Page 2 of The SEALs' Single Mom Baby Surprise

But he loves my daughter and lets me bring her in when she doesn’t have school. He provides her with coloring books and crayons. Warren is a big softy. It’s one of his best-kept secrets, hidden behind his stern brow and deep grunts, and I’m grateful for it.

First things first. I check my emails, look at the incoming deliveries and pickups, and print the current inventory. Our first delivery is in an hour, so I have that much time to check on what we’d left last night. But as it was office supplies and we have plenty of time this morning to sort it out, Edmund and I didn’t stay late to finish up.

We’re both overtime employees. Warren has warned us of it plenty of times.

Double-checking the boxes, I mark off a lot of printer paper. Yellow notepads. Staples. Paper clips. Post-It notes. All of the general hoopla that we run through on a daily basis. We’re one box shorter than we were yesterday, and one of the serial numbers is off.

I highlight them, nodding at a recruit to load the trolly and bring them into the office’s storage closet. I’ll check on the missing one once everything is put away.

One of the cartons of toner is also misnumbered. What is going on? How did we not catch this last night?

Granted, my head hasn’t been as clear as usual, given the state of my week, but I’m never this careless.

So, what the hell?

I wipe my hand down my face and sigh before helping to gather up the boxes and unload them on their shelves. It gets my blood flowing, and I feel significantly better when I’m moving.

Something about putting everything in its place brings me a kind of peace that I can’t fully explain.

I find the missing box of paper sitting open on one of the empty desks in the office. There are four in the small open space, but only Edmund and I work in the office regularly and keep our own desks. Well, Warren, too, but he has a door to close, even if he rarely does so.

I have just enough time to grab the printout for the next delivery and meet it at the loading dock.

Eighty crates arrive and I mark them off as they’re unloaded, frowning when another serial number comes up wrong. But the contents read the same. Maybe a batch got mixed up? I’ll have to track them down.

Double-check. Again.

I feel the itch to figure out why as anxiety spreads along the back of my neck and down my shoulders. I don’t like things being out of order. I don’t like mistakes.

I’ve made too many of them.

Sucking in a deep breath, I force the negative spiral away. Alistair was unreasonable in his demands.

I’m not ungrateful for thinking so.

But it’s unfortunate that working for the military means messy. Most of the people I work with don’t have my obsessive drive to keep things organized.

I start logging the new intake and mark the anomalies I’ve found. Even if no action is needed, I feel better having it recorded.

The second shipment comes in soon after, and it takes us more than an hour to unload and mark everything off.

Only one mistake in this batch, but the number isn’t the only problem.

There’s an unusual entry—a batch of military-grade tear gas listed under cleaning equipment.

Weird. It has to be a mix-up.

The canisters don’t look anything close to cleaning equipment. They might want to drug test whoever labeled this thing. Or get the specialist some more coffee.

An obvious mistake means an easy fix.

Our warehouse doesn’t even get live weapons through as a supply, maintenance, and repair warehouse. Parts, maybe, but we do a lot more mock combat drills than anything. Most of the soldiers on the base don’t even carry weapons.

At least I can take action on this and get the tear gas where it’s supposed to be.

A few recruits operate the forklifts for the big crates, and I put away what I can otherwise.

Taking my clipboard back to my desk, I confirm what we’ve received and start to dive into the misplaced items we’ve gotten by mistake.

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