“You belong tome.”
His voice was a whisper against her hair, and she tightened her arms, shaking from the force. Every once in a while, despite her best efforts, he caught her.
“Don’t forget it, rabbit.”
* * *
Chapter eight
She’dknownsomethingwaswrong the moment she woke. She felt sluggish and heavy, with a slight wave of nausea and mild vertigo as she staggered to the bathroom to empty the contents of her stomach. She’d felt an itch in her skin the entire day at work, and when the next day brought more of the same, she stopped at the corner pharmacy on her way home that evening, a heavy stone of certainty sitting in her stomach.
When she arrived back at her apartment, she deposited her bags on the counter — Chinese takeout, a bag of fun-size caramel candies that had made her mouth water at the sight of them when she stood in the pharmacy’s checkout line, and a collection of pregnancy tests. As she stood before the aisle in the store, she thought about how important the work they did was.
Hastings-Durning Pharma, one of the only multi-species pharmaceutical companies on the market, re-created common over-the-counter medications and remedies for a non-human clientele and developed their own line of eagerly anticipated pharmaceuticals. He still treated her as he always had at the office, the same sneering pompousness with which he treated everyone, but she had been brought along on the meetings with one of the firm’s biggest clients,hisbiggest clients.
She’d been brought along and introduced, slowly eased on board as a part of their team, and now she was meeting with their representatives independently. It was the singular professional gift he’d given her, but a mighty one, she recognized. It was not her account, and they were not her clients, but it was a far cry from stacks of discovery documents on her desk and a box of highlighters. They liked her. They said so every time they met, opining that they were grateful Grayson had left them in good hands in his absence for the afternoon.
The red tape was endless. Nothing underscored how completely the scales were tipped for humans when a basic OTC antihistamine for non-humans had to go rounds of battles to be approved by the federal regulatory committee. With each month that passed, Vanessa found herself in longer and deeper conversations with Grayson’s father, deciding his werewolf first way of thinking was not as radical as she had initially thought. She was still a tiny fish in their pond, and she knew the meetings she was left to steward weren’t of any real consequence, but it was a stepping stone to building a relationship with this client.
There was nothing on the shelf in the pharmacy made for her. Four different brands of pregnancy tests for humans, one for Nagas and lizardfolk, and nothing else. She put three of the four options for humans on the counter, along with the bag of candy and a bottle of water, leaving with her heart in her mouth. She realized that Cambric Creek would likely have what she was looking for, but she dared not venture to his mother’s doorstep for this particular task.
Halfway through her Mushu pork, three plus signs gracing the wands currently perched at the edge of her tub, she looked up the number for the clinic in Starling Heights. They were a family planning clinic exclusively for werewolves, Moon Blood something or other. She remembered seeing advertisements on the train and easily found the listing for their number. There was nothing else to be done.
She had a roadmap, and there were no pit stops for babies or motherhood on it that she could see. She liked knowing she was doing work for an organization in existence for people like her. She had made her billable hours quota every year she’d been with the firm, was a junior associate no longer, and the ladder before her only went up. She didn’t mind the long hours, didn’t mind the resulting lack of a substantial social life, and there was no room to be responsible for someone else. She’d fallen asleep while using the restroom just the week prior, leaving her desk around 10:15 p.m. to visit the lavatory down the hall, waking with a start nearly two hours later, her head sliding against the side of the stall until she’d nearly fallen forward off the toilet, yelping to wakefulness. That was what big law was; that was what she’d chosen. She was happy with her choices and liked her life precisely as it was.
Maybe she would change her mind someday, Vanessa allowed. She might look back on this decision with bittersweetness, and perhaps she would change her mind, but it was not this day. She had no intention of doing this and certainly not alone.
She didn’t need to ask to know what he would have said. He liked his life as well. He didn’t want children, he’d said so before, on more than one occasion, and she’d not put him in the position of being the one to tell her what to do. He kept things quiet and dark, left his expensive cufflinks where little hands would be able to reach and swallow, and tolerated his little nephew in small bursts. Perhaps he, too, might change his mind in the future, if they had a future that included each other, but it would not be this day.
