Chapter 8
Angela made it to the hotel before her composure gave way. She made it through the lobby. She held it together in the elevator. She didn’t break when the staff looked at her with the careful blankness Connor had clearly trained into them.
But inside the suite, she broke. The pain was too much to bear.
Pregnant. The word had entered the room wearing Lily's voice and hadn’t left Angela's body since.
She had thought the bedroom was the worst thing she could survive.
Lily in Blake's shirt. Blake unconscious.
The ruined bed. The ring she left on the nightstand but pregnancy made the betrayal so much worse.
Pregnancy made it the future. Pregnancy made it a child with Blake's eyes, Blake's name, Blake's money, Blake's family gathering around Lily because blood, even disputed blood, had power in families like his.
It made Lily present at birthdays, holidays, christenings, family portraits.
It made Richard speak of responsibility with his hand on Blake's shoulder. It made Katherine send tiny monogrammed blankets with sad, gracious eyes. It made Angela the woman expected to smile across a table while Lily held a baby like a crown. It was the thing she hadn’t given to Blake.
A lifetime claim, an heir. That was what Lily had brought into the Hunter dining room. Not just a secret. A leash.
Angela sank onto the edge of the bed, hating the way her mind kept building images she didn’t want. Blake holding a baby. Lily standing too close. The Hunter family choosing the child, and with the child, the woman who had turned Angela's humiliation into strategy.
Her phone buzzed.
Blake.
She didn’t answer.
It buzzed again.
Connor.
Angela closed her eyes, then picked up.
"I'm upstairs," she said.
"I know. May I come up?"
The question steadied her because it was a question.
"Yes."
He arrived five minutes later with no wine, no flowers, no performance. Just himself, dark suit, grave eyes, and a quiet kind of fury he had polished until it looked like control.
Angela opened the door and immediately turned away because kindness was unbearable up close.
Connor stepped inside but didn’t follow too far. "Do you want me to leave?"
"No."
"Do you want me to say something useful?"
A laugh cracked out of her, harsh and wet. "Do you have something?"
"No."
That made her laugh again, and then she was crying, one hand pressed over her mouth as if she could still discipline grief into silence.
Connor came closer, slowly enough for her to refuse him.
She didn’t.
He gathered her carefully, not like a lover taking advantage of collapse, but like a man sheltering someone who had been forced to stand too long in a storm.
Angela stiffened at first. Then she let herself lean. Only for a minute. Only because she had no strength left to pretend she didn’t need a human body between herself and the floor.
"I hate her," Angela whispered.
"You're allowed."
"I hate him too."
"You're allowed that as well."
"I still love him."
Connor's arms tightened, barely. "I know."
Angela pulled back, wiping her face with both hands. "That must be very inconvenient for you."
A faint, sad smile touched his mouth. "I've survived inconvenience."
She looked at him then and saw the truth he was too honorable to press into her hands.
Connor wanted her. Not as an opportunity, not only as a woman in pain, but with the old, quiet patience of a man who had loved her before her husband forgot how.
Still, he stood there giving her room to love Blake.
That made him more tempting than any attempt at seduction.
"I can take you away for a few days," Connor said. "No cameras. No calls unless you want them. I have a place on the coast."
Angela's breath caught. Peace opened in front of her, clean and blue and tempting. No Lily. No Hunters. No chandeliers under which women were asked to swallow humiliation. No Blake looking at her as if his regret should change the facts. A life with Connor didn’t come to her as a wild fantasy. It came as an exhale.
Breakfast on a terrace without checking a phone for another woman's name. A man who listened the first time. A hand extended, not grabbing. Conversations that didn’t require Angela to produce evidence before she was believed.
It wouldn’t be painless. She wasn’t naive enough to think any man was a cure.
But Connor offered a kind of quiet she hadn’t known she wanted until Blake's love became so loud with damage.
Connor's thumb brushed once near her elbow, then fell away before the touch could become persuasion.
"I'm not asking you to run," he said. "I'm offering you somewhere to breathe."
Angela turned toward the windows. For one moment, she almost said yes. Then her phone rang again. Blake. She stared at it until it stopped.
Connor looked toward the screen. "He followed you?"
"Probably."
Of course he was. Angela should have ignored him. She should have packed a bag and accepted Connor's coastal house and let Blake feel what an empty room could do to a man. Instead, she went to the elevator. Connor walked beside her but didn’t ask why.
Blake stood in the hotel lobby, exactly where he had stood before, except this time there was something wilder in him. Not anger at Connor. Not only panic. A grief so raw it seemed to have stripped him of the last layer of Hunter polish.
When he saw Angela, relief crossed his face. Then he saw Connor beside her, and the relief became pain. Blake swallowed it. He wouldn’t make this about him. That was how they ended up here.
"You shouldn't have come," Angela said.
"I know."
"Then why are you here?"
"Because I needed to tell you I didn't know she was coming tonight. I would never have let her do that to you."
Angela laughed, and the sound cut. "You keep being shocked by the woman I begged you to see."
Blake took the hit. "Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes. I keep being shocked because admitting you were right means admitting I failed you every time you warned me."
The lobby seemed to hush around them, though no one was close enough to hear. Connor remained near Angela's shoulder.
Blake looked at him once.
Angela braced for it.
But Blake only said, "Thank you for getting her out of there."
Connor's expression shifted with faint surprise.
Angela felt it too.
Blake turned back to her. "I'm not here to ask you to believe me about the baby. I don't know enough to ask that. I hate that I don't know. I hate that I drank enough to let her make anything possible."
Angela flinched.
His voice roughened. "I'm sorry. Not because I got caught in something ugly. Because I made ugly possible."
She wanted to scream. She wanted to fold herself into him and sob until one of them disappeared. She wanted to hurt him the way her body hurt.
"You keep saying things now that would have saved me months ago," she said.
"I know."
"And you expect me to what? Reward the timing?"
"No."
"Then what?"
Blake looked at her with wet, devastated eyes. "Let me stand here and be wrong without making you carry it."
Angela had no answer for that.
Connor spoke then, voice calm but edged. "She doesn't owe either of us a performance tonight."
Blake's jaw tightened.
For a heartbeat, the old Blake surfaced. The territorial husband. The man who would have seen Connor as an intruder instead of a consequence. Then Blake looked at Angela and stepped back.
"No," he said. "She doesn't."
Angela's throat burned. That was the cruelest part. He was learning. Too late, maybe, but visibly enough to keep her heart from closing cleanly.
"I'm tired," she said.
"I know."
"I'm not going home with you."
Blake's face twisted before he controlled it. "I know."
"And if that baby is yours..." She couldn’t finish.
He closed his eyes as though the thought had struck him through the chest. "Then I will take responsibility for the child. But Angela, I swear to God, I will not ask you to turn yourself into a martyr for my shame."
Her eyes filled again. Behind her, Connor was silent but his eyebrow raised.
Maybe because that was what a decent man would say.
Maybe because Connor knew it made Blake harder to leave.
Angela walked back to the elevator. Connor followed.
The doors closed, and neither of them spoke until they reached her floor.
At her suite, Connor paused.
"Still considering the coast?" he asked.
Angela looked at him.
"Yes," she admitted.
His face softened, though sadness moved behind it. "Good."
"Good?"
"Options are good, Angela. Even when you don't take them."
She watched him walk away, controlled and honorable and quietly wanting.
Inside her suite, Angela stood in the dark with Blake's grief downstairs, Connor's offer in the hallway, and Lily's hand on her stomach burned into her memory.
For the first time since the bedroom, Angela didn’t only feel destroyed. She felt cornered and cornered women, she had learned, could become very dangerous.