Chapter 39
Dual POV
The icy drizzle clung to my eyelashes, blurring the gray shingles of the porch into a smeared watercolor of slate and salt.
My kneecaps were numb against the wet cedar boards, the freezing slush soaking through the denim of my work pants to bite into the bone. I kept my palms flat on the wood, head bowed, my breath hitching in ragged, shuddering gasps that felt like glass scraping through my windpipe.
I was ready to freeze to death on her deck. If she walked back inside and latched the deadbolt, I would stay on these boards until my blood stopped moving.
Then the timber threshold creaked.
"Get inside, Justin."
Her voice wasn't warm. It carried the flat, terrifying finality of a winter ocean, but the words reached through the roar in my ears.
"Penny," I croaked, my throat raw.
"Get inside before you die on my porch," she commanded, stepping back into the shadows of the cottage, leaving the heavy door standing wide.
I tried to rise on my feet, but my quads were dead from three hundred miles behind the wheel and fifteen minutes kneeling in the sleet. My boots slipped on the icy wood, my shoulder clipping the door frame as I stumbled across the threshold like a drunken brawler.
I crossed into the room, tracking gray slush and road salt across the clean, dark pine floorboards.
The heat hit me like a physical shove—the dry, crackling warmth of birch logs glowing behind the iron grate of the woodstove, the scent of dried cedar boughs, peppermint, and the vanilla-almond soap that lived in my dreams.
I didn't step toward the furniture. I didn't look for a chair.
I collapsed back onto my knees on the heavy braided wool rug five feet from the hearth, my massive frame trembling with violent, uncontrollable shudders as the room's heat hit my frozen skin.
Steam began to rise from the damp waffle-knit of my black thermal shirt, smelling of highway grime and rain.
I sat back on my heels, bowing my head until my chin pressed against my sternum, staring at the dark weave of the wool rug.
I was in her sanctuary, and I felt like a rabid animal who had tracked mud into a church.
The soft, rhythmic scuff of wool socks moved across the pine boards. The hem of her cream knit cardigan brushed past my peripheral vision, but I kept my eyes pinned to the floor, terrified that if I looked at her face, she would vanish into the fog.
* * *
Penny POV
I set the thick navy wool blanket over his shivering shoulders, the heavy fleece settling over the massive slab of his back.
He flinched when the wool touched him, his head dropping lower, his breathing shallow, rapid, and hitched with the lingering tremors of the sub-zero wind. Beside his boots, I set down a steaming ceramic mug of peppermint tea, the steam rising into the space between us.
I stood three feet away, my arms crossed tightly over the front of my cream cardigan, my fingers digging through the knit to anchor against the sides of my waist.
The silence in the saltbox cottage was deafening, drowned only by the distant, rhythmic crash of breakers against the rocks below the bluff.
"Drink the tea, Justin," I said, my voice quiet, even, and stripped of all inflection.
He didn't touch the mug. His large, calloused hands remained resting palm-up on his thighs, the knuckles split and bruised, shaking with an exhaustion so absolute it seemed to hollow out his chest.
"I don't deserve your tea, Penny," he rasped, the words scraping out of him like crushed shale.
"You're right. You don't."
Justin flinched again, his shoulders bowing forward as if I had struck him with a composite blade.
"Do you think tearing up your contract fixes what you said in that underpass?" I asked, my voice steady, carrying the cold weight of the truth. "Do you think handing your draft rights to Dean Sterling brings back the man who sat in my bed and promised me that we were an iron front?"
"No," he choked out, his vocal cords tearing on the syllable.
"You looked at a forged signature," I said, stepping half an inch closer, the heat from the woodstove washing over my face.
"You looked at a cheap memo typed by Garrett Shaw and Wade Kozak, and your first instinct—after five weeks of holding me in your sheets—was to believe that I was a paid informant who opened her legs to balance an equipment ledger. "
Justin’s hands curled into tight, bloodless fists against his thighs, a ragged, dry gasp tearing from his throat.
"I was terrified, Penny," he whispered, his face still turned toward the floorboards, tears dripping steadily from his stubbled jaw onto the rug. "I have spent five years waiting for the bill to come due. I thought... I thought nobody could ever love a damaged enforcer without an angle."
