My fingers twisted tighter in his shirt. His jaw moved under my palm, and the roughness of it, the sheer physical fact of Braham Wolfe letting me hold his face in my hand, did something to my chest that I was going to have to write an entire novel about someday, probably under a pseudonym, because Petra would read it and know immediately.
From the guest suite, Grace woke up.
Not the gentle stirring. Not the soft, questioning mewl. The full-volume, lung-clearing, catastrophic wail of a week-old infant who had decided that this specific moment was the optimal time to express her profound dissatisfaction with the state of the universe.
It cut through the quiet like a fire alarm. Sharp. Escalating. Relentless.
I pulled back. Braham’s jaw was tight, his breath coming hard, and the look on his face—raw want layered over somethingdangerously close to amusement—was going in the archive, right next to the almost-smile and the sound he made when I pulled him closer.
“Don’t move,” I said, and pointed at him for emphasis.
I went to get her. The guest suite was dark, the bassinet still rocking slightly from whatever movement had woken her, and Grace was already at full volume, face red, fists balled, the particular outrage of a creature who had been asleep and was now awake and found this state of affairs personally offensive. I scooped her up one-handed, tucked her against my chest, and walked back to the kitchen.
Braham was exactly where I’d left him. One hand braced on the counter, the other at his side, breathing steadier now but the set of his shoulders still carrying the tension of a man who had been thoroughly interrupted. He hadn’t moved. Not an inch.
That registered somewhere in my chest as its own kind of answer, and I filed it under things I would examine later, with alcohol, when the baby was asleep, and I had the luxury of falling apart in private.
Grace saw Braham and immediately reached for him. Grabby hands. Zero patience. The kind of focused demand that suggested she had identified a problem—not being held by Braham—and intended to solve it immediately through the application of volume and insistence.
Braham took her. One hand supporting her back, the other cradling her head, the move so practiced it looked like he’d been doing it for years instead of days. She grabbed his lapel with one tiny fist, held on with the grip of someone making a point, and went quiet. Just like that. Volume off. Problem solved.
I looked at the two of them. This man in a custom Armani suit, gold lapel pin catching the afternoon light, holding a two-week-old infant in a penthouse forty floors above Portland, and the expression on his face—soft in a way I’d only seen ahandful of times—made something in my throat do something complicated.
“She has terrible timing,” I said.
Braham looked down at Grace, then at me. “She’s like a week old.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
Grace made a noise. A soft, wet, completely indifferent sound that suggested she had heard my complaint, considered it thoroughly, and decided it was beneath her notice.
She tucked her face against Braham’s chest and made a contented gurgle that should not have been possible from a creature with lungs that small.
Braham’s mouth did the thing. The almost-smile. The one that lived in the space between amusement and something warmer, and I filed it in the dedicated archive I’d been building for three days, right next to the sound and the look and the way his hands felt on my waist.
I leaned against the counter, arms crossed, and watched them.
The word turned over in my head.Yet.
I’m still not letting you bite meyet.
What it cost to mean it. What it meant that I was standing in a kitchen I hadn’t chosen, watching a man I hadn’t asked for hold a baby I hadn’t planned to keep, and the feeling in my chest wasn’t panic. It was something quieter.
Something that had been building since the moment I walked into his office and decided, against every instinct for self-preservation I possessed, to stay.
The coffee in the logical location was probably fine. I’d reassess after dinner. I was a romance novelist, for fuck’s sake. I knew exactly how this ended. Boy meets boy. Boy argues with boy. Boy falls stupidly, irrevocably in love with boy despite every defense he’s ever built.
The formula was not complicated.
I was going to make Braham work for it a little longer. Because the look on his face when I’d pulled him by the shirt—surprised, wanting, completely fucking undone—had been worth every second of three days of pretending to edit.
Worth considerably more than that, if I was being honest with myself.
Which I was trying very hard not to be.
Grace blew a raspberry against Braham’s shirt. He didn’t flinch. Just adjusted his grip, thumb tracing a circle between her shoulder blades, and went back to whatever he’d been looking at on his phone before I’d pulled him across a kitchen island and kissed him like I meant it.
I picked up my stylus. The page was still unread. The manuscript was still due in five weeks. Petra was still going to reduce me to ash when she read chapter nine.
