How happy were they to be involved?
Damien frowned in concentration, focused on both children as he tried to figure it out. It wasn’t like kids were a foreign concept to him, but he was more than a little rusty. Reed was thirteen now, and Damien hadn’t been deeply involved in his upbringing. If he could crack the code now, then one day, when Emily was feeling insecure about her place in their family, he could make sure she felt important, valued, and loved.
Damien sat back heavily in his chair, lost in thought. The shock of Matthew’s announcement was wearing off and reality was starting to sink in. If he took Matthew back to New York, he wasn’t only going to be a Daddy—he was going to be a father. Emily and the new baby would be counting on him not just emotionally, but financially, too.
He needed to figure his shit out, and he needed to do it soon.
Slowly but steadily, Damien pushed a breath out through his nose and ran the figures. Paying out of pocket for Matthew’s medical expenses was going to sting, but it wouldn’t come close to denting his savings. College, on the other hand? The expenses would get out of hand fast. If he put money into a trust now, they’d have enough to cover Emily’s expenses by the time she was of age. If they started an additional one for the new baby, what could they do for Emily to even out the four-year advantage?
Anxiety crept up the back of Damien’s neck and burrowed in the bottom of his skull.
Keeping things fair and even when it came to college funds wasn’t his only problem.
They’d need a bigger condo—maybe even a house. With Damien’s one-bedroom, seven-hundred-square-foot condo valued at a cool million and a half dollars,thatwas going to make a dent.
At some point, one of the kids would likely need braces. Maybe both of them.
There’d be checkups, medical emergencies, soccer practices, field trips.
Matthew would need a car, and a parking space to go with it. As a bachelor, taxis had suited Damien just fine, but he couldn’t have Matthew loading baby seats into some stranger’s vehicle on his own. There were too many risks.
Fuck.
Fuck fuckfuck.
Damien stole a glance at xV, then at Harlow. Both of them had raised their children on their own, and as far as Damien knew, neither of them had gone bankrupt doing it. But how? Had they punted their credit scores into the abyss to keep their families together? Had they sacrificed building toward retirement? Not even xV, with his lofty medical specialist salary, made as much as Damien did, yet Damien was the one worried about drowning under dollar signs.
Did people just not give a damn about how much it cost to raise a child? Did they look at the ledgers, frown, push them into the shredder, and rearrange the slices to put the zeroes in the order they wanted to see? How thefuckdid anyone working a normal nine to five afford one kid, let alone two?
The anxiety that had sunk its claws into the back of Damien’s head pierced his skull and breached his brain. A cold sweat broke out across his brow.
If he wanted to give his family the luxurious life they deserved, there was only one thing he could do—beat Bankes out, gain Whitcroft’s favor, and become a partnered managing director with the Goldcorp Group.
“Hey, Knot, are you okay?” Harley whispered.
Damien nodded.
“You look pale.”
Damien nodded again.
“It’s gonna be okay.” Harley patted his knee. “You’ll find someone.”
What Damien needed was to find the will to kick ass and take names, but first things first, he needed to talk to Gwynn. The rest, he was sure, would delight in sucker punching him later.
27
Matthew
With a catlike yawn, Matthew stretched and tugged one of the bed’s plump pillows to his chest. It was a poor replacement for Damien, but it was the best he had. In a few hours, after the wedding was over, Matthew wouldn’t have to settle for a fake—his Daddy would come back, and they’d spend the night together. Damien would snuggle him and call him his good boy, and Matthew would melt into his touch. Maybe, if he was lucky, Damien would reschedule his flight so it wasn’t so early the next morning and they could have breakfast, too. It’d be the last chance they had to spend time together for a while—as much as Matthew wanted to, he couldn’t follow Damien back to New York. Not right away. He needed to prepare Emily for the move and make sure that his father and Alex made arrangements for Violet’s care. It’d take a few weeks, but after that, Matthew would be free to move and they’d be together again.
God, was it exciting. Matthew crushed his face into the pillows and stifled a laugh that was better suited to a thirteen-year-old obsessing over his first crush than a twenty-year-old single dad. It wasn’t like he was about to break out his best gel pens and writeMr. Matthew Gwynn-Bigguntil he had his signature looking just right, but… well, there weren’t any gel pens in the hotel, and the ballpoint by the phone was starting to run dry.
Matthew’s grin widened. There was a distinct possibility that he was the galaxy’s dorkiest dad, but he took comfort in knowing that in a distant nebula, some excessively dorky alien dad was falling in love with the alien who took the universe’s greatest dick pics.
Head light-years away, Matthew dug his feet beneath the sheets and kicked them up over his thighs. In the last several minutes the air conditioner had kicked on. It was starting to get chilly. As he reached to pull the sheets over his body, his phone chimed with the generic tone he reserved for unknown numbers.
Weird.
