KILLIAN
Fuck my life.
I’m old enough to know I did this to myself by not keeping her in the loop, but, dammit did she need to find out today?
I know what she saw. I know exactly what conclusion she drew from it, and I know she’s not wrong that she should be angry, she’s just angry at the wrong version of what’s actually happening, and that distinction matters and I need to be the one to explain it before she decides she’s already decided.
I move fast through the main offices, nodding once at Camille without stopping, heading for my office with the specific intent of getting there before Harper does so I can have Maddox’s file open on the desk and the legal documents already minimized on the screen and some version of a controlled conversation available to us instead of whatever the alternative looks like.
I don’t make it.
Harper is already inside, standing in front of my primary monitor with her arms at her sides and her eyes doing something I’ve never seen them do before, which is be completely wide and completely still at the same time, like her body is holding itself very carefully so she doesn’t do something her professional instincts are telling her not to do.
The legal documents are open on the screen.
All of them. The inheritance amendment, the health coverage structure, the employment contract extension, Thomas’s latest draft with his revision notes still in the margins.
She looks up when I come through the door, and any version of a controlled conversation I had planned evaporates on contact with the look on her face.
“What the fuck is this, Killian?”
I close the office door behind me, fast, because the last thing either of us needs is this conversation reaching the corridor, and I say, “Calm down, Harper.”
Wrong choice of words. I know it the second they leave my mouth.
“Bullshit calm down.” Her voice has an edge in it I haven’t heard before, something that’s past frustration and into something older and harder.
“First you lied to me about getting involved with my parents and Evelyn, fucking Evelyn, and now you’re making decisions about my future without talking to me?
Decisions about this baby’s future? Who the fuck are you right now? ”
I take a breath and cross toward my desk, not to sit behind it but to stand in front of it, between her and the door, because I need her to hear this and I need her to stay in the room long enough to hear it.
“I didn’t lie to you,” I say. “I didn’t tell you everything I was doing, which is different.”
“Don’t you dare give me that bullshit of clusterfucks, right now, Killian.”
“It’s not the same thing. I made a strategic decision about timing. I was protecting you.”
“From what?” The word comes out like a blade.
“Facts? Information about my own situation? Because you decided I couldn’t handle knowing that my parents were still here running a con with your ex-wife’s help, so you just let me walk around this estate for two and a half months thinking everything was under control while they had my name on a slide deck in a meeting room?
” She gestures at the monitor. “And this. This is you protecting me? Legal documents about my employment and my child’s inheritance that you had drawn up without asking me a single question?
Let me guess, Asher and Maddox know all about this? ”
“No, not all about it.”
“Fucking perfect,” she lets out an exasperated laugh. “I thought you were done with this fucked up version of yourself, but I guess not.”
“The documents are to make sure you’re protected regardless of what happens between us. Regardless of what the paternity results say. That’s not a decision that requires your input, Harper, that’s something I owe you.”
“You owe me a conversation first.”
“I owe you stability.”
She makes a sound that isn’t a laugh but contains the same energy as one, sharp and short, and says, “Sophia told me you’d do this.
She told me and I defended you. I said you’d learned, I said the exam room conversation was real, and here I am two weeks later, after finding out we’re pregnant, that I find out you’ve been in meetings with my con artist father about a business scheme built around my professional reputation while simultaneously having your lawyer restructure your estate to include my child, who you haven’t even confirmed is biologically yours yet, without so much as a text to let me know any of it was in motion. ”
She’s not wrong. I’m aware she’s not wrong.
That awareness is sitting in my chest right next to the frustration of not being able to get to the part of the conversation where she understands why, because she keeps talking and she’s not wrong about any of it and I cannot get a word in that lands long enough to matter.
“Harper.”
“Don’t Harper me right now.”
“Will you listen—”
“I’ve been listening. I’ve been very cooperative about listening to explanations after the fact for this entire summer and I’m telling you that it stops now.
I don’t care if the plan was good. I don’t care if you had reasons.
I’m in this relationship, too. I’m the parent of this little avocado but you’re not protecting us by keeping me in the dark.
Walking in on that shit show and reading the documents needing your signature is humiliating because here I am thinking you’re in this with me, with us—”
“I am—”
“But you’re only in this with you!”
God dammit.
“This is exactly what I was trying to avoid.” Something in my own voice shifts and I let it, let it come out harder than I’ve been keeping it, because we’ve been standing in this room for ten minutes and I haven’t been able to finish a sentence.
