Chapter Ten
~ Jai ~
Grace started babbling at the ceiling at exactly five forty-seven in the morning. Not crying. Babbling. Full conversational cadence, no consonants, just a steady stream of vowels aimed at the recessed lighting like it had personally offended her.
I was on my feet before my eyes opened all the way, spine straight, hand already reaching for the bassinet—the kind of reflex that came from seven years of being woken by things that weren’t supposed to be happening.
The bedroom was still dark except for the amber slice of sunrise hitting the east-facing glass, turning the dark walnut floors the color of old scotch. The guest suite smelled like cedar and the faint cherry-blossom residue that clung to my skin no matter how many times I showered.
I stood there in yesterday’s socks, heart hammering for no reason, and listened to Grace conduct what sounded like a TED Talk on the subject of recessed lighting. Her fists punched the air. Her feet kicked under the swaddle. Not a cry in sight. Just pure, unfiltered commentary.
“Morning to you too, bean,” I muttered, and scrubbed a hand over my face.
My stubble had graduated to something that could legally be called a beard in three states.
I needed a razor. I needed coffee. I needed to stop launching out of bed like the building was on fire every time the baby made a noise that wasn’t screaming.
But my body had apparently decided that Grace’s vocal range was now my problem, regardless of volume or emotional content. I filed that under “new and annoying information about myself” and reached for her.
The penthouse was quiet in that specific way expensive buildings get quiet—not empty, just engineered to absorb sound before it hits the walls. But my brain, which had never fully stood down from active duty, was already running a full sensory scan of the space beyond the guest suite door.
Low hiss from the kitchen: espresso machine, probably the one that cost more than my first car.
Soft drag of leather soles across hardwood—Braham, moving from the living area to the kitchen with the unhurried pace of a man who owned every square inch of the floor he walked on, a large body moving through a space it knew intimately, the way pressure changes when someone that size shifts position in a room.
I knew exactly where he was. I’d known for the last twenty minutes, which was a fact I refused to examine with any kind of intellectual honesty.
Grace grabbed my thumb the second I lifted her. Her grip was getting stronger. She babbled something that sounded suspiciously like a question, eyebrows raised, waiting for my reply.
“Your timing is criminal,” I told her. “But your enunciation is improving. Solid progress.”
She blew a spit bubble in response.
Fair.
I got her sorted with the efficiency of a man who’d been doing this long enough to develop muscle memory, but not long enough to stop being impressed by his own competence.
Fresh diaper: thirty seconds, one-handed, no leaks. Clean onesie: pale blue, with little wolves printed on the feet because someone in this building had a sense of humor I was choosing to appreciate rather than resent.
I checked her temperature against the inside of my wrist—warm, not feverish—and ran a quick visual for rashes, weird colors, any sign that the universe had decided today was a good day to introduce a new complication.
All clear. For now.
The kitchen smelled like espresso and warm bread. Vera had left a fresh loaf on the counter overnight, wrapped in a cloth that probably cost more than the bread.
Grace’s bouncy seat was already set up on the island, the toy bar dangling brightly colored shapes at exactly the right height for tiny fists to swat.
I settled her in, clicked the safety buckle, and watched her go immediately for the red circle with the focused commitment of someone training for the Olympics.
“Go for gold, kid,” I said, and reached for my laptop.
The manuscript was due in six weeks. Petra, my editor, had the kind of attention to detail that turned misplaced commas into personal insults.
She’d reduced a senior publicist to tears last year over an em dash that should have been an en dash, and she’d done it with a smile that suggested she’d enjoyed every second.
I respected that.
I also respected the fact that she would not accept “I got kidnapped by werewolves and now I’m raising a baby” as a valid extension request.
The document loaded. Chapter fourteen. The love scene I’d been avoiding for three chapters because writing sex while living in a glass penthouse with a six-foot-three alpha wolf and an infant felt like performance art of the most embarrassing variety.
I scrolled to the last paragraph I’d written before the alley, before Grace, before my entire life had detonated and reassembled itself into something I didn’t recognize.
Drew reached for him across the bed, hand finding the line of his jaw in the dark, and for a moment neither of them moved.
