12. Dangerously Close to Hope
Chapter twelve
Dangerously Close to Hope
The gala was nine days away, and I couldn’t sleep in my own house anymore.
It wasn’t fear, exactly. It was the opposite of what I’d lived in for two months, that low hum of making myself small. Now I lay awake, staring at Elliott’s empty side of the bed. He traveled for the ‘onboarding’ twice that week, or said he did.
And I felt the immense weight of what I was about to do pressing on my chest like a hand. Nine days. A printed reservation in my bag. A lawyer waiting for my word. A grandmother who didn’t know yet that I was going to deliver the truth to her in a room full of people.
When Roman texted to ask if I wanted to come to the penthouse, I said yes before I’d finished reading the message.
He met me at the private elevator, and the first thing he did, before hello, was look at me. The slow, full sweep that started at my face and didn’t waver when it reached the bump.
Two months of that, and the sheer contrast still caught me completely off guard. A man who looked at the seven-month-pregnant body that Elliott couldn’t stand to touch as if it were the only thing in the room.
“You’re not sleeping.” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t make it sound like an accusation either, just an observed fact.
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’ve memorized your face, and tonight there’s a version of it I haven’t seen.” He drew me inside, one palm pressed warm against my spine, and the door slid shut on the city. “Talk first. Then I’ll take care of the rest of you.”
So we talked. He poured me sparkling water, himself two fingers of something amber. We sat on the long couch with the lights of the city spread below. I told him what I hadn’t said out loud to anyone.
“I’m afraid I’ll lose my nerve,” I said.
“Nine days from now I’m going to stand in a room and take a man’s whole life apart in front of the people he wants most to impress.
And some part of me is still the woman who spent two years apologizing for existing.
What if I get there and I can’t do it? What if I open my mouth and the old me comes out, the one who smooths everything over? ”
Roman didn’t rush to reassure me. That was a part of him I’d stopped doubting and started to trust. He turned his glass slowly and thought about it.
“You won’t,” he said. “But not because I say so. Because I’ve watched you do the hard version of this for two months.
You sat across from Julian and didn’t flinch.
You walked back into that club and asked for what was yours in a steady voice.
You’ve been carrying the worst thing you know every single day and smiling over dinner with the man who did it.
” He set the glass down. “The woman who apologized for existing couldn’t do any of that.
She’s already gone. You just don’t believe it yet because no one’s ever told you what you actually are. ”
“And what am I?”
“Dangerous,” he said, with the ghost of a smile. “In the best possible way. The kind of dangerous that looks like a pregnant woman in a beautiful dress and ends a man’s career between the soup and the champagne.”
I laughed, surprised, and felt some of the weight slide off my chest. He’d done that on purpose. He always knew exactly how much to lift and how much to leave.
“Can I tell you something?” he said, and his voice changed, went lower, lost its certainty for the first time all night.
“I don’t do this. I told you that at the start, and you probably thought it was a line.
It wasn’t. I don’t bring people here. I don’t text a woman at midnight because I noticed she wasn’t sleeping.
I built a whole life around not needing anyone, and it worked, right up until a pregnant woman at a bar told me she had a ‘hall pass’ and didn’t want one single thing from me.
” He looked at me, and the guard was all the way down.
“You unsettle me, Maeve. I can’t strategize around you. I’ve stopped trying.”
I didn’t have a clean answer for that. The truth was that he unsettled me too. Somewhere in the last weeks, the refuge had stopped being a refuge. It had become a thing I’d want regardless of the divorce, the gala, or the revenge. I’d been afraid to look at it directly.
So I didn’t answer with words. I set down my glass and reached for him. He came to me like he’d been waiting all night for a permission he refused to claim until I offered it.
He kissed me slow. Different from that first night in his apartment, all that hunger and discovery. This was a man who already knew exactly what I liked and was in no hurry.
He kissed me like the kissing itself was the only thing that mattered. His hand gently cupped my cheek, his thumb tracing my lower lip. When I made a small sound, he caught it against his mouth like something precious.
“Come to bed,” he murmured. “Let me look at you with the lights on. Let me remind you what you are, since apparently no one else will.”
In the bedroom he undressed me the way he always did, slow and deliberate, quieting the last of the old shame before it could even surface. He eased my dress off my shoulders and let it pool.
He stepped back to look, and the intensity of his focus pinned me in place. Seven months along, fuller and heavier than I’d ever been, the bump round and prominent before him. He looked at all of it like a man who’d been handed something he hadn’t dared to want.
“Every time,” he said, rough. “Every single time, it knocks the breath out of me.” His hands settled on the swell of my belly, spreading wide, dark against pale.
“He had this. He had you, like this, growing his child, and he looked away. I will never understand it as long as I live, and I’m done trying.
His blindness is the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. ”
He unhooked my bra and drew it away. My breasts came free, heavier with the pregnancy than they’d ever been, tender in a way that made me suck in a breath before he’d even touched them.
He noticed. He noticed everything. He cupped them slow, taking the new weight in his palms like he was learning it. When his thumbs brushed over me, I made a sound I couldn’t have stopped.
