AN: Two updates in one week... wow. But I'm sorry I'm neglecting Amazing Grace, I'll get to it, I promise. I just want to get over this part of the story before I concentrate on what's happening with the other.

Jeff drove her home in silence. From the moment she had heard the heartbeat, her mind had numbed completely. She'd heard nothing else that the doctor said and for once was thankful that Jeff was there to deal with him.

"Wanna go for a walk?"

It was only then that she noticed that they were home, and he'd parked the car. But she couldn't speak. She met Jeff's searching eyes and realised he was genuinely concerned. She would have laughed if she'd been thinking properly.

Jeff, worried about her? Wow.

"Maybe you need to lie down," he said. "We can talk later. I'll tell Matt and the others that you're not feeling well so they don't bother you."

She still didn't say anything.

She heard Jeff swear to himself as he came out of his car before opening the door for her.

"Come on," he said gently.

Why was he being so nice? She wanted the old Jeff back, the one she could be mad at, the one she could shout at until the pain in her heart stopped. She didn't want him to be nice. It made her want to cry...

"Keri... please, don't cry," Jeff whispered. "We'll work this out."

She lifted a hand to her face and was shocked when she felt tears on it. Then she stared at her hand and the offending tears as if she didn't know what the hell they were.

She felt Jeff's hands on her cheeks, gently wiping the tears away and she looked up into the emerald eyes.

"Come on," he repeated, taking her hand in his as he helped her out of his car. "I'll take you to your room."

She had no idea how he got her up the stairs without anyone seeing them – or even if anyone had seen them - but she was in her room a few minutes later. Jeff led her to her bed and lay her down. She felt useless, like she'd forgotten how to do even the simplest things.

"Get some sleep, Keri. You're in shock. I'd give you a shot of whiskey or something but..."

She could only look at him. Sleep? How was she supposed to do that? She had a feeling she wouldn't be able to sleep for a long, long time.

He turned to leave, but something lurched violently inside her at the thought of being alone.

"Stay," she begged weakly.

Jeff turned back and looked at her hesitantly. If she'd been thinking, she would never have asked. But their relationship had changed now. There was no denying that.

"Okay," he agreed.

She watched him take his shoes off before lying down on the bed next to her, his head next to hers and his eyes on her face.

Had his eyes always been such a beautiful green? She'd never looked so closely at him, she realised his eyes were gorgeous. Green, with specks of gold... like some sort of wild cat. She saw fingers gently tracing his cheek and with shock realised they were hers. But she didn't take them off. She felt completely detached from everything, like she was watching the scene from outside her body.

"Your skin is so soft."

She didn't even recognise her own voice but she knew it was hers because she'd felt her lips moving.

Jeff smiled at her and placed his large hand over hers on his cheek. She'd never noticed just how large his hands were before; her hand was completely swallowed in his.

"Not as soft as yours," Jeff said softly.

She entwined her fingers with his and looked at them in fascination. He had strong hands. Even the painted nails didn't detract anything from them. Then somehow, her fingers were tracing his ink, slowly going up the vines on his arm. She'd always thought his tattoos were awesome, but she'd never admitted that to anyone.

Still tracing his tattoos, she felt her lids get heavy, but she fought the sleep. If she slept, she would probably dream, and she knew what the dreams would be about. She was better off like this, just watching this man, with nothing to think about but his features.

"Sleep," Jeff urged gently. "I'll be here when you wake up"

He seemed to have read her thoughts, like he was always doing. She met his eyes to see if he was telling her the truth. She didn't want to be alone.

"I promise," Jeff said.

Maybe he wasn't reading her thoughts. Maybe she was speaking out loud. She wasn't so sure now. Noone could read thoughts that accurately. But she believed him and let her lids slowly close.

Jeff lay there for a while, watching her beautiful face as she slept. Even in sleep, there was a slight frown on her face and occasionally, she mumbled something. It didn't take a genius to see she was troubled.