The city outside the window was just a smear of orange and white, forty floors down, and in that suspended quiet, Eli did something Drew had never seen him do before: he went perfectly, utterly still, honey-brown eyes fixed on Drew’s mouth with an attention so complete it felt like being touched.
I stopped reading. My jaw tightened.
I scrolled back. The male lead—Eli, who was supposed to be a brooding architect with trust issues and a bad knee—had somehow acquired honey-brown eyes.
And a habit of going very still when he was paying close attention.
And the other one—Drew, who was supposed to be the chatty one—had started making dry remarks in short, punchy sentences that landed like punctuation.
None of that was in the character bible. None of that had been there three weeks ago.
I closed my eyes. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
Grace batted at the red circle and missed, which made her frown with the intensity of someone who had just discovered gravity was a personal attack.
I opened a cherry sucker, shoved it between my teeth, and started typing. Four hundred words in twenty minutes. Not my best pace, but respectable given the circumstances.
The love scene progressed. Drew’s hand on Eli’s chest. Eli’s voice, low and rough, saying something about not having done this in a long time. The dialogue felt real. Too real. I could hear Braham’s cadence in every line, the way he measured each word before he let it go.
I kept typing. Jaw set. Lollipop clicking against my molars. Grace occasionally connecting with the red circle and making a sound of pure triumph that should not have been possible from a creature with lungs that small.
By seven-thirty, the east-facing windows were full gold, Mt.
Hood a pale cutout against a sky the color of a bruise healing.
My books were on the shelves in the living room—spine-out, alphabetical, the way I kept them.
My knives were in the top drawer of the dresser, nested in fabric, handles visible.
The largest one, the one with the checkered grip, was sitting on the nightstand because some habits died harder than others.
The penthouse didn’t feel like someone else’s space anymore. It felt like mine had been grafted onto it, imperfectly, the edges still raw.
I saved the document, rolled my shoulders until something popped, and watched Grace attempt to eat her own fist with the focused determination of someone who had identified a problem and was committed to solving it through oral exploration.
“Your technique needs work,” I told her. “Try the thumb next time. Better leverage.”
She ignored me completely and went back to the red circle.
I went back to chapter fourteen. Drew’s hand was on Eli’s jaw now. Eli was saying something about belonging. I deleted the line, wrote it again, deleted it again.
Braham appeared in the kitchen doorway like the building had personally invited him and then remembered it should be afraid.
Dark Armani suit, gold lapel pin, Patek Philippe catching the morning light on his wrist. He looked like he’d been awake for hours, which he probably had, because the man treated sleep like a suggestion someone else had made.
He crossed to the espresso machine, poured himself a cup—black, no cream, no sugar, the kind of coffee that existed purely as a delivery mechanism for caffeine—and did not, I noted with the precision of a man keeping meticulous records, offer me any.
I filed that under “noted, will be addressed at a time of my choosing, possibly with violence” and went back to my screen.
Drew was currently explaining to Eli why the bedroom curtains were a fire hazard, which was not in the outline and which I was leaving in because it was the only honest dialogue I’d written all morning.
The cedar-and-scotch smell hit me before I registered the shift in air pressure.
Braham had moved to stand behind me at the island, not touching, just present, close enough that the heat off his body registered as a physical fact against my back.
Close enough that if I leaned back an inch, I’d hit his chest. Close enough that the scent of him—aged wood, expensive liquor, something warmer underneath—cut through the kitchen air like a blade.
I could feel his eyes on the screen. Not guessing. Reading. Line by line, the same measured pace he brought to everything.
I snapped the laptop closed. Hard enough that Grace jumped in her bouncy seat and gave me a look of profound betrayal.
Braham said nothing. The corner of his mouth did something small and controlled—not quite a smile, more like a door that had been left slightly ajar.
“If you ever read over my shoulder again,” I said, not turning around, “I will remove your hand at the wrist and feed it to you.”
“I wasn’t reading.”
“You were absolutely reading.”
He sipped his coffee. The mug was bone china, thin enough to see light through, probably worth more than my entire dish set. “The pacing in chapter seven is slow.”