Stand In The Rain

Prologue

All JJ wanted to do was sit quietly in her bedroom and think about how topsy-turvy her life had been lately, especially the last week alone. She really needed to sit down and sort out her priorities.

Only an hour ago, she and the BAU team had returned from a case in Oregon that had involved the disappearance of a family—a young couple and their infant daughter. The case had ended without any deaths, but even still, there had been a point when baby Zooey had been recovered before her parents were.

Although they never found out who had brought Zooey to safety, JJ found her at the police station where the BAU had set up camp. She was wrapped up in blankets and sleeping soundly in a small cardboard box on one of the benches in the main hallway. Zooey woke up when JJ picked her up, and because of that, the baby bonded with her immediately.

JJ couldn't help but return the favor, but it was almost with reluctance.

It wasn't that JJ disliked children—she loved them—but it seemed like babies or toddlers were everywhere she turned these days.

Normally, she didn't think twice about children unless she was interacting with a child or daydreaming about having her own, but because of recent events in her life, everything was different now.

Just before getting the call from Hotch that they'd be going to Oregon, JJ had been in the middle of telling her boyfriend, Baylor, about a very pressing matter: she was pregnant.

JJ had only known for a few hours beforehand, and she was in complete shock because she'd always wanted to be a mother, but she just didn't know if she could have Baylor's baby.

The two of them had met at the gym when she had been been kickboxing, and interested (mostly in her), Baylor offered to hold her punching bag steady for her while she got her energy out. JJ had been extra irritable that day because she'd just had a bad breakup-she'd caught her partner cheating on her.

Infuriated, JJ went straight to the gym.

Baylor cheered her up a great deal, and they ended up sleeping together that night, in more ways than one. JJ normally didn't go looking for hookups or even revenge sex, but she'd been spurned so badly that she threw caution to the wind and gave herself to this new person.

They turned into friends with benefits because of that first sexual encounter and they got together twice more for that reason because they both enjoyed it, plus, neither of them had any other kinds of relationship commitments that they were tied to.

After a month or so, they decided to start dating. That soon turned out to be a mistake, though. Baylor was a nice enough guy when they were at the gym or out with his friends from the law firm, but behind closed doors, he was a totally different guy.

Baylor McMath was an abuser.

Never in a million years had JJ expected to find herself at the mercy of a man who was not only equipped with a horrible temper, but who also liked to use her as his personal punching bag when he was drunk... and lately, because of the way things had been going at his law firm, the drunk thing had been happening more than JJ cared to see. Or experience.

Now, JJ could defend herself well and good because she'd always been a strong believer in self-defense, and she always had to ready at a moment's notice in the field. But ever since Baylor had switched from taking his anger out on JJ's face to targeting mostly her body, JJ had become so very bruised that her body was constantly aching now. Keeping up appearances, especially because she spent almost all of her time with a team of profilers and a very observant tech analyst was a project all by itself, and that almost drove her to exhaustion.