Chapter Seven

How to Embrace a Swamp Creature

Lilly arched a skeptical brow in Scotty’s direction as her blue eyes widened in surprise.

"What?" Scotty asked, somewhat defensively.

"You…ate Indian food?" she pressed, her voice shot through with disbelief.

Scotty shrugged. "Yeah," he replied. "I did. So what?"

"You hate Indian food," Lilly pointed out, glancing incredulously from Scotty to Kat and back again. "I could fill a book with how many times I’ve heard you complain about it. The idea of curry makes you gag like an eight-year-old in the school lunchroom when they’re servin’ Tuna Surprise."

"Hey, that’s what my daughter wanted to eat," he retorted. "Who am I to argue with her?"

Kat snorted derisively. "That’s half our problem, Valens," she muttered as she dashed through the last few lines of a form. "You never argue with her. About anything." She chuckled, then glanced up once more. "Your ass is completely useless," she declared.

"Useless?" Scotty repeated, with a confident, mischievous grin and a teasing expression in his eyes, one that almost dared Kat to meet them. "Aw, c’mon, now…there’s a lotta things I’m good for."

Sure enough, she glanced up from her work, shot him a glare, and said nothing, and Scotty chortled in triumph. Anytime she was silent, anytime she didn’t have a trademark sarcastic retort…that meant he’d scored a point. He’d learned, over the years, to take joy in those rare silences.

"You’re so damn full of yourself," Kat muttered, half under her breath. "Apartment ain’t big enough for you and your ego." Defiantly, she scrawled her signature at the bottom of the form she’d been working on and tossed it into the case file. "Besides," she added, looking back up at Scotty, "ain’t like I needed you to move in."

"Oh, yeah?" Scotty shot back with a self-satisfied smirk as he leaned back in his chair and triumphantly folded his arms across his chest. "Well, if I hadn’t…then who’da killed that spider last night?"

Kat glared murderously at Scotty, but, undaunted, he simply kept smirking, while Lilly stifled a giggle. Miller…perhaps the most fearless of them all…was afraid of spiders?

"Hey, I coulda killed that damn thing myself," Kat grumbled in reply, then seemed to fumble for an explanation. "It was just…too high up on the wall. You’re taller. It made more sense for you to do it."

"Oh, I see," Scotty replied smoothly, his grin widening even more and his eyes twinkling with a curious mixture of amusement and something else. Lilly couldn’t quite place it, but she knew she’d never seen it from him before. "So…that horror-movie scream was, what, for show?" he continued, his voice light and teasing.

"Valens, I swear to God---" Kat began threateningly, but she was cut off by Vera’s arrival in the office.

"Oh, tell me I heard that right," he implored them all, eagerly searching their faces as a mischievous smile spread across his own. "Tell me I just heard solid evidence that Kat Miller…the badass of Homicide… is afraid of a little bitty spider."

Kat looked around helplessly at her amused co-workers. "I ain’t afraid of ‘em," she sputtered in protest. "Just hate ‘em is all."

"This is beyond awesome," Vera enthused, ignoring both Scotty’s laughter and the homicidal glare Kat was now shooting both of them. "This is the best day ev---" he started to proclaim, but suddenly, upon reaching his desk, stopped dead in his tracks.

"Hey, what the---?" he interjected, glancing over the cluttered surface of his workspace, shoving aside empty coffee mugs and lifting up haphazard piles of papers and fast-food wrappers, all with a puzzled, quizzical expression on his face, then looked up, his confusion turning to narrow-eyed suspicion as he studied each of his colleagues in turn.

"All right, which one of you clowns stole my donut?" he demanded.

Lilly burst out laughing, the giggles she’d been trying to stifle for the last few minutes finally spilling forth. Vera glanced at her, instantly ruled her out as a suspect, then turned his attention to Kat and Scotty. Knowing one of them was surely responsible, he studied the pair carefully. His gaze settled momentarily on Kat before a thought occurred to him, and Lilly watched as his expression slowly changed from suspicion to horror, his eyes widening with something akin to fright.

"She’s here again, ain’t she?" Vera demanded, looking around wildly. "Ain’t she?"

"Oh, relax, Nick," Lilly instructed as she surreptitiously wiped tears of laughter from beneath her eyes, the mirth still readily apparent in her voice. "She’s in the kitchen with Boss."