“I needed them on my terms. Controlled, documented, with Maddox’s file complete enough to hand to a lawyer if it comes to that.
If I’d had them removed at Midsummer the way you wanted, they’d have left angry and publicly humiliated and a man like your father doesn’t absorb that quietly.
He’d have gone to a reporter. He’d have found some version of this story where you’re the unstable one and we’re the predatory billionaires who isolated you from your family, and none of it would need to be true to do damage to you, to your career, to your name, which is the thing you just told me you’re furious about someone else using without permission. ”
She goes quiet, and I press on because this is the first opening I’ve had and I’m not wasting it on a breath.
“Maddox spent a few days in New York building a file on your parents. Not because we went looking for ammunition, because we needed to understand what we were actually dealing with, and what we’re dealing with is not two people who are thoughtless and opportunistic, it’s two people who have done this before, to other people, with documentation, and who know exactly how to turn their targets into the problem.
Your name on that slide wasn’t just them being presumptuous, Harper.
That was them building leverage. They needed your professional credibility attached to this thing before I said no, so that when I said no they could imply you’d been promised something I’d gone back on. ”
I cross to my desk and pull the drawer open, taking out the file Maddox had couriered from New York six weeks ago, the full one, the one I haven’t shown her because I was waiting for the right moment and the right moment apparently doesn’t exist.
I set it on the desk between us.
“This is everything. Every business they’ve run.
Every investor they’ve burned. Names, dates, dollar amounts, the complaint that almost became a criminal case in 2019 before the plaintiff took a settlement.
It’s all in there.” I hold her gaze. “I had this before the Midsummer event. I’ve had it the entire time they’ve been on this property and I didn’t show it to you because I didn’t want to put this in your hands while you were also running the most important professional project of your summer, because you would have stopped sleeping, stopped eating properly, stopped being able to focus on anything except them, and that’s not me thinking you can’t handle it.
That’s me knowing exactly how hard you would have worked to handle it and wanting to give you the chance not to have to. ”
She’s looking at me differently now, still furious, but paying a different kind of attention, and I keep going because she’s listening and I’m not stopping until she has everything.
“The legal documents aren’t about controlling your future.
They’re about making sure you have one, regardless of what you decide to do with me or with any of this.
I’ve spent fifty-one years watching people I care about left without options because someone didn’t think far enough ahead, and I am not going to be that person to you or to that baby.
I should have told you it was in motion.
I should have sat you down and walked you through every page.
You’re right about that and I’m not arguing it.
” I don’t back up. “But I’m not changing the instructions. ”
She stares at me for a long moment and I watch the war happening behind her eyes, the part of her that hears what I’m saying fighting the part of her that grew up learning that when the people who were supposed to protect her made decisions for her it always cost something.
“You don’t get to decide alone what I need to be okay,” she says, and her voice is quieter now but it’s not softer, it still has the edge in it, just a different kind. “That’s exactly what they did. For twenty-four years that’s exactly what they did.”
That one lands and I let it land because she’s earned the right to throw it and she’s not wrong that it rhymes.
“I know,” I say. “It’s not the same thing and it rhymes and I understand why you hear both.”
She pulls in a breath that shakes slightly and I see her trying to decide what to do with the fact that I’m not arguing the point, and then she looks at the file on the desk and something crosses her face that I can’t fully read, some version of exhaustion that isn’t about this argument specifically but about the whole long story of the people who put her in the position of needing someone to run interference on her behalf.
She reaches for her bag from the chair beside her and I’m across the desk before she’s cleared it, my hand closing around her arm.
“Don’t,” I say.
She turns fast and her open hand catches the side of my face hard enough that the sound of it fills the room and echoes off the window behind me.
I don’t move. I let it settle and I hold her gaze and she looks back at me with her chest heaving and her jaw set and her eyes bright with everything she hasn’t been able to say yet, and then she swings again and this time I catch her wrist before it lands, and then her other wrist, and I back her one step into the wall and hold her there with both hands, not hard, not hurting her, but not letting go either.
“Calm down,” I tell her, low, close enough that she has no choice but to hear me. “And listen.”
She looks up at me with her chin lifted and her eyes saying things her mouth is deciding whether to let out, and what comes out is, “Fuck you, Killian.”
Fifty-one years of discipline and all it takes is this beautiful woman to obliterate all of it.
I grip her hair and her chin, meeting her fury with my own and kiss her.