Chapter 39
Dual POV
The cold had worked its way past my skin, past the dense muscle of my shoulders, settling deep into the marrow of my bones.
My knees were numb against the wet spruce planks of the porch, the freezing slush soaking through the denim of my jeans. My teeth clicked together in a hard, uncontrollable spasm that made the split in my lip throb.
The glass storm door gave a sharp, metallic creak.
I didn't lift my forehead from the wood. I stayed bowed in the dirt at her feet, my hands resting open and flat on the wet boards, waiting for her to tell me to get back in my truck and die on the highway.
"Get up, Mauricio."
Her voice came down to me through the freezing air, smooth, quiet, and steady as the coastal tide.
"I'm not scraping your corpse off Chloe's porch," she said. "Come inside."
The latch clicked as she pushed the door wide.
I forced my legs under me. The joints in my knees ground together with a sickening ache as I hauled my two hundred and twenty-five pounds upright. I stumbled across the threshold, my boots leaving gray, salty puddles on the dark pine floorboards of the entryway.
The heat inside the cottage hit my face like a furnace, thick with the dry, fragrant scent of seasoned oak burning in the cast-iron woodstove.
I didn't walk into her living room. I didn't look at the furniture.
I collapsed straight down onto the thick braided wool rug three feet from the woodstove, sitting back on my heels, my head hanging between my broad shoulders.
My wet black t-shirt was plastered to my ribs, steam beginning to rise off my bare arms as the room's seventy-degree air met my freezing skin.
A violent, convulsive shudder tore through my frame, my shoulders shaking so hard my jaw ached.
I stared at the pine floor between my knees, keeping my hands resting flat against my thighs.
I didn't feel worthy to draw breath under her roof.
I sat there in the quiet room, listening to the soft rustle of her wool socks moving across the floorboards, terrified that if I lifted my eyes, she would vanish into the whiteout outside.
* * *
I set the thick white bath towel and a steaming ceramic mug of hot peppermint water on the low pine coffee table beside his boots.
Mauricio didn't reach for the towel. He stayed on his knees on the braided rug, his head bowed, his soaked hair dripping water onto his broad shoulders, his chest heaving with shallow, shivering breaths.
I stepped back three paces, standing beside the glowing iron woodstove, folding my arms tightly across my ribs. My right hand stayed flat and motionless over the waistband of my wool trousers beneath the cream cardigan, feeling the steady, warm presence anchored beneath my palm.
"You drove sixty miles through a freezing gale without a coat to kneel in the slush, Mauricio," I said, my voice cutting through the hiss of the embers with cool, deliberate precision.
"You had Cross arrested, and you threw your captain’s sweater on Vance's desk.
Do you think that fixes what you said in that underpass? "
Mauricio’s shoulders flinched as if I had struck him with a stick.
"No," he rasped into his chest. His voice was a ruined, broken scrape that shook with absolute defeat. "It doesn't fix a damn thing. I am a monster, Kiyomi. I know what I am."
"You called me a mistake," I whispered, the words trembling with eleven days of locked-away grief. "You stood in that tunnel, after everything we shared in the dark, and your first instinct was to believe I was a calculating parasite who sold your broken bones to buy a fellowship."
He slowly lifted his face.
His bloodshot umber eyes looked up at me, hollowed out by days of sleeplessness, tears cutting clean tracks through the dried blood and road grime on his stubbled cheeks.
"I was terrified," he choked out, his chest hitching on a dry, ragged gasp.
"I looked at that forged paper, and all I saw was Scarborough. All I saw was Rafael’s chair.
I thought everyone I touched was cursed to be destroyed, and I couldn't bear the thought that you had looked at me and seen something broken. "
"I looked at you and saw the only man I ever loved," I said, each word a slow, clear strike in the quiet room.
I turned, walked to the small oak console by the bay window, and opened the wooden drawer.
I reached inside, pulling out the white linen handkerchief. I walked back across the pine boards, stopping beside the low coffee table directly in front of his bowed head.
With steady, deliberate fingers, I unwrapped the linen.
I placed the white diagnostic stick—its two bold, dark crimson lines gleaming under the lamplight—flat on the pine table, right beside the folded clinical confirmation slip signed by Nurse Megan Foley.
Mauricio’s gaze dropped to the plastic stick.
The room fell into an absolute, suffocating silence.
The only sound was the crackle of the birch logs in the hearth and the distant crash of the Atlantic surf against the rocks below.
"I wasn't running to that arena on Saturday to collect an endowment, Mauricio," I whispered, my voice breaking on a soft, ragged sob as my hand pressed hard against my lower abdomen.
"I was running down that tunnel to tell you that our baby was six weeks old.
I was running to tell you that you were going to be a father. "
Mauricio went completely rigid.
His breath died in his throat. The shivering in his massive frame stopped all at once, his body locking into an immured, paralyzed block of stone.
His bloodshot eyes dilated until the brown irises were swallowed by pitch, staring at the two crimson lines on the plastic stick with a shock so vast, so catastrophic, that the color drained from his lips in a single second.
* * *
A baby.
My child.
The words hit my sternum like an iron freight train, smashing through my ribs, driving every molecule of air from my lungs in a violent, silent explosion.
My vision swam with gray light. The blood in my carotid arteries roared with a deafening, thunderous pressure that drowned out the room, drowned out the storm, drowned out the world.
She had been carrying my baby.
When she ran down that concrete chute forty minutes before puck drop, breathless and trembling in her coat, she was carrying my blood beneath her heart.
And I had dropped her papers into the floor drain and told her to get off my campus.
A choked, strangled sound tore from the bottom of my lungs.
I didn't stand up. I couldn't.
I dropped forward onto my hands and knees, crawling across the braided wool rug toward her feet, my work boots dragging heavily on the pine floorboards.
I stopped at the hem of her cream cardigan.
My hands came up, shaking with a violent, terrifying tremor that ran from my fingertips to my shoulders. I didn't grab her waist. With infinite, reverent gentleness, my large, calloused palms flattened against the soft knit of her sweater, resting over the slight, warm curve of her lower abdomen.
Her skin beneath the fabric was burning hot.
A living, sacred reality thudding against the callouses of my hands.
My forehead dropped forward, pressing flat against the front of her thighs, and the last remaining wall of my life collapsed into dust.
I broke.
A ragged, butchered sob tore from my chest, shaking my entire two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound frame as I wept openly into her lap. The tears poured from my eyes in hot, burning torrents, soaking through the wool of her cardigan to wet the skin beneath.
"I'm sorry," I wept into her belly, my voice a ruined, shattered rasp that scraped the floorboards. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I'm so sorry."
I pressed my lips against the soft knit over her stomach, kissing the tiny life growing inside her with desperate, worshipful reverence, my hands splaying wide over her hips to anchor her to me.
"I'll bleed for you," I sobbed, my arms wrapping around her thighs, holding on to her like a drowning man holding on to life.
"I'll work the loading docks. I'll give up the draft.
I'll spend every second of every day on my knees earning the right to look at you.
Just please... let me protect you. Let me protect our baby. "
Above me, the room was silent save for the ragged sound of my weeping.
Then, a soft, trembling breath hitched in her chest.
A small, warm hand came down, her slender fingers hesitating for a fraction of a second before sinking deep into the damp, dark curls at the back of my neck.
Her touch was gentle, an unconditional grace that shattered the last shadow of my guilt.
A single hot tear dropped from her chin, splashing against the bare skin of my shoulder, as Kiyomi cradled my head against her stomach, holding the broken father of her child in the quiet dark.