Page 45 of His Texas Claim

She laughed, breathless, still catching up. "That's the most words you've said outside of bed all week."

"Told you. Runnin' low."

"You're never running low. You just ration it for effect."

"Maybe." I started the truck, pulled out of the lot, watching the annex shrink in the rearview. "C'mon. Let's go home before you decide he needs a second hit."

"No promises."

"Figured.”

SIXTEEN

Bryn

I was holding the news back from him.

Not because I was planning some great surprise…not because I was excited, per sé. It was more because I was scared.

Scared this was another false alarm. That this one would destroy my other ovary, my only chance of having a biological child.

Because I was pregnant…and Stetson didn’t know.

I told him I needed to go to the university for a day and I went to a clinic in San Antonio on my own.

The scan took twenty minutes. The relief took longer to land — intrauterine, good placement, a flicker of heartbeat where a doctor's careful voice told me everything was exactly where it should be. Eight weeks. I sat in the parking lot after with the little black-and-white photo propped against the wheel, crying the good kind of tears for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, and didn't manage to pull myself together enough to drive until the light outside had shifted.

By the time I got back to the cabin, dusk was settling over the ridge line, and I still didn't have the first idea how to say any of it out loud.

I let myself into the cabin, country music playing from a little bluetooth speaker I’d insisted on adding to our shopping list. Stetson was in the living room, on his knees in front of my worktable, and it took me a second to realize what I was looking at.

He’d gotten me a desk.

An actual desk—secondhand, clearly, scuffed at the corners, but sturdy, with a proper shelf underneath for my field notebooks and a spot cleared for the printer that didn't involve balancing it on a stack of USGS reports. He was carefully, methodically arranging my equipment across it, lining up pipette boxes like they mattered, setting the pink watering can on the windowsill exactly where I always left it.

"You're home early," he said, not looking up.

"Was gonna say the same to you."

"Finished the fence line faster than I figured." He nudged a stack of notebooks square with the edge of the desk. "Saw your corner was fallin' over itself. Figured you needed somewhere that wasn't a chair nobody could sit in anymore."

"Stetson."

"Got it off Wyatt. Barely a scratch on it." He finally looked up at me, and whatever was on my face must have shown, because his hands went still on the desk. "You okay?"

I didn't answer right away. Just looked at him—kneeling there in the middle of a mess he'd built into something that actually worked, doing something so quiet and so entirely him that I hadn't even had to ask.

“I’m actually fantastic,” I said, letting out a short laugh that I knew didn’t quite reach my eyes—mostly because I’d already started crying. “I’m pregnant.”

He didn’t stand up. He didn’t say anything—didn’t laugh, or shout, or even move for a second.

Just watched me cry and blinked, like it took him that long to believe I’d really said it. His hands stayed braced on the desk the whole time.

Then he scrubbed at his face and made a sound that could have been a laugh or a cough.

“Seriously?” he said.

I held up the photo, the proof, the little suggestion of a person soon to be. “I have paperwork,” I said, and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “It’s all real.”