Amelia
Amelia wrapped her hands around the steaming cup of coffee Ethan had placed in front of her. Summer was dying, and the nights were cooling rapidly, the way they always did in the desert. That wasn’t the problem at the moment, though. It was nerves, pure and simple, that made her shiver now.
He sat down across the table from her with his own mug. He took his coffee black. Hers was practically blonde. She wondered what that meant. If it even meant anything. She’d heard that smokers drank black coffee more often than nonsmokers. It was supposedly something about how smoking killed their taste buds. Did Ethan smoke? He hadn’t been smoking that night at the bar and she hadn’t smelled it on him on the ride back to his house. He’d just smelled like fresh air and leather.
She shook her head slightly. Why was she wasting her time thinking about that? Probably because she had no idea how to begin a conversation about what they actually needed to talk about.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked once he’d taken a sip of his coffee.
Apparently, he had no problem diving right in. She took a breath, rubbed her suddenly sweaty palms down the sides of her pants and gathered her thoughts. She wanted to be upfront and honest because it looked like they were going to be in each other’s lives for the long haul now. She was tired of tiptoeing around things with her father and Anthony. She wanted at least one person who knew her inside and out.
“Because you were already mad,” she said. “You walk in looking like a thunderstorm and expect me to say what? Glad you dropped by, I’m having your baby?”
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth and he shook his head. “No. But tell me honestly, were you going to get around to it if your father hadn’t come home?”
Amelia ran her fingertip around the rim of her cup. “I can’t tell you honestly, because I don’t know. I...wantedto. But I can’t promise I would have had the courage to do it tonight.” Ethan frowned, but she went on before he could ask more questions. “I can tell you why and it doesn’t have anything to do with you as a person. It’s just that no one has had a good reaction to this news, Ethan. Anthony is annoyed because it speeds up the wedding. My father is humiliated. I’m terrified. I couldn’t handle it if you’d walked out on me, or told me to get rid of it. Out of all the outcomes I’ve already dealt with, I was expecting a good one from you. I never in a million years expected you towantto be a part of this.”
Ethan shifted in his seat and, for a second, she thought that was almost as if he’d planned to reach for her. In the end, he stayed where he was. Was he already distancing himself from her? Amelia pressed her lips together so they wouldn’t tremble. There was no time to deal with the voice in her head right now. She needed to focus on the issue at hand and worry about where they stood as a couple later. If they stood anywhere at all.
“I was kind of ticked off about that,” Ethan said. “But then I figured it out. You don’t know much about me. Hell, we don’t know that much about each other. But I can tell you why I feel the way I feel. If you’re interested.”
“Of course I’m interested!” Amelia said eagerly, leaning forward. She’d been dying to find out more about Ethan since the minute she’d left him.
Ethan looked flattered and a little flustered by her enthusiasm. He pushed one hand through his hair and put the coffee cup down on the table. “Okay. Well...” He shifted in his seat again and cleared his throat. “My parents were only nineteen when I was born. They weren’t...the most stable couple. My dad, Marcus, drank. He drank a lot, actually. My mom did, too, but she cleaned it up when she found out she was pregnant. My dad didn’t. When I was about six months old, she finally got tired of him drinking their paychecks away and she packed up. She left with this other guy she knew who was headed out to a job in the south.”
“So that’s where your accent comes from,” she mused.
He made a face. “Yeah. I’ve tried to get rid of it, but--”
“Don’t!” she said emphatically. “It’s hot.”
This time he did grin. The accent broadened as he said, “Why thank you, ma’am.”
Amelia laughed. He made that move again, as if he wanted to touch her, but he held himself back. She wished he wouldn’t, but she couldn’t say she didn’t understand why he did.
“So is that why you want to be a part of this baby’s life?” she asked. “Because your dad wasn’t part of yours?”
Ethan looked surprised. “He was. I mean, later.”
She blinked in confusion. “Oh. I thought...”
“It’s not really a complicated story,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s not really normal either.”
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“We lived in North Carolina until right before I turned sixteen,” Ethan went on. “My mom wouldn’t let me talk to my dad. She didn’t even like to talk about him. All I ever heard was that he’d rather drink and mess around with other women than take care of his family. I thought he must be a real jerk. A loser. A drunk.” Ethan looked down at the table for a long moment and then he took a sip of his coffee before he went on. “Then my mom died.”
Amelia’s lips parted. “Oh, Ethan.”
