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“Or if you think anyone could make Jane do something she doesn’t want to do,” Abby added, her eyes narrowed and her lip curled.
Heat crawled up Rafe’s neck as he was roundly chastised. “I said I’m sorry,” he ground out. “I withdraw the comment.”
Jaw clenched, his sister nodded at him then turned back to her breakfast. And everyone followed suit.
After an unbearably awkward minute of nothing but the sound of eating, Ulysses asked Abby, “Why do you think the babe will be a girl?”
Abby flicked her gaze to Rafe, as though trying to gauge his mood, then lifted her chin and said, “Henry, Paul and Charlie all had girls. I figured it was a foregone conclusion.”
His father harrumphed. “I figured four granddaughters was karma coming back to bite me in the arse.”
Jane burst out laughing, and just like that the lingering tension eased from the room, and Rafe finally relaxed.
“I’ll try my best not to add to your burden, Uly,” Jane said, then lifted her coffee to her lips. “What the—” She frowned at her cup then slowly turned to glare at Rafe. “What did you do?”
Rafe grinned then took a sip of his own coffee. “It’s decaf.”
“Gah!” She shuddered and put her mug down. “I should have realised you were up to something when you didn’t stop me from pouring myself a cup.”
Everyone pushed their mugs away, except Wolf, who drank deeply from his. “What?” he said, realising he was the centre of attention.
“How can you drink that?” Ulysses asked, staring at his future son-in-law as though he’d just swallowed a live octopus.
Wolf shrugged, unconcerned. “I’m guessing you’ve never drunk the coffee in a teacher’s lounge at a public high school before. Believe me, decaf’s an improvement.”
An hour later they were sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office, Jane flicking through month old magazines, looking at recipes, and Rafe silently noting how many people filled the other chairs.
He calculated the time it would take for the rest of the town to know Jane Melville was having his baby to be roughly as long as it took for the doctor to see them.
Already he could see the glint of mobile phone screens surreptitiously appearing in the hands of onlookers, people who glanced away with more speed than necessary when he caught their eye.
Adding fuel to the fire was Jane’s decision to wear a form-fitting T-shirt. “Go big or go home,” she’d said when he’d questioned her choice. “You wanted people to know. Now they will.”
She was right. He did want people to know. Rafe was tired of hiding his feelings for Jane and it had occurred to him that just maybe, by forcing their budding relationship into the light of day, Jane might finally admit her true feelings too.
Not that he’d admitted his, exactly. He’d been denying them to everyone, even himself. But who was he kidding? His feelings for this woman hadn’t changed in sixteen years, and try as he might to forget her, forget how she turned his world upside-down and shook the fuck out of it, he couldn’t. Because in Rafe’s world, filled with rules and law and responsibility, Jane was the sweetly scented summer breeze.
She was the highest point on a rollercoaster right before the stomach-flipping plunge.
She was the peas to his carrots.
Two complete opposites who fit perfectly together.
Rafe could be himself with Jane, and her him. They didn’t have to hide their true natures from one another as they did from everyone else, ashedid from everyone else. Jane was far more courageous in that department.
The boring bastard.
She was the only one outside the Bennett clan who didn’t see him that way, and with any luck she’d be a Bennett soon.
At least he hoped.
He let his gaze sweep over her face, smiled at the look of concentration he saw as her gaze danced over the page and her lips moved silently as she read. Then he looked lower, lingered on her breasts for a moment before settling on her stomach.
The soft white cotton of her T-shirt clung to her body and accentuated the subtle curve of her baby bump. Confirmed the rumours that’d been swirling through town since the wedding debacle.
She was pregnant.
And his presence in the doctor’s office that morning would only be seen in one light.
