SEAL Baby Daddy Page 5

  Those were dangerous thoughts to have.

  Finally, I had enough information for the story, and I reached forward to turn off the recorder. I sat back for a moment. I had told myself I wasn’t going to ask this question, but the curiosity was killing me. “Why did you ask for me to interview you?”

  Ace studied me for a moment and then shrugged, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I was getting a bit of a complex since you wouldn’t agree to see me,” he said teasingly. “So I found a window of opportunity.”

  I shook my head and packed my things away. Then I got up. “Don’t go looking for trouble just so you can see me,” I told him, only half-joking.

  Ace stood up as well. “If you’d just talk to me, then I wouldn’t have to,” he said seriously. “I’m not asking you for anything big. Just let’s maybe grab a drink. Catch up.”

  “Like I said, I’m really busy,” I told him.

  “But not so busy that you couldn’t schedule an interview with me for this afternoon,” Ace pointed out. “What were you going to do otherwise?”

  “There would have been another interview, with someone else,” I said, even though that was kind of a lie. I’d been hoping to get Ava and I both to the salon, actually. We both could use a trim.

  “Tina told me you were only working freelance for the Globe now,” Ace said, cocking his head to the side. “Are you busy with some other paper as well? I looked at your bylines online, and they seemed to all be with the Globe.”

  I frowned at him, my brow furrowing. He’d looked me up? Why would he do that? I shook my head, deciding not to think too hard about that. Even if he were here in Boston for me, I couldn’t start anything. He wouldn’t want to start anything once he found out about Ava.

  For a second, I debated telling him about her, just to get him to stop trying to ask me out. But there was a selfish part of me that didn’t want him to know about her. If he didn’t want to be part of her life, if he didn’t want to have children, then I didn’t want him to know about her. He didn’t deserve to know about her.

  “Come on, just one drink, and I promise that the next time I do something heroic, I won’t request you as an interviewer,” Ace said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Don’t do stupid shit just to get my attention,” I said, my tone harsher than I’d intended. I turned away before I could see his reaction, walking out the door and moving quickly to my car.

  My heart was beating, and my palms were damp as I sat in the driver’s seat and fumbled the key into the ignition. I didn’t know why he got me so flustered like this. Didn’t know why I felt so nervous around him. But hopefully he got the hint: I didn’t want to see him. Hopefully, he’d stop bothering me.

  I put my foot on the gas and sped off.

  8

  Ace

  I was still sitting at the kitchen table, staring at my laptop screen, when Stone came stomping in after work. He paused and whistled at the picture of Harper up on the screen. “Who’s the hot black chick?” he asked.

  I was about to tell him to fuck off, finding myself strangely bothered by his calling her that, as though Harper was just another woman. There was so much more to her than that. But as I made to close out the window, embarrassed at having been caught looking at Harper’s bio, Stone caught my hand, peering at the screen.

  “Oh hey, wait, I recognize her.”

  “You do?” I asked in surprise, craning my head to look up at him. We hadn’t talked about where we’d done our service; the guys placing us had recommended that we try to find things in common other than the fact that we’d both killed people for a living. And I didn’t recognize Stone from Kuwait, but there was no reason to think he hadn’t been there. Maybe he’d passed through the base while Harper was there.

  “Who is she?” Stone said, frowning. “I know I recognize her, but I’m trying to place her.” He grinned crookedly. “You know that stupid maddening thing where you can’t figure out how you know a person when you see them outside of the context that you normally see them in?”

  “Yeah,” I said, frowning as well. “You didn’t happen to pass through Kuwait ever, did you? She was there at our base for about five, six months as an overseas reporter. That was maybe four years ago.”

  “Huh,” Stone said. But he shook his head. “I was never there. And I don’t recognize her as a journalist.”

