Chapter 6
H e’d said the wrong thing.
He knew it the moment the words left his mouth.
Well-positioned . As if Fairchild Development were a line item to be optimized rather than something Nikki had built from nothing, with her own hands, on her own terms, purely because she’d refused to let her mother be right about her.
He’d watched her fight for that business the same way he’d watched her fight for everything—with a quiet, relentless ferocity that most people missed because she packaged it in warmth and self-deprecating humor.
He didn’t miss it. He never had.
Which made it worse that he’d said something so spectacularly obtuse.
She’d gone to check on the kids, and he’d let her go.
Picked up a magazine he had no intention of reading and waited, because Nikki occasionally needed a few minutes to put herself back together before she could accept comfort—and because he knew, with the certainty of a man who had studied this woman more carefully than he’d ever studied anything, that she’d come back.
She always came back.
After the apologies, after she’d curled into his side and said she had everything she wanted, he’d held her and waited for her breathing to slow into sleep.
It didn’t. Instead she’d shifted against him, restless, and he’d felt the tension still coiled in her shoulders—the particular tightness that meant she was still carrying something she hadn’t said.
“Come outside with me,” he’d said.
She’d looked up at him, surprised. “It’s late.”
“Just for a little while.”
So now they were on the terrace, the fire pit freshly lit, the Pacific a dark mass beyond the railing.
Nikki was wrapped in the blanket she’d grabbed on the way through the bedroom, her hands around a mug of chamomile that he’d made while she got settled and the kindling caught.
He had bourbon. It had been that kind of day.
He waited. He was good at waiting. It was one of the few skills his childhood had given him that he’d actually found useful.
Nikki watched the fire for a while. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said as the silence grew heavy.
“You already apologized.”
“I know. I’m apologizing again.” She pulled the blanket tighter. “I was awful.”
“You were tired and blindsided and scared,” he said. “That’s not awful. That’s human.”
She made a small sound that wasn’t quite agreement.
He let the silence sit for a moment, watching the firelight move across her face. She was looking at the flames with that expression he’d learned to read—the one where she was working something out, turning it over, deciding whether to say it.
“What’s the real thing?” he asked quietly.
She glanced at him. “What?”
“You said everything you wanted in the bedroom. You meant it. I could tell.” He held her gaze. “But there’s something else underneath it. There has been all day. So what’s the real thing, Nikki?”
She was quiet long enough that he thought she might not answer. Then she exhaled, slow and deliberate, and looked back at the fire.
“Eric leaving means more travel,” she said.
“More client dinners. More of the things he was handling that I now have to handle. Which means I’ll be away more.
Not just eight to five—more.” She paused.
“And I was already going to miss things. I was already going to be the mom who misses things. But now it’s going to be more things.
More chunks of time that just disappear. ”
She stopped. He waited.
“Lara’s going to do something for the first time,” she said, and her voice had dropped to something quieter and more careful, the voice she used when she was trying very hard not to cry.
“She’s going to say a word or take a step or figure something out, and I won’t be there.
And then she’ll do it again for Bree, and Bree will call me all excited, and I’ll say that’s wonderful, and I’ll mean it.
But it won’t be the same. It won’t ever be the same as being the one who was there.
” She shook her head. “And Anne is so little. She’s so little, Damien.
I feel like I’m going to turn around, and she’ll be walking, and I’ll have missed half of it. ”
“You’re going to miss some things,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you otherwise.”
She grimaced. “That’s not exactly comforting.”
“I’m not done.” He set down his glass and shifted toward her, then took her hand, relishing the way her fingers curled around his.
“You are going to miss some things. And your girls are going to have a mother who built something extraordinary on her own terms, who went back to work when it was hard because the work mattered to her. They’re going to see every single day what it looks like to want something and go after it. That’s not nothing, baby.”
She looked down at their joined hands. “I guess,” she said softly. “I mean, yes. I know you’re right. It just—it doesn’t always feel like enough.”
“It never feels like enough,” he said. “For either of us. I miss things too. You know I do.”
He squeezed her hand. “But I also know our kids are going to be extraordinary, and I think that’s mostly because of us. Not despite us.”
“How can you be so sure that it’s all going to work out?”
He looked at her for a moment. “Because I’m Damien Fucking Stark, sweetheart. And I’ll make sure it does.”
She stared at him. Then she laughed—a real one that seemed to shatter the tension. “You are absolutely ridiculous,” she said, leaning against him.
“And yet,” he said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head, “you feel better.”
She didn’t argue.
He held her close, and they watched the fire burn down, his chin resting on her hair. The night was quiet around them—just the ocean, the low crackle of the fire, and the soft sounds coming from the portable baby monitors.
He’d meant what he said. Both parts of it—the true part and the arrogant part, because with him those were frequently the same thing.
He couldn’t promise her she wouldn’t miss moments.
He couldn’t give her back the time that work would cost her, any more than she could give him back the dinners he’d missed or the bedtimes he’d come home too late for.
What he could do was everything else. He was very good at everything else.
And she—his Nikki, his infuriating, brilliant, relentless wife—was going to be just fine.
He’d make sure of it.