Page 105 of Act Like You Don't Care

“What would you like?”

He took a deep breath, almost gasping for air. “I don’t know. I want to be safe. I want our daughter to be safe. The restraining order won’t stop him if he wants to come after me.”

I should have expected this. Actually, I had, but not quite in this form. “I’ve already talked to Jim. You’re getting a whole new security system whenever you’re okay with having him in the house. He’ll wire up the fence and replace the gate with something a little more high tech too.”

“How much will that be?”

I shook my head. “Our treat. I want the baby to be safe, too. And Jim, well… he wants to make it up to you for what Odette did.”

His head snapped around, his eyes wide with astonishment. “I don’t blame Jim for that!”

“No,” I said gently. “But he does.”

“Oh.” Tam stared out the windshield, a thoughtful expression on his face. “I think I should pay for it, but if he can use his connections to get stuff cheaper, I wouldn’t mind.” His leg jigged again. “Could you tell him I’m not mad about that? I mean, not at him, anyway. You can’t control what someone else is going to do.” He sounded surprisingly wistful, and I wondered if he was thinking about Joshua again.

“Hey, you couldn’t do anything about Joshua’s choices either. Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for our own decisions and not taking responsibility for things we weren’t consulted on.”

He made a face. “Yeah.”

Why did it feel like we’d been having two entirely different conversations? “I’ll talk to Jim tonight and we’ll sort out some details. Are you okay if I bring him over on Sunday?”

“Sure. The place is probably still going to be a disaster, though.”

“Not if Josephina has anything to say about it,” I reminded him. It made him laugh, which was what I’d been hoping for, and the conversation drifted off to other topics until I’d dropped him off at the new house.

The car felt very empty afterward as I headed back to the office.

Miles

Iushered our newest client out the door, turned over the billing information to the receptionist, and nearly ran right over my mother as I headed back to my office. “Something wrong?” I asked.

“You need to call Tam,” she said, turning to follow me. “He said your phone was off.”

“I was in a meeting.”

“I know. And he knows. But he says he thinks he’s having contractions again and they’ll take him at the hospital but he doesn’t want to drive.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and said a silent prayer to whatever deity it was that looked out for alphas dealing with anxious, control-freak omegas. “Did he say they were coming regularly?”

“No, just that the last one hurt.” She smiled sympathetically at me. “It’s his first. And he’s Tam.”

“He is indeed,” I muttered. I was exhausted, having been up late last night with an emergency evaluation, and the night before sitting in the hospital with Tam because he hadn’t felt the baby move since the morning.

She was asleep.

Mom had laughed.

“I have a box you can take over when you go,” she called merrily from the kitchen.

If it was more baby clothes I was going to take a page out of Tam’s book and throw a tantrum. The baby’s clothing was already migrating into the unused dresser drawers in the room that Tam had set aside for me and we still had a month to go.

I grabbed my keys from my desk and locked my office door, took the damn box, and squealed the tires out the driveway on the way to pick Tam up.

Tam was sitting on the front step when I got there, a small bag on the ground at his feet.

“Have you had any more?”

He shook his head, but his lips were pinched and, from what I knew of him, it could have been him toughing it out, or it could have been him being stressed because this wasn’t something he could be in control of.