Chapter 6
GUNTHER
The muffin hand touches my cheek.
Sticky. Warm. Tiny fingers press directly over the dimple I've had my entire life, the one my mother used to call my "secret smile spot" when I was small enough to believe such things mattered.
The baby—Orry, Cecie called him—beams up at me with a grin that mirrors my own face with such precision that the air leaves my lungs in a single, silent rush.
Green-tinged skin. Crystal-clear eyes. And that dimple. Right cheek. Exactly where mine sits.
No.
I take a half-step back, breaking contact with the child's hand, and my hip connects with the edge of Colum's desk hard enough to rattle the novelty mug collection he keeps lined up like trophies.
The ceramic clinks together in a discordant chorus that matches the sudden chaos unspooling inside my chest.
Cecie doesn't seem to notice. She's wiping Orry's hand with a napkin, murmuring something about "sticky disaster mode," her voice bright with the kind of practiced maternal cheer that barely masks exhaustion.
I should say something. Anything. Professional politeness. Normal human interaction.
Instead, I stand frozen, staring at this child who has my face, and try to remember how to breathe like a functional adult instead of a man whose entire reality just cracked down the middle.
The timeline.
Nine months. Maybe ten. I don't—I can't—
The Ridge night was eleven months ago. Colum's celebration party. The hotel. The woman who laughed like summer storms and tasted like peppermint and called herself Sis when I asked her name in the hazy, champagne-soaked dark.
I look at Cecie Newman.
She's focused on Orry, not me, tucking the napkin into her apron pocket with one hand while balancing the child on her hip with practiced ease.
Her hair's pulled into a messy bun, a few strands escaping to frame her face.
Freckles dust across her nose and cheeks.
Bright lipstick. A bandana tied around her head like she stepped out of a vintage poster about hard work and determination.
Nothing like the woman from that night.
Except—
Except the laugh. When she thanked Colum earlier, she laughed, and something in my chest tightened with recognition I immediately dismissed as coincidence.
And the eyes. Hazel. Warm. The kind that crinkle at the corners when she smiles—which she does frequently, I notice, even in the midst of managing a toddler and making conversation with a stranger who's apparently forgotten how to blink normally.
They're the same eyes that held mine across a hotel bar eleven months ago, bright with amusement and something that felt dangerously like possibility.
The same eyes that laughed at whatever joke I'd slurred out in my Ridge persona, back when I thought I could compartmentalize that night into a neat little box labeled "one-time indiscretion" and file it away.
And the—
Perfume.
It hits me in waves as she moves closer to hand Colum back the napkin she'd borrowed. Faint. Barely there beneath the smell of baby shampoo and vanilla muffins.
Faint. Barely there beneath the smell of baby shampoo and vanilla muffins. But unmistakable once I notice it.
Hibiscus. Citrus. Something floral and clean.
The same scent that clung to the hotel sheets. The same scent I've been half-remembering for eleven months every time I walked past the plaza florist and caught a whiff of something similar enough to make me pause mid-stride like an idiot.
My hand moves without permission, reaching into my jacket pocket where I keep Clarence, my lucky calculator. My fingers brush the worn plastic casing. Press the cracked screen. The familiar texture grounds me just enough to force words out of my throat.
"Sis?"
It comes out wrong. Uncertain. A question instead of a statement.
Cecie's head snaps up. Her eyes meet mine, and for one suspended heartbeat, I see something flicker across her face. Surprise. Recognition.
Fear.
Then it's gone, replaced by polite confusion.
"Sorry?" She shifts Orry higher on her hip. "I think you mean Cecie. Cecie Newman. We just met."
Her voice is steady. Friendly. Absolutely nothing like the breathless way she whispered call me Sis against my collarbone while I tried to remember how to form coherent sentences through the haze of want and champagne and her hands tracing patterns across my chest.
Did I imagine it?
No. I'm certain of what I witnessed. My analytical mind doesn't make mistakes about faces, about the precise micro-expressions that flicker across someone's features before they can control them. She saw me for that fraction of a second before the shutter came down.
The recognition was unmistakable. The way her pupils dilated, the subtle tension that seized her jaw, the sharp intake of breath she tried to mask with a smile. It was all there, written in the language of someone who remembers exactly where they've been and with whom.