“Yeah,” he said, acknowledging her sympathy roughly. “It happened really fast. One day she was fine and the next...she was just gone. Meningitis. It’s apparently a pretty rare thing to die from when you’re her age, but that’s what happened. Anyway, the state didn’t know what to do with me because she didn’t really have any other family. It was either foster care or Marcus and he said he’d take me. So, they bought me a plane ticket and sent me to live with my dad.”
“That must have been rough,” she said, knowing “rough” was probably inadequate.
Ethan shrugged and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess it was,” he agreed. “I didn’t know what the hell was gonna happen. You know, was he gonna drink himself stupid every night? Was he going to try to hit me? Maybe he’d just disappear for days at a time and I wouldn’t know what the hell to do.”
“You were scared,” Amelia said softly.
“Hell yeah, I was,” he admitted. “My mom was a good person, and she did the best she could for me, but she never had a kind word for Marcus Billings. And I’d...never really been away from her. Never been out of North Carolina. At least, not that I could remember. The idea of getting on a plane really freaked me out. And I was leaving every single friend I’d ever made on the other side of the damn country.” He rubbed his hand over his chin. “By the time I got off the plane and got smacked in the face with all the dry, desert air, I was ready for a fight.”
He got up and poured Amelia another cup of coffee, putting in sugar and creamer, turning the drink golden brown before putting it down in front of her. This time, he didn’t sit across the table from her. He leaned against the counter instead, holding his own fresh coffee and looking pensive.
“He was waiting for me at the gate. Grease all over his hands and his clothes. See, he meant to change before he came to get me, but he always got distracted when he was working on something new. And he’d just gotten his hands on a 1960 Royal Enfield Interceptor.” Seeing Amelia’s blank expression, Ethan said. “British bike. They’re hard to find and 1960 was the first year they made ‘em. Anyway, he’d been working on it when he remembered me--”
“He forgot his son was coming back for the first time since he was six months old?” Amelia asked, completely incredulous.
“He didn’t forget,” Ethan said, just a touch defensive. “He just lost track of time and couldn’t clean up. So he’s waiting at the gate, covered in grease and looking like a bum. Ripped jeans, black tee shirt, black leather vest. He hadn’t shaved in a few days...what?”
Amelia smiled. “Nothing.” Ethan stood before her, grease under his nails and in the creases of his palms. He was wearing ripped jeans, a black tee shirt, and a black leather vest. And he hadn’t shaved in a few days. It was a really good look for him, no doubt, but it was more than a little funny given the way he’d just described his father. “Go on,” she encouraged when he continued to look a little quizzically at her.
“I walked over,” Ethan went on. “And he said hello. That was it. Just...hello. He didn’t ask how my flight was or anything else. It pissed me off, so I blew him off and went and got my suitcase. He just kind of stared at it when I brought it back and then he said it wouldn’t fit on the bike.” Ethan shook his head, a half smile playing around his lips. “I asked him what the hell I was supposed to do with all my stuff, shove it up my ass? My mom would have smacked me right across the back of the head for talking to her like that. Dad just shrugged and said if I thought it would fit, I could try. But otherwise, he could call me a cab. So, that’s what he did. I rode to his house by myself and he followed on the bike.”
“And then what?” she asked.
“Then we kinda settled in. He was gone most of the day, working. He was gone a lot at night with the club. So I kinda thought I was right; he was just gonna be out all the time, doing whatever he wanted. It would have been okay if it weren’t summer. I didn’t know anybody in the town yet, so it wasn’t like I could throw any parties while he was gone. And then I noticed there wasn’t a drop of beer in the house. No liquor either. Now, my mom had said that this was a guy who couldn’t go twelve hours without a drink, so I figured he was drinking at the club. One day, he got tired of me just lying around the house and dragged me over to The Angel’s Keepers HQ.” Ethan pulled the picture out of his back pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Amelia. “This was taken that day. It’s pretty much the only picture of us there is.”
Amelia picked it up carefully. The camera had obviously been a cheap one and the color was a little off, the edges a little fuzzy. Sixteen-year-old Ethan looked out at her slightly defiantly. He’d been pretty tall by then, only a few inches shorter than he was now. His shoulders had been beginning to broaden and his hair had been longer, falling into his eyes.
“You were grunge,” she said with a smile, looking at his red and black flannel and baggy jeans. “I never would have pictured that.”
He shrugged, looking away. “Well...it was a big deal back in North Carolina.”
Amelia chuckled at the tone. “I think it’s cute.”
Ethan reached over and twitched the picture out of her light hold. “I think you’ve seen enough.”
