Page 173 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

“I mean it, Amai.” I looked straight ahead, out the windshield, done entertaining his face. “This is not a negotiation.”

He didn’t answer right away. I felt him staring at the side of my face, felt the tension radiating off him like heat off asphalt in July, but I didn’t turn to meet it. I’d already given enough ground today. This piece, I was keeping for myself.

He drove for another ten minutes without saying a word, and I let him. The silence between us had settled into something less sharp—still loaded, but the edges had dulled. Outside the window, New Orleans blurred past in the way it always did at dusk: gold light catching the iron lacework on the old buildings, the live oaks throwing long shadows across the neutral ground, the city putting on its evening face like it was getting dressed for something. I watched it instead of watching him.

He turned onto Magazine Street and slowed, pulling into a narrow space in front of a building I’d passed a hundred times and never really looked at. The storefront was dark glass and brushed bronze, understated in the way that only very expensive things are understated. No flashy signage. Just the name etched in the glass in clean, serif letters: LANDRY NOIR.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

Amai put the truck in park and looked over at me like the answer was obvious. “This is my store.”

I turned back to the window. Looked at it again. “Your store.”

“I design custom pieces. High-end clientele.” He said it like he was reporting the weather. Like this was information that required no fanfare.

“Amai.” I turned to face him fully. “You finally brought me to your infamous jewelry shop, huh?”

“It’s been so hectic I just didn’t have the time.”

“Better late than never I guess. Let me find out my baby daddy the Harry Winston of New Orleans. I learn something new about you almost everyday.”

Something shifted in his expression—not quite a smile, but the cousin of one. “There’s a lot you still need to learn about me, Truth.” He opened his door and came around to my side before I’d even unbuckled my seatbelt. He held his hand out. “Come on. I’ve got good parts too.”

I looked at his hand for a beat longer than necessary, then I took it.

The alarm gave a low, descending tone when he punched the code, and then the store breathed open around us—that particular hush of a space that exists outside of time, where the only thing that matters is the thing behind the glass. He hit a panel near the door, and the interior lighting rose slowly, warm and directional, designed to make everything it touched look like the center of the universe.

He was right. It was good.

The showroom was long and narrow with a high ceiling, the display cases running in parallel lines down the center, more pieces mounted on backlit panels along the walls. I stepped away from him without thinking and just walked. He let me. He stayed near the entrance, one hand in his pocket, watching me move through his space with the same quiet attention he gave everything.

The first case I stopped at held a collar necklace—eighteen-karat rose gold, set with alternating round-cut rubies and champagne diamonds in a repeating starburst pattern that looked like it had been designed for someone who had decided, once and for all, that they were done being quiet. I pressed my fingertip to the glass above it.

“That’s for a client in Houston,” Amai said from across the room. “She wanted something that announced her before she walked into the room.”

“She’s going to get what she paid for.”

I moved to the next case. A men’s chain in oxidized white gold, heavy and deliberate, the links asymmetrical in a way that looked effortless but had clearly been agonized over. Past that, a pair of earrings that were less jewelry and more architecture—long, articulated drops in yellow gold that moved in sections like vertebrae, each segment set with a princess-cut emerald. They looked like something that would make a room go quiet.

Then I found the piece that stopped me entirely.

It was a bracelet. Wide cuff, platinum, the surface engraved with a pattern so fine it looked like smoke caught and suspended in metal. Set flush into the surface were seven stones—no prongs, no bezel, just the stones embedded in the metal like they’d grown there—and they were a color I didn’t have a name for. Not blue. Not gray. Not violet. All three, at once, shifting when I tilted my head.

“Alexandrite,” he said. He’d moved without me hearing him, and he was closer now, not quite behind me but near enough. “Color-changing. Those are untreated stones from Russia. Cut for that bracelet specifically.”

“Someone commissioned this?”

“I made it because I wanted to. Sometimes I make things just to make them.”

I looked at him over my shoulder. He was watching the bracelet, not me, his expression held admiration for the work of his hands.

“Come to the office,” he said.

His office was in the back, behind a door that looked like part of the wall. Inside it was sparse and deliberate—a long black desk, bookshelves lined with design references and gemological texts, a drafting table with a light pad built in, sample stones organized in shallow trays by color and cut. His laptop sat open on the desk, the screen dark. He went around to his side without sitting, woke the machine, and turned it toward me.

“Sit,” he said, and then corrected himself, pulling the chair out. “Please.”

I sat.