Keri was in shock. Jeff had known this from the time he'd seen her eyes when they'd heard the baby's heartbeat. She hadn't turned to look at the screen and hadn't heard a word the doctor had said to her. She hadn't seen the tiny thing growing inside her, with its perfect limbs and perfect everything. She hadn't heard the doctor tell her she was almost thirteen weeks pregnant. She hadn't heard him suggest involving the police. And she hadn't heard the 'options' the doctor had told her she had if she didn't want to keep it. She definitely hadn't heard the doctor talk of test he had to do because of the circumstances; blood tests and swabs for DNA and sexually transmitted diseases, though he was sure, after thirteen weeks, there would be no trace on her body of the man who'd impregnated her. But Jeff knew there would be truckloads of his own sperm inside her, because he'd only used protection once. The rest of the time, it had been the furthest thing from his mind. And that was a stupid thing to do because he knew that meant he'd have to book himself in for blood tests as well.

He had to admit, as he'd driven her to her appointment, he had thought the easiest solution was for her to have an abortion even though he didn't believe in that. He'd always thought it was a cruel thing to do. But he'd seen the little thing now, and he'd been assailed by so many conflicting emotions. First, he'd shocked himself by wishing the baby was his – that thought had immediately been burned, it would never again see the light of day. Then he'd thought: would it be fair to bring the kid into the mess Keri had made of her life, for him or her to grow up fatherless? Then he'd burnt that thought, too. The baby was innocent. And it turned out the mother was innocent, too. Well, innocent in terms out sexual experience; she was still a petty criminal when it came down to it. Then he'd realised his strongest thought was to protect the tiny thing growing inside this woman.

Whether they found the man responsible or not, that baby was real and was entitled to a life. And if Keri wasn't up to it, he'd have to persuade her. He'd pledge his lifelong support, and he knew his brother, his dad and their friends would do the same. The kid would never want for anything.

As he watched her sleep now, he knew he'd never repeat the options Dr. Jenkins had talked about. Abortion was out of the question, and so was adoption. He wanted her to keep the baby.

And now that he'd decided that, that left one very important question: who was the daddy?

Thirteen weeks pregnant? She would have had to have got pregnant around Christmas. Dr. Jenkins has said the measurements he had done on the foetus were pretty accurate, give or take a couple of days. That gave them a specific timeline to work with. So what he needed to do was for her to retrace everything she did, all the people she came into contact with around that time. Was there a day she woke up with a particularly nasty hangover and didn't remember what she'd done the night before? But he knew that was asking the impossible – the girl loved to party but had never handled her drink well, waking up with no recollection of the previous night's events would be a regular occurance. He knew this because a quite a few times over the years, after one of Matt's parties or a good night out, she'd woke up with no recollection of the previous night. It was okay for her to drink like that when she was home, because she was among friends, but to drink like that with strangers... any one of them could have taken advantage.

It would be hard for her to remember everything, but at least they now had something to work with.

He stroked her cheek gently and sighed. So much had changed in the past few hours; it was too much to take in. From finally sleeping with her, over and over again, to discovering she should have been an innocent, to finding out there was a baby growing inside her. And that was all on top of coming home to find the threat to her life sprayed on Matt's wall.

He'd fix this one thing at a time. He'd find out who she owed and pay them off first thing in the morning. But tonight, as soon as she woke up, they had to get cracking on this 'who's the daddy thing'. The sooner he found and killed the bastard, the better.

There was a knock on the door, and whoever was on the other side walked in before he could get off the bed.

Matt stopped in his tracks, looking at him suspiciously before slowly walking further into the room.

"We've been looking for you two," Matt started, still frowning as he looked from Keri back to him.

"Um... she had a check-up," he said. "I drove her to the doctor's."

"And?"

"She's still a bit sick but getting there," he lied.

Now wasn't the time to tell the truth, not until he'd had a chance to really talk about this with Keri.

"And you're laying there next to her because...?"

"Because we were talking and she fell asleep."

"You were talking? You two? Since when do you talk?"

"Since you asked me to find out who she owes money," he snapped as he finally got off the bed and walked out of the room. "Don't talk so loud, you'll wake her up."

He walked to his room and wasn't surprised his brother followed him there.

"You two have been acting really weird the past few days. What's really going on?"

"Nothing," he sighed, pulling some clean clothes out of his wardrobe. "Look, I'm going to shower now, but could you ask the guys not to wake Keri up? The doctor says she needs to rest as much as possible."

Matt sighed, realising he wasn't getting anything else out of him, and walked out of his room. He dropped himself down on the edge of the bed. His own house would be ready in a few months; it would be nice not to have anyone question his movements so much.