"What’s she doin’ here, anyway?" Vera asked blankly, then realization dawned and he turned his attention to the girl’s parents. "Oh, for the love of God, what’d your demonic offspring do this time?" he asked, sounding simultaneously incredulous and weary.

Scotty didn’t reply, just grinned and arched a brow pointedly at Kat. "Yeah, Miller," he added with elaborate casualness, looking over at her again with that strange twinkle in his eyes. "What did she do this time?"

"Nothin’," Kat snapped in reply, but at the skeptical expression from Vera and the amused look from Scotty, she sighed and rolled her eyes. "Fine. She bit some kid," she admitted, glaring at them both. "You happy now?"

"Biting?" Vera repeated in disbelief. "She’s biting again?"

"Yep," Scotty proclaimed, smirking almost proudly. "That Miller DNA’s some damn stubborn stuff, apparently."

"You better shut it," Kat argued, trying to sound vicious, but not quite able to hide the grin that tugged at the corners of her lips, "now, or your ass is sleepin’ on the futon tonight."

Lilly’s eyes snapped open in surprise, and the continuation of Scotty and Kat’s bickering quieted to a background hum as her mind whirled with the possibilities. Did Miller just…threaten Scotty…with the futon? That would imply that the two were somehow sharing a bed. The fact that Scotty and Kat were roommates was common knowledge; they’d lived together since before their daughter was even born. But sharing a room? A bed? When the hell had that happened?

Alarmed, Lilly shot an inquisitive glance in Vera’s direction, to see if perhaps he’d picked up on the implication, and if he cared to join her in her interrogation of the pair, but, to her consternation, and amusement, he was too busy frantically digging through a desk drawer.

"Nick," Lilly began gently, chuckling to herself as his head disappeared from view. "It’s not in there."

"Oh, I know it’s not," Vera blustered, his voice strangely echoing around the metal chamber of the large drawer. "I’m lookin’ for somethin’ else."

Lilly frowned as she watched Vera continue to dig, then her frown deepened when he issued a triumphant "Aha!" and shut the desk drawer with great vigor, plopping a pair of latex gloves onto his desk.

Spying the gloves, Kat arched a brow at him. "You don’t gotta run prints, Fatass," she informed him. "You know perfectly well what happened to that donut."

Vera shot her a brief glare and picked up the gloves. "Damn right I do," he said defiantly, poking his right hand into a glove.

"Then what the hell you need gloves for?" Scotty asked, frowning in confusion.

Vera didn’t answer, just wriggled his left hand into the remaining glove. "No way in hell she can bite through latex," he announced, punctuating his declaration by letting the glove slap against his flesh with a defiant snap, then glared at the room in general before turning and striding purposefully toward the kitchen. "I’m gonna go get my donut back."

Lilly dissolved into giggles again, while Kat merely stared after him incredulously, and Scotty’s eyes began to sparkle anew with repressed laughter.

"Trust me, Nicky," he called after his colleague. "You ain’t gonna want it now."

"We’ll see," Vera muttered as he reached the doorway. "And if you’re right…" he began, then paused, turned around, and glanced meaningfully from Scotty to Kat, "…then you two owe me a new donut."

"Worth it," Kat shot back, but he ignored her, the dark cloud of indignation following close behind.

"So…" Lilly began nonchalantly as soon as Vera disappeared. "Futon, huh?"

The silence that followed her oh-so-casual inquiry was deafening, as she’d suspected it might be. Without even looking up, Lilly could feel the awkward hesitation from Scotty, as well as the sudden defensive bristling from Miller. She could tell in a heartbeat that Miller’s sharing of that particular aspect of their…whatever the hell it was…had been purely unintentional, and also that Scotty had been startled, both by the fact that Kat had let that detail slip and the fact that Lilly had noticed, though she knew he wasn’t entirely surprised by the latter. She didn’t miss anything, especially when it came to him, and Scotty knew that.

Lilly watched as Scotty and Kat exchanged an inscrutable glance, and then Kat rose from her desk. "I’m…gonna go make sure Nicky doesn’t come to blows with our daughter over a damn donut," she muttered as she swept past, avoiding Lilly’s gaze entirely.

Scotty glanced up to see Lilly’s sapphire eyes sparkling with an almost girlish curiosity, much as they did when they took the lid off a new evidence box, and heaved a sigh of great reluctance. He had no idea how much Kat was willing to let him share about their arrangement, nor was he sure how much he wanted to share in the first place…but his annoyingly persistent partner wasn’t going to let this go, not in a million years, and, as he sat there pondering his options, he eventually, to his chagrin, settled for the solution that so many doers had over the years when faced with those same penetrating blue eyes: the sooner he came clean, the better.

