Chapter 3 #3
“It’s not for me.” Draven kept packing containers into an insulated bag stamped with the logo of a wellness shop he’d had someone scout out that afternoon. “Her name’s Sloane. She’s pregnant. It’s mine.”
Hugh went very still, the easy posture dropping away as he processed it in pieces. “I’m going to need you to back up about four steps, because that rolled off your tongue way too easily.”
Draven exhaled, set the bag down, and gave him the short version, the rooftop, the rules about names, the morning he woke to empty sheets two blocks from his own building, the three weeks it took to find her and bring her into Mercer Enterprises without her ever knowing whose name was on the door.
Hugh listened without interrupting, his expression cycling through several stages of disbelief before settling somewhere unreadable.
“So you found her, had her investigated, built a job offer to get her into the building, and didn’t tell her any of it until she fainted in your office this morning.” Hugh said it slowly, like he was making sure he had the shape of it right.
“That’s roughly it.” Draven didn’t flinch, didn’t dress it up. “She knows now. All of it. There’s a clause that lets her walk away clean any time she wants..”
“And she didn’t take it the second she found out?” Genuine surprise, with something like reluctant respect underneath it.
“She was angry. She had every right to be. I’ve already sent her a background check on myself. I was thorough.” Draven leaned against the island, arms crossed, the memory of her face in the cafe still sharp in his chest.
Hugh studied him a long moment, the kind of look only a brother could get away with, then shook his head slowly, something close to a laugh escaping.
“You’ve been like this since we were kids splitting rent four ways to keep the lights on.
You decide you want something, and the world either gets out of the way or gets run over.
” He gestured loosely at the food, the skyline, the whole impossible distance from the block they’d grown up on.
“I’m happy for you, Drave. I haven’t seen you care about anything outside that company in years, and now you’re standing here packing soup for a woman carrying your kid. ”
“I’m not asking for your blessing.” Draven said it without heat, more amused than anything.
“I know you’re not. You’ve never asked anyone for anything in your life.
” Hugh pushed off the island and clapped a hand briefly to his brother’s shoulder, sobering.
“I just hope she can handle you. Really handle you, not just survive you the way most people do.” He held Draven’s gaze.
“You don’t do anything halfway. You bought this whole building before you turned thirty because you didn’t like how someone else was running it.
You’re not going to do this halfway either, and from what you just told me, she didn’t ask for any of it. ”
Draven didn’t answer right away, turning the words over because he respected his brother enough not to wave them off.
“She’s not weak, Hugh. She walked out of a wedding the same day she found her fiancé cheating.
She negotiated her own salary up before she signed.
She told me to my face today she’d raise this baby on her own if I wanted out.
” A faint, certain edge crept into his voice.
“She can handle plenty. The only thing I have to manage is making sure she never has a reason to think she has to handle it without me.”
Hugh held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded, some of the concern easing toward something closer to approval.
“Alright. Then go take care of her.” He scooped his keys off the island and headed for the door, pausing with one hand on the frame.
“Bring her by sometime soon. I want to meet the woman who’s apparently strong enough to deal with an ass like you. ”
“I will.” Draven zipped the bag shut and lifted it off the counter, already thinking ahead to her apartment, her door, the particular look she got deciding whether to let him in or argue with him first.
Hugh laughed his way out, the sound trailing down the hall toward the elevator, and Draven stood a moment longer in the quiet of his penthouse before grabbing his keys and heading down to the car waiting in the garage below.
* * *
Sloane had spent the better part of the afternoon at her kitchen table with his life spread out in front of her.
She’d meant to skim it. Instead she’d read every page, twice, the background report and the labs and the financial disclosures, and somewhere around the second pass she’d stopped looking for the catch and started, reluctantly, being impressed.
He hadn’t redacted a single thing. He’d even included his social security number, printed plain on the cover sheet, as though daring her to do something with it, as though there were no part of himself he wasn’t willing to set in her hands.
She tried to remember the last time a man had offered her even a fraction of that kind of transparency and came up empty.
Marcus had hidden a whole second life in a walk-in freezer.
Her college boyfriend had managed to keep a girlfriend two towns over for half a semester.
And here was a man worth more than she could fully conceptualize, handing her his entire history unprompted and telling her, in effect, that she was allowed to know all of him.
She’d also, somewhere around four o’clock and against her own better judgment, looked him up online.
That part she regretted almost immediately.
She’d scrolled past photo after photo of Draven Mercer at galas and openings and charity functions, and on his arm in nearly every one of them stood a different woman, each of them the kind of beautiful that came with an agency contract, long-limbed and luminous and entirely unlike the woman currently sitting at a kitchen table in leggings with a nausea remedy at her elbow.
She’d closed the laptop harder than necessary and told herself it didn’t matter, which it didn’t, which was exactly why she’d thought about it on and off for the next hour.
Sloane heard the knock at exactly five and didn’t bother with the peephole, already knowing who it would be.
Draven stood there in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, a paper bag from a restaurant she didn’t recognize loose at his side, his eyes finding hers and staying the second the door swung open.
She stepped back to let him in, suddenly aware of how little she’d done to put herself together since changing into leggings and an old sweater an hour ago, suddenly aware too of every flawless woman she’d scrolled past that afternoon and how thoroughly she did not resemble a single one of them.