  I started to wonder if he really recognized her at all or if he was mixing her up with someone else. But then, he snapped his fingers. “Wait, I know who she is. Yeah, she lives pretty close to here. I’ve gone by her house a few times and seen her outside with her daughter. You know her from Kuwait? What a crazy small world, huh?” He went to the fridge and grabbed an energy drink and then made his way into the gym to work out, oblivious to my reaction.

  I was frozen in place at the table. With her daughter? Had I heard him right?

  I felt my heart sink. If she had a daughter, then there must be a man. A husband, probably. She was a nice girl, not the type to get pregnant and have a baby out of wedlock. Not that I really knew her.

  I wanted to ask Stone more about her. Where exactly did she live, and how old was the baby? She hadn’t been in a relationship when she’d come over to Kuwait, as far as I knew, so I figured the kid had to be maybe two years old at the most. That gave her time to come back home, find a guy, get married, and have a kid.

  It was weird to think that it had been so long. With the way that I remembered her, it seemed impossible that it had been that amount of time. But time always seemed a little strange when I had been deployed. Things blurred together.

  I frowned. Shit. That must be why she didn’t want me to be around. Now I felt like an ass for forcing her to do the interview with me. I’d really thought that if I showed her I was going to be persistent, that I was going to be there, then I could get her to at least grab drinks or dinner with me. I’d really thought that we could reconnect and pick up where we’d left off.

  I felt a strange sense of loss, and it wasn’t just because I wasn’t going to get to have sex with her again. I pushed it down. I was sure this stupid feeling was why the guys at the group had told me not to give in to those baser needs. This was one more feeling I had to deal with, and I was already dealing with so much strangeness with the reintegration process.

  I kept thinking about what Stone had said, that she lived near here. I was tempted to hop on my bike and cruise around the neighborhood looking for her. But that was crazy. There was no knowing if I’d actually even see her, and even if I did, what was I going to say? She’d been over to my place; she knew how close we lived to each other.

  And she wanted nothing to do with me. I had to let her go.

  I hated that Stone was using the gym equipment right now. I really wanted to go a few rounds with the punching bag, to get the noise in my head down to a dull roar again. But I didn’t want to get in his way or throw off his own rhythm. I just had to deal with this.

  I was Harper’s past. That was all. There was no future for us.

  For some reason, I didn’t like that. Not that I’d ever been the family and kids kind of guy. I didn’t know what I’d even wanted with Harper. Sex. A friend. Not a relationship, though. I should be happy that she’d found someone who could give her everything she deserved.

  I had a million questions, more now than before. But I knew she wasn’t going to give me the time of day. She wasn’t going to answer them.

  For a moment, I looked guiltily at my phone. But there hadn’t been any information on the internet about her kid, I didn’t think. I was tempted to look again.

  Before I could, my phone rang. I picked it up automatically. “Hello?”

  “Hi, is this Ace Bradley? This is Connie Winters with…”

  I was still thinking about Harper. About Harper and her kid. Her daughter. Did her daughter have the same coffee-colored skin, the same curly hair? Those bewitching dark eyes? Did she have her laugh, her brains? For some reason, even though I’d never been intere
sted in kids before, I suddenly wanted to know all about Harper’s daughter.

  I didn’t even know the girl’s name.

  I was so distracted that I found myself agreeing to do an interview, live, with the local news. That was the only excuse I could come up with, looking back. Because I damn sure wouldn’t have agreed to it if my mind hadn’t been clouded. The only reason I’d agreed to do the interview with the Globe was as an excuse to see Harper.

  I didn’t need my five minutes of fame. Especially not for something I had just done automatically because I’d been trained to take out the bad guys.

  But somehow, I found myself agreeing to be at the studio the following morning, stupidly early, so that I could tell the world, or at least the greater Massachusetts area, all about the day in the café where I stopped a guy from stealing, what, fifty bucks?

  I rolled my eyes, disgusted with myself. Stone was still working away in the gym, so I threw on my running shoes and headed out to pound away at the asphalt. I purposefully headed out of our neighborhood as quickly as I could.