"Look," he began carefully, "it…kinda started when she was born, okay? I didn’t think it was fair for Kat to have to do all the work at night…so I moved into her room to help with diapers and all that."

"Well, that explains back then…" Lilly remarked casually, as she took a sip from her coffee mug.

"Yeah," Scotty agreed lightly. "Just temporary," he added, praying fervently that Lilly wouldn’t make a mountain out of a molehill, as was her tendency with such things.

"But…" Lilly pressed gently, lowering her eyes to the desk and pretending she was interested in nothing more than the vehicle registration records she was searching.

Dammit. "But…it wasn’t, okay?" he replied, his casual shrug unable to hide the slight irritated edge to his voice. "That girl’s anything but a quiet sleeper," he insisted. "She needed her own room so the rest of us could get some sleep."

Lilly studied him carefully, giving him the same once-over she gave suspects in the interview room, and he resisted the urge to squirm in his seat, even though, unlike those scumbags, he had nothing to hide.

"Uh-huh," she finally replied, and Scotty’s hackles were instantly up even more than they already were. He hated that tendency of hers with a fiery passion. Hated the fact that with two simple, skeptical, nonsensical syllables, she could shoot holes through even the most carefully crafted of arguments. Which, admittedly, this was not. Truth be told, Scotty had no idea why he was still sleeping in Kat’s room, other than that it was just…comfortable. It was home. It was where he belonged. It was just the way things were. Whatever Lil’s overactive imagination thought was going on simply wasn’t, and he wished she’d just drop it.

"What the hell’s that supposed to mean?" he demanded gruffly, turning back to his paperwork.

"Nothin’," Lilly replied innocently. "Hell, I’m still surprised the two of you have lived together for three years and haven’t killed each other yet."

Scotty resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief. It seemed, for the moment anyway, that he was off the hook. "Hey, miracles happen," he chortled in response.

Late January, 2009

The remainder of Kat’s first trimester passed almost without a hitch. After agreeing that they were in this together, the blanket of easy camaraderie they’d always known settled over them once more, layered with a new closeness that they both explored with a sweetly tentative, uncharacteristic shyness. To be honest, Scotty had expected things between them to still be awkward as they figured out the nuts and bolts of how things would work between the two of them, and they occasionally were, but, for the most part, things went smoothly. Oh, sure, they had their squabbles, namely Kat’s independence and her trump card that she had, in fact, been through all this before pitted squarely against Scotty’s natural tendency to worry, his guilt over her pregnancy symptoms (and the fact that, no matter how vociferously she argued, they were entirely his fault), and the unassailable truth that he hadn’t done this before. Despite the fact that he could count on at least one of his vast collection of female relatives being pregnant at any given moment, he had very little up close and personal experience with the ins and outs of life with an expectant mother…so he didn’t have a clue what the hell he was doing. Fortunately for everyone involved, Kat was direct, and although her orders for him to back off sometimes stung a bit, Scotty welcomed them anyway. He wanted to do the right thing, dammit, and, beyond that, he wanted to do it in the right way. So he was eternally grateful that Kat was helping him in his endeavors.

In addition to trying to figure out how to best handle things with her, Scotty was trying desperately to wrap his mind around the reality that he would, in a few short months, become a father. Being Uncle Scotty to his niece and nephew and the swarms of small, excitable relatives that constantly swirled around him at family gatherings was fun, and he loved every minute of it…but being a dad? He didn’t have any idea how the hell to do that, either, so he was grateful he had several months to come to terms with it. Right now, fatherhood was still simply too huge, to abstract, to accept in any kind of real sense. Though Kat’s nausea, fatigue, moodiness, and aversion to coffee still lingered, they’d improved drastically, and many days, she acted just like she always had. The casual observer would never know she was growing a new life inside her, and this made it all but impossible for Scotty to really absorb the truth…until one chilly Friday at the very end of January, when she’d invited him to come with her for the first ultrasound.

Scotty hadn’t been sure what to expect at all, and he’d politely averted his gaze when the technician instructed Kat to lift her shirt and expose her still-flat belly, though he felt her rolling her eyes at him and muttering that it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before. She was right, of course, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before…but he still thought he should probably be a gentleman. First time for everything, Valens, his brain snarked at him.

