

Yeah, I had no intention of walking in on some guy jerking off into a cup.

“Excuse me, gentlemen.”

We spun about at the voice, ready to do battle, but found ourselves facing a smiling gray-haired woman in scrubs. “The donors’ waiting room is that way.”

Donor waiting room?

She pointed in the opposite direction of where we’d been headed. Matt tipped his cowboy hat and gave her a smile that had been known to make panties drop all around the state. “Thank you kindly, ma’am.”

Oh lord, his aw-shucks cowboy drawl was over the top. But if he intended to make the nurse sweet on him, it did the job. I assumed he was planning to sweet talk the old lady into telling us which room was Rachel’s, but his tactics proved unnecessary.

I saw her walk from the bathroom back to one of the closed doors and step inside without glancing in our direction. Matt must have seen her too, because he turned on the charm and told the older lady. “We’ll be right behind you.”