“Wait just a second!” she protested. “Give it back. I wanted to look at your dad!”
“You had your shot,” he said.
Amelia pushed her chair back and dove for the picture he was starting to push back into his pocket. He grabbed her wrist and spun her neatly, putting her chest to his back. She squirmed, trying to break free of his grip.
“If you promise to be good, I’ll give it back,” Ethan said, his voice rough in her ear.
Amelia caught her breath. “I’m never completely good,” she answered, bolder when she wasn’t facing him.
“That much I know for sure.”
Ethan let her go slowly and she turned around, too shy suddenly to look up at him. She held out her hand and he reluctantly returned the photograph. This time she focused on the other man in the frame.
Marcus Billings was tall, too. In fact, Ethan bore a very strong resemblance to his father now that he was grown up. They had the same firm jawline and dark eyes. They both had the same expression in the picture too. She would describe it as manly terror.
“He looks like a pretty nice guy,” she offered.
“He’d really cleaned himself up,” Ethan said. “I had to put the story together piece by piece, but he’d stopped drinking when I was about two years old. He’d tracked my mom down, tried to see me, but she wouldn’t let him. She said we were better off without him.”
“Even though he was clean?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if maybe she didn’t believe it, or if she just liked her life a whole lot better without him in it. Either way, he left. Joined the Army for a while. Then, when his tour was up, he came back and he and William started The Angel’s Keepers. I would have been about ten then. So it had been around for about six years when I came out to Nevada. I didn’t know anything about mechanic work, but I didn’t have anything better to do, so I started going to the HQ with my dad. He taught me everything he knew.”
“And then you joined the Army, too,” Amelia said when Ethan stopped talking. “Right? You said you were a mechanic in the Army.”
He nodded, surprised she’d remembered. “Yeah. I probably would have stayed in longer, too. I kinda planned to make it my full-time gig. But my dad got sick.” He cleared his throat. “He kept saying everything was fine, but I could tell it wasn’t, so when it came time to reenlist, I didn’t go back in. I came home and saw he’d lost more than fifty pounds while I was gone. His hair was starting to get really thin and he looked about twenty years older. I sat him down, told him I wasn’t going to leave until he told me what the hell was going on. He finally gave in and told me. He had cancer, pancreatic. He made it two years after that, which was a year and a half more than they gave him.” He paused, swallowing hard. “Eventually the pain got to be too much. Then I lost him. So I had ten years with my dad when I could have had twenty-six.” He met her eyes. “Amelia, I’m not gonna do that to my kid. Nobody knows how long they’ve got, but I’m gonna be there as long as I can.”
Amelia blinked back sudden tears, looking down at the scarred tabletop. He’d sounded like he meant every word. It was the most emotion she’d ever heard in his voice. And, as foolish as it sounded, she felt a little jealous of the baby.
“Hey,” Ethan said, sitting down across from her once more. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
That I’m falling in love with you. That I don’t think you’ll ever love me back.Amelia took a breath to steady her voice. “I’m sorry,” she said, putting on a small smile. “I’m an emotional wreck. Thanks for telling me that story. I understand now.”That I’m just the woman who happens to be pregnant with your child. That it wasn’t me you came back for.
Ethan’s dark eyes searched her face. “I’m not so sure you do,” he said flatly. “You look--”
Her phone rang and she pulled it out of her bag. “It’s my father.”
His mouth tightened. “Ignore it.”
“I can’t,” Amelia said. “If he has even the smallest, slightest reason to think you might have hurt me, he’ll have the police out here before you can think twice. I don’t want to put you through that.”
Ethan stood up. “I’ll leave you alone, then.”
She grabbed his shirt as he walked past. “No, please don’t. I’m sorry, but...I just need you to stay with me for this.”
He stopped as she accepted the call and after a brief second, she felt his big hand resting on her shoulder. The warmth and strength there were the only thing that gave her the courage to say hello.
“Where are you?” Gregory demanded. “I’ve had security all over the house and the grounds, so don’t try to lie and tell me you’re still here!”
Ethan squeezed her shoulder and she glanced up at him. He could clearly hear her father’s shouting from where he stood. It was just as clear that he didn’t like it. His jaw was tight, but his eyes were reassuring.
“I’m not going to try to lie,” she said, her voice shaking only slightly, which she was proud of. “I’m with Ethan.”
Amelia jerked the phone away from her ear as her father bellowed, “What did you just say?”
