Page 6 of His Valentine

I nod. “Let’s.”

“You might have guessed this already, but the baby is yours.”

I let a beat pass—not out of shock, but out of wistfulness that I can’t slide over to her side of the booth and pull her into my arms. She’s still too guarded for that.

“How’s the baby doing?” I ask.

“She’s good. Healthy.”

My eyebrows lift. “It’s a girl?”

Lena nods.

Images suddenly flash through my head of our little girl running around a sun-dappled backyard. Of her laughing as Lena sweeps her up into her arms and peppers her with kisses. Of her tiny arms around me, whispering silly gibberish into my ear.

“And how areyou, Lena?”

“I’m good. Everything’s fine.” She takes a sip of water, then sets down the glass and looks at me with skeptical eyes. “Well? Why didn’t you reply to my message?”

“What message are you talking about?”

She tells me the site she contacted me through. And, suddenly, I understand what happened.

“Oh, shit,” I say. “I’m really sorry, Lena. I didn’t reply to your message because I never log in there. It’s just not a site I use anymore. I even turned off notifications because it was annoying to keep getting those ‘hey, you haven’t logged in recently’ emails. Seriously, the last time I logged in was—” Suddenly, something occurs to me. “Wait. I tried findingyouon there.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I was trying like crazy to find you.”

“When?”

“Right after our night together.”

“Oh,” she says. Her face falls. “Right. So the reason you couldn’t find me was because I didn’t have an account then. Iusedto have one, but then I started feeling like I wasalwayson there, so I deleted it. When I contacted you I had to make a new account. And that was about four weeks after…our night together.”

Okay. It all makes sense now. It was just an issue of bad timing. But I still don’t understand why it wassodamn impossible to find her. There are only so many people named Lena in this city.

When I ask her about that—admitting to her that I went so far as to look her up in a database—a tiny smile lifts the corner of her mouth. It’s the first iota of warmth she’s given me since running into her again, and it’s almost as good as a hug from her. I guess now that she knows I didn’t ignore her message—and that I was trying to get in touch with her, too—she’s letting down her guard a little.

“Lena’s not my legal name,” she tells me. “It’s Valentine.”

“Huh,” I say, shaking my head. “Well, that explains it.”

“Yeah. I started going by Lena in grade school after I was teased about my name. I know the obvious nickname to pick would have been Val, but that was just too close to Valentine. So I took the ‘l-e-n’ part of my name and ran with it.”

“I wouldn’t have teased you.”

A smirk appears on her mouth. “Easy for you to say that as a grown man.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

She studies me for a second, then says, “Well, thank you.”

The waitress comes by with our food. As we start to eat, we ask each other the questions weshouldhave asked each other that night in the hotel lounge. I learn her last name. I learn she works the front desk at a healthcare clinic. I learn she has two siblings, both of whom live out of state, but that her mom is local.

As we continue to get to know each other—I tell her about my family, and about the security firm, explaining that’s why I was at The Regal that night—the guard she’s had up continues to fall. But it doesn’t vanish completely. There’s still something there.

And there’s also a question I still need an answer to.

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