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Mar- . . . Jeff smiled at me. “I hope so. You’ll be a wonderful mother.”
“Hope so.” I wondered if he was worried about how the drugs that had enhanced his powers could affect our getting pregnant. “I’m sure we won’t have any trouble.”
“No. We won’t.” He sounded both sure and unconcerned, not breezy, but definite. He also seemed to be struggling with something.
“Jeff . . . is there something you need to tell me?” I tried not to get worried, and failed, as always.
He kissed me tenderly. “Yes. But it’s not bad. At least, I don’t think it’s bad.”
“Okay, so tell me.” He took a deep breath. Opened his mouth, shut it, tried again, didn’t work again. “Jeff, we’re not making any progress here on the telling.”
“I don’t know how to tell you.” He looked nervous and worried all of the sudden.
“Just blurt it out. Before I start freaking out.”
“Yeah, don’t want you getting upset.” His fingers were ru
“Especially . . . what? Do I have some dread disease you’re trying to tell me about?”
“No, not a disease.” He kissed my forehead. “I just . . . I need to take care of you, baby, that’s all.”
“Why? Not that I’m arguing, but you always sort of take care of me. I take care of you, too. That’s why we got married, remember?”
“Yeah. I’m glad we had to speed it up.”
“Well, it might have been nice to have had a few more weeks to adjust, but it was all great, so I’m glad, too.”
He shook his head. “No, I think we’ll be happy for the extra adjustment time now.”
“Back to totally cryptic. Would another girl get what’s going on and I’m just dense, or is it that you’re not telling me anything that resembles a fact?”
He shrugged. “If I hadn’t been drugged and had my powers altered, you’d probably be telling me, so maybe that’s why it’s confusing.”
He was still tracing infinity on my stomach, and a stray bit of conversation I’d had with Reader months previously floated through my mind—something about me saying that Jeff would probably know I was pregnant before I would.
“Oh, uh, wow. When?” I wasn’t excited or upset, I was in shock.
“Sometime when we were in Vegas, but before our wedding night.”
“How do you know?”
“Since being drugged . . . I can sense the changes in your body. It’s a big change.”
I thought about it. We hadn’t made love between him giving up the Alpha Four throne and our wedding night. Which meant . . . “You knew when we were fighting the invasion?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t thrilled with how you got into the middle of the fight, I have to mention.”
My throat felt tight again. “Is that why you gave up the throne?”
He snorted. “I gave it up because I love you, and there is no way in the world I’m living anywhere without you. You being pregnant with my child was added incentive.” He kissed my forehead. “You know, I was sort of surprised you didn’t realize it when the late and unlamented Adolphus said you’d failed the tests.”
“I did fail.”
He snorted again. “Uh, how, exactly, do you think conquering all the warriors sent to destroy us would be failure? The tests were to prove ability to lead and rule. You passed those better than I did.”
“So what test did I fail?”
Jeff gri
“Oh.” Duh.
“Believe me, I don’t object at all. I knew whose baby you were carrying, though Adolphus might not have.”
“I’m like a week and a half pregnant, does that count as carrying?”
“Does to me.”
“Is that why you were and have been carrying me everywhere?”
“I love carrying you, but yeah.”
“You’re so sneaky with the taking care of.”
“It’s a gift.” He kissed me, and we made love again. He was gentle and tender and loving. He murmured how he was going to take care of me and keep me safe against my skin, while I clung to him and let him carry me along to a mutual climax that was both soft and special, just for being when it was in our lives.
“You want to swim before di
“I’m still allowed to exercise?”
He laughed. “Yes. You already do all the good mommy-to-be things, other than your soda addiction, but we’ll work on that slowly.” I dreaded that but figured now wasn’t the time to whine about how I didn’t want to do without Coca-Cola products in my system.
“Okay, then, a swim sounds great.” He pulled his trunks on, helped me into my bikini, then slathered the sunscreen on me. “Guess I shouldn’t suggest racing you to the water this time.”
Jeff stood up and lifted me into his arms. I wrapped my legs around him just like always. “No. Like everything else for the rest of our lives, we go together.”
He kissed me, and I forgot about everything else . . . everything other than what we’d created together. We didn’t make it to the water. We had other things to do, and I loved every moment of them.
Nothing in my life ever goes according to plan but, as my husband says, things always work out perfectly in the end.
Coming in December 2011
The fourth novel in the Alien series
from Gini Koch
ALIEN PROLIFERATION
Read on for a sneak preview
JEFF GLARED AT CHUCKIE AS HE WALKED IN. “Why are you still here?”
“Because we have a problem,” Chuckie said. He wasn’t looking at Jeff, or me, and he was still pacing.
Jeff somehow reined in the jealousy all on his own. Either he wanted to impress me or Chuckie’s stress levels were particularly high. I figured on the latter. He shot a worried glance at Chuckie then looked at me. “With the C.I.A.?”
“In a way. More with what you were doing in Paris.”
Jeff nodded. “Whatever we were fighting, they weren’t superbeings.”
I felt all proud. “See, Chuckie? Someone other than us was monitoring the weird.”
Chuckie heaved a sigh. “And that makes it better how?”
“Pardon me, Mister Glass Half Empty.”
“It doesn’t,” Jeff agreed. “We have nothing left to study.”
“You weren’t able to contain them any other way?” Chuckie asked.
“No. We weren’t the ones who destroyed them.”
Chuckie spun so fast I was worried he’d fall over. “Explain that, please.”
Jeff sighed. “It looked like normal clustered activity, only there were no emotional warnings whatsoever. There were a dozen of them. We were barely able to contain them, but they destroyed no significant property and, as far as we can tell, no one was killed.”
“That’s not normal at all.” Every superbeing was a destruction machine and their overriding desire was to kill any humanity in their vicinity.
“Right, baby, it’s not. We herded them to the Seine—we were going to use self-contained nukes to destroy them. Right before I could give the order, they all blew up. At the same time.”
“I monitor for super-soldier projects all the time,” Chuckie said. “So does your mother. Nothing like this has come up on either of our radars.”
“If the lie is good enough, and the support is high enough…”
“Yeah, that’s what’s really worrying me.”
“How trustworthy are your superiors?”
He chuckled. “They’re top in the C.I.A. How trustworthy do you think that would make them?”
Jeff snorted. “Not at all.” Chuckie shrugged and managed a grin.
“I meant for you, for us, for the safety of the U.S. and the world. That kind of thing?”
“They seem reliable. Your mother doesn’t trust them overly much, but she trusts them more than some.” He looked thoughtful. “There was a shake-up right before I became head of the ET division.”