Page 20 of Hold on Tight

And that was just fine with him. They’d all try this out. See what happened.

“I’m trying to think if there’s anything else you need to know,” Mira said. “If you’re still game to do it tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he echoed her.

“So if there’s an emergency—”

“I’ll call 911. Or patch him up myself. I’ve done that a time or two. All Rangers have some medical training.”

“I guess you’re a little overqualified for this job, huh?”

“My dad’s a soldier,” Sam reported.

The room suddenly shrank, closing in on them. Mira’s face drained of color.

“You don’t say,” Jake said. “Where is he now?”

Mira shot Jake a hard look.

“He was my sperm donor.”

Holy shit. He felt like he’d been hit in his chest plate with a round. He guessed it should have occurred to him, before this moment, that Sam had some mythology about his father—abouthim—that wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. Butsperm donor?

Jesus.

He opened his mouth to speak, but Mira grabbed and pinched his arm. “Can I talk to you a second?”

He followed her without protest. He wanted to hear how she’d explain this one.

“I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “I’m sorry I told him that, but—you tell me if you can think of a better way to explain it to a little kid. Why his dad isn’t anywhere around, why he shouldn’t be out on a campaign to find him. I’d already looked for you. I’d already called bases. I knew it would be hard, if not impossible, to track you down. I didn’t want him to turn it into a quest.”

“You could have told him I was dead,” Jake said quietly.

She turned away. When she turned back, there were tears in her eyes. “I couldn’t,” she said.

He didn’t ask her why not. He was already reeling, already feeling more than he’d felt in months. Years, maybe. He didn’t want to know the answer behind the tears.

Sperm donor.

Yeah, that was about all he was good for, these days. And on bad days, not even that.

“Look,” she said. “I know this is weird. I know it’s—hard to believe. If—if it would help, I could do a paternity test.”

Her offer helped, oddly enough. It eased something. Not that he’d ever really doubted her, not even when he’d been so grumpy and difficult in the PT’s office. The world was full of women who would lie to ensnare a guy, but he just couldn’t make himself believe Mira was one of them.

But the fact that she’d offered, and how vulnerable she’d made herself in doing so—it soothed him.

“I think we can wait on that a bit,” he said. He’d leave it open. Maybe at some point he’d feel like he needed to know for sure, some evidence beyond those too-familiar blue-gray eyes of Sam’s. But he couldn’t see himself demanding a cheek swab.

Not now, not when he wasn’t even completely sure what, if anything, he wanted from them, or what, if anything, they were asking of him.

Chapter 6

When Mira opened the door the next morning, she wore tailored gray slacks and a matching blazer over a silky-looking scrap of pale-blue fabric. The slacks and blazer were all buttoned up and professional looking, but that scrap of blue was as insubstantial as tissue.

Like a sexy nightgown. It would feel good to her, against her bare skin, cool and light. You could tease her with it.

No hesitation this time, only a surge of blood, powerful in his veins, the chain of neurons all the way from the images burning into his brain to the quick tightening of his dick. She’d woken something up, and it wasn’t going back to sleep.

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