“Is this a cancer talk?” he asked lightly—but the concern in his eyes gave him away.
“No one has cancer, dickhead,” I said with a short chuckle.
But the question had already landed.
“I think we should use Ella to produce our heirs,” Rowan said, tapping his gold pen against the desk in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
Nick reared back as if he’d been struck—shoulders tensing, spine straightening, breath hitching for just a fraction too long.
Then Rowan twisted the knife with surgical precision.
“Become a real family.”
Chapter 25
Nick
Without Mum, he used to take me to the pub and park me beside the table like an inconvenience he couldn’t be bothered to hide. The verbal whipping boy became the actual one soon enough. He blamed me for everything—from Mum leaving to the table being uneven. If his pint spilled, it was my fault. If the night dragged on, my fault.
The more he abused me, the angrier I got. Even as a kid, I could see the rotten core in him. The way he spoke of others. The hate in him.
My mother didn’t have that in her.
Neither did Ella.
But that didn’t mean—didn’t guarantee—that I wanted to have a child with her.
She was a nurse.
Not a drinker.
Not stupid.
Not tied to a man like my father.
And still—I’d heard her beatings.
The shouting.
The rest of it.
I glanced at Alec.
He gave me a small shrug. Judas-like. Noncommittal. As if to say it’s already in motion.
How could Rowan leap from a trial period to heirs and family like it was nothing?
With Ella.
I’d be thirty soon.
One kid now meant fifty before they were grown.
Old.
Sophie had never been permanent. None of them were meant to be. That had been the rule.
But trusting another woman—really trusting her with something that couldn’t be undone?
