Achilles gaped at Cain, caught between shock and laughter.
“I think you broke him,” Kenan whispered.
More of those bonds.
“Okay, got it,” Achilles rasped.
Moments later, his brothers left, and Achilles still stared at the door. Finally, shaking his head, he got back to work. And if his chest felt a little lighter, well, he attributed it to the challenge of a new project, nothing else.
Hours later, a knock at his office door brought his head up, and another kind of warmth streamed through him. Molten. Greedy. Which made sense, since Mycah stood in his doorway. It’d been a couple of days since he’d seen her, sharpening the need inside him to a knife’s edge.
He glanced at the clock at the bottom of his computer monitor. Several minutes after seven. That meant they were most likely the only ones left on his floor. He rose from his chair as she stepped inside, closing the door behind her.
It’d been almost two months since that night at her parents’ disastrous dinner party—since they’d had sex on his living room floor. And on his couch. And in his bed.
Not that it’d been the last night they’d spent together. More had followed. Many more. But by tacit agreement, they’d kept it between them, a secret, not allowing what they did to each other after hours to cross the boundaries into the office. Since they rarely saw one another, no issues had arisen. Still, he was cognizant that he was an owner of the company...at least for the next several months. And because she’d made her worries about her professional reputation very clear, he ensured he didn’t cause any tongues to wag by behavior on his part.
Still... He would be lying if he didn’t admit that the secrecy irritated him like a pebble in an ill-fitting shoe. After Yvette, he’d vowed never to be someone’s dirty little secret. Never to allow anyone to make him feel as if he were unworthy. And while he understood Mycah’s very valid concerns for her career, he couldn’t help the seeds of doubt that had never been fully uprooted; they’d been sown in hurt and betrayal. The similarities between then and now crept into his mind after the passion cooled and she curled next to him or left his apartment.
Coming to him in the cover of darkness.
Pretending they weren’t lovers around others of influence.
Conscripting him to live a lie.
But then she’d touch him. And the need trumped what he’d ever experienced with any other woman, even Yvette. The loneliness that he’d convinced himself didn’t bother him disappeared.
Maybe he was worrying over nothing, though. Unlike with Yvette, he recognized this...arrangement with Mycah couldn’t go anywhere. It had an expiration date and a definite conclusion. For both of them.
“Hey,” he said, rounding the desk. “What’re you doing here? I thought we were meeting at the—What’s wrong?”
He pulled up short, for the first time noticing the stark look in her eyes and the tension holding her body unnaturally rigid.
She parted her lips, and they moved but no sound emerged. Unease pulsed through him, and he stepped toward her, but she shook her head, holding up a hand, and he stopped. Though everything in him demanded he go to her, pull her to him, slay and then fix whatever it was that had darkened her gaze to nearly black.
“I’m pregnant.”
Eleven
I’m pregnant.
Her announcement reverberated in the room like a shout. Except instead of gradually quieting, it seemed to gain volume, growing louder and louder until it assaulted her ears, boomed in her head. Of course, that was her imagination, but staring into Achilles’s stern face, the honed slashes of his cheekbones and jaw jutting out in stark relief under his taut, golden-brown skin... Well, she could be forgiven for her dark flight of fancy.
Not that she could blame him.
She’d had two days to absorb the fact that she—a twenty-nine-year-old professional woman well versed in the mechanics of sex—had fucked up and ended up pregnant. Yes,she. Because ultimately this washerbody,herresponsibility. No one would love it, care for it, protect it like she could—was supposed to. No, it wasn’t all on her, because hell, he’d been there. But she’d known she hadn’t been on any other contraception; there hadn’t been any need since she... She squeezed her eyes shut. Damn that heat of the moment and that one and only time that had seemed so harmless... Turned out, it hadn’t been.
Fear slicked a path through the highway of her veins, leaving dangerous black ice behind. Oh, God, she was scared. So fucking scared. And alone. For two days, she’d called in sick, claiming a stomach flu when in truth, she’d lain curled up in bed, shell-shocked, grappling with her new reality. A new reality that had twisted and warped into this alternate universe with a plus sign on a stick.
Her job. Her lifestyle. Her family. Those had been her first thoughts, as selfish as they’d been. And she could admit that they had been selfish. She’d worked hard for years to get where she was now. This was just the beginning. There were so many more years of work to put in, and regardless of the foolish woman she’d been years earlier, she hadn’t imagined a man and baby in her life now. Some women wanted all of that and managed it beautifully—she wasn’t one of them. Besides, she enjoyed the freedom of being single, of not having to answer to anyone. Of doing something as simple as going out to dinner or to the store when she wanted—by herself. Or going on vacation. She’d heard enough from friends with kids to know she could kiss that carefree lifestyle goodbye.
And then her family. Jesus. A child out of wedlock. They’d disown her. Even discovering the identity of the father wouldn’t appease them. Finding out Achilles was the father might be worse because he was the bastard, the thug, in their eyes. The nobody. Anger rushed through her. Not that they knew what they were talking about since they’d never even given him a chance.
As suddenly as the anger entered, the emotion evaporated like smoke, leaving her exhausted.
None of those reasons that had bombarded her mattered in the end, though.
Because as she’d stared at another dawn creeping over the horizon, chasing away the night, a certain bone-deep knowledge drove away her doubts.
