Page 92 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Hmm?”

“What are we?”

He went still for a second. His hand on my stomach tightened slightly, his fingers spreading over my skin. “What you mean?”

“I mean,” I turned around in his arms so I could look at his face, “we didn’t start like normal people. I was supposed to be a surrogate. Then you were a client. Then we were accidental lovers caught in the middle of a war.” I paused, searching his dark eyes. “What are we right now?”

Amai looked at me like I’d just asked the stupidest question in the world. He reached up, tucking a loose curl behind my ear, his thumb tracing the curve of my cheek.

“We raising a daughter together,” he said, his voice quiet, steady, and devoid of any hesitation. “You live in my house. You sleep in my bed. I’m in love with you, and you in love with me. We a couple, Truth. We been a couple for a while now.”

A soft, genuine smile spread across my face. Hearing him say it out loud—plain, simple, and without the shadow of a contract—made the last lingering pieces of anxiety melt right out of my chest.

I leaned in, resting my chin on his chest, looking up at him.

“I’m in love with you,” I said softly.

Amai looked down at me, the corners of his mouth twitching into that cocky, arrogant smirk I’d grown to adore.

“You just figuring that shit out?”

I burst out laughing, smacking his chest with an open palm. “You are such an asshole.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, catching my wrist and pulling me up to kiss my lips one last time, slow and sweet. “But I’m your asshole. Now go to sleep, baby. Our daughter is gonna wake up in three hours expecting breakfast.”

I closed my eyes, resting my head against the steady beat of his heart, and for the first time in a very long time, I fell asleep knowing exactly who I was, and exactly where I belonged.

Chapter 15

KAISEN

To outsmart a wolf, you have to let him believe he already broke your legs.

For two weeks after Trumai’s birth, I’d felt Amai’s surveillance tailing my movements like a bad shadow. He had two cars rotating outside my gated drive in the Warehouse District, and Winston had called twice under the guise of asking about commercial lease renewals in the Quarter. They thought I was stewing. They thought the quiet meant I was loading magazines in the dark, getting ready to crash out over a baby girl who was Amai’s.

So, on a humid afternoon, I put on a tailored cream linen polo, khaki trousers, and a pair of butter-soft Italian loafers. I left the cane by the umbrella stand in the foyer. The limp had served its purpose at the hospital, softening Truth’s guard just enough to get that plush bear into her hands, but around my father and my brother, weakness was just an invitation for a kill shot. I had to tighten up ASAP.

I walked up the wide brick steps of my parents’ estate with an easy, rhythmic gait, keys jingling lightly in my palm.

The front door opened before I could reach for the brass knocker. Mrs. Gable, the housekeeper who’d been wiping down dad’s baseboards since before Silas and Elias were in diapers, gave me a tight, nervous nod.

“He’s in the sunroom, Master Kaisen,” she whispered, keeping her eyes glued to the parquet floor. “He ain’t been eating much today.”

“Appreciate it, Martha.”

I strolled through the high-ceilinged hallway, past the oil paintings of French Quarter landscapes and the heavy mahogany side tables that smelled of lemon beeswax. When I stepped into the sunroom, the sudden wash of light showed me a man who looked like he was on his death bed.

Winston sat in his green velvet wingback chair with a wool throw blanket tucked around his knees despite the eighty-degree swamp heat outside. His skin had a dull, ashen cast to it, the kind of gray that sits underneath the brown when the organs start negotiating their surrender. His hands, usually steady enough to count twenty-thousand dollars in banded hundreds without looking down, trembled slightly as he held a porcelain teacup.

“Look at you,” he rumbled, his voice rough as dry gravel. He didn’t look up right away. He took a slow sip, grimaced at the swallow, and set the cup down with a faint clatter against the saucer. “Walking without that stick. I thought you were gonna milk that gunshot wound until next Christmas.”

“Healed clean,” I said smoothly, pulling out the wrought-iron chair across from him and sitting down with my ankles crossed. “Doc said the muscle knit back together faster than expected.”

Dad narrowed his rheumy, bloodshot eyes, studying me from under heavy black brows. “You look too damn cheerful for a man who lost his leverage. Amai’s over there in the Lower Garden District playing happy family with that Renois girl. Got the old lady cooking in his kitchen and Priest babysitting like a damn nanny.”

I chuckled, low and easy, shaking my head like a man listening to a joke he’d heard three times already. “Let him have it, Pop.”

He paused, his brows clenched. “Say that again?”