Chapter 15 Elena
Elena
The water is lukewarm at best now, but I don’t care.
My fingers trail through the surface, sending little ripples skittering out toward the edges of the clawfoot tub as I lean my head back and stare at the ceiling.
Every muscle in my body feels like it’s been broken down, like something inside me cracked open yesterday and the pieces haven’t figured out how to glue themselves back together.
Five weeks.
That morning in the woods. The first time we’d actually had sex.
The man must have fucking super-sperm.
I’d asked him to let me take the rest of the day yesterday to come to terms with it on my own.
I hadn’t made much progress, though, because I’m still reeling over the entire thing.
My hand settles on the softness of my stomach, struggling to really put two and two together.
It doesn’t look like I’m pregnant, but of course it wouldn’t.
Five weeks is barely anything. But now that I know…
it feels different, like a whisper under my skin, like some strange, tiny flicker of life calling out from inside of me.
A soft knock rattles the bathroom door, and I realize just how much I’d drifted into my own head. I hadn’t even heard the front door open.
“Elena?”
Harry. I let out a breath. “It’s not locked.”
The door creaks open slowly, and he pauses on the threshold. I sit forward, drawing my knees up, my arms folded around them. The bathwater is a little cloudy from the eucalyptus bath bomb I’d dumped into it earlier, but I don’t bother covering myself.
He’s seen me bare. He’s touched me bare. Right now, modesty isn’t even in my top fifty concerns.
Harry doesn’t look away, but he doesn’t stare either.
He steps in, letting his gaze drop to the tub only briefly before meeting my gaze again.
He sinks down on one knee beside the tub, shifting so his leg is under him fully, his other bent upright, his arms resting on it like he’s accepted his fate of seeing me like this.
“How are you feeling today?”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Tired. Nauseous. Emotional,” I mumble. “That’s the short list.”
He hums softly, rubbing a hand over his freshly trimmed jaw.
His hair’s still damp from a shower, curling slightly at the ends, and the silver looks darker like this, almost stormy.
Everything I thought I knew about him right now feels muted — calm, but rattled.
He’s wearing a soft, grey t-shirt and black lounge pants, but somehow still looks like the most expensive man in the goddamn world.
“I’m still working through it,” he admits. “I won’t lie to you and say I’m entirely fine with this.”
I nod and rest my chin on my knee. “I know. I’m not either.”
Silence stretches for a moment, his eyes lingering on me, his lips pressing into a soft line. “You want to keep it.”
It’s not a question, but I nod anyway.
He watched me, not judging, just seeing. “Can I ask why without you assuming the worst of me?”
I snort, adjusting my head slightly and averting my gaze, and shrug noncommittally.
“I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to be a mother,” I say, my voice a little weak.
“Even when I was little. I used to push Sarah around in our stroller like she was my own kid, even though she was only a year younger than me.”
His mouth twitches. “I think that’s most kids.”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” I grin, the image already forming in my head of a smaller version of myself.
“I was the really odd eight-year-old at school who’d plan birthday parties for my dolls and have a meltdown when no one turned up.
I used to cry when I dropped them. Mom told me once that I could kill a real baby by dropping it like that if I wasn’t careful, and I was inconsolable for about a week.
I used to shove pillows under my shirts and make Sarah play labor-and-delivery with me. I was weird.”
He actually chuckles for once, his half-stoic demeanor breaking.
“But it was more than that,” I continue. “I think… I don’t know, I think I just wanted something that felt like it was mine. Growing up in my house, you learn real fast that love is conditional, that you earn affection by obeying. By doing what’s expected of you. By being useful.”
He doesn’t interrupt me to drop pity on me, and I’m genuinely thankful for that. Just watches me, waiting for whatever I’m going to say next.
“My mother once told me I should stop working so I could get liposuction before the wedding,” I add, sweeping my hair to one side and dropping my gaze to my knees. “Said it would be more useful to the merger than anything else would be.”
He stays quiet. When I glance at him, he’s looking away, a muscle in his jaw twitching.
“So, yeah,” I murmur, shrugging again. “I want to keep it. I don’t need a perfect situation to want that. I just want to be good to something small and new and mine, and do it differently than I was taught.”
A beat of silence passes us, nothing but the sound of our breathing and the slight sloshing of water filling the space.
“Does that bother you?”
“Hm?”
“That I want to keep it.”
He shakes his head, dragging his gaze back to me. “No,” he says carefully. “It doesn’t.”
I hesitate, watching him, counting the flecks of gold in the green of his eyes, memorizing the softness of his features for once, the way the crease in his forehead is mostly smooth, the way the crinkles by his eyes aren’t too deep this morning.
“Okay,” I murmur.
His eyes flick down to the bath again, watching the water ripple as I adjust my legs. “You seem less nauseous this morning.”
“The bath helps,” I say. Part of me half-expects him to get up and leave any minute now that I’ve answered the question he clearly came in for, but he lingers, settling in a little more and dropping his rear to the floor.
“Helped Geraldine too, funnily enough,” he says quietly.
My brows lift. I have vague memories of her from when my father first met Harry, back in my early teens, just before the contract was drawn up for me and George.
I knew she’d passed, had heard my parents whispering about it, but never learned any of the details.
Maybe it was my way of fighting the contract — keep myself at as much of a distance from the Highcourts as long as I could.
“She was your wife, right?” I ask carefully.