He snapped back to attention, though, when the technician chuckled softly. "Well, there’s your baby," she announced, and Scotty’s eyes suddenly riveted on the small screen suspended from the ceiling.

The image puzzled him to no end. Its black background was smeared all over with fuzzy white blobs that constantly faded in and out, and, though he strained and squinted and tried his damnedest…he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out which of those blobs was the baby. To be honest, none of them looked like a baby. Not even a little bit. But he didn’t want to ask. He didn’t want to come across as a complete idiot. After all, Kat had done this before, and the technician did this every single day of her life. They knew what they were looking at. He didn’t. So he supposed he should just be content with the fact that one of those blobs, though he still had no freakin’ idea which one, was his offspring, the next generation of his family…his child. His flesh and blood. One of those blobs. Goddammit, which one?

"Wow," Kat breathed, and Scotty tore his eyes from the screen just long enough to brave a glance in her direction. "These things sure have changed since I was pregnant with V."

"Haven’t they?" the technician enthused, then moved a mouse arrow over a centrally-located blob. "There’s the head…there’s two arms…one, two legs…" she explained, moving the pointer over the screen and circling the areas she named.

Scotty stared intently at that little mouse arrow…and lo and behold, as the technician pointed them out…he really could see them. There was a head…there were two arms and two legs…holy mother of God, there really was a baby there. An actual, honest-to-God baby. His baby. His baby. His…baby…

"Catchin’ flies, Valens?" Kat asked, though her voice was warm and rich with some of the purest happiness he’d ever heard from her. Finally managing to scrape his jaw from the floor, he glanced down at her and noticed, to his pleasant surprise, that her coffee-colored eyes shone bright with a thin layer of unshed tears. As he glanced from Kat to the screen and back again, his own vision blurred and he wondered briefly if her No Touching rule was still in effect, because he suddenly wanted nothing more than to…

…but he didn’t even get to finish his thought before he felt her small hand slip into his, almost shyly, as though she wasn’t sure the gesture would be welcomed, and he hastily reassured her with a gentle squeeze. It was the most welcome thing he’d ever felt in his life, he decided, as he blinked furiously, swallowed hard, and focused his attention once more on that tiny black screen, and the fuzzy white blob that was his baby.

"There’s the heartbeat," the technician announced softly, and turned up the volume on the ultrasound machine.

The first thought that registered to Scotty, as he listened to that peculiar, yet instantly memorable sound, was that it didn’t sound anything like a heartbeat. Hell, it was a lot like the sound effects from that stupid video game he’d been addicted to as a kid. It was steady and almost alarmingly fast, though, he noticed with wry amusement, the frantic rhythm of his own heart wasn’t much slower. That unforgettable sound echoing around the tiny room…that fast, whooshing, alien sound…that was his child’s heartbeat.

He glanced down again at Kat and saw her exhale a long, shaky breath, one he didn’t know she’d been holding.

"Guess that means the miscarriage risk is down, huh?" she ventured, trying to keep her voice light as she turned toward the technician, and Scotty knew she would have fooled most people. Most…but not someone who knew her well. Holy mother of God, he realized, Kat Miller had been scared.

"Less than five percent now," the technician agreed cheerfully, clicking around and scribbling notes in Kat’s chart, and Scotty glanced at her again in utter amazement. He’d had no idea that the possibility that she might lose the baby was even there, let alone that it had obviously been worrying her a great deal. No idea whatsoever. His heart ached with sympathy at the burden she’d been carrying, followed closely by a surge of irritation that she hadn’t shared it with him, that she hadn’t let him help her through it…but that was swallowed up by an overwhelming warmth at the realization that she already loved that little baby so much. His baby. And hers.  Their baby.

Scotty couldn’t believe it. Feeling that all-too-familiar stinging sensation in his eyes again, he longed to envelop Kat in a bear hug, but he didn’t know how she’d feel about that, so he settled for giving her hand another squeeze, and was elated when she beamed up at him and squeezed back.

They really were doing this. They really were in this together.

They really were having a baby.

***

Scotty didn’t know whether the ultrasound was the driving force behind what he did two weeks later or whether it was merely one of many factors…but, whatever the reason, it had just seemed like the right thing to do.

That morning, he’d strolled into the office without a care in the world, ready to launch into another day of sweeping the streets clean of their scum. Dropping his things off at his desk, he greeted his co-workers and then headed for the kitchen for a much-needed cup of coffee.

