Expectant Father. Melinda Curtis
Maybe she had missed the Hot Shots. Maybe she should give up. She glanced back, knowing her stubborn pride wouldn’t let her return just yet. Her mother used to say that pride would one day be Becca’s downfall. That might be true, but willpower and pride had certainly taken Becca far in a field dominated by men.
She started climbing again. It was slow going. The trail steepened and wove through a patch of boulders. She could walk between some and gingerly climb over others where they overlapped or nearly kissed.
Aiden had been a great kisser.
Becca walked faster, despite having to angle her belly this way and that to get through nature’s rock garden. She thought about the baby inside her. Aiden had done his job and they’d both moved on. She’d hardly spared him a thought all these months until she’d seen him on this fire.
Except she often dreamed about him at night.
She shook her head, trying to dispel those unsettling thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand.
A sound on the slope above drew her attention. With images of Aiden still lingering, Becca was startled by a vision of him running over the boulders ahead of her wearing boots and boxers, and carrying his backpack.
And then her foot slipped and her stomach churned with sickening certainty.
She was going to fall.
The baby…
She cocooned her belly with her arms. Her left elbow scraped across a tall boulder as she stumbled cockeyed, and her temple connected with a sickening thud on that same rock.
Becca landed with an air-stealing thump on the ground.
CHAPTER TWO
“WHOA! WHOA! EVERYBODY SLOW UP. Big Mama down.” Spider leaped across a couple of boulders just as a pregnant woman with a long blond braid stood on shaky legs.
“Take it easy, Big Mama.” Spider hopped to the ground next to her.
She took a step back, her blue eyes widening at the sight of him. Or maybe it was at the sound of thundering booted feet on rock as the rest of the Hot Shots approached.
“You’re bleeding.” Without sparing a glance at the crew, he yelled, “Doc, get down here!”
Blood spurted over the side of her face, but that didn’t seem to shake her. “Did you just call me big?”
“I don’t know,” Spider hedged. His grandmother would tan his hide if she’d heard him disrespect a woman like that. But the woman was big. And carrying…a baby.
She raised her eyebrows at Spider with the disbelieving expression of a school principal, challenging him to tell the truth.
Spider lasted another ten seconds before he crumbled. “Okay, I might have.”
She huffed. “Were you raised by wolves? Never call a pregnant woman big.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
But she was on the offensive now. “Are you so blind that you can’t see a pregnant woman in front of you?”
Spider took a step back. “Hey, these boulders are ten feet tall. I couldn’t see a bear hiding down here.”
“I wasn’t hiding.” She crossed her arms over her large—really large—stomach, which only plumped up her prime-size breasts. “A gentleman wouldn’t knock someone over, call them names and then accuse them of hiding.”
“I never said you were hiding.” Spider kept backpedaling. Pregnant women, as a rule, made him nervous. Sex was supposed to be fun, not result in…in…that. “I’m just trying to make sure you’re okay. Doc!” he yelled again. Sheesh, where were your friends when you needed them?
“I’m fine.”
Dang, she was stubborn. He stared into her ice-blue eyes and almost believed her despite the blood trail on half her face. She wasn’t kidding. She thought she was fine.
He took a finger and ran it over her plump cheek, turning his bloodstained finger in her direction. “That would seem to indicate otherwise.”
Cool as you please, she lifted a hand toward her forehead. He caught her wrist before she could touch the wound.
“Aw-aw-aw. You might have germs on those fingers. Let’s have a medic look at it.” He craned his neck around, reluctantly taking his eyes off her. Most of the guys were standing up on the boulder in their Skivvies, looking down on them with concern. Some were yanking off their boots and pulling on their pants. Arms crossed, Victoria stood apart from the rest in full field gear. She didn’t understand that making a game of racing down to the base-camp showers would ease the tension from the crappy day they’d had.
Doc landed on the ground next to Spider with his pants on. Spider suddenly felt a bit underdressed. Air-conditioned, but definitely underdressed.
Lifting her blond bangs out of the way, Doc examined the cut on the pregnant woman’s temple. “It’s already slowing down on the leakage department, but you’re going to need a stitch or two.”
Blond Mama frowned. At Spider. As if it were his fault.
“I don’t know why you were out here hiking in your condition.” He was compelled to say it, although normally, he’d be a little kinder to a damsel in distress, especially one with a bun in the oven. Yet, there was something about this woman that wouldn’t let him be her hero. “There’s a wildfire raging up there.” Spider pointed behind him. “And it’s not safe for anyone, especially a woman as pregnant as you, to be out here.”
She glared at him in a way that made him wonder how she’d ever gotten pregnant in the first place. He could almost imagine her saying “Oh, you are so dead when I get you alone.”
Really. It was as if he could hear that smooth voice filled with playful disdain, as if he’d heard her say those words before or something like them, although he heard a more loaded, sexy undertone in his head.
Sexy? The Ice Mama?
Ignoring her back-off stare, Spider leaned closer and peered at her in the hopes that he’d figure out who she was. She was almost as tall as Spider, and full of chutzpah, not backing down from his scrutiny. They would have gone on staring at each other all day if Doc hadn’t elbowed him aside.
“Give me some space to work, man,” Doc mumbled as he swabbed her wound with an antiseptic wipe and then applied a butterfly bandage.
She drummed her fingers on the huge rise of her belly. She had long, dexterous fingers. Something in Spider’s memory hiccuped. He knew this woman. “Don’t I—”
“No,” she cut him off emphatically, as if reading his mind.
“Isn’t that the Fire Behavior Analyst?” someone asked from the boulder above them.
Spider looked at her again. In her khaki shorts, white T-shirt and sturdy boots, she looked like your average hiker, except for the baby in her belly. He hadn’t noticed she was pregnant, but he’d only been to one base-camp briefing and he’d been at the back of the throng of teams.
Had he seen her somewhere else? He would have remembered talking to a pregnant woman, right?
Well, not usually.
But there was something naggingly familiar about this one.
IT WAS HIM.
Black hair and intense black eyes. All five foot ten inches of sculpted, sexy man.
Not only was it him, but Aiden Rodas had looked her in the eye as if she were some irresponsible, idiotic woman who had caused her own accident. He had filled her nights with pleasurable memories that came pressing back on her now, heating her from the inside out. And he…
Didn’t even recognize her.
While the man they called Doc applied