Chapter 8

Tank offered to take Nicky for another night, to let Steph work through whatever had caused her semi-breakdown that afternoon, but she refused. If she couldn't have the comfort of her husband by her side as she came to terms with the changes that needed to be made in her life, she could at least have her son there to steal cuddles from if she needed to. Nicky had never really been in the plans either, but they'd made things work. They'd found a balance and shared in all the ups and downs that came with raising a child. Embracing the family they'd been blessed with the same way they'd embraced every other obstacle life had dropped in their paths in an attempt to tear them apart.

And now that she'd had some time to process, she realised the irony that she would find out that she was pregnant with their second child under such similar circumstances to their first.

Almost seven years ago, Ranger had gone into the wind for what was supposed to have been his last mission. His handler had called him just after midnight and given him six hours to get his affairs in order and be at the airport with his standard duffle. Ranger had made the smart decision to call Tank to deal with any official business that needed to be sorted before he left, tasked Ella with packing his duffle for him, and had spent the next five hours making love to his wife.

Apparently, at least one of those times, his little soldiers had managed to dodge the defences they had in place, stormed her castle and fertilised the golden egg... though maybe that metaphor had gotten away from her a little bit…

He'd been gone ten weeks, during which time Steph had dealt with increasing bouts of what they now realised was morning sickness, but at the time had had the Merry Men, Bobby in particular, out of their minds with worry. It wasn't until the happy couple had been reunited, spent the night in each other's arms and weathered Steph's nausea storm the next morning that Ranger, having listened to Steph's explanation that it had been happening for a few weeks now, twigged to the cause.

It had been another couple of weeks before they'd figured out the key to keeping her morning sickness under control, but at least he'd been there to support her every step of the way.

That morning after returning to Trenton though, when her alarm went off, and she realised that with Ranger out of commission down in D.C. she absolutely had to get up to get Nicky to school on time, she wished she'd agreed to Tank's offer to extend his babysitting duties. It wasn't pretty, but she powered through and managed to get them both dressed, Nicky fed, and his lunchbox filled, dropping him at the school gate just in the nick of time. All with her trusty Berocca clutched in her hand and her game face firmly fixed in place. It's all a out game face, as Nicky would say.

And then it was onward to Rangeman because there was no way she could stay home, alone with her thoughts today. She needed the bustle of the control room, the men's laughing and joking, and other people's problems to solve to distract her from her own personal crisis. Someone must have heard her thoughts as she pulled into the underground parking garage, but because other people's problems is exactly what she got the second she stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor.

"Bomber!" Hal called, spotting her from across the room. "Thank god you're here! I have a problem."

Steph flipped the switch on her worries, shoving them into a box in the corner of her mind so she could focus on work and nothing else until she had at least a spare half hour to herself. "How big?" she asked, accepting the file folder Benny passed her from behind the monitor station as she passed. "On a scale of one to ten, one being we ran out of orange juice, and ten being the building is on fire and the alarm system isn't working."

Hal had to pause to think about his answer since Steph was constantly changing the benchmarks for one and ten. "Uhh, three?" he guessed. "And a half."

"Three and a half," she repeated thoughtfully, glancing at him over the rim of her Berocca infused water. "You've lost a file and have a client meeting in-" she checked her watch. "Ten minutes?"

"I- Yeah," he admitted, caught off guard, as he always was, by her accuracy. "How do you do that?"

She sent him an indulgent smile. "It's a sixth sense," she said with a shrug. One that had only strengthened after Nicky was born and those maternal instincts had come out swinging. The guys had always told her that her ability to follow a gut feeling was one of her strongest qualities in the security and fugitive apprehension business, so she'd spent a lot of years honing her intuition to the point where it was almost as powerful as Ranger's ESP. "What's the name on the file?"

"Hodgekiss."

Steph nodded. "I left it in Ranger's office when I was checking through it for you the other day," she explained. "I'll go get it for you."

The relief on the man's face was instantaneous. Everyone knew that Hal was the biggest worry wart of the company, surpassing even Bobby's levels of concern, so it made Steph feel a little better to help in anyway she could. And she wasn't at all surprised when met her gaze and asked, "Could you…?"

Another nod. A client meeting was just the kind of distraction she needed. She just hoped her stomach would hold out for the duration and she wouldn't have to embarrass herself by running from the room. "I'll grab the file and meet you in conference two," she said, turning on her heel to head toward Ranger's office. She called hello to some of the men she passed on her way, and was just flipping open Benny's file as she pushed open the door, stepping into the low lighting of her husband's inner sanctum.

She might have made it all the way to the coffee table where she'd left the Hodgekiss file and halfway back to the door before noticing the man behind the desk if it hadn't been for that familiar tingle on the back of her neck. Her head snapped up, her gaze locking onto her husband's dark brown eyes easily in the gloom.

"We need to talk," he said quietly.

She hesitated, terrified by the possibilities that stood before her. Did he remember who she was? Or was he confused by her presence in his building? Should she come clean regardless? Probably. A glance down at the folder in her hand reminded her than she'd come in for a purpose. She had a schedule to keep and men relying on her to keep it. She couldn't just brush off her responsibilities because her amnesiac husband needed to talk.

In saying that, though, she couldn't deny that there was a lot for them to talk about. Not just her recent revelations, but literally every part of their history from the moment they met to the moment she stepped inside his hospital room three days ago. Whether or not he remembered her now, she'd need him to know who she was and what he meant to her, because at the end of the day, they were still married, they were still parents, and she was still his office manager. They were inevitable.

She must have hesitated too long because he pulled out his trump card. "You obviously work here," he pointed out evenly, pointing to the black-on-black dress shirt she wore with the company name embroidered on her upper left chest. "So whatever you have on your schedule can't be more important that catching your boss up on the last ten years of business."

He had a point, of course, and there was so much more beyond the business to catch him up on, too. But she still couldn't just drop everything and sit straight down in his visitor's chair. "Give me ten minutes to rearrange some things," she requested, holding up Benny's folder as evidence of the fact that she was in the middle of something. "I'm supposed to be in a meeting in a few minutes."

The only reply Ranger gave her was a short nod of consent, but it was enough. Her morning sickness was the last thing on her mind as she hurried over to grab the file she'd come in for and raced back out the door, down the hall and-

"Steph!"

-almost ran face first into Tank's chest.

"Tank!" she breathed bracing a hand against him so she didn't fall over. "I just need to-" She tried to tell him she didn't have time for whatever he needed right now because she'd already over promised on her time, but he cut her off.

"Ranger checked himself out of hospital overnight. He wasn't there when Lester and Bobby arrived this morning," he informed her, drawing her attention to the fact that he had his phone pressed to his ear. But again, Steph didn't have time for this.

"I know," she said quickly. "He's in his office."

"Oh." That got his attention. He relayed the information to whoever was on the other end of the phone, listened for a second and opened his mouth to say something more to Steph, but she held up a hand to stop him.

"I need to get this file to Hal," she said. "He needs it for his client meeting in five minutes, and I need to talk to Ranger."

Wordlessly, the big man took the file from her hand and thrust it at the first Merry Man that came within arms reach with a growled, "Hal, conference two." All the while, his eyes never left Steph's face, gauging her state of both physical and mental health in the wake of everything that was happening in her life at the moment. "Lester needs to talk to you before you go back into that office," he said, holding the phone out toward her.

She eyed it warily, not sure she could take much more news right now, but at the same time curious about what would be so important that it couldn't wait until later.

"Everything's fine," Tank assured her. "They found some letters addressed to you in Ranger's hospital room."