Chapter One #2
His gaze dropped to my stomach again, this time holding there. Yeah. He might not be able to see through my jacket, but he’d figured it out anyway. Why else would I show up here out of the blue? Sure, he’d used a condom, but those were never foolproof.
“Four months,” he said. Not a question.
I nodded. “Our night.”
A flicker of something crossed his face -- too quick to name, there and gone in an instant. He set my bag down carefully. “You should have called.”
“I tried. Three times. The club’s phone went straight to voicemail. Didn’t seem like something I should leave a message about. I did leave my name and number and asked for you to call me. Clearly, you didn’t.”
He was quiet for a moment, processing. “I never got the message.”
Of course he hadn’t. I’d tried the bar where the Reckless Kings were known to hang out. The address I’d found online for the strip club they owned. Nothing had panned out until I’d remembered the compound. The last option.
“I would have found you sooner,” I said. “If I could have.”
He studied me, his gaze moving over my face like he was memorizing it. “You’re keeping it.”
Not a question this time either. A statement of fact. And I wasn’t sure I was ready to correct him just yet. Not one baby. Two.
“Yes.” I met his gaze steadily. “I am.”
He nodded, a short movement that might have been acceptance or just acknowledgment. “You have somewhere to stay?”
The question caught me off guard. I’d prepared for anger, for denial, for cold dismissal. Not this -- this careful assessment of my immediate needs, this matter-of-fact approach to a situation that had turned my life upside down.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
He picked up my bag again, hefting it like he was judging its weight. “There’s a room in the back. The one we used before. You can stay there tonight. We’ll figure out the rest tomorrow.”
It wasn’t acceptance. Wasn’t commitment. Wasn’t any of the things I’d both hoped for and feared. But it was a start -- a place to stand while the ground shifted underneath me. A chance, at least, to be heard.
“Thank you,” I said.
He looked at me for one more moment, his expression still unreadable. Then he turned and headed for the hallway, my bag in his hand, clearly expecting me to follow.
I did. One foot in front of the other, across the floor and into whatever came next. The same choice I’d made that night, when I’d followed him down this same hallway to his room. The same irrevocable step into a future I couldn’t predict.
But different now. Changed by what had grown between us in the months since. By the two lives taking shape inside me. By the fact that this time, I wasn’t walking away at dawn.
This time, I was staying.
* * *
Nitro
The door shut behind her. I stood in the hallway, my hand still raised where I’d let her go first, and felt something shift in the space between my ribs.
It had been four months since I’d seen her.
Four months of wondering where she’d gone, what she’d been thinking when she walked out before dawn.
Four months of a particular kind of quiet I’d gotten used to.
And now she was back -- her shoulders straight, her voice level, and her hand resting on the slight curve of her stomach in a way that wasn’t casual at all.
I didn’t move right away.
Let the moment settle. That was rule one -- don’t act on impulse, don’t let surprise make decisions for you.
I’d learned that lesson twenty years ago, in circumstances far more likely to get a man killed than finding a woman in his hallway with a child in her belly.
I made myself stand there, breathing, counting to ten in my head, while my thoughts rearranged themselves with a speed that should have worried me.
She was back.
She was pregnant.
And she was under the Reckless Kings’ roof.
I exhaled slowly. My jaw had gone tight without me noticing, the muscle there pulled taut enough to ache.
I forced it to relax, forced my shoulders back down from where they’d crept up toward my ears.
Control. Always control. It was what had kept me alive this long, what had earned me my position, what had made me the kind of man women like Willa walked away from before dawn.
I hadn’t even had time for denial. My mind had skipped straight from surprise to certainty -- the angle of her body, the tension in her posture, the protective instinct written in the curve of her arm across her middle.
I’d seen it immediately, a flash of understanding so complete it felt like someone had dropped ice down my back.
She was carrying. She’d come back. And the moment our gazes met, I’d known with the same bone-deep certainty I felt about my own name that the child was mine.
I pushed off the wall. Started down the hall, got three steps, and stopped again. The energy building under my skin had nowhere to go -- controlled on the surface, sharp underneath. It made my hands want to move, to find something to do with themselves, to act before I’d finished thinking.
I kept them still.
Mine.
The word formed first as a thought, then hardened into certainty -- not a question but a fact my body had known before my brain had caught up.
She was mine. Had been from the moment I’d crossed that room at the party four months ago, no matter that she’d walked out and stayed gone.
And now there was another life attached to hers, another part of her that I’d claim without hesitation.
The baby was mine too. Our blood. Our making. Our responsibility.
I’d had little time to process this information. Willa was back. Willa was pregnant.
I needed a moment to get past the first wave of reaction -- the white-hot flash of possession, the immediate question of why the hell she hadn’t come to me sooner, the slightly less immediate question of what the hell I was supposed to do with any of this.
Needed them to settle into the kind of clear thinking that had nothing to do with how it had felt to watch her walk through the door, her eyes wary and her chin up.
She’d try to leave again. Once she’d stabilized, once she’d gotten what she needed from the club’s resources, she’d start looking for the exit.
I knew it as surely as my own name. She’d done it once already -- slipped out in the dark without a word, leaving nothing behind but the ghost of warmth on the sheets.
It was what people like her did. People who knew how to disappear, how to make themselves into questions rather than answers.
Not this time.
The thought landed clean and hard, a decision made before I’d realized I was making it.
Not this time. Not with my child in her belly, not with my blood in her veins, not after four months of wondering where she’d gone and if I’d see her again and why she’d left at all.
She’d walked back into my life with her pride intact and her defenses up, and I wasn’t letting her walk out again.
My mind locked into decision mode -- the gear I shifted into when something needed handling and I was the one to handle it. No more circling. No more questions that didn’t have answers yet. This wasn’t temporary anymore. I was already choosing the outcome.
I’d have to talk to Beast. The club had rules about situations like this -- not written down but clear enough that everyone knew the score.
A brother’s child, a brother’s responsibility.
A brother’s woman, a brother’s to protect.
She’d be given space at the compound, medical care, whatever she needed, but there would be expectations in return.
Mine to manage. Mine to make sure she understood.
I’d have to figure out what she wanted. Why she’d come back at all when she’d been so careful to leave no trace of herself the first time. What had happened in the four months since she’d walked out of my room and my life?
I’d have to decide what happened next. What kind of father I was going to be. What kind of man I was going to be to her. What kind of future we were going to build on the foundation of one night and one child and the gravity that had pulled us together in the first place.
One thing at a time.
I walked to the door and put my hand on the knob.
The day was nearly gone, the club’s business waiting on my attention, a hundred details that needed handling before I went to bed.
I set them all aside, pushed them into the part of my mind that would keep track until I could get back to them.
Right now, there was only this woman. This moment.
I needed to find out exactly what I was dealing with.