She called the clinic the following morning, made the earliest appointment, and took the rest of the week off work. She could already smell the difference in her urine and didn’t want him smelling it on her, for she knew it would change everything, just as the thought of him having children had nearly changed things for her all those moons ago.
She’d had brunch with his family more times than she could count after that first month that he’d invited her, celebrating the full moons and their shared nature, celebrating what they were together. She understood the dynamic he had with his brothers, understood the fraught dynamic they all had with his father. Part aggravation, part hero worship, and very easily manipulated, although she would never tell him that. Still, her observations of his family over the better part of the last two years had given her insight she never would have gleaned in the courtroom, the office, or beneath him in his bed.
Jack Hemming was an island. He permitted his wife and sons temporary mooring at his shoals, one at a time, but behind the genial smile and cooly affable personality, Vanessa saw the machinations and planning, a permanently guarded heart, and his son was exactly the same.
She liked to claim she wore her heart on her sleeve and cultivated the wide-eyed passion necessary to make the assumption stick. Utter bullshit, of course, but it was useful for taking opposing counsel and judges by surprise, although Grayson had never once fallen for her schtick. He wore his heart on his sleeve as well — pulled up, concealed under sleeve after sleeve of high-end cotton and french cuffs, pricey champagne and a revolving door of women whose names he barely bothered learning, layers and layers, his heart pinned somewhere at the center, and she had abandoned the expectation of ever truly reaching it.
He was driven by a single purpose — to be better than his brother, in all things, in every way. A fight for their father’s attention they’d begun fighting in infancy and a futile one at that, because it seemed exceedingly apparent to her that Jack Hemming was most delighted by his three eldest sons as a collective. The best she could hope for was a spot at his side — if she even wanted it, which wasn’t something she could say with absolute certainty — as he and Jackson attempted to outdo each other at every turn.
And when she really scraped down to the heart of things, she hadn’t let him in very far either. She’d not brought him home to meet her family, had never alluded that she was seriously involved with anyone. The thought of admitting aloud for the whole world to hear that she had begun a sexual relationship with her boss made her skin crawl. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t bear the smell of other men, an affliction that had cut her mid-month extra-curriculars in half, and it didn’t matter if he was the only wolf she ever wanted to spend another full moon with for the rest of her life. She didn’t feel any closer to knowing what he wanted than she had the day she’d let him follow her to that hotel lobby.
. . . Vanessa wasn’t sure if she quite knew herself, but that was a reflection for another day. Neither of them was fit for this, not at present, and she’d not make their dysfunction someone else’s problem.
When she returned to work, she barely noticed his absence at first. It was not unusual for him to not be in the office, and several days passed before she realized he was not at trial, was not busy with meetings, and was just as absent as she had been for the week and a half prior.
The house was black when she arrived. Blackout curtains kept the bedroom shrouded in darkness, the temperature was set to a near Arctic degree, and she found him exactly where she thought she might — on his back in the center of the bed, a tight skullcap over his head that extended over his eyes, one she knew was an ice pack.
“Hi, baby,” she whispered. She crawled onto the edge of the bed, attempting not to jostle him. “Can I call someone? Can I bring you anything? Tell me what you need.”
One of his fingers hooked around hers, pulling her hand closer, shaking his head infinitesimally.
“Trapp is on his way,” he whispered, the slightest exhalation of air. “How was your trip?”
Her lungs seized, and she threaded their fingers together. She’d told him she was going home to visit her family, someone’s birthday, and he had accepted it without question. She would tell him the truth, she had decided, but not now. She would wait until he was upright and no longer in pain; until the crampiness had passed from her body and he was back to barking at her in the office, then she would tell him what she had done, the decision she had made that affected her and only her, that would have ended them.
She watched a needle slip into his skin, Trapp seeming as chipper as ever, utterly unfazed by his brother’s condition.
“You know, between the debilitating neurological condition of his brain attempting to chew its way free a few times a month and his blood pressure, he’s probably going to drop dead of a stroke before he’s forty-five,” he told her cheerfully as she walked him out of the dark house. “So if you’re planning on tricking him into marrying you, I’d start planning the ceremony.”
