Emily needed to get home. Staying at Cormac’s had seemed necessary, but they’d gone twenty-four hours without a threat, which made sense, since Maxwell knew he was being watched. Yes, the ex-con likely knew where she lived, but with the police watching her place outside, the doorman downstairs and her triple locks, she should be fine.
She couldn’t just keep sitting at Cormac’s dining table, fighting thoughts of him. The only way to regain control of her life was to get away from the constant reminders of what wasn’t going to be.
She had to look at her space in terms of the rearranging she was going to have do, rather than just thinking and guessing. Needed to measure, to figure out which room would work best as a nursery—probably her office—and figure out where things would go.
Unless, what if she ended up with a live-in nanny?
Where would her office go?
The dining room was out—there was no way to close the door on the noise that might be coming from a child and nanny playing when she worked from home during the day.
A nanny.
Where would she find one? A person who she’d be able to trust with her life—her baby’s life—seemed like an impossibly tall order to her, but she knew that people all over the city had them.
Thankfully, having a good job, having worked it for two decades, having lived alone all that time and taken few vacations, she had no financial worries.
Could she risk her baby’s life on the say-so and vetting of a service where people were being paid to do jobs, without personal stake in the outcome?
No way. Her days were filled with people others had trusted, who’d done horrible things for their own gain.
Businesses and individuals alike...
Chest tight, she stared at her computer screen. How could she bring a baby into a world that...
...had people like her who dedicated their lives to trying to do the right thing and make the world a better place.
And it wasn’t just her.
There were far more people who cared and did good than the opposite. Just because her days were filled with the opposite didn’t mean her baby was destined to...
What?
She’d met plenty of great people throughout her career.
Like the Coltons. The family gave their lives to serving the people of New York City. To keeping them safe.
Look how they’d piled on for her! Other than that brief week with Cormac, and a couple of cases with Sean, she was a complete stranger to them.
Albeit one who was carrying their biology in her body.
Not that they knew that, of course.
Other than Cormac.
Who continued to pull at her, to consume her thoughts, even though she knew that they were meant to be apart.
Needed to be apart.
She had to get home. She had to get back to her own life and quit worrying about having had sex with a man more than a decade her junior...
Emily was still sitting at the table, her thoughts going around in circles with no clear answers except a need to escape, when Cormac texted to say he was on his way up.
He must not have found Humphrey. Surely he’d have texted to let her know if they had him.
Sliding the pregnancy pamphlets spread on the table back into her purse, she reminded herself to act her age and was prepared to discuss business. Most particularly, she was eager to hear what was going on with Humphrey, to escape into the world she and Cormac legitimately inhabited together, when she heard Cormac’s key in the lock.
He had barely finished giving her the rundown on his disappointing afternoon search when she blurted, “I’d like to head back to my place.”
“You need to pick up more things? I can send someone.” Pulling out his phone, he came closer and said, “I’ll call Eva.”
“No!” She hadn’t meant to speak so sharply. Or, really, to speak of leaving at all, until they’d had more of a discussion about the immediate personal future that, ready or not, they both had a part in. But the second he’d walked in the door, she’d started waffling again.
The whole possible bed-rest thing.
“I want to go home.”
She needed him to refuse to let her go. To insist that it wasn’t safe. To list all of the reasons why it was a bad idea.
And...
She also needed him to tell her that he agreed it was time for her to go back to her place. To mention that there’d been no threats for twenty-four hours and Maxwell was under watch. Maybe even throw in the bit about Julius Hemming being off their list.
She needed him to engage with her on the topic.
She needed him to be Cormac and state things logically, unemotionally, so she could be her corresponding self and get on with things. She needed him to be the man she’d known and bring out the best in her just as he’d done two months before.
Instead, Cormac dropped to the chair at the end of the table.
And just sat.
So many things needed to be said. Some of which weren’t his to say. Needing to chase a suspect, catch him and then...maybe chase another, Cormac sat at his dining table, at a loss.
He’d looked over the file being shared by everyone working Emily’s attempted abduction in the cab on the way back from Morningside Heights. The police escort report said she’d gone out that morning to an undisclosed location. The outing had taken from midmorning until she’d met him for lunch.
She’d come straight to him from there and hadn’t given even a hint of indication that she hadn’t just come from his place.
She’d been working on her own abduction. He’d figured that out immediately. After all, it’s what he’d have done.
Whatever she’d come up with after he’d left that morning—or maybe even the night before for all he knew since he got up and left the apartment before she’d come out of her room—she’d followed up with on her own.
Meaning she didn’t trust him?
Didn’t want him involved?
Hadn’t wanted to fight him for the right to do things on her own?
As independent as she was, maybe she hadn’t even given a thought to telling him.
How the hell did he know?
Or, for that matter, how did he discern, in the midst of their bizarre situation, what was even right?
Yeah, she could have just gotten herself killed.
He could have, too, meeting with Maxwell. With Hemming. It was all part of the job.
His job, not hers.
Prosecutors weren’t usually directly in the line of danger.
He was legally armed, licensed and trained.
She was not. She didn’t even carry a gun.
“Are you aware that your police escort logs time in and out every time you leave this apartment?”
Eyes wide, her gaze landed on him, very briefly, before gluing to her computer screen. “No.”
If the situation hadn’t been so serious, and he hadn’t been fighting desperation in his dealings with her, he might have smiled at the truculent tone in her voice.
Like she was in trouble. And worried about what her punishment would be.
He’d like to punish her all right. With soft touches all over that sweet body of hers. With tender kisses and...
Where was the tenderness thing coming from?
There hadn’t been a lot of tenderness between them during their physical encounters. Mostly they’d been hunger-fueled, sweaty workouts.
