Chapter Nine
~ Jackson ~
I was sitting on the porch with a mug of coffee that had gone cold about two hours ago when Rawley’s truck rolled up my gravel drive.
The morning was clear—one of those perfect Montana fall days where the sky goes blue from horizon to horizon and the light hits the valley at exactly the right angle to turn the eastern pasture gold.
I didn’t get up. My back had been aching since dawn, and standing meant putting my full weight on feet that felt like they’d been worked over with a ball peen hammer.
Rawley climbed out of the driver’s seat without bothering to kill the engine, the door closing behind him with a solid thunk that carried across the yard.
He looked exactly like he always did—clean-shaven, eyes alert, moving with that motion that came from twenty years of knowing exactly how much energy any given action was worth.
I watched him cross the gravel with my coffee cup balanced on my knee and my other hand resting—not deliberately, it just ended up there—on the curve of my stomach.
The flannel shirt wasn’t doing much to hide it anymore.
It rode up when I sat, exposing a strip of skin between the bottom button and the waistband of my jeans, the fabric stretched tight across a stomach that three months ago had been flat and now wasn’t.
Not dramatically pregnant—not the basketball-under-the-shirt stereotype—but definitely, undeniably not flat.
Definitely pregnant. Cruz’s child. The physical impossibility that had rewritten my entire understanding of myself.
Rawley stopped at the base of the porch steps, one boot on the bottom stair, arms loose at his sides. “Team’s on their way back,” he said, not bothering with small talk. “Should land sometime tomorrow.”
His eyes dropped to my stomach the way everyone’s did now—that involuntary flicker toward the flannel shirt that betrayed more than it hid, the quick assessment, the careful blankness that followed.
It had been happening for weeks—Jojo noticing first, then Decker, then the whole damn ranch in a wave of careful glances and adjusted conversations. Nobody said it out loud. Nobody needed to. The evidence was right there, impossible to miss once you knew what you were looking at.
Rawley didn’t comment on it, but the pause before he spoke again was its own kind of comment. “What are you going to tell him?” he asked, the question direct in the way Rawley’s questions always were.
I laughed, and it came out flat and wrong, the kind of laugh that wasn’t one. “I have no idea,” I said, and meant it completely.
Six weeks of trying to figure it out. Six weeks of typing messages and deleting them, of drafting explanations in my head at three in the morning, of standing in the shower with water hitting my back and no words that felt like they’d fit the space between what I knew and what Cruz would need to hear.
Rawley didn’t push. He just held my gaze for a long moment, his expression giving away nothing, then said, “I’ll send him over when they land.”
I shook my head. “Don’t bother. He’ll come on his own.”
Cruz would. He wasn’t the kind of man who let six weeks of radio silence go without showing up in person to understand why. Not after the thing between us—not after those passionate nights that had somehow become the measure I used for everything else.
Not after the morning he’d stood on my porch with a jump bag over his shoulder and Montana dust on his boots and told me he’d be back in two weeks, max, and kissed me like he was making sure I’d remember it.
Two weeks had become six. Six weeks of unanswered texts and calls, six weeks of me sitting at the kitchen table with my phone in my hand and no words that felt like they’d fit.
Rawley nodded once, understanding without being told. “The team’s bringing back some intel on Peterson’s network,” he said. “Nothing actionable yet, but Sterling thinks we might have a line on who’s still running things now that she’s in custody.”
I nodded back, grateful for the shift to operational details—something I could process without thinking about Cruz. “You want me at the briefing?”
“If you’re up for it,” Rawley said, his voice carefully neutral.
I was up for it. Had been running the vineyard and the greenhouses and the daily security checks on Rawley’s eastern fence line despite the fatigue and the nausea and the way my center of gravity seemed to change by the hour.
Had been showing up, doing the work, keeping it together in all the ways that mattered.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Rawley held my gaze for another beat, then nodded once and turned back toward his truck.
He didn’t make it into more than it was—didn’t offer advice or reassurances or any of the things people said when they didn’t know what else to do.
Just climbed into the driver’s seat, turned the truck around in the open space by the barn, and headed back down the drive toward the main ranch house.
