"He wasn’t impressed with you," she says.
"Not even slightly."
"Good. Someone should keep you humble."
"Katriona."
"I know." She lifts her hands and covers mine where they cup her face, pressing them closer. Her fingers are warm from the mug. "I know what you're saying. I understood you." She holds my gaze and what's in her eyes is the thing she spent the first six months here learning how to leave unguarded. "I've been thinking about it too."
"For how long."
"Since Claudia told me she was pregnant." She says it plainly, without the defensiveness she used to carry around anything that felt like wanting. She's allowed herself to want things for a year now, steadily, and every time she does, I feel it in my own chest like a door opening. "I was scared to say it. I'm still a little scared. Marsh says the surgery improved the odds significantly and the hormonal treatment helps and there's noreason I shouldn't be able to carry a pregnancy, but 'no reason you shouldn't be able to' is a long way from 'it will definitely happen,' and I spent years being disappointed by my own body and I—"
"Katriona."
"I'm working up to something."
"I know. I'll wait."
She exhales. Her thumbs move over my knuckles, a small, unconscious stroke. "I want to try. I want to try and I want to not be terrified while we do it, and I need you to promise me that if it doesn't work the first time or the fifth time or ever, that what we are right now is already enough. That you won't look at me like I'm failing you. Because I don't think I could survive that, and I know my own limits."
I lean down and press my forehead to hers. I let the closeness do the thing that words can't quite reach.
"If it doesn't work," I say, "we will have tried together. Which is already something I didn't have before you. And what we are right now is more than enough. You are more than enough. You were more than enough before you ever set foot in that auction, and you will be more than enough regardless of what happens next." I pull back just far enough to see her face. "And I will never look at you like you're failing me, because you don't know how to fail. You only know how to adapt, which is a different thing entirely, and frankly more impressive."
She blinks. Her eyes are bright and she's doing the thing where she presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth to hold herself together.
"You're going to be a disaster as a father," she says. "You're going to terrify every other parent at every school event."
"Without question."
"The teachers will be afraid of you."
"Reasonably."
"Our child is going to grow up thinking it's normal to have five large men appear out of nowhere whenever anything goes wrong."
"Thatisnormal in this family."
She laughs, and it breaks through whatever she was holding back, open and genuine and filling the kitchen the way her laugh has been filling this house for a year, in increments, room by room, until there isn't a corner of it that doesn't sound like her.
I pull her off the stool and into my arms, lifting her with the ease that she rolled her eyes at for the first three weeks and now permits without comment. Her legs wrap around me. Her arms go around my neck. I hold her there in the warm kitchen, her face tucked against my throat, and I breathe the scent of her hair and I think about Rovin's face in that hospital room.
The look of a man who finally believes in the thing he spent his whole life building.
I understand it now, from the inside, which is the only place it was ever going to make sense.
"Come to bed," she says against my neck.
Katriona
I follow Akyl up the stairs, my hand in his, heart pounding with a mix of nerves and pure need. The house feels quieter than usual, like it knows what is about to happen. When we reach the bedroom, he closes the door behind us and turns to face me. His eyes are dark and hungry in a way that makes heat pool low in my belly.
He pulls me close and kisses me hard, his hands sliding under my robe to cup my ass. I moan into his mouth as he lifts meeffortlessly and carries me to the bed. He lays me down gently, but there is nothing gentle in the way he looks at me now.
"I’ve been waiting for this," he says, voice rough as he strips off his shirt. "Waiting to fill you up properly. To breed you like you deserve."
My breath catches. The word sends a fresh wave of arousal through me. I watch him push his pants down, his cock already hard and thick, and I feel myself getting wetter just looking at him.
