Page 39 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Better than expected,” I told him, which was the truth.

He laughed, and then he reached out and tucked a loose piece of hair back from my face, unhurried, just because it was there.

“I don’t know what I’m doing with you,” he said. Not distressed about it. Just honest.

“You’re learning,” I replied. “I’m learning. That’s what tonight was.”

“And what’d you learn?”

I considered it. “That you’re complex but have experienced life like everyone else. I mean, with Winston as a daddy, maybe not just like everyone.”

“That is accurate.”

“And you eat gas station snacks in your truck like a human being.”

“Also accurate.”

“And your grandfather had good records.” I looked at him. “And you listened to them when you thought nobody was watching. Which means some part of you has always been looking for something gentler than what your father built.”

He didn’t say anything to that.

“You don’t have to confirm it,” I said. “I’m just telling you what I learned.”

He took a slow breath, the way he did when something got past his armor, and he was deciding what to do about it.

Then he stepped forward and kissed me—not the foyer kiss, not the desperate kind, just slow and sure, one hand on my jaw, the other at my waist, careful of the dress and the belly and everything else.

I kissed him back.

When we pulled apart, I said, “The dress is satin.”

“I know.”

“I’m telling you that because I’d like help getting out of it without ruining it.”

He looked at me for a moment, and the controlled version of his face was fully gone.

“I can do that,” he said.

And he did—carefully, with both hands, unzipping the back of the dress in a single slow motion while I stood with my palms flat against the hallway wall. The satin pooled on the floor, and I stepped out of it. He hung it on the hook by the bedroom door without being asked, which was either trained behavior or genuine attentiveness. I had decided some time ago to let those things live in the same category.

What came after was not the same as what had come before. It was slower. More conversation in it than sound, which was its own kind of intimacy—a hand on my hip and a pause. His voice quiet and close, checking in without making it a question, and me saying yes with something other than words. The pregnancy made certain arrangements better than others, and he adapted without comment and without performing the adaption, which I’d been a little afraid of and was glad to be wrong about.

Afterward, we were still, and my daughter pressed against his hand the one time he rested it flat on my side. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. That was the right call.

This was what it looked like, then. Learning a person. Getting it wrong some days and right on others. Not solving anything but building something instead.

I could work with that.

Chapter 7

WINSTON

My study smelled like cedar and old money, which was exactly how I liked it, because both of those things would last if you took care of them right. I built this room the year I turned forty, back when I still thought a man needed a room in his own house that nobody else got to touch. Desk older than both my sons combined. Cigars in a box that cost more than most men’s cars. A bar cart Odette hated because it clinked when she walked past it too fast, and I never once moved it, because a man ought to keep at least one thing his wife can’t rearrange.

I was behind the desk when they came in, which is where I always was when my boys had business to discuss. A man sits behind his own desk, in his own house, and lets the room tell people who runs it before anybody opens their mouth.

Amai came in first. He always did, these days. Used to be Kaisen who walked through a door like he owned the air in it, quick, a little too eager to talk, but that had changed some months back, and I hadn’t put my finger all the way on why yet. Amai had that same walk his whole life—controlled, unhurried, a man who’d already decided how the conversation was going to end before it started. He had a folder under his arm, which meant he’d actually done the work instead of showing up to argue with me for sport, which I appreciated, though I wasn’t fool enough to say so out loud. Compliment a man too much, and he starts thinking he don’t need you no more.