  9

  Harper

  On Saturday morning, I loaded up Ava into the back seat of my car and headed out to Mom’s place. She lived out in Winchester, a little bit of a drive outside the city, but she claimed she liked the peace and quiet, and she could still take the train in whenever she wanted to come in to Boston proper.

  Mom and I hadn’t really gotten along very well from the time I was a teenager until really around the time that Ava was born. She was a retired policewoman and cranky as all get out, but she thought Ava was the best thing in the world, and all her hard edges went away when she was around her granddaughter.

  I tried to get over to her place at least once a week, usually on the weekends, but it had been a couple weeks now since we’d been out there. I was feeling guilty about it, so I stopped at the store along the way.

  “Help Mama pick out some flowers for Grammie,” I said to Ava, lifting her up so that she could see all the different ones.

  “Sunflowers, sunflowers!” Ava said excitedly.

  “Sunflowers it is,” I said, smiling as I set her back down and grabbed a bundle of the flowers. I paid quickly, and we were on our way again.

  Mom had brunch on the table by the time we arrived. “Thank goodness, I was starting to wonder if it had been so long since you’d been here that you had gotten lost,” she said snarkily as we arrived.

  I rolled my eyes and leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  Ava was already chattering about everything she’d done since the last time she’d her grandma. Of course, there wasn’t really all that much, but you’d think that a whole lifetime had passed in those couple of weeks.

  We sat down at the table, and Mom served everyone muffins and egg hash. “So what have you been up to lately, Mom?” I asked as Ava started to wind down.

  Mom took a bite of her food, considering her words. “Just the usual,” she finally said, shrugging. “Petie and I still go for our run first thing in the morning. He’s stopped chasing after rabbits finally; I think he’s realized he’s never going to catch one of them. And then I’ve been involved with the local library, helping out with sorting the new books that come in.”

  “That’s good,” I told her.

  “What about you?” Mom asked. “I know things have been busy at work, but you’re taking time to have a little fun, too, aren’t you?”

  “Sure, Maisie and I hang out every week,” I told her carefully. I knew that wasn’t what she was really asking.

  Sure enough, she rolled her eyes, but she didn’t press me about my love life, not with Ava sitting right there. We finished our breakfast in peace.

  Suddenly, I heard a familiar voice. I whipped around to see the television, which Mom usually had on as background noise. She’d been like that for my whole life, so I was pretty good about tuning it out. But that voice—I couldn’t ignore him.

  Ace. There, on TV.

  I stared blankly at him, wondering if he was doing this just to get under my skin.

  “I’ve already told the whole story to Harper Dawson, with the Boston Globe,” Ace said, sounding irritated. “I’m sure everyone already knows the story by now.”

  “They do,” the reporter said. “And they all think that you’re a hero. So, we were hoping—”

  “I’m not a hero,” Ace interrupted, sounding crabby. I wondered why he had agreed to the TV interview if he didn’t feel like talking about what he’d done the other day in the café.

  “You interviewed him?” Mom asked, watching my face carefully. There was something mischievous in her eyes. “He’s pretty attractive.”

  “He’s a former SEAL,” I said without thinking.

  Mom stared at his face on the screen for a moment and then looked at Ava. I could tell that she was probably putting it all together, analyzing Ace’s features and comparing them to those of my daughter. Our daughter.

  Sure enough.

  “Is he the one?”

  “Yes,” I said shortly. There was no point lying to her about it. I’d never been good at lying to Mom anyway.

  She cackled. “So he’s back, huh? Does he know?”

  I shook my head. No, Ace didn’t know anything about Ava. He didn’t even know I had a daughter. And I planned on keeping it that way.

  I didn’t exactly want to discuss that with my mother. I already knew exactly what she would say. She’d told my dad about me when she’d found out that she was pregnant. And Dad had married her. He’d died when I was young, and Mom had ended up having to raise me on her own, mostly. That was part of what made her so cranky, I thought.