I watched him go, the coffee mug gone completely cold in my hand.
The truck’s tires popped against the gravel, each stone a distinct sound in the morning quiet.
Then the engine noise faded, then disappeared completely as Rawley turned onto the main road, leaving behind the silence that comes after news you’ve been waiting for and dreading in equal measure.
Tomorrow. Cruz would be home tomorrow.
I set the mug on the porch rail and put my hand back on the curve of my stomach, feeling the weight of it, the reality of it, the truth that had been growing inside me for three months.
Somewhere in the world, Cruz was on a plane headed for Montana, for the ranch, for whatever came next. Somewhere in the world, a man who thought he knew exactly who and what I was, was about to find out he’d been wrong.
We’d both been wrong.
I stayed on the porch as the morning stretched toward noon, one hand on my stomach, eyes on the valley, and tried to figure out how to tell a man that everything he thought he knew was about to change.
I put one hand on the curve of my stomach, palm flat against the flannel that didn’t hide anything anymore, and waited. Three breaths. Four. Then it came—a small, insistent pressure against my palm, a thump so deliberate it still caught me off guard every time, even now.
I pressed back gently, the way Dr. Sharma had shown me at the last appointment. “That’s good,” she’d said, watching the ultrasound screen with careful attention. “The baby responds to touch already. Strong reflexes, good development.”
Strong. The word had stuck with me—strong reflexes, strong heartbeat, strong development. Not the fragile, delicate thing I’d imagined, but something with its own agenda, its own presence, its own undeniable claim on the space it occupied.
The baby moved again, a slow roll rather than a kick, then settled. I kept my hand where it was, feeling the weight of it, the reality of it, the truth that had been growing inside me for twelve weeks without my permission or participation.
Three months along. The halfway point for omega pregnancies, according to the pregnancy guide Jasper had pressed into my hands the day after my clinic visit.
Six months total instead of nine, faster development, different hormone patterns.
All the things I should have known and didn’t, because nobody had ever thought to tell me they might apply.
In another three months, there would be a child. Cruz’s child. A fact that had been true since the clinic, since the ultrasound, since the blood-work panel that rewrote the operating manual I’d been running on for thirty-two years.
The moral math wasn’t complicated: Cruz had a right to know.
He was the father. He had contributed exactly half the DNA currently growing under my palm.
He deserved to hear it from me, not from Rawley or Jojo or whoever would be the first to notice that I’d been avoiding the conversation for six weeks.
What I couldn’t work out—what I’d been failing to work out since the moment the clinic nurse had handed me that glossy ultrasound image—was how to hand a man that information.
How to say, “I know we’ve known each other for eight months and slept together a few times, but it turns out everything you thought you knew about me was wrong, and also there’s a baby.”
Not exactly the kind of conversation they covered in the Navy SEAL communication handbook.
Below the porch, the valley spread out in all directions—pasture to the west, mountains to the east, the main ranch house visible as a cluster of buildings half a mile distant.
In the yard, the Pruett brothers were unloading bags of potting soil from their truck, moving with the efficiency of men who’d done the same job a hundred times before.
Caleb and Mitch. Twenty-four year old twins, local, reliable, currently bunking in the ranch bunkhouse because I’d hired them to tend the greenhouses when it became clear that bending at the waist for eight hours straight was no longer an option.
They showed up every morning at seven, worked until three, and disappeared without asking questions about why the man who’d hired them was suddenly wearing shirts two sizes too big and taking three-hour naps in the middle of the day.
They were good at their jobs. They minded their business. They were exactly what the vineyard needed while its owner was busy having his entire understanding of himself dismantled and rebuilt.
I watched them carry soil bags to the third greenhouse, then turned my attention back to the valley. The morning had fully arrived now—sun high enough to burn the frost from the grass, light catching on the greenhouse glass below the porch, turning it from clear to gold.
The nursery had started as a practical question about paint swatches. I’d gone to the hardware store in town for greenhouse supplies, had walked past the paint counter on my way to checkout, and had stopped—not deliberately, my body just did it—in front of the display of color samples.