“Gods, you’re right. That’s going to be weird.” Maddox shook his head.
“I’m going inside to check on Ben.” I shut the front door behind me and headed for the hall bathroom where I found Benbent over the toilet and Angus standing at the sink wetting a washcloth.
“Are you okay?” I asked Ben.
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, wiping his face when Angus handed him the cloth. “I’ll feel perfectly fine, and then, suddenly, I’ll have to puke.”
“How long has this been going on, and why didn’t you tell us?” Angus demanded.
“Just a few days. I haven’t mentioned it because it keeps going away. Just now, the wind changed and I got a big whiff of the hog pen. But it never used to bother me like that.”
“Let’s go get you changed,” I told him, since by the look of his shirt, he hadn’t quite made it to the toilet in time. “Why didn’t you just throw up outside?”
Ben shrugged. “It never occurred to me.”
Angus and I followed him into our bedroom and sat on the bed while Ben changed shirts.
When he was finished, I said, “Ben, come sit on the bed.” I patted the mattress. When he did, I said, “Angus and I think you might be pregnant.”
Ben’s face went white.
“What? Already?”
“It only takes once,” Angus pointed out.
Ben looked away, and my heart fell.
“You’re not happy about it?” I asked him. Ben only shrugged.
I’d noticed he had a tendency to shut down when he was worried about something, and evidently Angus had, too.
“Ben.” His tone held a slight warning.
Raising innocent eyes, Ben said, “I’m not, Angus. I-I’m happy, I guess. Just…a little scared.”
Taking his hand, I asked, “What are you scared of?”
Biting the corner of his bottom lip, Ben worried it between his teeth. Finally, he blurted out, “I’ll be a lot of trouble to you!”
Over Ben’s head, my eyes met Angus’s.
Resting his hand on the back of Ben’s neck, Angus said softly, “Baby, you could never be any trouble to us.”
When he talked like that, I swore my bones melted inside my body.
“I, for one, am very excited,” Angus continued. “You must remember that I said I wanted more kids. I only had one, and he’s been gone a long time.”
“But what if the baby is Colt’s?” Ben asked, voicing a concern that had never occurred to me until that moment.
“You think I’d care? I love Colt. I’ll love his children,” Angus said.
There went my bones again.
“That’s likely not something we’re going to know for sure, anyway,” I added.
Suddenly, Ben chuckled. When we looked at him in question, he said, “I was just thinking how, when Jackson first told me he was attracted to Carter, I told him he was weird for liking someone so old. But here I’ve fallen for you, Angus, and you’re way older than Carter is.”
“Hardy-har-har,” Angus grumbled, giving Ben a gentle push on the side of his head. “Thanks for bringing that up. Way to cut up my ego.”