Harper
Ineed to get ahold of myself.
I keep catching myself pacing with nerves, halfway across the living room with no memory of standing up, and making myself stop, and then five minutes later I’m doing it again.
I showered the second I got here, mostly because I needed somewhere to stand still that wasn’t this room, and by the time I came out in a cloud of steam Asher and Maddox had already arrived with enough food to feed the entire tasting room staff.
I haven’t touched any of it.
I don’t know if it’s the baby or the nerves.
Possibly both, working together like they’ve formed some kind of committee against my appetite.
Asher poured me a glass of wine and thankfully, no one questioned my preference for water, instead.
while it’s been sitting on its coaster on the coffee table for twenty minutes, untouched, while he and Maddox eat at the table without me because I told them to go ahead, I wasn’t hungry, I was fine.
I’m not fine. I’m sitting in the armchair that faces straight into the foyer, the one with a clean sightline to the elevator doors, one leg drawn up with my foot on the cushion and my elbow propped on my knee, the other leg folded flat underneath me, and I’m biting my own cuticles like I’m nineteen again and failing a chemistry final.
I haven’t done this since college. I used to do it whenever the stress got bad enough that I couldn’t talk myself down from it, the same way I used to chew the inside of my lip raw, except I don’t have access to any of my usual vices right now.
No wine. No long run to burn it off, not with everything still so new and fragile inside me that I’m half convinced overexertion alone could undo it.
Just my own teeth working at the edge of my thumbnail and a head full of noise I can’t seem to organize into anything productive.
I used to be better at this. Or at least I used to be better at hiding it, which I suppose isn’t the same thing at all, but it felt close enough back when the only person I had to manage was myself.
Now there are three of them to account for, three sets of reactions I can’t predict and can’t control, and somewhere in there a fourth person who doesn’t even have a heartbeat I can hear yet but who’s already rearranging every plan I thought I had for my own life.
My sweater, which is really one of Asher’s, swallows me whole, the sleeves long enough to bury my hands in if I let them, the hem hitting somewhere mid-thigh so the whole thing reads less like a sweater and more like a dress I borrowed from a man twice my size.
It still smells faintly of rosemary and butter even after I washed it, which I’ve decided not to mention to him, because some small part of me likes carrying that around without explanation.
Do they even want this. Killian already has Sophia, a fully grown daughter who’s my best friend, which is its own special kind of insane to sit with for too long, and as far as I know neither Asher nor Maddox has ever had kids at all.
What if I tell them and the room just goes quiet in the wrong way.
What if it turns into some kind of primal who’s-the-real-father posturing, three grown men sizing each other up over a baby that isn’t even fully formed yet.
What if it’s the thing that finally breaks whatever this is, whatever the four of us have somehow built out of a summer I never planned for, and any version of a future I didn’t know I wanted until I had it disappears because my body made an executive decision none of us were ready for.
And then there’s the other version, the one I let myself have for exactly four seconds before I shove it back down because it feels too dangerous to hold onto for longer than that.
The version where none of them flinch. Where this just becomes one more thing the four of us absorb the way we’ve absorbed everything else this summer, the way Asher absorbed my parents showing up without warning, the way Maddox absorbed an entire investigation he ran quietly behind the scenes before any of us knew to ask, the way Killian apparently absorbed an entire board fight I’m only now finding out about.
Maybe this is just one more thing. Maybe it doesn’t have to be the ending I keep building it into in my head.
I’m spiraling. I know I’m spiraling. If I said any of this out loud to a stranger they’d have me committed by morning, but it’s just me in here, just my own head running laps, so I let it run.
I glance at the wine again. Untouched, the surface of it catching the lamplight, and some small, stubborn part of me actually misses the version of stress relief that involved a glass of something dry and a hot bath instead of whatever this is, sitting cross-legged in a borrowed sweater chewing my own fingers raw.
The elevator chimes.
Every thought in my skull goes silent at once.
The doors slide open and Killian steps out with his suit jacket and tie bunched in one hand, his other hand working open the top three buttons of his shirt like he’s been wanting to do that since the moment he left the office.
His hair’s slightly mussed, like he’s run a hand through it more than once in the last hour, and there’s a tiredness around his eyes that he never lets the board see, the kind that makes him look fifty-one instead of timeless.
Then he looks up and finds me across the room, and something in his face just loosens.
He smiles. Soft. Like he’s finally allowed to breathe.
I’m across the room before I’ve decided to move, and then I’m in his arms, and his mouth finds mine like it’s the only thing either of us has done right in eleven days.
I’ve missed him. I’ve been furious at him.
I’ve wanted to cry more than once over how cold and clipped he’s been whenever we’ve crossed paths during work hours, routing every question about me through Mallory like I’m a line item on a spreadsheet instead of a person he supposedly can’t stop thinking about.
All of it disappears the second I’m against him.
Every sharp edge I’ve been carrying around for eleven days just dissolves, like his presence alone is enough to quiet the noise in my head long enough for me to actually be here.
