Page 121 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“Don’t Harper me right now.”

“Will you listen⁠—”

“I’ve been listening. I’ve been very cooperative about listening to explanations after the fact for this entire summer and I’m telling you that it stops now. I don’t care if the plan was good. I don’t care if you had reasons. I’m in this relationship, too. I’m the parent of this little avocado but you’re not protecting us by keeping me in the dark. Walking in on that shit show and reading the documents needing your signature is humiliating because here I am thinking you’re in this with me, with us⁠—”

“I am⁠—”

“But you’re only in this with you!”

God dammit.

“This is exactly what I was trying to avoid.” Something in my own voice shifts and I let it, let it come out harder than I’ve been keeping it, because we’ve been standing in this room for ten minutes and I haven’t been able to finish a sentence. “I needed them on my terms. Controlled, documented, with Maddox’s file complete enough to hand to a lawyer if it comes to that. If I’d had them removed at Midsummer the way you wanted, they’d have left angry and publicly humiliated and a man like your father doesn’t absorb that quietly. He’d have gone to a reporter. He’d have found some version of this story where you’re the unstable one and we’re the predatory billionaires who isolated you from your family, and none of it would need to be true to do damage to you, to your career, to your name, which is the thing you just told me you’re furious about someone else using without permission.”

She goes quiet, and I press on because this is the first opening I’ve had and I’m not wasting it on a breath.

“Maddox spent a few days in New York building a file on your parents. Not because we went looking for ammunition, because we needed to understand what we were actually dealing with, and what we’re dealing with is not two people who are thoughtless and opportunistic, it’s two people who have done this before, to other people, with documentation, and who know exactly how to turn their targets into the problem. Your name on that slide wasn’t just them being presumptuous, Harper. That was them building leverage. They needed your professional credibility attached to this thing before I said no, so that when I said no they could imply you’d been promised something I’d gone back on.”

I cross to my desk and pull the drawer open, taking out the file Maddox had couriered from New York six weeks ago, the full one, the one I haven’t shown her because I was waiting for the right moment and the right moment apparently doesn’t exist.

I set it on the desk between us.

“This is everything. Every business they’ve run. Every investor they’ve burned. Names, dates, dollar amounts, the complaint that almost became a criminal case in 2019 before the plaintiff took a settlement. It’s all in there.” I hold her gaze. “I had this before the Midsummer event. I’ve had it the entire time they’ve been on this property and I didn’t show it to you because I didn’t want to put this in your hands while you were also running the most important professional project of your summer, because you would have stopped sleeping, stopped eating properly, stopped being able to focus on anything except them, and that’s not me thinking you can’t handle it. That’s me knowing exactly how hard you would have worked to handle it and wanting to give you the chance not to have to.”

She’s looking at me differently now, still furious, but paying a different kind of attention, and I keep going because she’s listening and I’m not stopping until she has everything.

“The legal documents aren’t about controlling your future. They’re about making sure you have one, regardless of what you decide to do with me or with any of this. I’ve spent fifty-one years watching people I care about left without options because someone didn’t think far enough ahead, and I am not going to be that person to you or to that baby. I should have told you it was in motion. I should have sat you down and walked you through every page. You’re right about that and I’m not arguing it.” I don’t back up. “But I’m not changing the instructions.”

She stares at me for a long moment and I watch the war happening behind her eyes, the part of her that hears what I’m saying fighting the part of her that grew up learning that when the people who were supposed to protect her made decisions for her it always cost something.

“You don’t get to decide alone what I need to be okay,” she says, and her voice is quieter now but it’s not softer, it still has the edge in it, just a different kind. “That’s exactly what they did. For twenty-four years that’s exactly what they did.”

That one lands and I let it land because she’s earned the right to throw it and she’s not wrong that it rhymes.

“I know,” I say. “It’s not the same thing and it rhymes and I understand why you hear both.”

She pulls in a breath that shakes slightly and I see her trying to decide what to do with the fact that I’m not arguing the point, and then she looks at the file on the desk and something crosses her face that I can’t fully read, some version of exhaustion that isn’t about this argument specifically but about the whole long story of the people who put her in the position of needing someone to run interference on her behalf.

She reaches for her bag from the chair beside her and I’m across the desk before she’s cleared it, my hand closing around her arm.

“Don’t,” I say.

She turns fast and her open hand catches the side of my face hard enough that the sound of it fills the room and echoes off the window behind me. I don’t move. I let it settle and I hold her gaze and she looks back at me with her chest heaving and her jaw set and her eyes bright with everything she hasn’t been able to say yet, and then she swings again and this time I catch her wrist before it lands, and then her other wrist, and I back her one step into the wall and hold her there with both hands, not hard, not hurting her, but not letting go either.

“Calm down,” I tell her, low, close enough that she has no choice but to hear me. “And listen.”

She looks up at me with her chin lifted and her eyes saying things her mouth is deciding whether to let out, and what comes out is, “Fuck you, Killian.”

Fifty-one years of discipline and all it takes is this beautiful woman to obliterate all of it.

I grip her hair and her chin, meeting her fury with my own and kiss her.

45

HARPER

Killian’s body against mine is hot and hard and everything I don’t want to admit is craving, but I’ve never felt so desperate while pissed the fuck off at a man than I do right now. He pins me against the wall, the cool marble biting into my shoulder blades, and kisses me deep, a claiming kind of kiss that feels less like affection and more like a takeover. He lifts me, my legs instinctively wrapping around his waist, the smooth fabric of his trousers bunching beneath my thighs. He pushes my panties to the side, calloused fingers spreading me open, and begins to finger me hard, a rough, insistent rhythm while his thumb rubs circles around my clit.

“Good girl,” he growls into my hair, the sound vibrating through my skull. “You like that, don’t you? All that righteous anger… makes you so wet for me.”