Page 88 of Her Christmas Wish

Right. That. Except... He shook his head. “You aren’t,” he reminded softly. “Remember, this morning...”

It wasn’t that he thought she was confused. It was that he was. He got that. Just couldn’t find... He shook his head...

“I had some...bleeding...it stopped. This morning, actually. Before I even talked to you. I just didn’t know it. All day, it hasn’t started again. So I took a test.”

She took a test.

Oh!

Oh, God. She took a test.

“You’re pregnant.” He stood, as though he could intimidate the words away. They were a threat to everything he’d come there to say. To do. To accomplish.

“It looks that way, yes,” she said. “Both lines turned very solidly pink.”

Pink. Both of them.

He hadn’t known there were two lines.

“You’re pregnant.”

Sage stood, too, reaching out a hand toward him, but let it drop. “I know it’s a shock.”

“No! No, it’s fine,” he said, knowing that it wasn’t fine at all. Knowing that she knew that, too.

“You’re pregnant,” he said one more time. Just couldn’t seem to wrap his three-beer-addled mind around the implications behind the sentence.

“Yeah,” she said then, wrapping her arms around herself.

Holding her child. Not reaching out to him.

“Okay, well, good deal,” he said. Then turned, trotted down her steps and strode off up the beach. As quickly as his flip-flops in the sand would take him.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sage cried some Saturday night. More than she’d cried in years. For herself, a little. For Gray, and for the child who maybe wouldn’t see the great man their father was, a whole lot more.

With tears trickling slowly, steadily down her face, she stayed out on the porch, waiting for him to come back. He’d walked the opposite direction of Scott’s house when he’d taken his leave. Knew he’d have to pass by again to go home to bed.

She wouldn’t let herself make judgments or worry about the mammoth changes coming in her own home life. She just sat with her newfound knowledge.

And waited.

Sometime after midnight, when she’d cried all the tears she had and still hadn’t seen Gray head back down the beach, she’d figured out that he’d taken the road home.

He hadn’t been able to see her.

She got that, too.

He’d been right when he’d said that he wasn’t great at expressing himself when it came to emotional issues. But she was beginning to read between his lines a little better than she had in the past.

With the help of a little maturity, and a lot more insight where he was concerned.

The man had spent his entire life solving not only his own problems, but those of his caregivers as well, largely by himself. He’d taken on the burden fully alone.

Made most if not all his important choices on his own.

She couldn’t expect him to suddenly change, just because he’d fallen in love with her.