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“No kidding.”

He takes one step closer, not touching me this time. “Maggie.”

Something in his voice makes me go still.

“I think,” he says, slowly now, “there’s a real chance the child you’re carrying is mine.”

For a second, I honestly don’t understand the sentence. It reaches me one word at a time. Then I do understand it, and the whole room seems to tilt.

I stare at him.

He keeps going, because of course he does, because he has decided truth matters and now he’s committed to it. “The timing⁠—”

I put a hand up between us. “Don’t.”

He stops. Thank God he stops.

My whole body is still humming from sex, from anger, from humiliation, from the whole awful night, and now this. Now this. I can’t even feel the floor properly under my feet.

“Maggie, listen to me.”

“No.”

His face tightens. “You need the full⁠—”

“I said no.” The words come out sharper than I mean them to, but I can’t help it. My heart is pounding too hard. My hands are cold. My cheeks still feel hot from the party, from Alester’s hand on my back, from flashes going off while a camera caught me standing there smiling like an idiot.

And now Dalton is standing in front of me, right after fucking me against a wall in a side room, telling me he thinks the baby is his.

I actually laugh. It sounds horrible. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am serious.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Why now?”

His eyes don’t leave my face. “Because it’s true.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, that’s not an answer.”

“It is.”

“No, Dalton, it isn’t. It’s a declaration. You don’t get to say something like that to me right now and call it truth like that makes the timing noble.”

His expression changes then, some hurt surfacing under the control. “You think I’m doing this for effect?”

I stare at him. “I think you picked a hell of a moment.”

He takes another step toward me. “You asked me what was wrong.”

“That was before you decided to detonate my life in a storage room.”

“It’s not a storage room.”

I look at him in disbelief.