Unbreak My Heart (Unbreak My Heart #1)(39)

My mom said I was working too hard.

My brother Alex said that I had an alien in my belly and it was sucking the life out of me.

Shane didn’t say anything because I didn’t tell him that I was still sick.

Things had been good since he’d apologized for tearing my head off. Great, really. We didn’t have the chance to talk very much because the kids dominated the Skype calls—with good reason—but we filled in those breaks with emails almost every day. We wrote about everything, from movies we liked—one of the guys in his room had a small DVD player and a fiancée who sent him all the new releases—to what the kids had been up to that day and websites that were driving me insane. I also posted massive amounts of photos on my Facebook page so he could scroll through them whenever he had a moment to spare, marking off every milestone the kids hit, from a lost tooth to sleeping dry all night.

We’d become friends again through our emails, and it felt really good. But it also made my anxiety rise. The closer we became, the more frightened I was that something would to happen to him—and I didn’t want to worry him with things that were happening back in California.

I didn’t want him to know that I was staying awake until one or two a.m. to finish projects and then rolling out of bed six hours later to get Sage ready for school. I didn’t tell him that I’d begun to sit on a stool when I was making dinner because, by five o’clock in the evening, I was completely worn out. I didn’t tell him that, for some ungodly reason, Gunner had started waking up at four a.m. a couple of nights a week, and we’d barely fall back asleep before my alarm went off, usually after I’d busted out my guitar and sung to him—he liked Of Monsters and Men songs.

I was handling it. Sure, I looked like shit except for the nights I knew I’d be seeing him through the computer screen—but hey, I had no one to impress.

We were three months into the deployment when Shane’s birthday rolled around. He’d promised to Skype that night so I spent the whole afternoon getting the boys cleaned up and dressed for the occasion. I’d even picked up a cake on our way to grab Sage from school so it felt like an actual party.

By eight o’clock that night when my computer sounded with an incoming call, we were ready. Barely. My laptop was perched on a stool at one end of the living room, giving Shane a view of the kids as they ran around excitedly and me on the couch with Gunner and my guitar.

“Happy birthday!” the kids screamed as Shane’s tanned face showed up on the screen.

“Thanks, guys!” he answered, smiling huge and fiddling with the earbuds he always wore so he could hear us.

I strummed the first chords to the birthday song, just like we’d practiced, and the kids began singing boisterously while Gunner nodded and watched wide-eyed beside me. Oddly enough, the one-year-old was the only kid with a sense of rhythm.

“We got you a cake!” Keller yelled, jumping up and down, once they’d finished singing.

“You did?” Shane replied, raising his eyebrows. “What does it look like?”

“I’ll get it!”

“Wait, bud!” I yelled at Keller, imagining blue frosting covering the carpet in the living room. “Why don’t you let Sage grab it?”

Sage ran out of the room while Shane chuckled softly. “What have you guys been doing today?”

“Took a bath,” Gavin replied with a scowl.

“Played with my Lincoln Logs!” Keller yelled again.

“Not so loud, bud,” I warned Keller as Gunner scooted onto my lap between me and the guitar I was using to hide my growing bump.

It was silly, but normally the laptop was tilted enough that Shane only saw us from the chest up and I was feeling a bit self-conscious.

“My Lincoln Logs, too!” Gavin shot at Keller.

“Mostly mine,” Keller taunted back.

“Boys,” Shane said sternly, quieting them both. “Enough.”

God, I wished I could say two words that would stop them that fast.

“See, Daddy?” Sage called as she went to stand in front of the camera holding the small cake I’d picked up.

“That’s an awesome cake!” Shane replied, nodding. “Is it chocolate?”

“Yep!”

“Why don’t you guys go sit down and Auntie Kate can bring me into the kitchen while you eat it?”

“Yeah!” Keller and Gavin yelled in tandem, their screech making Shane wince and laugh. The changes in volume must have been killing his ears.

I let Gunner down so he could follow the kids into the kitchen and stood up, holding the guitar awkwardly in front of me.

“Hey,” I said before pushing my lips together and smiling slightly.

“Hey,” he answered, smiling back in amusement.

It was the first time in weeks that I’d seen him without the kids crawling up and down off my lap to speak to him, and I felt shy knowing that we were relatively alone.

“Why are you carrying around the guitar?” he asked.

“Um.” Great, Katherine. Um is not an answer. Get it together.

“I want to see you,” he said quietly. “Put the guitar down.”

“Um. I’m a bit bigger—”

“Let me see, Katie,” he ordered gently.

I turned completely around to set the guitar back in its case on the ground and jumped in surprise when a wolf whistle played over my laptop’s speakers.