He pulled her more tightly against him, feeling her warm body pliant against his. To his knowledge, he’d never fathered a child. Not biologically. Kristi’s mother, Jennifer, had cheated on him. Plain and simple. And she’d gotten pregnant. That could have been the end of it, as Jennifer had owned up to the fact that the baby in her womb wasn’t his in the eighth month of her pregnancy. But Bentz had taken one look at Kristi seconds after she’d been born and had claimed the baby as his own. Even now, twenty-seven years later, he remembered the moment she’d come into the world, the moment that had changed his life forever.

In all the years since, neither Jennifer nor anyone else had gotten pregnant by him, whether by luck or incredibly good birth control. He’d never been tested, hadn’t really worried about it. Never felt the need for another kid, but now Livvie wanted a baby, when he was facing the big five-o. If she got pregnant now, Bentz would be pushing seventy when the kid finished high school. If he didn’t get killed in the line of duty first.

Was that fair to the child?

His wife stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. She tasted of jasmine and desperation and damn it, he gave into her. As always.

Kristi took off across campus.

The air was thick. Heavy. A wisping fog rising from the damp ground. She wasn’t alone. Other students, too, were heading this way and that, cutting across the quad. They passed her on bikes, skateboards, or on foot; knots of kids talking, solitary students walking briskly to the various old brick buildings that made up All Saints College.

It was weird to be back.

Most of the undergrads were nearly a decade younger than her. There were the grad students, of course, in much smaller numbers, and a few adults who’d returned to school in midlife or beyond. Though the campus with its vine-clad, hundred-year-plus buildings and neatly trimmed grounds seemed fairly unchanged, the feel of being at All Saints was quite different from her freshman year.