After the nurse took her vitals and asked her a battery of questions, she suggested a pelvic exam and an ultrasound today. Axel feigned a need to use the restroom while Reese got a brief pelvic exam. After that, they met in the hall and were ushered to an ultrasound room.
The room was small and dim. An exam table sat beneath a folded paper sheet. The ultrasound monitor was mounted on a swing arm beside it. The air carried the faint scent of disinfectant and the low hum of the machine.
The tech was a broad, cheerful woman named Dee with reading glasses on a beaded chain. She told Reese to lie back and get comfortable. Axel stopped just inside the door, hands loose, waiting instead of assuming.
Reese motioned for him to come stand next to the table. He came over while Dee prepared the equipment. Reese pulled her shirt up over the small bump she had been hiding and lay exposed in the dim room. Her pulse climbed with anticipation. Axel's hand found hers, and she gripped it.
Dee spread the cold gel across Reese's skin. "A little pressure now," she said, working the wand into her belly. "There we go."
The screen filled with moving gray, cloudlike static that looked like weather patterns. Then shapes emerged from the blur: a spine, a curled back, the round of a head, one fist tucked up by the face like a sleeping boxer.
"There she is," Dee said and started clicking measurements. "And here's the heartbeat."
Sound filled the room. The rapid thrum of a tiny heartbeat, so quick it almost blurred into itself. "A hundred and fifty to the minute," Dee said. "Right where it should be." Reese had read about this in the library stacks. The book had not mentioned that hearing it would take her breath away.
Axel's eyes were on the screen, and his jaw was tight. He seemed to have forgotten everything in the room except the image on thescreen. She had come to catch him pretending. She had caught him in a real, unguarded moment instead.
She squeezed his hand.
"Measurements all look great," Dee said. "Sixteen weeks, so we'll put you at the last week of November. Feeling movement?"
"Flutters for about a week now."
"That'll be kicks before long." Dee angled the wand, watched her screen, and smiled at it. "Do you want to know the sex?"
Axel looked at Reese. "Do you want to know?" he asked.
"Yes," Reese said.
"It's a girl."
A girl. The baby had been a blur on a test strip, a flutter low in her belly. Now she had a face-shaped shadow with a fist tucked up by her cheek, a due date, and a sex. Reese's eyes went hot, and a tear slid down her cheek.
"Pictures?" Dee said, already tearing the strip off the printer.
"Two," Axel said. "If you can."
Reese looked up at him, examining his face in the dark. Dee ran the printer again. Reese watched him take his copy. He gazed at it and slid it into the inside pocket of his jeans.
"A girl," he said, smiling at her. "Her mother's daughter."
At the front desk she counted out the cost of the visit from the cash in her wallet. Before she could place them on the counter, Axel slid a card to the receptionist. Reese looked at him.
She didn't say anything. They'd been playing husband and wife. Protesting after all that would make it weird. The receptionist ran the card. Axel signed the slip and tucked the pen back into its cup. Reese shoved her cash back in her wallet.
Outside, Main Street carried on with its ordinary morning traffic past the hospital. They stood on the sidewalk, and she still had the sonogram strip in her hand.
"Thank you for coming," she said, unable to articulate anything else.
"I need you to know something, Reese. I said it after the picnic, and I need to say it again. I'm committed to you and to her. She's part of you. And you are my mate."
His words landed hard enough that she had to look away. She stared across the street at a woman wrestling a stroller out of a sedan, at a delivery truck double-parked by the pharmacy, at anything that wasn't him. Her throat hurt. The sonogram strip crackled as she slid it into her purse. She folded her arms across her chest.
For months she had carried all of this alone. Every doctor's visit she couldn't make. Every bill she couldn't pay. Every night she woke up in a cold sweat and had to remind herself she was safe. She had gotten used to bracing for impact. Used to assuming that if things got difficult enough, she could always run.
But he'd shown up early and saved her a seat in the waiting room. He hadn't flinched when the nurse called him Dad. He'd taken that sonogram like it was precious. And when he talked about her and the baby, he sounded like he was in it for good.
Reese let out a breath. She wanted to believe him because he kept doing the right things, even when no one was watching.Reese knew enough about shifters to at least trust that the one in front of her was the man he kept showing himself to be. For now.
