Chapter 9
nine
. . .
Clayton
Three weeks. That’s how long we wait after she tells me she wants my baby before the test turns positive. Three weeks of fucking her every night with purpose, filling her deep, both of us hoping. Both of us too superstitious to say it out loud.
She’s late. Two days. Not enough to be sure, but enough that she buys the test on a Tuesday afternoon while I’m at work and doesn’t tell me until I walk through the door and find her standing in the hallway, that particular look on her face—part fear, part wonder, part something so bright it hurts to look at.
“I took a test,” she says.
I stop. Keys in hand. Coat half-off. The world narrows to her face, her eyes, the way she’s biting her lower lip.
“And?”
She doesn’t answer. Just takes my hand and leads me to the bathroom. The test is on the counter. Two pink lines. Clear as fucking day.
My knees hit the floor.
Not a decision. A collapse. My body gives out before my brain processes what I’m seeing, and I’m on the bathroom tiles, my hands finding her hips, pulling her to me, and my face presses against her lower belly—still flat, still just her, the tiny life inside too small to show—and something breaks open in my chest so completely I can’t speak.
I can’t speak. Me. The man who’s never at a loss for words, especially filthy ones, especially when they’re about her. My mouth is against the warm skin of her stomach and no sound comes out. Just my breath, hot and ragged, and the feeling of her hands in my hair, trembling.
“Clayton.” Her voice is soft. Wondering. “Baby. Say something.”
I lift my head. Look up at her. Those honey eyes wide, wet, looking down at me like I’m something precious instead of the broken mess I am.
“It’s there,” I manage. My voice is wrecked. Scraped raw. “My kid. In you.”
She nods. A tear tracks down her cheek. “Your kid. Our kid.”
I press my face back to her stomach. My hands span her hips, fingers digging in like I’m afraid she’ll float away, and I talk to the tiny thing inside her. My voice low. Rough. Earnest in a way I’ve never been with anyone.
“Hey,” I say to her belly. To the life growing there. “It’s your dad. I’m gonna keep you safe. Both of you. Always. That’s a promise. That’s the only promise that matters.”
Winny’s hands tighten in my hair. I feel a drop of warmth hit my scalp—her tears—and I look up to find her crying silently, her face transformed by something so bright it could power cities.
I stand. Lift her. Carry her to the bedroom the way I carried her that first night—effortless, like she weighs nothing, like she’s made of something more precious than flesh—and lay her down on the bed.
I undress her slowly. My hands shaking. Every button, every zipper, every inch of skin revealed treated like a sacrament. When she’s naked, I kneel between her spread thighs and press my mouth to her stomach again. Kiss it. Once. Twice. A third time directly over where my child is growing.
“Mine,” I murmur against her skin. “Both of you. Mine.”
She reaches for me. Pulls me up. Her hands find my belt, my zipper, and she frees my cock—hard, aching, already leaking—and guides me to her entrance. Wet. Ready. Always ready for me.
I push inside slow. So slow it burns. Her body takes me the way it always does—perfect, tight, welcoming—and when I’m fully seated, balls-deep in that heat, we both stop breathing.
My hand finds her lower belly. Spans it. Protective. Claiming. My thumb traces small circles over the place where our baby lives, and the intimacy of it—fucking her while protecting what’s already growing inside her—sends a pulse through my cock so intense I have to grit my teeth to hold back.
“Look at me,” I say.
She does. Those eyes holding mine, clear and certain, and I start to move. Long, deep strokes that build a heat different from anything we’ve shared before. Not desperate. Devotional. Each thrust a promise. Each withdrawal a return.
“My good girl,” I tell her, my voice rough with feeling. “My perfect girl. Carrying my baby. Making me a father. Fuck, Winny, you’re my whole damn world.”
She comes with a sob. Her body clenching around me, her hands fisting in the sheets, and I follow—deep, pulsing, filling her the way I’ve been filling her for weeks, but this time it’s different.
This time there’s something there to protect.
Something already growing. Something that ties her to me in the most permanent way possible.
I collapse beside her. Pull her against my chest. My hand stays on her belly, protective, possessive, and I press my face into her hair and breathe her in.
Vanilla. Sleep. Something sweet underneath that’s just her. And now, somehow, mine.
The streets still get Detective Holloway. The hard man. The uncompromising cop who walks into dark places without flinching. They get the scarred hands and the flat stare and the voice that leaves no room for negotiation.
She gets something else. The man underneath.
The one with soft hands and quiet devotion and the capacity for tenderness I thought I’d burned out of myself fifteen years ago.
She gets the promise—whispered against her skin, pressed into her belly with each kiss—that she will never face a single day alone. Not ever again.
Our child will know that promise too. Will grow up in it. Will be raised by a man who learned, too late and just in time, that some things are worth protecting more fiercely than others.
Some things are worth burning the world down for.
I press one last kiss to her stomach. To the life growing there. To the future we’re building one careful day at a time.
“Mine,” I whisper. To her. To the baby. To the life we’ve chosen.
And for the first time since I walked through that broken door and found her trembling in the corner, the obsession doesn’t feel like hunger.
It feels like coming home.