"Are they coming?"

Matt was still frowning when he walked downstairs to the den where Shane and Shannon were waiting.

"Huh?" he asked, a bit distracted. "Oh, Keri's asleep and Jeff's jumping into the shower."

"Well, it'll be no fun watching this without them," Shane grinned. "The funniest parts are when they strip naked to play Jeff's guitars."

"Hey, you sound like you watched it already," Shannon accused.

"No, I didn't. But I was the cameraman, remember? I was the only sober one out of the whole sorry bunch of you," Shane laughed. "I especially liked filming you, Shannon, when you fell out of that hammock that Keri put up."

"I still don't get why you just stood there and watched when you knew that thing wasn't safe," Shannon grumbled. "My shoulder still hurts from that."

"It's not my fault you trust Keri when she's had a drink," Shane laughed again.

Matt sat down and picked his beer up, still thinking about his brother and Keri. Not that he thought he'd walked in on something, they'd both been fully dressed, but he found it weird that they had been that close to each other without fighting. It was something he'd always wanted, of course, for them to learn to co-exist, but he couldn't help feeling that there was something else there that was bringing them together.

"We'll watch this tomorrow, then," Shannon said. "Kimo and Yuk will be here, too. What do you think, Matt?"

"Huh?"

"Man, what's wrong with you?" Shane chuckled. "You didn't walk in on Jeff and Keri fucking, did you?"

He burst out laughing at that, as he thought that they would never live long enough to see the day Jeff and Keri stopped hating each other enough to actually sleep together.

When Keri woke up, a pair of green eyes was looking at her. He was there, just as he'd promised. She smiled lazily as she stretched, relishing this time between sleep and wakefulness where nothing ran through her head.

"Did you sleep well?" Jeff asked gently.

Then just like that, reality crashed down on her again. It all came back; finding out she was pregnant, sleeping with Jeff, the sound of the baby's heartbeat...

Then the panic set in.

How? How? How?

The question kept ringing through her head, so much so she sat up and pulled at her hair, needing something, anything to distract her from thinking.

"Calm down, Keri," Jeff said.

"Calm down? Calm down?!" she snapped with an incredulous laugh. "I'm fucking pregnant and I have no idea how it happened. How the fuck am I supposed to calm down?"

"I'll help you. We'll find out who did this," Jeff said, "but you need to calm down and think of the baby."

At this, her breath started coming in short, painful gasps. Baby? The fuck?! She had a fucking baby inside her! She had a life growing inside her! A life she didn't want...

"Breathe," Jeff said as he grasped her by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. "Just breathe. We can fix this."

"Can we?" she asked.

"I've never let you down before. I'm not about to start now."

She looked into his eyes for a minute before letting out a long, calming breath. He was right. Panicking wouldn't solve anything. She had to think about this rationally.

"Okay, so what do we do?" she asked.

He looked into her eyes and it almost broke him that she was looking at him so trustingly. There wasn't much he could do; it was mostly going to be down to her. She had to think back three months. She had to remember who exactly she'd hung out with, or who'd bought her drinks. And she had to have the baby.

"Well, while you were sleeping, I read some of the stuff in the folder Dr. Jenkins gave us. You're almost thirteen weeks pregnant so we know when you got pregnant, give or take a few days," he said. "According to the notes I read, you can only get pregnant certain days of your cycle. Do you remember when your last period was?"

He'd been pretty shocked by some of the things he'd read. Apparently, once a guy shot his load up there, the suckers were pretty tenacious and could take up to three days to travel to their target. So even if she was raped three days before she ovulated – they had so many big words in that leaflet! – she could still have got pregnant once the time was right.

"Um... it was before Christmas, maybe a week before I came home," she replied. "I'll have to look at my calendar for exact dates."

"The sooner you do that, the sooner we can get to the bottom of this," he said.

"I think my diary is somewhere downstairs."

"We can get on that later, then. We have quite a few other things to talk about right now," he said.

He didn't know how to approach the subject, or even if it was the right time. But he only had a couple of days to fix this before going back to work.

"Um... do you want to see the pictures?" he asked tentatively.

"What pictures?"

"The sonograms? Dr. Jenkins was kind enough to do quite a few for you. And he gave us a DVD as well."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Keri snapped, getting off the bed.

