“I'm what?”
Seizing another pillow off the bed, she threw it, hard, at his head.
But Mike had excellent reflexes and dodged it easily.
“I love how your tits bounce when you throw like that.” Hip checking the dresser, he leaned against it and grinned at her, though his eyes were troubled.
“I can't believe I ever liked you,” she called out, scrambling to find another pillow to knock the smirk off his face.
And then she burst into tears again.
Mike's next sigh was one of compassion. Of realizing he was wrong.
Of regret.
“I know what we need to do.” He paused, looking at her with those ice-blue eyes, a flash of lust radiating to her like a nuclear hit. Even in the middle of a crisis, he could make her deliciously wet.
“You do?” she sniffled, grabbing a tissue from the nightstand, wiping her tears.
“Or, rather, what you need to do.”
“I thought there was no 'you' in pregnancy.”
“There isn't. And I can't help you with the next step.”
“Which is?” Dread raced through her blood.
“I think it's obvious.”
“Spell it out for me, Mike.”
Bending before her, still gloriously naked, the scent of their sex wafting through her, hitting her brain with a primal note she couldn't put into words, Mike clasped her hands and said something so simple.
Yet so hard.
“You have to find Jeremy and sleep with him. No condom. Right now.”
3
Lydia
“Hey,” she said, Jeremy turning to her with a grumpy frown.
Oh, no.
This was already hard enough to explain, but now she had to try to convince an angry Jeremy to get it up and have service sex with her?
The universe was really messing with her.
Mike was right. The broken condom wasn't their fault. Not one bit. And Jeremy would understand and see that this was the best way to make something good – if not, at least, more fair – out of a random accident.
Right?
“What?” he snapped, turning his attention back to some tube he was feeding into an enormous glass jug.
Mead.
He was making mead.
The guy had become obsessed with homemade mead from honey he produced himself, ever since Miles taught him all about beekeeping. The two of them treated their bees like lovers.
Better than lovers, actually. Lydia bet Jeremy didn't glare at his queen bee like that.
“I need you.”
“Can't it wait?”
“No.”
Slamming the tube on the ground, he kicked the doorframe, lightly but with enough violence to make Lydia reel back. “Damn hole.”
“Hole?”
“It's too wet.”
Sensing an in, she joked, “I've never known you to find a hole too wet.”
Narrowed eyes met hers. For the past three months, Jeremy had been growing a beard. It wasn't the clean, perfectly trimmed kind Mike had toyed with for a while before shaving it off.
Oh, no.
Jeremy looked like a mountain man.
A tall, lean, and wiry wild dude.
One who made her hole very, very wet.
“What's going on, Lydia?” When he scowled, his eyelids rose, but his brow didn't. He looked older, meaner, and fear spiked through her.
But so did something else.
“You – you look really hot like this,” she said, stroking the scraggly ends of his beard. That wasn't a lie.
He snorted. “Didn't think I was so hot this morning when I made a pass at you in bed and you shot me down.”
Damn. He was still sore about that.
“No, no,” she said quickly. “I did. I just – I have more time now.”
Nose twitching, his eyes stayed narrow. One very big, obvious sniff was followed by an even deeper glare. “I can smell Mike on you.”
“What?” she squeaked.
“I can smell him.”
“But I took a shower!” Smacking her hands over her mouth, she was too late.
Caught.
Withering glances were Jeremy's second job. His first was being sarcasm champion of the world. “You need me for what? To take out the garbage?”
“Not exactly. I want you. In bed.”
Suspicion filled his face, the beard making him positively wild.
Wilderness wild.
Untamed, unbound, and ruthless.
“I'm not buying this. Something smells, and not just your – ”
“HEY!”
“Look. I just spent the last four hours fighting with a log splitter and losing.”
“You're hurt?”
“No. I lost because that's four hours of my life splitting wood that I'll never get back.”
“Mike says it's peaceful to cut wood. Warms you twice. Once when you chop it, once when you burn it.”
“If I want to raise my body temperature, I can think of far better things to do than chop wood.” The look he gave her was not entirely frosty.
She sensed her chance. “Speaking of which,” she murmured, stroking a soft spot of exposed skin at the base of his throat.
Instead of body language that made him interested, she got a tense wall of stone.
And a frown to go with it, like a broken toy in a Happy Meal she didn't want.
“What're you doing?”
“Trying to have sex with you.”
“Why?”
“Because we're partners, and I find you arousing.”
“That part's a given. But you have an ulterior motive.”
“No, I don't.”
“You're a terrible liar, Lydia.”
“I am not! I'm a very good liar!”
“Good liars never admit they are.”
“Then I'm a terrible liar!”
“You turned me down when I tapped on your thigh with a flesh baseball bat this morning. I had a crazy sex dream about you, Gritty the Mascot from Philly, and a giant jar of raw honey.”
“That's what you dream when you have a sex dream? You conjure up having sex with a hockey team mascot?”
“I guess so.”
“I'm not sure whether to be more offended that you have Furry dreams or that it wasn't the Bruins mascot.”
“Don't bag on me because of my dreams! They're not my fault. And I woke up with massive morning wood.”
“Not my fault you're aroused by costumed, uh... what is Gritty?”
“I am not deconstructing my sex dream! And let's get back to you. I get rejected, and now you smell like sex. You showered after you admit to screwing Mike instead of me, and now you're suddenly horny?”
“Yes,” she said, drawing out the word, a spike of fear zooming up from her womb to her throat.
“Then why do you look like you're about as excited to make love as you are to clean out hummingbird feeders.”
“I love cleaning out hummingbird feeders!”
“LYDIA.”
“Fine. The condom broke,” she babbled, hating the words but unable to stop them. “And Mike made me come so that's why it broke, maybe? That's never happened to me before! I mean, I’ve come before. Haha, you should know. The condom, though. Never had one break like that. I didn't think you could break one of those, really, like it was an urban legend. And we weren't being super athletic or anything, although the sex was good. Great, really. But not enough to do that! We don't know, and it's day fourteen of my cycle, and we didn't know what to do and then Mike told me I had to come and find you and fuck you so you have a chance of maybe being the baby's father so it's all fair and – ”