he’s the kind of guy who would abandon the woman who’s pregnant with his child?” she challenged.
Her friend looked away. “Drop it, Paige. Please.”
Because she could tell that Olivia was still hurting, and because she knew better than anyone that a man couldn’t be forced to feel something for a child he didn’t want, she’d dropped it.
And Olivia had never told her anything else about her baby’s father, not even his name, which meant that Paige had a lot of questions for Lieutenant Colonel Zach Crawford.
She headed back downstairs now, determined to get some answers.
Zach was still standing in the hallway where she’d left him, his feet shoulder-width apart, his hands clasped behind his back. Paige recognized the military stance but, in conjunction with the uniform, it left her feeling anything but “at ease.”
She moved toward the kitchen, and he fell into step behind her. She’d spent countless hours in this room, usually with Ashley or Megan or both, and she’d never felt as if the space was small. But something about Zach’s presence made her feel… crowded. She was far too aware of him—his impressive height, his obvious strength, his overwhelming masculinity.
She glanced at him as she reached for the empty carafe from the coffeemaker, and she swallowed hard when she found those intense and stunningly blue eyes on her. The tug of attraction came again, and she found herself as annoyed as she was baffled by it.
Of all the times for her body to suddenly decide it had been in stasis for too long, now was not a good one. And even if it had been a good time, Zach Crawford was definitely not a man she should ever find herself attracted to. Not just because of the uniform, but because he had once been intimately involved with one of her best friends.
It occurred to her that the uniform might have been why her friend had never told her about the man who had fathered her child. Because Olivia knew something of Paige’s history with her father, she knew Paige would question her decision to get involved with a man who could never make her or their daughter a priority in his life.
She was considering this as she turned on the tap to fill the carafe. “Do you want coffee?” she asked Zach.
“I’ve been on the go since oh-five-hundred,” he told her. “I would love coffee.”
She’d been up since oh-five-hundred herself—5:00 a.m. to nonmilitary people—and she would have preferred to skip the coffee and sink into her mattress and into the oblivion of sleep as peacefully as Emma had finally done.
But she knew she wouldn’t get any sleep tonight—not until she had some answers to the questions that had been swirling through her brain since Lieutenant Colonel Zach Crawford had spoken the two words that continued to echo in her mind.
Emma’s father.
If it was true, if Lieutenant Colonel Zach Crawford really was the father of Olivia’s baby, that simple fact would change everything.
Paige worried over the possibility as she put a filter in the basket and measured out the grounds.
It was easy to see how Olivia might have been attracted to the man. Over and above the fact that he was six feet three inches of mouth-watering masculinity, he moved with a sense of purpose and carried himself with an aura of command that were as much a part of who he was as those blue, blue eyes.
She reached into the cupboard for two mugs and filled them from the carafe.
“Cream? Sugar?” she asked him.
“Just black, thanks.”
She handed him one of the mugs and added a splash of milk to the other.
He waited until she’d taken a seat at the pub-style table in the dining room, then sat down across from her.
“I understand you worked at Wainwright, Witmer & Wynne with Olivia?”
She nodded.
“You were good friends?”
“Since our first year at law school together,” she told him.
“She never mentioned you to me.”
“She never mentioned you to me, either,” she told him. “In fact, she never said anything about Emma’s father.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Nothing at all?”
“The only thing she ever told me, and only when I asked where the baby’s father fit into the picture, was that he wasn’t interested in playing any role in his child’s life.”
He scowled at that. “I might not have been thrilled by the news of her pregnancy, if she’d ever bothered to tell me, but she had to know there was no way in hell I would abandon my child.”
“If Olivia never told you she was pregnant, how did you find out? And how do you know that you are Emma’s father?”
“Well, at this point, I’m not one-hundred-percent certain,” he admitted. “But I have a letter from Olivia that says I am, and I have no reason to disbelieve it.”
“You just said Olivia lied.”
“She lied to you,” he clarified, “if she told you that I didn’t want to know my child. Because the truth is, I didn’t know about the baby. Not until I got home from Afghanistan and found the letter she’d left for me.”
“Olivia died five-and-a-half months ago,” Paige told him, with an ache in her heart that was more for the child who would never know her mother than for the premature end of her friend’s life.
A shadow—grief? regret?—momentarily clouded those stunning blue eyes, but then it passed and he nodded. “I found that out when I went to your law firm to find her. The receptionist told me about the accident.”
“No one knows why she was in New Jersey,” Paige admitted.
He sipped his coffee, then set the mug down again. “I live in Trenton,” he told her. “Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I have an apartment about five minutes from the base, which is where I sleep when I’m in town.”
“She went … to see you?”
He nodded, confirming another fact that seemed to give credence to his claim of paternity. Of course, Paige wasn’t going to take his word for it, nor was she simply going to hand over a child on the basis of his say-so.
“My landlord told me a young woman stopped by looking for me early in the new year. When he told her I was overseas, she left a letter for me.”
“Do you have the letter?”
He took it out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it across the table to her.
Apprehension whispered through her as she picked up the envelope. Her fingers trembled as she lifted the flap and pulled out the single page.
Zach,
I’m