Shaking his head, he asked, “Since I’m working the case and doing my best to keep you safe, do you mind telling me where you were? I assume you were following a lead, as you have every right to do, and you followed protocol by taking your escort with you, I just...”
Was hurt that she hadn’t kept him in the loop.
And that was just damned ludicrous.
“I was at the ob-gyn.”
Oh. Ohhhhh.
“She did an internal and everything looks good. Changes that happen are happening. There’s no sign of bleeding or infection.”
Cormac froze. He appreciated her businesslike tone. Nevertheless, his heart was pounding like a kettle drum in his chest.
“I’m considered high risk, due to my age, and will need closer monitoring. She wants me to get a blood pressure cuff and take regular readings as I’ll be more prone to preeclampsia.”
“Preeclampsia?” Throat dry, he held back the cough that needed to accompany the word. He wanted to sound as calm and in control as she was.
She’d come straight to lunch with him after this appointment and...he hadn’t noticed anything different about her.
Because she was that good at hiding things? Was taking it all so much better in stride than he was?
Or because he’d been too busy building walls between them so he didn’t fall for her that he hadn’t allowed himself to notice her as anything more than a work associate across the lunch table?
“It’s a condition that occurs during pregnancy sometimes when the expectant mother’s blood pressure soars to dangerous levels. If it’s not caught, it can be fatal.”
“And if it’s caught?”
“As long as it’s treated, mother and baby can be just fine. And, apparently, after the birth, the mother’s blood pressure generally returns to normal and there are no lasting effects.”
He pulled out his phone and opened his favorite shopping app. He typed in blood pressure cuff, tapped the one with the highest rating and tapped once more for an instant buy.
“Cormac?”
Shaking her head, she was staring at him, mouth open. And then, when she had his attention, asked, “Are you even listening to me?”
“Of course. The doctor-recommended Heart-Healthy Supreme Cuff will be arriving tomorrow.”
Eyebrows raising, she blinked.
She didn’t smile.
But she didn’t look angry, either.
“Go on,” he told her. He was ready to take mental notes, ferret out any action he could take to make things easier on her.
She talked about diet. Fine, he’d put himself in charge of that.
If she’d let him.
He could deliver to her place or his. Either way, that one he could get done even with a full day of work.
When she said she was going to need extra rest, that she’d likely be getting more tired within the next month or two, he panicked a little.
Emily wasn’t going to agree to slow down.
Any more than he would. You powered through.
She was starting on a vitamin regimen immediately. “She wants me to have extra ultrasound checks, at least in the beginning,” she told him next. “And recommended that I have an amniocentesis, too.”
He looked that one up. He could feel her watching him. He wasn’t fond of the words on the screen. There was risk. The needle wasn’t little. Would likely hurt her.
“There’s a higher risk of Down syndrome,” he read aloud. There were other possible defects, too. Potential complications that the invasive test would detect.
“The amnio thing...it’s like good investigative work,” he said aloud. “To show us what dangers we might be facing, yes, but more to rule out suspects. Like Hemming. We don’t have to bother sending any energy in his direction anymore.”
Emily’s smile shocked his entire system. Left fire burning in his veins. And then she sobered.
“There’s a higher-than-normal chance that toward the end, I could need to be on bed rest.” Her words didn’t put out the fire. It just shifted the hottest point of the blaze from his groin to his gut section.
“My uterine wall isn’t twenty anymore. It might thicken as well as it would have when I was twenty. Or it might not.”
“Can they give you drugs to help with that?”
“They can do things, yes, but it’s not just the uterus. It’s everything else, too.”
The intent look in her dark brown eyes hit him in the chest. What a chump he was, thinking about how being a father was going to affect his life. Trying to figure out where Emily would fit in. Big-picture things. While she’d been dealing with real-life, potentially life-threatening facts. Like, she was in her forties, not her twenties, producing another life.
“You still want to have the baby?” he asked, no judgment, or even his own opinion, at all present.
“More than anything in the world.” Her tone...almost angelic...set him back in his chair. Tightened the band around his chest some more.
“What does your doctor say? Did she recommend that you think about not having it?”
“That wasn’t even mentioned,” she said, frowning now. “She said I’m in excellent shape, and that I have every chance of having a healthy baby. Look, Cormac, if you’re having second thoughts...if you don’t want the baby... I totally get it. I understand. No one knows that you’re the father, and if you’d rather, I’m willing to agree to never tell anyone. I’ll put ‘unknown’ on the birth certificate and leave it at that.”
What the hell! Was she out of her mind?
The woman needed him. He had responsibilities, too. And...she had a stalker.
He stood without forethought. Then dropped to a knee in front of her. “I want my name on that certificate and everywhere else,” he told her quite clearly. “I want to be totally involved every step of the way. And the only way to make this happen is for us to get married. It’ll be for the baby’s sake, which is the only way either one of us would ever get married—to protect the life of another—but we can make it work, Emily. As determined as we both are, we understand each other, respect each other...”
She wasn’t saying anything. And he couldn’t stop talking because when he did, he knew his brain was going to kick in, reminding him that he couldn’t have a close one-on-one relationship with another adult. The afternoon’s lesson to himself hadn’t been an accident of timing.
“The marriage would have boundaries that protect us both,” he continued, flying without a parachute. “It would be a non-platonic, friends-with-benefits thing, but between roommates, not soul mates.”
Yeah. Roommates who shared a bedroom. Not soul mates.
“We’d have each other’s backs where the kid is concerned,” he added. “It’ll be like working a case together again, but one that lasts a lifetime.”
The tension in the invisible band squeezing his lungs lessened. Air got through. Made it to his brain.
And with rational thought taking control of the panic, he still saw his proposal as the best choice. The right choice.
Professionals working a permanent case together.
He just needed Emily to come out of her seeming state of shock and agree to marry him.