"I loved you without an angle, Justin," I said softly, the words hanging between our chests like iron.
He shuddered violently, a low groan of pure agony slipping past his split lip.
I didn't answer his grief with comfort. I turned, walked three paces to the cedar side table by the bay window, and picked up the white digital stick wrapped in its clean linen handkerchief.
I walked back to the hearth.
I knelt down on one knee, reaching between his trembling hands, and laid the white plastic device flat on the dark weave of the braided rug right beneath his bowed face.
The high-contrast black pixels stared up into the amber light:
PREGNANT.
"I wasn't in that tunnel to collect an eighteen-thousand-dollar waiver, Justin," I whispered, my voice trembling with the first crack of raw emotion. "I ran through the snow forty-five minutes before puck drop to tell you that we were having a baby."
* * *
Justin POV
The world ceased to exist.
The ticking of the woodstove, the roar of the Atlantic surf, the hum of the blood in my ears—all of it vanished behind a white, blinding silence that stopped the air in my lungs.
My head lifted half an inch.
My bloodshot, burning eyes dropped to the braided rug between my knees.
The white plastic stick sat in the firelight.
PREGNANT.
A physical blow struck the center of my breastbone with the weight of an anvil dropped from the arena rafters.
My vision narrowed down to a single pinpoint, the room tilting at a violent, sickening angle.
A baby.
Our child.
The life conceived on December 10 in the dark of my carriage house while the blizzard raged outside. My blood. Her heart. A baby growing inside the woman I had hurled onto the concrete floor of a basement underpass.
You were my biggest mistake.
The words I had snarled at her flashed across my retinas, searing into my brain with the agony of a brand. She had been standing in that freezing tunnel carrying my child, holding the test against her chest, running to stand beside me against the world—and I had called her a mercenary.
A monstrous, shattered sound tore out of my throat, raw and animalistic, dragged up from the absolute ruin of my soul.
I didn't think. I didn't breathe.
I pitched forward off my heels, my knees crawling across the braided wool until my chest hit the soft fabric of her cream cardigan.
I reached out with both hands.
My large, scarred, trembling palms came up, hovering for a fraction of a second in pure, terrified reverence before they settled flat against the lower curve of her abdomen.
The skin beneath the knit fabric was warm.
The contact hit my bloodstream like an electric detonation, sending a violent, shuddering tremor through my broad shoulders.
I leaned my forehead down, pressing my face flat against her belly, my cheek resting against the soft swell of the wool, my arms wrapping around the curve of her waist to hold her against me.
The enforcer broke into pieces.
I wept.
Heavy, ragged, suffocating sobs ripped out of my chest, tearing through my ribs, shaking my two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound frame like a child beaten in the dark. Hot, scalding tears soaked through the cream yarn of her cardigan, burning into the fabric over my baby.
"Penny," I sobbed into her stomach, my voice destroyed, my fingers digging gently into the knit to hold her anchored to the earth. "Oh God, Penny... I'm so sorry. I'm so damn sorry."
I kissed the fabric over her belly. I kissed the wool, kissed the warmth beneath it, my lips trembling against the tiny life taking root inside her.
"I've got you," I wept against her womb, the words dragged up from the marrow of my bones. "I've got you both. I will spend every second of the rest of my life on my knees for you. I will bleed for you. I will tear this world apart to keep you safe."
I lifted my face, my cheeks drenched in tears, looking up into her hazel eyes from the floor.
"Please," I rasped, my hands keeping their sacred, immovable grip on her belly. "Let me be a father, Penny. Let me be the man you deserved in that tunnel. Don't cast me out."
Penny stood above me in the amber glow of the hearth.
Her chest was heaving beneath her clothes, her chin trembling as she looked down at the ruined titan sobbing against her stomach.
A single, hot tear broke from her lower eyelid, tracking slowly down her cheek to drip onto my dark hair.
Her hands lifted.
Slowly, delicately, her slender fingers slid into the damp, messy curls at the back of my neck, cradling my head against the curve of her belly with an unyielding, fierce tenderness that silenced the storm outside the glass.
"I'm here, Justin," she whispered, her voice breaking on a soft, ragged breath. "We're here."
I closed my eyes, burying my face back into the warmth of her womb, holding my entire universe in the dark.