  When I’d finally got the guts up to tell her that I was pregnant, she’d tried to convince me to tell the father. I’d told her that it was impossible, that it was one of the SEALs that I’d met over in Kuwait, that I had no way of contacting him. And I definitely had no way of contacting him in secret. I knew that all of his letters probably got read before they reached him. And I knew he could get into trouble if they found out that he had slept with me.

  That was just an excuse that I told myself, though. The truth was, I knew Ace didn’t want to have kids. And even though a selfish part of me wanted him to reconsider, to decide that he could have the perfect life with Ava and me, I knew that wasn’t fair to him.

  He would feel honor-bound to take care of Ava and me. I couldn’t trap him in a life that he didn’t want just because his sense of honor made him feel like he had to take care of me.

  And I especially didn’t want to do that when I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself.

  Mom looked over at Ava. “Ava, honey, why don’t you go see the surprise I put in your playroom,” she suggested sweetly.

  Ava’s eyes lit up while I rolled mine. Mom spoiled that little girl rotten. But as long as she didn’t act like a little brat, I supposed that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ava ran into the other room, and I heard her squeal.

  “Stuffed animal,” Mom said. “So she’ll have to introduce Mr. Sloth to all the other stuffed animals. She won’t be out for a minute.”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Mom, I don’t want to talk to you about Ace,” I said.

  Mom pursed her lips. “Just one thing,” she said, and I knew there was no way to get out of that. “I know it’s your decision to make. But make sure you’re thinking about Ava and not just about yourself. If this man wants to be in his little girl’s life, who are you to take that from her?”

  I sighed and rubbed at my temples. “He doesn’t want kids, though,” I told her. “He told me that.”

  “Back in Kuwait? Four years ago?” She clucked her tongue. “People change, and what they want doesn’t always stay the same.” She paused. “You know the last thing I’d want is to see you hurt. But I can’t help thinking, where’s the harm in letting him know? If he doesn’t want to be around you, then at least you’ll know that he didn’t want to be around you. Otherwise, you’re always goi
ng to wonder.”

  “I know,” I sighed. But knowing that and actually telling Ace were two different things. I picked at my napkin. “I guess part of me thinks that if he doesn’t want to know Ava, he doesn’t deserve to know about her,” I said quietly.

  “Hmm,” Mom grunted. “I think it’s more that you’re afraid to give up some of your responsibilities.”

  “What?” I asked incredulously.

  “You want to prove to yourself and to the world that you’re a big bad mama, able to raise that little girl while balancing your career and everything else. But it’s okay to have help sometimes.”

  “I have plenty of help,” I protested. “Maisie watches her a lot. And you watch her sometimes too.”

  “All the same,” Mom said, shrugging as she started to clear the plates. “Like I said, just make sure you’re making the decisions with Ava in your heart, not just yourself.”

  I was silent when she said that. I hated to admit she had a point, but maybe I really was being selfish. I guess when it really came down to it, Ace did deserve to know. Ava was half his. But I still didn’t want to tell him about her. And I honestly still doubted that he’d want to know.

  I shook my head and got to my feet, glad that Mom had dropped that topic of conversation. I knew she just wanted the best for me; she wanted me to be happy and loved and everything else. But what she didn’t seem to realize was that my life was complete enough. I was more than happy with Ava in my life. I didn’t need Ace or anyone else.

  Opening up to Ace would only give him a chance to let me down. And the last thing I needed was for my memories of Ava’s father to be tinged with sadness. I wanted to hang on to those perfect, fun, sexy moments we’d had in Kuwait. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.

  Except that maybe I should be considering things from Ava’s point of view instead, I realized. When Ava was ten or fifteen or twenty, if she found out that her father had lived just a couple blocks over from me, that he had sought me out and I hadn’t let him know about her, how would she feel? Would she be angry with me? Would she stop talking to me?