Chapter 2 The Genetic Revelation #2
"Because we barely know each other. Because we kissed twice. Because your family engineered this situation, and I'm standing in the middle of it, feeling like my body isn't my own."
His hand came up. He touched her face, one finger tracing her jaw, the same way he'd on the terrace. She felt it like a brand.
"I didn't choose the marker," he said. "I didn't choose the marker. I didn't choose the failed labs. I didn't choose to be a breeding stallion for my family's research division. And I didn't choose to want you."
She swallowed. "You don't want me. You want what I can give you."
"You think I'd be standing here if any of those fifty other women were in this house?"
"Yes. I think you'd be standing exactly here, saying exactly this, because I'm the one who's available."
Anger and hurt shifted in his eyes, both buried fast.
"You don't believe me," he said.
"I don't believe anyone in this family."
He dropped his hand and waddled back. The distance between them felt like a wound.
"Then I'll prove it," he said.
"How?"
"By not asking. By not pushing. I will let you live in this house for twelve months without pressure. If you change your mind, come to me. If not, we finish the paperwork, and you leave."
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime, I keep my distance."
She laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. "You said that on the terrace. You said it would not happen again. Then you touched my face."
His jaw tightened. "I meant it then. I mean it now."
"You lie to yourself."
"Maybe." He ran a hand through his damp hair. "But I will not force anything, Vesper. I will not manipulate you. I will not use the estate, the inheritance, or the clause to pressure you. The choice is yours. It stays yours."
She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that this brooding, beautiful, complicated man desired her for reasons beyond just her ability to bear children.
But the evidence weighed against him: the files on the desk, the will with its breeding clause, and the grandmother who picked her from a database.
"I need time," she said.
"Take what you need."
"I need to think without you standing there looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you are starving, and I am the only thing left to eat."
His eyes darkened. He held a breath too long, and his chest expanded.
"That will not change," he said. "The wanting. I can keep my distance. I can maintain my personal space. But I cannot stop wanting you. I have been trying for five years."
He walked past her to the door. She felt the heat of his body as he passed, close enough to touch. He did not touch her.
At the door, he stopped. "Your medical files. The ones your doctors gave you. They are incomplete."
She turned. "What?"
"The scarring. Your doctors told you it makes conception nearly impossible.
But they did not test you against my marker.
They did not have access to Thorne Variant 7 data.
The scarring changes your uterine environment.
The scarring makes normal conception incompatible.
But with my marker, it is different. The scarring facilitates implantation for embryos carrying Variant 7. "
She stared at him. "You are saying my condition is not a barrier. It is a requirement."
"I am saying the thing that makes you think you cannot have children is the same thing that makes you the only person who can have mine."
The words landed like a blow. She sat on the edge of the desk. Her legs felt weak.
"My doctors said I would never be a mother."
"Your doctors did not have all the data."
"You are asking me to trust research from your family's biotech company. The same family that wrote a breeding clause into a will."
"I am asking you to consider that you received incomplete information. That is all."
He left. The door closed behind him. She sat in the empty office and stared at the files.
Rain fell. The ocean crashed. The house held its secrets.
She reread her medical file, page by page, line by line. She searched for what she and her doctors had missed.
It was there, in the clinical notes: a reference to an unfamiliar marker, a footnote her doctors had not explained, and a compatibility profile never tested.
She read it three times. Then, she set the file down and pressed her hands to her face.
For two years, she mourned a child she believed she would never have. She grieved, accepted, and built her life around that absence.
Now, this man, this stranger who was not a stranger, told her that the absence was a lie. Her body, the body she felt had betrayed her, was capable of something extraordinary, something impossible.
Something forbidden.
She did not sleep that night.
She lay in the four-poster bed, listening to the rain. She thought about babies, about the children she told herself she would never hold. She pictured the nursery she designed in her mind during years of hope, before doctors crushed it with careful words and clinical certainty.
She thought about Cillian: his hands, his mouth. He touched her face with one finger, as if she were fragile and precious.
She thought about his genetic marker, Variant 7, and the 97.3% compatibility index. Fifty women on Earth could carry his child; one slept in his grandmother's house.
She thought about the desire in his eyes, the hunger he did not hide.
She thought about her wanting, the heat that flooded her whenever he came near, and the ache that kept her awake. Her body responded to him as if it had waited for him.
She pressed her thighs together, feeling the wetness, the need. She closed her eyes and imagined his body over hers, his weight pressing her down, his seed inside her.
She stopped. She opened her eyes. She breathed.
She could not think that. She could not want that. It was wrong, forbidden. He was her stepbrother. His family engineered this situation. She was a means to an end, a compatible womb.
But her body ignored logic. Her body wanted him. It had wanted him since the party in Cambridge, since the hallway, and since the kiss that had ruined her for other men.
She rose, put on a robe, and went downstairs for water.
The kitchen was dark. She filled a glass and drank it at the counter. The rain had stopped. Moonlight cut through the windows, painting silver lines on the floor.
She heard him before she saw him: footsteps on the stairs. She turned.
He entered the kitchen in gray sweatpants, barefoot and bare-chested. Moonlight highlighted the lines of his body: shoulders, chest, and stomach. A healed scar marked his left side, low on his ribs.
He stopped when he saw her. They stood ten feet apart, the kitchen island between them.
"Can't sleep?" he asked.
"No."
"Me neither."
Silence filled the room. The wall clock ticked; the refrigerator hummed.
"I read the files," she said. "The ones you left. I read all of it."
"And?"
"And I don't know what to think."
He moved to the counter and filled his glass. His back faced her. Muscles shifted under his skin. A Latin tattoo she couldn't read marked his shoulder blade.