“Sensitive,” he murmured, watching my face, doing it again to be sure.
“Everything’s different,” I admitted. “My whole body. It changed, and Elliott acted like it was an inconvenience, like I’d done something to it on purpose.”
“It changed because it’s doing the most important work a body can do.
” He lowered his mouth and closed it over me, careful, his tongue slow against the tightened peak.
The pleasure was so sharp and immediate that my hips lifted off the bed.
He gentled me back down with a hand flat on my belly and continued, unhurried.
He learned just how much had changed and worked every bit of it.
Helpless sounds escaped me, my fingers tangled in his dark hair.
“You hear that?” he said against the underside of my breast, voice gone thick. “That’s the sound of a woman your husband convinced that she was finished. He had no idea what he was holding. I’m grateful for it every time you make that noise.”
He laid me down the way he’d learned, mindful of the bump, building me a nest of pillows so nothing pressed where it shouldn’t. And then he took his time. He kissed the place beneath my breasts where my body had thickened, the soft give of me I’d spent months hiding. He didn’t hurry past it.
He pressed his mouth to the long silver stretch marks low on my belly, the ones I’d hated in every mirror.
He stayed there until the absolute certainty of it sank in, until I understood all over again that he wasn’t enduring my body.
He was worshipping the parts of it the world had told me to apologize for.
“These,” he said against my skin, his mouth on the silver lines. “I keep telling you. They are a map of you building a life. There is nothing on this earth sexier to me than what your body is doing right now, and I’m going to keep saying it until you stop tensing when I get here.”
“I’m not tensing,” I whispered.
“You’re getting better.” He smiled against my belly. “Say it with me. They’re beautiful.”
“They’re beautiful.” And the strange thing was that this time, with his mouth there and his eyes coming up to find mine, I almost believed it.
He moved lower, and what he did then dismantled my hesitation entirely, patient and reverent at once. His hands never stilled, his mouth murmuring praise against the most private parts of me. The last of the nine-day weight burned off.
There was nothing in the room but his voice, his hands, the helpless sounds I’d stopped trying to swallow. When I came apart, it was with his name in my mouth and his eyes on my face. He watched me the whole way through it, like that total surrender was exactly what he’d been seeking.
When he finally settled in behind me, curving carefully to protect the bump, he paused. Just barely inside me, he made me turn my head to look at him.
“This isn’t a thing I’m doing to feel powerful,” he said, and his voice was unsteady in a way I’d never heard from him.
“I want you to know that before the gala, before any of it. Whatever happens in that room, whatever you decide after, this part is real. You’re not a strategy to me.
You stopped being anything I could be strategic about a long time ago. ”
“I know,” I said, and found that I did. “It’s real for me too. That’s the part that scares me more than the gala.”
He let out a long breath, the tension visibly leaving him, and then he eased into me slow, and we both stopped talking.
He’d learned my body by now, the way it had to be in these last months. He arranged us with a care that somehow made the anticipation even sharper. With me on my side, his chest curved to my back, the bump cradled and weightless, his thigh hooked over mine to open me.
The first full slide of him drew a sound out of us both. He held still there, buried deep, his hand splayed wide over the swell of my belly. As if he were holding the whole of me at once, the woman and the child and the wanting.
“Feel that,” he murmured against the back of my neck. “That’s me, not going anywhere.”
Then he moved, and it was unhurried and deep and devastating, every stroke patient and angled to wring sound out of me, his hand never leaving the curve of me. His restraint was deliberate, a gift, and I could sense the exact moment he was going to lose it.
His mouth worked at my throat, alternating filth and tenderness until I couldn’t tell them apart. He told me what I felt like. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere. He told me, between one slow stroke and the next, that I wasn’t finished—not even close.
When I tightened around him, he groaned, the sound heavy with the cost of holding back. His steady rhythm finally broke, and the last of his careful control completely shattered. He brought his hand to where I needed it and stroked me in time with his movements.
I came a second time, quieter, deeper, drawn up from somewhere lower than the first. My head tipped back to his shoulder, his name a ragged sigh in my mouth. He followed a few strokes later, my name in his mouth, his arm locked tight around the swell of me. Like he couldn’t get close enough.
Afterward we lay anchored together in the lamplight, his hand resting over the bump as the baby started her nightly turning. For a long while neither of us said anything.
“Nine days,” he said finally, into my hair.
“Nine days.”
“You’re going to walk into that room, and you’re going to be the most dangerous person in it.” His hand moved slow over the curve of me. “And then you’re going to come home, and I’m going to be here. Not as the weapon. Just here.”
I lay in the dark with a man who’d seen the worst of what I was carrying and chosen to stand beside me anyway. And for the first time since a cabana bathroom, the thing pressing on my chest wasn’t dread.
It was dangerously close to hope. I let myself have it, just for the night. In the morning I’d put the armor back on. But tonight I let myself be a woman in a warm bed. Wanted, seen, and nine days from taking back my entire life.