Eyes Wide Open (The Blackstone Affair 3)

“I’ll be right here waiting, then.” I nodded.

He lost the smile and got serious again but turned back at the door, in his jeans and bare feet, his hair in disarray from dragging his fingers through it, his beard looking scruffy.

He took my breath away.

? Heading down the grand staircase, I was able to take my first relaxed breath in hours. Well, maybe relaxed is not accurate, but the dread that had been crushing me like an anvil on my chest had lifted enough that I could breathe without physical pain.

She was back in the land of the living, for one thing. We were on the same page with unplanned pregnancies for another. The rest of it would have to be dealt with one step at a time.

First step was to find the unused test kit.

It wasn’t in the powder room where I’d last seen it, and that made sense as this house was a working hotel most of the time. Hannah wouldn’t leave something like that out in a room where guests might find it. I hadn’t expected it to still be there anyway.

I hit the kitchen next. I had an idea where she might have put it and went to switch on the lights. The pantry was huge, with one whole wall devoted to nonfood items and supplies for the business. I scanned each shelf, and then bingo, there it was. The box I’d purchased in the Kilve chemist’s shop earlier in the day sitting on the shelf with the soaps. I read the package again. “Over 99% accurate” and “As accurate as a doctor’s test” had to mean something, right?

As I went back through to leave the kitchen I passed the shelf with the photograph on it of my mum with Hannah and me. I stopped and picked it up. As I studied the picture, I realized this was the way I imagined her always. Her beauty captured in this photo for the final time before she went away and became something else. I looked at image of me at four, at how I leaned into her and how she was touching me, my hand on her leg, and wondered if I’d ever told her I loved her. I had in my dreams and prayers of course, but wondered if I’d ever said the words to her so she heard them coming from me. There was nobody I could ask, though. Even if there was, I don’t think I could ask them the question. It would be cruel to make my dad or Hannah try to remember something like that.

I thought about where I was headed and what Brynne and I would be doing a few minutes from now, and wished so badly that my mother could have known about us. That I could ring her up and say, “I have some news, Mum, and I hope you’ll be pleased to hear it.”

I brushed my finger over the image of her lovely face and set it back on the shelf, somehow feeling the connection was there and that it was possible for her to know about me. I held that hope close to my heart as I turned out the light and went back upstairs to my girl.

Brynne was sitting up in bed looking beautiful and anxious, and the protective urge that flowed from me was so incredibly intense, it made me pause. And I realized something important. I knew in that moment that anyone who dared to try to hurt her or our potential child would have to kill me first to get to them. Wow. I shrugged it off because it didn’t matter about me, anyway. If anything ever happened to her, I’d be finished.

This was my truth.

“You found it?” she asked in her sweet voice.

I waved the package in front of me as I came forward. “One missing test.”

“Okay, I’m ready.” She spoke quietly and held her hand out.

I placed the package in her lap and picked up her right hand. Instead of kissing the top, I turned it and pressed my lips to her wrist. I could feel her pulse beating. Her eyes filled up and got watery, so I smiled and told her the truth. “Everything will work out the way it’s meant to, baby. I have no doubts like that.”

“How can you not?”

I shrugged. “I just know that we are going to be together, and if this is part of our future then we’d better go forward with it.” I pulled back the blankets and helped her out of the bed.

“I can walk,” she told me. “And I promise that I will come out the same door I went in this time.” She looked down at the floor, ashamed.

I could afford to be cocky at the moment, so I grabbed the chance even though it made me a bastard. “Yeah, I’m pretty confident of that, my beauty. You’d have a tough time getting down the staircase with that pole and me not noticing.”

She lost the look of shame immediately and glared beautiful flashing eyes at me. “I can think of a good use for the pole.”

“That’s my girl.” I led her to the bathroom, rolling the pole for her, unable to curb my smart-ass mouth. “This really is a very fine pole, you know. It probably has a good many practical uses—”

She shut the bathroom door in my face and left me standing there on the other side for the second time, waiting for some information that I now hoped would be true. It’s weird, but from the start, I embraced the idea almost as soon as it was suggested. The idea of a baby was a daunting prospect, sure, but we were intelligent people and had to have more going for us than many people do when they start a family. Our child would just cement us more solidly together, and that was a beautiful thing in my eyes. I knew what I knew, even if I couldn’t admit it to a single other person on this earth. If I’ve gotten my girl pregnant, if we’ve made a baby together and it’s growing inside her right now, then I’ll never lose her, she’ll never leave me, nothing can ever take her away.

I didn’t see how anything or anyone could dispute my logic. Yet again, it made perfect sense to me.

10

? When I opened the bathroom door to come out, test in hand, Ethan was still there where I’d left him when I’d shut it on his smirking face. God love him for trying to tease me and make a stressful situation a little easier. If I had to read him, I would say he was handling the possibility of being a father very well.

Actually, he almost seemed to be hopeful I was pregnant. I wondered why, and could certainly tell that he and I weren’t in the same place in the head about this at all. Far from it. Ethan was a lot older. Eight years older. Years that made a significant difference when faced with the imminent possibilities of marriage and a family. Life was happening much too quickly and it terrified me. The only thing keeping me from going bat-shit crazy was his attitude about the whole situation that we could do this.

I still didn’t really see how it was possible for me to even be pregnant at all. I had some major questions for my doctor, I knew that much. Like how in the hell do birth control pills just not work when they are never missed and taken religiously for years?

He put his arm around me and started walking me and my pole back to the bed. “You waited for me right here?” I peeked up at him.