I breathe him in, scotch and mint and underneath that the warm, familiar spice and cedar that’s just him, and for one full second I forget every single thing I came in here to say.
He pulls back enough to look at me, and I’m dazed, smiling without having decided to, and he cups my face in one hand and runs his thumb slow over my bottom lip.
“Sorry I’m late, Princess.”
I open my eyes. He’s grinning down at me, his eyes warm in a way that looks dangerously close to something I don’t have the nerve to name out loud yet.
“You’re just in time, Mister Thorne.”
Something flashes hot behind his eyes, and for one disorienting second I almost let myself forget why I dragged him across this room in the first place, almost let the last eleven days dissolve into nothing more than this, his hand still cradling my jaw, his thumb still resting against my mouth.
He leans in to kiss me again, and I put both hands flat against his chest instead.
He looks down at them, then at me, brow lifting.
“Are you in the mood to be spanked tonight, Harper? Because stopping me from kissing you after going eleven days without you is a dangerous road to walk.”
Under any other circumstances I’d take that bet without blinking. Tonight I swallow, take a breath, and make myself hold his gaze instead.
“We need to talk, Killian.”
I glance past him to the table, where Asher and Maddox have gone quiet over their plates, both of them clearly having forgotten I knew they were even in the room until just now. I look back at Killian.
“The four of us. The four of us need to talk.”
I step back, and he lets me, though I can see the worry land behind his eyes immediately, see him already theorizing that whatever this is must be about him, about whatever he’s been doing for the last eleven days, about whether he’s finally about to pay for it.
I can’t comfort him through that right now. The baby comes first.
I step back far enough that all three of them are in my line of sight at once, Killian still half undone from the elevator, Asher with his fork frozen halfway to his plate, Maddox watching me over the rim of his glass with an expression I can’t quite read yet.
“If you’re ready, I’d like for this conversation to happen in the living room.”
I turn and walk toward the couch without waiting to see if they follow. I hear them anyway, the scrape of chairs, the click of forks set down a beat before footsteps fall in behind me, Asher and Maddox’s dinner clearly forgotten the second I said the word talk.
I turn back around and ask them to sit.
“What’s this about, mon coeur?” Asher lowers himself onto the sectional, Maddox settling in near him with a tumbler of whiskey he must have grabbed on the way over. “Are you sick?”
Killian doesn’t sit.
I look at him, already certain he’s going to be stubborn about it, and decide I’m not giving him the satisfaction of an argument over something this small.
I shake my head instead and start shaking out my hands, pacing again without meaning to, my bare feet silent against the rug while three sets of eyes track every step.
“Sweetheart, what is it?” Maddox leans forward, elbows on his knees.
Killian crosses his arms over his chest. “If this is about breaking up—”
I huff out a laugh, sharp and a little disbelieving. “No. Nope. After the way you’ve been since Midsummer, you and your soapbox aren’t invited to the podium. This isn’t a BYOO type of party.”
“What the fuck is a BYOO party?”
“Bring Your Own Opinion.”
“That’s not a real acronym. You just made that up right now.”
“Doesn’t matter if I made it up. It still applies to you.”
“I showed up, didn’t I?” His nostrils flare. “It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact, because I’m standing right here.”
Maddox snorts into his glass. “Yeah. A week later, asshole.”
“You know I had every intention—”
“Again.” Maddox sets his drink down hard enough that it rattles against the table, and he’s on his feet, squaring up to Killian like the two of them are thirty seconds from throwing actual punches. “Get off the fucking cross, Killian.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Killian doesn’t back up an inch. “Stop whining that you had to be more of an adult than usual for once and think about someone other than yourself for a change.”
“Excuse me?”
“Is there a single person in your life you haven’t let down eventually? You’re the most indignant excuse for responsible I have ever met.”
“At least when I let people down I don’t pretend it’s a strategy. You went dark for eleven days and called it protection. I’ve never once dressed up running as a virtue.”
“You ran to Milan.”
“I ran to New York to get her parents’ entire criminal history into a file because somebody had to actually do something instead of just sitting on a board call deciding who gets to know what and when.”
“I was deciding how to take Evelyn off that board permanently without burning this estate down in the process. Forgive me for not consulting you on the timeline.”
Wait. What?
I don’t have time to ask, don’t even have time to fully register the sentence before everything else swallows it whole.
The two of them are talking over each other now, voices stacking on top of voices, and Asher’s saying something I can’t make out over the noise, and the room feels smaller than it did thirty seconds ago, the air thick and close, every sound too loud, the three of them folding in toward each other like the whole suite’s shrinking around us.
“You guys.” Asher’s up too, drink abandoned, trying to wedge himself between them with both hands raised, and the room is getting loud, voices climbing over each other, the air pressing in close, and something in my chest finally gives out.
“I’m pregnant!”
The room goes completely silent.
All three of them stare at me.
I’m not entirely sure if I screamed it or just said it too loud, but judging by the look on every single face in this room, I’m fairly sure it was somewhere closer to the former, and it is absolutely not how I planned to say it.