Just A Little Bit Pregnant. Eileen Wilks

the newly arrived Seraphina Pfeister. Seraphina’s nightmares had lasted for months, long past the time it took for her arm to come out of the cast, her bruises to heal and her mother to start serving her sentence for child abuse.

      Jacy used to lie in that upper bunk and plan her marriage to Beaver’s big brother, Wally. The lavish wedding. A wedding dress so full-skirted no ordinary human could have walked down the aisle in it. The two-story house they would live in afterward and the pets she and Wally would have.... Oh, yes, that had been a favorite daydream. Even after Sera stopped crying at bedtime, Jacy had liked to lie in bed and think up names for the dogs she and Wally would have.

      She had known then that her “plans” were fantasy, just like the old sitcoms. It hadn’t mattered. Those fantasies had nourished something in her.

      Jacy sat now in her gradually cooling car and tried to remember if she had ever fantasized about having a baby. A puppy, yes. She’d longed quite hopelessly for a puppy to take care of. But another whole, entire human being? Had she ever thought she could be responsible for anything as helpless and endlessly important as a baby?

      When she shivered, it wasn’t from any outside chill.

      Jacy closed her car door at last and slipped her seat belt into place. She picked up the cellular phone she kept in her car for calling in stories or getting answers while trapped in traffic, and punched in a number she knew by heart.

      Tabor answered his own phone for once. She told him she’d be out the rest of the day, doing research.

      She would be, too. Jacy only knew one way to approach a problem—head-on. She intended to get a grip on her situation the same way she explored a story on any unfamiliar topic. She’d look up what the experts had written on the subject before she tried to figure her particular angle. There were bound to be plenty of experts on a subject as important as motherhood.

      She just regretted the half-truth she’d told her boss. Tabor would have to know about her pregnancy soon, of course. He wasn’t just her boss, after all. He was her friend.

      But she wouldn’t tell him quite yet, she thought as she pushed in the clutch and shifted into Reverse. Another man had to hear the news first However much the idea turned her stomach, however little consideration he rated otherwise, Tom would have to know he was going to be a father.

      Her baby deserved a father.

      But that, too, would have to wait. Jacy felt lost in the suddenly altered landscape of her life. She was too unsteady to face the man who’d walked out on her. Friday, she decided as she shifted gears and pulled out into traffic. She’d tell him on Friday, four days from now.

      In the meantime, she had some research to do.

      

      Four days later

      

      The carpet on the fourth-floor office of the Houston police headquarters building was gray. So were the battered metal file cabinets lining one wall of one of the offices in the Special Investigations section. Late-afternoon sunlight streaked through the blinds of the office’s single window to land in hot bars on the gray carpet, the corner of one file cabinet and the left shoulder of the man who sat at the big metal desk.

      It was a broad shoulder, covered in white cotton with thin blue stripes. On that Friday afternoon the desk was full but orderly, with a black Stetson hat placed brim-up on one corner and the usual office paraphernalia neatly arranged. An extension to one side held a computer. The credenza behind the man held nine neat piles of papers and miscellany, and four family photos in brass frames.

      Another photograph, larger than the rest, sat on the corner of his desk. Those pictures provided the only color in the office.

      Tom Rasmussin seldom chained himself to the desk for the entire day, but he’d arrived before the sun this morning and stayed in the office all day, trying to clear away enough paperwork to go to the family beach cottage at San Padre Island with his brother this weekend.

      His early arrival that morning was nothing unusual, though. He normally came in early and left late. There was no one to object to the hours he kept. Not anymore.

      He was working on the last report when his office door opened. When he glanced that way, one corner of his mouth turned up. “Aren’t they checking IDs downstairs anymore?”

      The man who sauntered into Tom’s immaculate office wore torn jeans, a three-day beard and a faded black T-shirt with an obscene suggestion printed in Spanish on the front. A greasy bandanna tied Indian-style across his forehead held shaggy light brown hair out of his eyes. “Hey, you got a problem with how I look, man?” He stopped and glanced up and down his grungy body. “I don’t see anything wrong. I even changed my underwear this morning.”

      Tom leaned back in his chair. “I’m surprised you’re wearing any. Maybe you should run by Mom and Dad’s place and get her opinion on your wardrobe.”

      “Think she’d give me hell, don’t you?” Tom’s only brother grinned, turned one of the wooden chairs around backward and straddled it. “If there’s any woman who would understand, it’s Mom.”

      Raz had a point. After being married to a cop for forty-one years, Lydia Rasmussin understood the necessities of police work, including undercover assignments. “Even the shirt?” Tom said, raising both eyebrows.

      “Hey,” Raz said, “you’re conservative enough for both of us. Do you even own any shirts that aren’t white?”

      Tom grunted. “Run along and get some coffee, why don’t you, and quit bothering the grown-ups.”

      “Are you kidding? That stuff’s bad for you.” Raz shuddered. “Especially the sludge you desk jockeys in S.I. brew. You aren’t ready to go?”

      “I’ll be done in fifteen minutes, if you can be quiet that long.” Tom turned back to his computer.

      Raz didn’t have a problem with being quiet, but sitting still was another matter. After a moment he stood and moved restlessly around the room. Raz had been known to say that his brother got the family quota of patience while he got all the charm.

      Few people took the two men for brothers on first glance, or even on second. Both had their father’s bone structure, the sort of angular face Clint Eastwood had made famous a generation earlier, but in other ways they were opposites. Tom’s hair was nearly black. Raz’s was light brown. Yet it was Tom who had the pale eyes, while Raz’s were cocker spaniel warm. Tom was cool, orderly and reserved; Raz was outgoing, energetic and worried about his brother.

      His drifting carried him over to the window. He ran a finger along one of the slats of the blinds. “This office is revoltingly neat, you know.”

      “Send a complaint to maintenance,” Tom said without looking up, “so they’ll quit doing such a good job.”

      The office wasn’t just clean, Raz thought. It was sterile. Like everything else in Tom’s life since Allison died. He didn’t know what it would take to jolt his brother out of the half-dead existence he’d settled into after the initial grief faded.

      Dynamite, maybe? Tom was one stubborn son of a bitch. He wandered over to the wall where Tom’s various certificates and awards were distributed. “Got your gear together?”

      “It’s in the Jeep.”

      “Want to check out that new exotic dance club while we’re down there?”

      Tom grimaced and reached for a small black notebook, checking something in his report against his notes. “Not much point in getting hot and bothered and then going back to the cottage with you, bro.”

      Raz shrugged, unsurprised. It wouldn’t occur to Tom that he didn’t necessarily have to go back to the cottage with only his brother for company. Tom had changed a lot in the three years since his wife died, but he was an intensely private man. Raz couldn’t imagine him bringing a one-night stand to the family beach cottage.

      A loud bzzz announced an