Upon entering, he became aware of some low, vaguely irrational muttering coming from the table in the center of the room, and he glanced down to see Kat settled down with a steaming mug of coffee and a chocolate-glazed donut. In the past couple of weeks, her coffee aversion had disappeared, but she was confined to drinking decaf only, which irritated her to no end. For a brief moment, Scotty assumed that was the source of her consternation, as he simply couldn’t imagine doing their job without a steady stream of caffeine flowing through his veins…but then he saw the newspaper spread out on the table in front of her and the red pen in her hand, with which she was either drawing circles or scratching defiant X’s through various…were those…classified ads? For what?

"Everythin’ okay?" he asked lightly as he reached up to grab his favorite mug from the shelf next to the fridge. He didn’t really expect a reply, so he was surprised when Miller heaved a gusty, exasperated sigh and shoved the paper toward the center of the table in a fit of frustration.

"Damn real estate market," she muttered as she took an aggressive bite out of her donut.

"Real estate?" Scotty repeated blankly, glancing at her over his shoulder as he poured the steaming brew into his mug. "You movin’?"

"Tryin’ to," she replied, tossing a few locks of hair behind her shoulder in a fit of irritation. "But I can’t afford anything bigger than a shoebox."

Scotty lowered himself into the seat across the table from her. "Mind if I take a look?" he asked casually, and she studied him critically for a moment, then shrugged and tossed him her pen, which he caught a mere fraction of an inch before it decorated his crisp white shirt.

"Be my guest," she said, glaring at the offending advertisements as she hoisted herself from the chair and stormed out of the kitchen. "I gotta go pee again."

After she left, Scotty sipped his coffee and perused the classifieds, not quite sure what he was looking for, and also not quite sure whether or not he should trust the harebrained idea that had suddenly begun to form in his mind. He squinted to read through some of Kat’s chicken scratches, and it took some doing, but by the time she returned to her seat, having poured herself a fresh mug of coffee and grabbed a second donut (which would, of course, piss off Vera to no end when he found out about it), the idea, harebrained or not, was fully formed and halfway out of his mouth.

"What about this one?" he suggested, handing the paper back to her and indicating an ad with the tip of the pen.

"Three bedroom, two-and-a-half bath townhome, close to downtown, convenient to train stop, huge closets, fireplace, wood floors…" she trailed off, her eyes flashing with irritation, but also with the barest hint of wistfulness. It was brief, and she hid it quickly, but the fact that she’d let him see it at all made Scotty even more determined to convince her of his, still possibly harebrained, idea.

"Sounds great," she snapped, then shoved the paper back toward Scotty. "Can’t afford it."

"No…but we can," he replied evenly, returning the ad to the center of the table, where it lay there, enveloped in the thick, suspenseful silence that had settled over the kitchen.

After a few seconds, Scotty braved a glance in Kat’s direction to try to gauge her response. Admittedly, it was exactly what he’d expected. At first, her eyes were wide in disbelief, but as she met his gaze, the disbelief faded as her trademark withering glare moved firmly into place to block whatever else he might have seen.

"I ain’t a goddamn charity case, Valens," she insisted peevishly. "You’re doin’ enough. I don’t need you to send me a rent check when you can’t even---"

"That’s not what I meant," Scotty argued, his voice rising, and he took a deep breath and forced himself to keep calm. She looked across the table at him expectantly, almost challenging him to explain to her satisfaction exactly what the hell he did mean, and he met her gaze unflinchingly. "What I meant was…with what I’m payin’ for rent, and what you’re prob’ly payin’, if we pool it together, I think we could get this place."

Her eyes widened again, first with something intensely guarded, like she was sizing him up, unsure of whether or not he was serious, then amazement, then, before that even had a chance to register, the withering glare was back.

"Uh-huh," she replied. "You wanna give up your swingin’ bachelor pad to move in with me, a pre-teen, and a baby? Good one, Valens. You come up with that all by yourself?"

"Dammit, Miller," he snapped. "I’m serious."

"I told you I don’t need you to feel sorry for me," she retorted heatedly.

Scotty sighed in frustration. Of course she didn’t. And that wasn’t what this was. Well, okay, it was partially what it was. With anyone else, he griped inwardly, a magnanimous gesture like the one he was offering to make would have been welcomed with open arms, and he silently cursed the fact that he’d wound up with the one woman on the planet for whom that didn’t apply. But, he suddenly realized, if being nice didn’t work…well…the opposite stood a chance.