He watched her pace, muttering angrily to herself, but he knew the sooner she accepted she was pregnant the sooner she'd have to think of the future. The baby was real.

"He already has little hands and feet, little fingers__"

"Stop it," she cut in. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay," he said gently. "Another time then."

He watched her pace a little bit longer and decided to change the subject until she got used to the thought of being pregnant.

"Maybe you want to tell me who broke in and left you that message, then."

"Oh, don't worry about that. I can fix it," she said distractedly.

"How?"

"I'm going to pay him. I missed one payment, that's all," she answered.

"What, you make regular payments? How much did you borrow?" he questioned with a frown. Then something occurred to him when he remembered that Keri didn't think like normal people, she always went to the extreme. "Did you borrow from a loan shark?!"

"Stay out of it, Jeff. There's enough to deal with without dragging that shit out, too."

"You borrowed from a loan shark!" he exclaimed, reading between the lines. "Do you know how dangerous those people are? They'll kill you for a couple of bucks!"

"I can handle the repayments. I just got a bit behind because I was sick," Keri said.

"How are you going to pay him, then? Are you going back to 'work'?"

She looked away from him but he'd already seen the truth.

He was amazed that he could still feel angry with her after what he'd learnt, but the girl just seemed to make one mistake after another.

"I have to work, Jeff."

"Yeah?" he growled angrily. "How will you feel this time, taking your clothes of in front of the man or men who raped you, who got you pregnant, the man or men you don't fucking know?"

"Jeff..."

"You're not going back to that job," he said firmly. "Not only because I won't let you allow strangers to touch you but also because you aren't safe there. If we don't know who did this, he could do it again. And again. And again."

He watched the expressions on her face and knew he was winning the battle.

"I guess you're right," she sighed "I'll have to find something else."

"Good," he said, feeling a little bit of self-satisfaction relax his body. "As long as 'something else' isn't grand theft auto or drugs. Or stealing anything at all, actually. Nothing criminal from now on."

She didn't argue with him but he had a feeling she was going to ignore him. Keri had never done anything above board in her life.

"So if you tell me where I can find this guy, I'll go there tomorrow and pay up."

"You don't need to do that, I can pay him myself."

"How? You just admitted you were struggling to pay him."

"I've got some savings... I just didn't want to ever have to use that money," she sighed. "I guess it makes sense to get rid of that problem so I can concentrate on the bigger one."

"You've got savings? Then why the hell did you borrow in the first place?"

"It's Matt's money... I don't like taking his money, he does enough for me as it is."

"You mean the money he deposits in your account every month? You saved some of that?"

"All of it."

That was impossible! Matt had been depositing into her account for years so she could take care of herself while they were on the road. When they had just been starting out, Matt hadn't been able to afford to give her that much every month but he'd still given her something, a few hundred dollars at a time. But he knew that over the years, that amount had risen to thousands every month.

"What do you mean all of it?" he asked, just to be sure.

"Matt has taken care of me since I was a kid, feeding me... school... He lets me crash here as long as I want, rent free. For years he's been trying to make me actually crash here permanently. He's done a lot. I couldn't take his money as well on top of all that," she sighed as she sat down again.

"But that's... he's been giving you money for years."

"Thirteen years," she said.

Son of a bitch!

He was no math genius, but that meant Keri had a hell of a lot of money.

It also meant that another of his beliefs about Keri had just been kicked out of the water. Keri was no sponge, not if she'd never used a cent of Matt's money.

"You must be one really dumb bitch!" he said with a frown. "Why the hell would you go to a loan shark when you have so much money in your bank account?"

"Jeff, stop," Keri sighed, standing up again. "Let's go downstairs. I can get something to eat and find that diary. I just want all of this over with, I want to get back to normal."

"But you know things will never be the same again, don't you; not with a baby on the way?"

She didn't look at him as she walked to the door but he could tell by the set of her shoulders what she was about to say.

"There'll be no baby," she said. "I can't have it, not when it'll remind me everyday of what happened."

Thank you for your lovely reviews, I'll update again as soon as I can. They're quite close to finding out who the daddy is... And, shall I add, the answers are all there, you just have to know where to look...

Muahahahaha!

Much love.