Chapter 4.5 –

A/n - See, speedy update!

Thanks to all of you for your reviews. You guys never fail to make me smile. I think it's the first time I've had a review where someone has started with 'Oh, Holy Crap', and yeah, I do love to torture you guys sometimes. :evil grin:.

He simply continued to stand, unmoving, and stare seemingly blindly at the rocky ground by the roots of the tree. His mind was still trying to put all the pieces into place, he knew what he had felt, but was still having exceptional difficulty in grasping the entire concept.

'Sara was pregnant?' The thoughts were whirling around Grissom's brain so fast the fixing on one was more difficult than he could have imagined. His first comprehensible thought being 'how could he not have noticed?' The second surprisingly was, 'was it his?' Something he would later consider should have been his first thought. A little of the doubt and disbelief he had first felt when he felt the movement were creeping back in. Maybe he was imagining things - it could have been anything, right? Something in him knew that this was probably not true, but he kept running over the possibility none-the-less. It was better not to make assumptions about things you didn't know.

As a scientist he knew he should know enough about these things to work out the chances, but when it came down to it; he could barely think straight enough to work it out. Having done some mental calculations as best he could under the circumstances he figured it was distinctly possible, almost he would say- a certainty. That he was the father of Sara's baby.

That was unless Sara had been seeing somebody in the last few months, somebody who Grissom had not yet heard about. He thought about the possibility briefly and decided in the end that it was highly unlikely. Sara was hardly the type to just jump straight into bed with another man. At least, not that he knew of; then again, what did he really know?

When his brain had slowed down enough to consider another thought, then came the why. Why didn't she tell him? He was going to be a father, so why did she not say anything? She could have at least found a way to tell him something as significant as that. He shook himself out of his trance, closed his mouth, and turned to follow the direction Sara had gone.

He found her sat on the ground her back against the wheel of the car apparently deep in thought. As he thought back over the past few weeks, all the clues were slowly dropping into place in his brain. Things that had no significance at the time were now put into context, and made perfect sense.

It was only a few days ago that she had disappeared very rapidly, right in the middle of super-gluing a wallet. It was only now that he realised why. The fumes were bound to be bad for her, if his suspicions were correct. He had assumed at the time that she had, had been paged by someone, or needed to look up on another piece of evidence. Now he realised the real reason behind her reactions. She had been protecting herself and her child - his child.

His initial anger had dispersed into more a feeling of regret and concern. He crouched carefully on the hard dusty ground beside her and the pair sat in silence for several minutes. He would never tell her but the thought she might be carrying his baby made him happier than he ever would have thought. He didn't want to think how it would feel for him if it turned out it was another man's. Being a parent was one of the things he had never really considered as he'd never found the right woman, he had never expected it would ever happen to him.

Grissom took a deep breath and let it out steadily before he began to speak. He wasn't sure how to confirm his thoughts, without the possibility of offending Sara, or making a fool of himself. It seemed he would just have to take the risk and hope for the best.

"I'm guessing it's mine?" Grissom asked quietly, resting his arms onto his knees as he crouched down beside her. She glanced over at him but there was no affront in her gaze. At least she hadn't taken it like he thought she slept around, one thing to be thankful for.

"Unless there's something that I really don't know about, then yes." She looked at the ground again and began drawing small swirling patterns in the dirt beside her foot. "I know what you're thinking and I don't want anything from you if that's what you're worried about. I can manage just fine on my own." There was another short silence.

Grissom looked up swiftly at her words, from where he had been watching her trailing her fingertips through the dry earth, to her face so he could observe her reactions. "That's not what I was thinking," he muttered. "Why didn't you tell me? You could have said something"

"I tried when I found out and you didn't want to listen." She still refused to look up and meet his eyes.

Grissom dropped his head. "I'm sorry. I know that doesn't help now. But really I am."

Tears were building in Sara's eyes, threatening to overflow. She turned her head away slightly to hide them resting her forehead on her hand.

Grissom stretched out his hand slowly, he was afraid of her response and how easily it could hurt him. His touch was gentle and caressed her cheek wiping away the tears that fell there. The electricity between them was undeniable, it always had been. As he drew his hand away Sara's caught hold of it once more and rested it on her bent knee still holding his hand with her own.

It was then the coroners van began to approach the scene to remove the body. Grissom stood still holding Sara's hand and reached the other down to pull her up to him. "We should get this body dealt with, but then we need to talk." Sara nodded mutely and their eyes met, just for a moment and she swore she could see a sparkle behind them that she hadn't seen before. He turned and walked away from her before she could consider what it was she had seen. She shook her head wearily; like that would happen.

David exited the van, along with a forensic assistant whose name Grissom could not recall. "So have you two got what you need to?" David asked.

"Not yet. I was waiting for your help to get the evidence from up there. I can't get up there by myself." Sara jerked her head up at his simple words and met his eyes once more. He had reined his emotions in enough that she could not read him anymore, it was like they had just been talking about the weather.

David and Grissom turned and with the help of the forensic assistant and a ladder Grissom was soon sat precariously on one of the upper branches of the tree. David looked expectantly towards Sara. "I-I'm uh… sitting this one out I'm afraid, keeping myself at ground level." She gave him a rueful smile and started to collect some of the more accessible evidence.

Crouching down was starting to become difficult, not that she would ever admit it to anyone. She was distinctly uncomfortable and knew that she wouldn't have been able to keep doing this kind of work for too much longer without arousing suspicion. At least it was out in the open now, or almost. There was still the rest of the team to think about, they would find out soon enough. There were obviously still a lot of things they would have to discuss.

There didn't appear to be anything worth collecting down on the ground from the look of it. Sara had taken a sample of the soil and found one partial footprint, but it didn't appear that their perp had left them a whole lot to go on. There was a coin which was probably entirely unrelated, no possible weapons of any kind, and no foreign trace material that she could find. After hours of fruitless searching even a dedicated CSI like Sara had to admit she was getting nowhere, something which always frustrated her no end.

In the end she simply decided that their simply wasn't anything else to find, packed her kit up again and made her way across the scene to where Grissom and David were talking. The body had been removed, and with David's help Grissom had been able to collect several samples of trace and a couple of fibres from otherwise unreachable areas. David smiled shyly at Sara and nodded her with a greeting, before leaving them to take the body back to the morgue.