“I said I’m with Ethan,” she repeated. “I told you if he wanted to be involved--”
“Don’t be an idiot, Amelia. He doesn’t want to be involved!” Gregory interrupted, his tone angry and mocking. “He just wants to screw me over!”
Ethan snorted and Amelia glanced up at him. He looked furious now.
“Dad--”
“This conversation is over. Get home. Now, Amelia.”
“This is my child,” Amelia went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “And it’s his, too. If he wants to be involved, I won’t stop him. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. All it would take is a DNA test and any court would give him visitation rights.”
“All it will take is some money.”
There was a different tone in her father’s voice now. Amelia thought she heard an undertone of desperation. She’d never disobeyed him so blatantly before. To her surprise, under the nervousness, she felt good.
“Ask him, Amelia. Ask him right now and make sure he knows I’m serious. Ask him how much it will take to pay him to ride off into the sunset.”
“My dad wants to buy you off,” Amelia said, looking up at Ethan.
He laughed humorlessly. “Sure, let’s work something out. How about a million dollars and my kid?”
“Hear that?” Amelia asked into the phone. “This is going to happen, Dad. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“You can!” Gregory said and there was no denying the desperation in his tone now. “Amelia, just come home. Maybe...maybe I have been too hard on you. I’m willing to let you come and go a little more as you please. Willing to give you a little more freedom. I...we can talk about the engagement to Anthony. Maybe we’re rushing things. I’m sure Governor Barlow would understand.”
Amelia put her head in her hand, fighting the urge to laugh. If she laughed, it would dissolve into tears and she didn’t want to cry anymore. “Dad. You were rushing things a month ago. It’s too late now.”
“No, sweetie, it’s not.” His voice was calming now, a tone she remembered from childhood. It very nearly weakened her resolve because it had been so long since she’d felt soothed by him. “I know you’re scared and you think this is the right decision, but just because he’s the baby’s father doesn’t mean he’s going to be a good dad. He’s never going to be able to provide anything. Do you really want to raise your child in a world with no opportunities?”
Amelia’s voice was firm. “I could help provide those opportunities, too.”
There was a long pause and she could almost hear her father swallowing his words. The soothing tone seemed to be a struggle for him now. “Amelia. I know you think you’re capable of doing that, but you have no idea how the world works. You’ve never even managed your own money!”
“And whose fault is that?” she demanded. “I begged you to let me have some control! I’ve been asking if I could get a job since I was sixteen! I’ve wanted you to let me...” she broke off. A list of all the ways she’d wanted to be a functioning adult would take much too long. “This is pointless. I’m not going to deal with it right now. Ethan and I have things to work out and that’s all there is to it.”
“Amelia May Stratton, don’t you dare disconnect this call!” Gregory boomed. “Get home where you belong before you make a fool of me and end up getting yourself hurt!”
Amelia ended the call, shaking. She tried once again to hold back the tears, but they poured down her cheeks anyway. She covered her face with her hands and let the sobs shake her.
Ethan pulled her up from the chair and wrapped his arms around her. “Don’t let him get to you,” he said in a low voice. “You’re doing the right thing.”
She only cried harder. The worst part, even worse than having her lack of money and profitable skills rubbed into her face, had been the prediction that she was going to get herself hurt. She hadn’t needed to hear that. She knew it was true. It was actually the only thing she was sure of. She felt more for Ethan than she’d ever felt for any man in her life. She was teetering on the edge of falling in love with him and she would always just be the woman he got pregnant. Amelia pulled away, wiping her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I should go.”
Ethan eyed her. “Go where?”
“I... I guess a hotel.” If she could figure out how to pay for it. Amelia chewed her lower lip. Maybe Gregory hadn’t cut off her credit cards just yet.
“Don’t be stupid. You can just stay here.”
She caught her breath. Was she wrong? Maybe she was. He had kissed her earlier, after all. Before he found out about the baby. And he’d held her twice since then. Maybe--
“You can have the bedroom,” Ethan went on. “I’ll stay out here on the couch.”
Her heart sank. “Oh. No, I can sleep on the couch, it’s fine.”
He caught her upper arm and steered her down the short hall. “I’ve got shirts in that drawer over there if you want something to sleep in and you know where the bathroom is,” he said brusquely. “I’ll be down the hall if you need me.”
“Thanks,” she said, feeling a little hollow.
He only nodded and closed the bedroom door behind him. Amelia stripped off her clothes and pulled one of his shirts on. Then she slid down into sheets that smelled like him and closed her eyes, even though she knew sleep wasn’t going to be easy to attain.