Page 174 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 3

The screen showed a 3D rendering program, and in the center of it, rotating slowly on a dark background, was a ring.

I didn’t say anything for a long moment.

The center stone was pear-shaped, large enough to command the entire composition, and it was not white. It was not colorless. It occupied a color category so rare that most people went their entire lives without ever seeing one in person—a fancy vivid pink-orange diamond, that precise, fiercely saturated range that the GIA certified in fewer than a handful of stones per decade. The cut was custom, slightly elongated from a standard pear, and the facets had been mapped so that light exited in a spray pattern from the point, spreading upward through the stone like fire pushing through a crack. Flawless clarity. The saturation was even and deep all the way through—no windowing, no extinction, no dead zones. Seven carats. Natural. Untreated.

The setting was where it got complicated. There were no prongs. Instead, the stone floated inside a framework that reached up and curled inward in a way that protected it on all sides while leaving it exposed from above and below, so light could move through from any direction. The metal was split-shank, rose gold on one side and white gold on the other, the two colors twisting together at the base of the setting before separating again to form the band, which tapered and curved to a slight point at the back. Pavé diamonds ran the interior of the split—tiny, colorless, perfectly matched—so that when you looked at the ring from below, there was a river of light running underneath the colored stone. Like it was being lifted by something invisible.

The wedding band rendered beside it was white gold, curved to nest against the engagement ring exactly, its inner surface engraved with something I couldn’t read at this scale.

I leaned forward. He must have anticipated that, because he reached past me and zoomed in on the band.

Even when you don’t see it.

I sat back.

“Amai.”

“I’ve been working on that design for three months.” He wasn’t looking at the screen. He was looking at me. “Since before your sisters came. Before the ultrasound. Before any of it.” He paused. “I wasn’t trying to impress them. I wasn’t trying to impress you. I made it because I couldn’t not make it.”

“That’s—” I shook my head. “That’s a lot.”

“I want you to be my wife.”

The words landed with the particular weight of things that have been held a long time before being set down. Not a performance. Not a pitch. Just the truth, plain and patient, waiting to see what I’d do with it.

“This is fast,” I said.

“I know.”

“We’re in the middle of a war, Amai. I’m carrying twins with two different fathers, one of whom is your brother, who you have been putting belt to ass to relentlessly. We have not had a single uncomplicated week.”

“I know all of that.”

“Then you understand why ‘I want you to be my wife’ requires more than just you saying it.”

“I understand.” He didn’t move. “I’m not asking you right now. I’m not pulling that ring out of a drawer and getting on my knee tonight. I’m showing you what I made. I’m telling you what I want.” He tilted his head slightly. “When you know, you know, Truth. I’ve known for a long time.”

“How can you know? We’ve barely—we’ve had so much chaos between us. How can you separate what you feel from everything that happened?”

“Because I designed that ring in this office at two in the morning on a Wednesday when there was nothing dramatic happening. No crisis. Nobody threatening anybody. Just me, alone, thinking about you and what I wanted to put on your hand.” He finally looked back at the screen, at the ring rotating slowly on its dark background, the vivid stone catching the rendered light and throwing it back warmer than it came in. “That’s how I know.”

I looked at the ring for a long moment. The split shank with its two colors of gold—the way they wound around each other without quite becoming the same thing. I thought about what that meant, or what he’d meant it to mean, and then I thought about how he could be the man who designed something like that at two in the morning and also the man who shot his brother in the spleen in the middle of the afternoon on a random day.

Both of those things were true. I’d made my peace with that a long time ago, or I was in the process of making it.

“I’m not saying yes tonight,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m not saying no, either.”

He looked at me then, and something behind his eyes went very still, the way deep water goes still.

“I see you,” he said quietly. “All of it. The good, stubborn, terrifying whole of you. That’s what I see when I look at you.” He reached out and touched my jaw, just the tips of his fingers, barely contact at all. “I see forever.”

Panic swelled inside me. I straightened my dress with long, nervous strokes.

“Don’t rush me,” I said.