She wanted this baby with every fiber of her being.
In December, she’d been nervously excited to tell him the news. She’d planned what to say. She was having his baby, but she wouldn’t force him to be a father. He could make his own decisions about what role he wanted to have in their child’s life. She didn’t want her child to be fatherless, but neither did she want her baby to have a dad who resented the responsibility.
She’d called Jae and left him a message, asking him to tell Xavier to call her. It was the only way she had to get ahold of him. She then spent the rest of the day waiting with her cell phone in hand.
Nothing could have prepared her for the shock she felt the following morning when she stepped into park headquarters and came face-to-face with Xavier. For a moment, she’d thought he was there because he’d guessed why she needed to speak with him and wanted to hear the news in person.
She’d felt a rush of wild joy.
The feeling lasted less than sixty seconds. Her happy fantasy flamed out when he opened his mouth and told her what he’d just done: he’d filed a complaint with the park superintendent. The subject of the complaint was none other than Audrey herself for refusing to sign off on a Navy SEAL training slated for Lake Olympus Lodge and the surrounding forest.
A proposal for the training had crossed her desk just days after the site was looted. Upset by the damage to the site, she would admit she’d viewed the proposed exercise with a jaundiced eye. What if she approved it, and then the SEALs harmed the historic or prehistoric sites that dotted the lakeshore? Sites were everywhere around the lake. For thousands of years, Lake Olympus had been an important gathering place for Indigenous people. If SEALs playing war games hurt those sites after she’d given them the green light, it would be her fault.
She’d never be able to look George in the eye again.
She sent the proposal back, asking the Navy to resubmit in the spring after they did a proper assessment of potential impacts to cultural and historical resources. Perhaps with more information and after extensive consultation with local tribes, they’d be approved for the following year.
It was standard procedure for a substandard—and clearly rushed—proposal.
It turned out Xavier didn’t take rejection well, so he turned to the park superintendent to override Audrey’s finding. When Jim refused to ignore the finding of his subject matter expert, Xavier insisted on bringing it before the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation—the ultimate governing body for her profession—to put pressure on the superintendent. But Xavier’s complaint wasn’t a simple objection to her findings. No. That she could understand and even forgive. He had his job; she had hers.
But that wasn’t what he did.
When he couldn’t win with the facts, he smeared her, claiming she wouldn’t agree to sign the Finding of No Significant Impact because of their personal involvement. Because he’d slept with her and then rejected her.
The accusation was ridiculous—she hadn’t even known Xavier was in the Navy until she saw him in uniform at park headquarters—and she certainly hadn’t known he had anything to do with the proposed training. But the truth hadn’t mattered to ACHP. They’d believed him.
His accusations nearly got her fired. She was still a little surprised she hadn’t been. Her boss, at least, had believed her, which was why Xavier had to turn to ACHP in the first place. But that didn’t mean her job wasn’t hanging by a thread in the fallout of the success of his ploy. And that this had all happened on the heels of the looting? Not a great month for ONP’s park archaeologist. A month later, her job remained on shaky ground.
That day at park headquarters, she’d been too angry to tell Xavier their big news, and she still hadn’t told him. She wanted to. And she would. Soon. But every time she reached for the phone, anger would rise and steal her ability to speak. This was joyful news. For the rest of her life, she would remember telling the father of her child about her pregnancy. Did she really want that memory tainted by anger?
She imagined telling him dozens of different ways, but they always ended up tinged with bitterness. “Hey, funny thing, remember how you tried to get me fired two weeks before Christmas? Yeah, well, I’m pregnant with your child. Good thing I kept my job and didn’t lose my health insurance.”
Or sometimes she went a different route. “Guess what? I’m having your baby, so you might want to recant what you said so I don’t lose my job and the maternity leave I’ve accrued.”
She didn’t want to be bitter. She wanted to share the joy in her heart. But she didn’t know how to get into that mental space with Xavier.
Now she stopped in the circular drive that fronted the lodge and stared at the façade as memories of that night flooded her. His touch. His smile. His warm laugh and deep, husky voice as he told her exactly what he wanted to do to her. The heat in his gaze during the intense stare down before that first incredible kiss.
Facing the lodge, she realized this was the first time she’d been able to think of Xavier without anger since mid-December. Maybe she should call him right now. She shook her head, irritated with the distraction of it all. She had work to do. She needed to check on the site. Check on George. Then head home before the storm hit.
She parked in the spot next to the blue-painted accessible spaces at the far end of the loop. Even in the middle of winter when the lodge was closed, she couldn’t bring herself to park in a blue spot. She hit the lock button on the SUV as she walked away, knowing that too was unnecessary. Some habits were too ingrained.
Before hiking to the site, she would check the fuse boxes to see if the outbuildings had power. This might not be about looting. A surge could have caused an outage at the blacksmith shop. She’d braced herself for the worst-case scenario, but there was a whole continuum of possibilities. This could be nothing.
She rounded the lodge, heading for the exterior basement door on the lake side of the building. Wind swept along the roof, whipping water from the gutter and dropping it straight down the back of her neck.
She squealed at the frigid shower and pulled the hood of her raincoat up, protecting her neck too late to do any good. The temperature hovered at forty degrees, and the wind had a cold bite. She wished she’d grabbed her gloves from her pack in the back of the SUV.
She reached the basement door, which was at the base of a set of stone steps cut into the earth. She inserted her key into the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. She checked the key. Gray plastic ring around the top. It was the right key.
She inserted it again. It refused to budge.
Frustration won over, and like a petulant child, she kicked the thick door. “Dammit! I do not have time for this.”
A chill ran down her neck, but it wasn’t raindrops that triggered it. Someone was behind her. She didn’t know how she knew this, because she hadn’t heard a sound except for the incessant wind. Before she could turn, she heard the distinctive clicks of a slide being racked to chamber a bullet.
“Do you have time for this?” The words were a soft, malevolent whisper.