He nods, his gaze flicking around the bathroom, then out the open door. “This was her space, originally. Her art studio. She used to be in here half the time, before she…” His words trail off, not bothering to finish the sentence.
My lips part as I follow his gaze. The half-covered furniture downstairs, the faint scent of paint that still lingered, the way this place felt lived in — it made sense now. “You—you didn’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t ask.”
I watch him again, memorizing his profile, the way his throat bobs just once. “You didn’t have to let me live in here. If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have—”
He shakes his head, meeting my gaze again.
“It was her space,” he says, “but it hasn’t been used in years.
You wanted to stay with me, and I figured you’d want your own space to do what you wanted with.
It made the most sense. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think I’d be okay with it. And I didn’t think she’d mind.”
I hesitate, but nod, half to myself and half to him. “Thank you,” I murmur. “It’s… peaceful, in here.”
He doesn’t reply, but something in his expression shifts, like I’ve hit a bit of a nerve he wasn’t expecting me to touch on.
I know I should leave it alone. I do. But I can’t bring myself to stop talking to him, and a part of me doesn’t want him to inevitably leave, so I keep talking.
“What was she like? I don’t really remember.”
The corner of his mouth twitches, barely noticeable, but I see it. “Fierce. Crazy, in a good way. Could hold a grudge for years, and loved just as intensely if she hadn’t seen you in days or a decade. Quiet when she wanted to be, loud when she didn’t. She hated coffee. Loved flowers.”
I smile faintly. “Sounds like someone who didn’t do things halfway.”
He huffs a quiet breath, almost a chuckle, but dampened. “No,” he says. “She didn’t.”
I roll my lips together, tempted to reach out to him, to drag my fingers along the stubble on his jaw or feel the softness of his hair. But I don’t. “Can I ask you something?”
“You’ve asked me a handful of things already.”
I crack a small grin. “Another thing, then.”
He gestures for me to continue.
“Do you think she’d be upset with you?” I ask, regretting it almost immediately. “For what we’ve done.”
“Ooh, that’s dangerous territory,” he warns, but his lips have curved up at the corners, just slightly. “You’ll have to be more specific. Which thing, exactly? Marrying the woman who was meant to be my daughter-in-law? Marrying again at all? Sleeping with you? Getting you pregnant?”
I let out a startled laugh. “All of the above.”
He chuckles softly, pushing the damp strands of hair back from his face. “No,” he says, “I don’t think she’d be upset with me. At least, not for all of it. It’s not as if I intended to do it, you know? Being a father again wasn’t really in the plan. Especially not like this.”
I snort. “Because it went so well the first time?”
He shoots me a playful glare, and something twists in my stomach — not with nausea this time, but something different, something human.
“George was supposed to be it. My heir, my legacy. And then he turned into a self-important jackass with a passport addiction and no spine, so who knows, maybe this is my redemption.”
“Do you think this one will turn out the same?”
He shrugs. “Don’t know. Maybe. But I know it wouldn’t be your fault if it does.”
I grin softly at him, watching the way his chest rises and falls, the way he’s here so casually, like we haven’t been tiptoeing around each other for two months.
“Just to be clear, I… I don’t expect anything from you,” I say.
“I know we’re not — you know, this wasn’t supposed to happen.
And I know there’s still talk of an annulment or divorce or whatever works once George—”
“Matthew’s still working on that. Haven’t heard a goddamn word, though.”
“What do we do? If he shows up, if he comes back.”
His mouth opens, poised to say the practiced thing, the thing we’ve been saying for months. But he hesitates, swallows, looks at me. “I don’t know,” he admits. “But I’d let you decide.”
It’s not what I expected him to say, but it feels like a gift. My fingers twitch at the surface of the water, little ripples spanning out from them, and I watch them instead, my cheeks warming. “I don’t want to marry him,” I answer.
Silence.
“I mean — in case there was any confusion there, or doubt. If I have a say, I’m not doing it. I don’t care what my parents want, I don’t care if he grovels or brings a goddamn parade. That ship’s sunk and every person on board has been eaten by sharks.”
He lets out an amused, breathy laugh. “Yeah, I figured as much.”
“But,” I pause, meeting his gaze again. “I think we need to be honest about this. You and me. With ourselves.”
He doesn’t look away. “What do you mean?”
I take a deep breath, trying to find the right words, combing through them to string something decent together. “We didn’t get married for love, we did it for damage control,” I say carefully. “Your plan was clear — dissolve it once George reappears and gets his act together.”
“I know.”
“And I meant what I said about keeping it,” I add. “But I’m not expecting a happily ever after, Harry. Just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean we have to pivot if you don’t want to.”
His jaw works like the cogs are turning in his mind, but he nods.
“I know,” he repeats. “If I’m being honest, I don’t know what the best plan of action is here.
But whatever it ends up being, I won’t leave you alone in this.
I know that much. I’m not going to vanish, or pass you off to the lawyers, or battle custody.
We’ll figure something out. Whatever you need. ”
Something heavy lifts from my chest, leaving me lighter, calmer. But the words themselves weigh me back down the longer I sit on them, the softness in them doing something to me.
It should bother me — him being this nice, this accommodating, this caring. But it doesn’t. I’ve avoided him half because I wanted to sleep with him and half because he’s incredibly good at being an asshole, but right now, he’s not being an asshole at all.
It’s jarringly nice in a way I shouldn’t want.
“Thank you,” I murmur.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.” He holds my gaze, his hand reaching out to find my damp one. “Don’t thank me for treating you like a human being.”