My jaw tightened. I wanted to argue and knew I couldn’t, because Sterling was right and we both knew it, and the truth was that I’d been avoiding thinking too hard about what the symptoms added up to—because the answer that kept surfacing was one that would require me to completely rearrange what I knew.
“I just need to finish the mission,” I said finally. “Get back to the ranch. Figure out what’s happening from there.”
Sterling was quiet for a moment, his eyes on my face. “You mean get back to Jackson,” he said.
Not a question.
“Yes,” I said, and the word came out without hesitation, which was its own kind of answer.
Sterling nodded once, then clapped me on the shoulder with careful attention. “Then let’s finish this mission,” he said. “Two more weeks. Then home.”
I was good with that. Two weeks of Istanbul, two weeks of whatever was happening to my body, two weeks of wondering what was happening in Montana—all of it ending with me on Jackson’s porch, asking the question I’d been carrying since day three.
Sterling moved past me, heading back up the stairs toward the safe house. I stayed where I was, one hand on the rail, eyes on the street below.
The vendor had attracted a crowd—five or six people clustered around his cart, steam rising between them in the cool air. The kid on the bicycle had disappeared around the corner, moving too fast to track.
I pulled out my phone and checked it one more time—no new messages, just the unanswered thread between Jackson and me, the last entry still my “landed safely” text from nineteen days ago.
Whatever was happening—with Jackson, with my body—it would wait. Would have to wait, because the mission came first and the team came first and the fourteen days between now and home were non-negotiable.
I could make it fourteen days. I’d survived worse.
I tucked the phone back in my pocket and started up the stairs, following Sterling’s path toward whatever came next.
Chapter Nine
~ Jackson ~
I was sitting on the porch with a mug of coffee that had gone cold about two hours ago when Rawley’s truck rolled up my gravel drive. The morning was clear—one of those perfect Montana fall days where the sky goes blue from horizon to horizon and the light hits the valley at exactly the right angle to turn the eastern pasture gold.
I didn’t get up. My back had been aching since dawn, and standing meant putting my full weight on feet that felt like they’d been worked over with a ball peen hammer.
Rawley climbed out of the driver’s seat without bothering to kill the engine, the door closing behind him with a solid thunk that carried across the yard. He looked exactly like he always did—clean-shaven, eyes alert, moving with that motion that came from twenty years of knowing exactly how much energy any given action was worth.
I watched him cross the gravel with my coffee cup balanced on my knee and my other hand resting—not deliberately, it just ended up there—on the curve of my stomach.
The flannel shirt wasn’t doing much to hide it anymore. It rode up when I sat, exposing a strip of skin between the bottom button and the waistband of my jeans, the fabric stretched tight across a stomach that three months ago had been flat and now wasn’t. Not dramatically pregnant—not the basketball-under-the-shirt stereotype—but definitely, undeniably not flat.
Definitely pregnant. Cruz’s child. The physical impossibility that had rewritten my entire understanding of myself.
Rawley stopped at the base of the porch steps, one boot on the bottom stair, arms loose at his sides. “Team’s on their way back,” he said, not bothering with small talk. “Should land sometime tomorrow.”
His eyes dropped to my stomach the way everyone’s did now—that involuntary flicker toward the flannel shirt that betrayed more than it hid, the quick assessment, the careful blankness that followed.
It had been happening for weeks—Jojo noticing first, then Decker, then the whole damn ranch in a wave of careful glances and adjusted conversations. Nobody said it out loud. Nobody needed to. The evidence was right there, impossible to miss once you knew what you were looking at.
Rawley didn’t comment on it, but the pause before he spoke again was its own kind of comment. “What are you going to tell him?” he asked, the question direct in the way Rawley’s questions always were.
I laughed, and it came out flat and wrong, the kind of laugh that wasn’t one. “I have no idea,” I said, and meant it completely.
Six weeks of trying to figure it out. Six weeks of typing messages and deleting them, of drafting explanations in my head at three in the morning, of standing in the shower with water hitting my back and no words that felt like they’d fit the space between what I knew and what Cruz would need to hear.
Rawley didn’t push. He just held my gaze for a long moment, his expression giving away nothing, then said, “I’ll send him over when they land.”
I shook my head. “Don’t bother. He’ll come on his own.”
Cruz would. He wasn’t the kind of man who let six weeks of radio silence go without showing up in person to understand why. Not after the thing between us—not after those passionate nights that had somehow become the measure I used for everything else.