She knows who I am. She knows exactly what happened between us in that hotel room eleven months ago. Every carefully constructed moment. Every whispered confession. Every inch of skin and every breathless plea and every promise that felt so true in the darkness.
And she's choosing to pretend otherwise. Standing here in her store, surrounded by the ghosts of glitter and customer service politeness, she's deliberately erasing me from her present even though I'm standing directly in front of her.
The realization settles over me like frost spreading across a windowpane. She's not confused. She's not mistaken.
She's lying.
"Right." I push my glasses up my nose with one finger, a nervous habit I've never successfully broken. "Cecie. Of course. I'm—I'm Gunther. Ridgeway. I work with Colum."
"Nice to meet you, Gunther."
She extends her free hand. Professional. Polite.
I stare at it for a beat too long before my brain catches up and I shake it. Her palm is warm. Callused. The same hand that traced my jaw in the dark and made me forget every careful rule I'd built around myself.
Let go.
I do. Too fast. My hand retreats to my pocket where Clarence waits, solid and reliable and utterly useless against the tidal wave of panic currently drowning my ability to think.
Orry squirms. Makes a happy sound. Reaches for me again.
"No, baby, we're bothering the nice man." Cecie pulls him back gently, but Orry protests with a high-pitched squeal that makes both Colum and the intern at the far desk wince.
"He's fine," I hear myself say. "I don't mind."
What am I doing?
Cecie hesitates. Then she adjusts her hold, and Orry beams at me with that damned dimple, and I feel something crack wide open inside my chest that I have absolutely no idea how to fix.
"He likes you." Cecie's voice is carefully neutral, but there's something underneath it. Something sharp and wary that makes me think of cornered animals and defensive walls built brick by brick.
"I like him too." The words come out steadier than I feel, and they're true—so devastatingly, terrifyingly true that I have to grip the edge of the desk to keep myself grounded.
Orry grins wider, that perfect dimple deepening, and something in my carefully ordered world tilts on its axis.
I've spent years building spreadsheets and routines, constructing walls brick by brick against exactly this kind of chaos.
Against exactly this kind of love, messy and illogical and entirely outside my control.
Yet here it is, blooming in my chest like some kind of data I never saw coming, some variable that no amount of calculation could have predicted.
True. Absolutely, impossibly true. The kind of truth that terrifies me more than any spreadsheet error or social misstep ever could, because it demands vulnerability.
It demands I admit that in four minutes, this small, green-eyed child with his confident toddler energy and his infectious grin has made himself indispensable to me.
Cecie watches my face as I say it, and I can see her cataloging my reaction, filing it away behind those sharp, wary eyes.
She knows something. Perhaps not everything, but enough to make her careful, protective in that fierce way of hers.
I hold my breath, waiting to see if she'll push, if she'll demand answers I'm not yet ready to give.
I've known this child for approximately four minutes, and I already feel a fierce, irrational protectiveness that makes no logical sense except for the part where he might be—
My son.
The thought hits me like a physical blow. I take another step back. Bump the desk again. This time, one of Colum's mugs tips over. I catch it reflexively, set it upright with shaking hands.
"You okay there, Ridge?" Colum's voice cuts through the chaos in my head. He's watching me with that particular expression he gets when he's trying very hard not to laugh at my expense.
"Fine." I clear my throat, forcing my voice into something approximating normal despite the way my pulse hammers at my temples. "Just a long day."
"It's ten in the morning," Cecie observes with the precision of someone who's spent the last four minutes cataloging every one of my tells. Her tone carries that particular brand of wry observation that suggests she finds my excuse both transparent and mildly amusing.
I grip Clarence a little tighter, my knuckles whitening around the calculator's worn plastic shell. The cracked screen catches the fluorescent office light as I avoid her gaze.
"Long week," I amend quietly, as though the distinction matters.
As though anything I say right now will somehow adequately explain the peculiar combination of panic and recognition and bone-deep certainty that's currently dismantling my carefully ordered internal spreadsheet into something resembling chaos.
My spreadsheet, the one I've maintained with meticulous color-coding and logistical precision, suddenly feels laughably inadequate for processing this particular moment.