Decision made, he laughed mirthlessly. "Don’t flatter yourself, Miller," he ordered, shooting her a glare. "It ain’t ‘cause I feel sorry for you. Hell, it ain’t even about you. It’s ‘cause my lease is up in a month, and I’ve been lookin’ for an excuse to move outta that rat hole for weeks."

He looked down at the newspaper, chuckled again, and then continued. "Hell, I got one set of neighbors that listen to country twenty-four/seven, and the other set can’t cook a damn thing without a cup and a half of curry in it. I’m sick of the ceiling bein’ so thin I can hear every word of every conversation from the people above me, I’m sick of only gettin’ about five minutes of hot water in the mornin’ before the damn thing runs ice-cold the rest of the day, and I’m sick of the lazy-ass landlord that takes six weeks to fix anything…but I can’t afford anything better, either. Not ‘till this came along. And now I got a chance to live someplace nice, with three people I care about, one of whom’s my own goddamn child, Miller. I ain’t doin’ this for you. You got nothin’ to do with it. I’m doin’ it for me."

He stopped then, forcing himself to slow his breathing and regain some measure of his composure. All those things he’d said…well…they were at least half-true. He was doing this partially for himself. He did get annoyed with his neighbors and his landlord, and wished that he didn’t always have to time his showers down to the second, and he had idly perused the classifieds from time to time, but he’d never been serious enough to do anything about it…not until now.

But this child was his family, and he realized, during the ensuing silence as Kat pondered what he’d just said, that he wanted nothing more than to make this work. He wanted to live with his child, wanted to be able to help Kat any way he could. She had a need, a very real, practical need, one that was a good bit his fault in the first place…and he ached to fill it.

He just hoped she couldn’t see that.

Kat studied him for a moment, and as intimidating as her scrutinizing gaze was, he refused to allow himself to back down, barely even to blink. He met her piercing dark eyes with an even, sincere expression that he hoped conveyed nothing more than a desire to enter into an arrangement that made practical, logical, and financial sense.

The silence between them stretched for eons, and Scotty was glad she couldn’t see how fast his heart was beating as he waited for her decision. Resisting the urge to squirm under the steely gaze that had brought many a doer to his knees, he poured every ounce of effort he could into keeping his face calm, and keeping those damn "save the damsel in distress" urges the hell out of it. That’s what got your sorry ass into this mess in the first place, his brain reminded him.

"I’m a terrible roommate," she finally told him, her expression still closely guarded. "I don’t cook, I don’t clean, I barely remember to pay the bills…and the baby’s just gonna make things worse."

"I ain’t much of a cook, but I can get by," he replied coolly. "And I shared a room with Mike for fifteen years. I’ll bet you anything he was messier than you."

Kat arched a skeptical brow, but didn’t argue.

"V’s always had her own room," she continued. "That ain’t changin’."

"Fine by me," Scotty agreed.

"And the second I see one of those damn floozies you bring home from the bar paradin’ around in her unmentionables, I swear to God I’m throwin’ your ass out," she threatened darkly.

"Well, the last floozy I brought home from a bar was…you," he retorted with a smirk before he could think better of it, "so I guess that means you always gotta be fully clothed."

His eyes twinkling with amusement, disguising the sudden fear coursing through his veins, he waited for a brief, nerve-wracking moment for Kat’s reaction. She sat in stunned silence for a second, then, much to his relief, the trace of a grin began to tug at the corners of her mouth, soon blossoming into a wide smile, her eyes sparkling with self-deprecating mirth, and Scotty was elated.

"’Sides, I ain’t plannin’ on doin’ that with kids in the house, anyway," he informed her, the tension now fully dissolved. "I got a date, we’ll go to her place."

"Fair enough," Kat agreed, then eyed him with suspicion, though slightly less than before. "I sure as hell hope you know what you’re gettin’ yourself into," she warned him.

"Life with a woman, a baby, and an about-to-be-teenager?" he replied with a grin. "Hell, no. S’why you’re bunkin’ with the baby and I’m gettin’ my own room."

"Deal," she agreed with a smile, lifting her mug of coffee. "Long as V’s okay with it."

"Okay, then," Scotty replied casually, clinking his mug against hers. Their eyes met briefly, and he began to entertain a glimmer of hope that this crazy idea just might work after all.