Gift of Fire

“Verity, you little idiot—you shouldn’t have kept it to yourself this long. You should have told me the instant you suspected you might be pregnant. No wonder you’ve been more temperamental and emotional than usual. I should have guessed.”
    For some reason Verity grew furious at his words. “I have not been acting more temperamental or emotional than usual. I
never
act temperamental or emotional, so how could I be more so than usual? I always act in a perfectly reasonable, rational manner. I’ll have you know I happen to possess plenty of common sense, unlike some people I could mention, and I resent the implication that I’m temperamental and emotional and strange!”
    “Hush, honey.” He laughed indulgently and pulled her tightly against him. “Take it easy.” His arms went around her and his palms moved soothingly up and down her spine. “Just take it easy, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be okay.”
    “You haven’t said how you feel about being a father.” Verity buried her face against his chest.
    “Well, I haven’t had too much time to think about it,” he admitted lightly. “But I don’t see that it’s any big deal. I’m a fast learner. I can always ask Emerson for advice. Look at what a great job he did raising you.”
    “Oh,
Jonas,
this is serious!” Verity was torn between laughter and tears. In fact, all her emotions seemed suddenly to be too close to the surface. She clung to Jonas, her arms wrapped around his lean waist. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
    “Did you think I would?” he whispered into her tousled curls. “Is that why you couldn’t bring yourself to tell me earlier?”
    “I wasn’t sure how you would feel about it. I mean, it’s a big responsibility.”
    “And you’ve always been a little worried about my attitude toward responsibility, haven’t you?” he concluded with a hint of exasperation. “Jesus. No wonder you were so upset about my going off with your father to rescue Lehigh. You probably saw that as an example of how life was going to be from now on. Except that in the future you’d be left behind with a kid whenever I took off.”
    “I didn’t know what to think.”
    He gave her a small shake. “I told you that was a one-shot deal, not a lifetime pattern. I’m different from your father. We have some overlapping interests and experience, but we’re not the same. Come on, Verity. Don’t you have any more faith in me than that?”
    “I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t planned to get pregnant. Hadn’t even thought about it. We were taking precautions most of the time and I just sort of assumed…”
    “We were not taking precautions all of the time. In fact, we rarely remembered them when we came out of our trips into the time corridor,” he reminded her bluntly. “And we did a lot of practice sessions with the psychic stuff this past winter.”
    She sighed. “I know. I think I somehow convinced myself that sex after one of those trips was different in some way. It always seems so urgent, so demanding. I think of it as being connected to the psychic stuff.”
    “And you convinced yourself you couldn’t get pregnant as long as the sex was taking place on a higher plane? A psychic plane? Is that it?” There was laughter in his voice.
    “Don’t you dare make fun of me!”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it, honey. But there is something a tad amusing about you pretending the sex we have after a mind trip is different from the kind we have the rest of the time. Talk about rationalization. This from a woman who prides herself on having more common sense than other people, specifically the male of the species?”
    “I’m warning you, Jonas.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, chuckling. “I hear the warning. I seem to be inundated with threats and warnings from you lately. After a while it gets hard to take them all seriously.”
    “You don’t sound terribly upset.” Verity lifted her head, puzzled at the cheerfulness in his tone. “I thought it would be a terrible shock for you.”
    “Well, the news did knock me on my ass at first, as you saw, but fortunately I recover fast.”
    Verity started to relax, truly relax, for the first time in days. A great sense of relief began to unfurl inside her. She hadn’t realized how tense she had been. “You really don’t mind being a father?”
    “If I minded,” he told her softly, “I wouldn’t have forgotten to take precautions after we made a trip into the psychic corridor,