Page 70 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 2

After building up the fire,they left Hunter, reasoning he’d be safe for the short time it would take for her to gather a few supplies she’d need for the long night and return. Clambering back up the cliff path took all their breath and not a little of her strength. By the time she made it to the top, she felt as rubbery as Gumby. She could understand why, in all those stories of forced marches, people sometimes fell and couldn’t make their feet again. She didn’t know what she could do about that either.

God. If I’m running low on gas, what about you? She almost put a hand on her belly but caught herself in the nick of time. She was not going down that road. This thing growing in her wasn’t a you. It was cells. A powerful cluster of cells, yes, enough to play hell with her hormones and make her sick in the mornings and change her body. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to go all maternal here.

“You okay?” Will asked.

“Fine.” She kept her eyes on the well-worn path they’d carved over days of moving back and forth between the cockpit and fuselage. “How long have you known?”

“Since the first day. When I examined you, I could feel your womb and your…” He cleared his throat. “Women’s breasts change when they’re pregnant. But I would be lying if I said I was a hundred percent sure.”

She kept her gaze fixed on the trees straight ahead. In a few more minutes, she should be able to see the orange spark of their signal fire. “What changed?”

“Well, there’s you being sick every morning. You can only blame the altitude and shock for so much. But then the night you stayed with Hunter, when Mattie and I lit the menorah—”

“Oh.” The realization broke over her mind the way a shaft of sun pierces thick clouds. She’d kept the menorah and candles in her pack. “You found the pills.”

“Actually, Mattie did. Don’t worry. I said they were some kind of medicine for headaches or something. But, yeah.” They crunched over snow for a few seconds before he asked, “By my exam, you’re further along than for the time frame the meds are designed for. They’re best by eight weeks at the latest. And you’re—?”

“About eleven weeks.” By Christmas…God…if this was the sixth day of Hanukkah, that meant Christmas was two days away, and she would be three months along, through the first trimester. She would still have plenty of time for an abortion. The procedure would only be more involved, that was all.

“Well, I don’t know if the pills would work, but I’m not an obstetrician. They might, if you wanted to try. Do you?”

“I don’t know. I know I didn’t want to do it now, here. I was thinking when we’re back in civilization would be nice. I do know that if there’s something wrong with the fetus, I will. I won’t even hesitate. I know other people make different choices about what to do if they’ve got a fetus with Down’s or some other congenital problem. But I know me.”

“I’m a doctor. You don’t have to justify anything to me. I respect whatever choice you make. But I’m not the one who’s pregnant. It’s why I didn’t say anything until today. This is none of my business. I figured you would tell me yourself if and when you were ready.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t know how she felt that he knew. She ought to be ashamed. She’d gotten herself into this mess and still wasn’t sure how to fix it. “That’s why you kept after me to eat. It’s why you gave me your energy bars.”

“At least you kept them down. Look, I’m sorry I sprang it on you this way. I wasn’t going to say anything, but you didn’t give me much choice.” He stopped walking and turned to face her. “I can’t let you risk this. You can’t stay by yourself.”

“I’m pregnant, Will, not sick.” It hit her that she hadn’t been queasy at all this morning. “Women have been pregnant for centuries in harsher conditions than this. If I were back on base, I’d still be doing PT or whatever. I think the only thing I’d get out of is standing at parade rest for longer than fifteen minutes and riding in a vehicle on unpaved roads. Apparently, they worry about the vibrations.”

He let out a silent dog’s laugh. “I would suspect there’s nothing in regs about airplane crashes.”

She smiled back up at him. “Apparently not, although they might have had something to say about all that turbulence.”

“What about the father?”

“What about him?”

“Does he—”

She cut him off. “Yes. He wants nothing to do with it or me. In fact, he told me to get rid of it. He’s married, got kids. It was a mistake. I was stupid. He—”

“You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“But I want to tell you. He was Ben’s CO.” Saying that made her face flame. “At first, it was him making condolence calls, you know? An invite to come to his office, go for a walk, and then it was a drink and then meeting for more drinks and then…” She slicked her lips. “I…we ended up in bed. More than once. It was…I was…it went on a while. Three, four months.”

“Hey.” He still wore a sling to rest his shoulder, and now he circled the fingers of his good hand around her left wrist. “It’s okay. I understand. I told you.” His thumb found her naked, scarred skin. “I know grief when I touch it.”

“Yeah. It was a way for me to remember Ben, I guess. He would talk about what a good investigator Ben was, but how the pressure must’ve gotten to him, that kind of thing. Then, one night, he asked me how much Ben had told me about what he was working on because it was highly classified and blah, blah.” She blew out a shaky breath. “That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That Ben hadn’t killed himself. I gave Ben the idea, not the other way around. I was the one who’d heard about a smuggling ring from a sergeant I knew and passed it to Ben. He was working this strictly off the books. He didn’t tell anyone in his command, not even his partner.”

She watched as Will sorted through this information. “You’re saying the CO was involved? In the smuggling ring?”

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