Page 19 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Something moves across her face. Fast, controlled, the practiced expression of someone who has answered this question enough times to have a version ready. She produces a light shrug. “Bad timing. Wrong place, wrong moment. It happens.”

It doesn’t happen to people like her. Not the way she said it. There’s a longer story living underneath that shrug and I file it away without asking, because this isn’t the moment and she didn’t offer it.

But I noticed.

“Send me the final contracts this week,” I tell Sophia. “I’ll have legal review them and get them back to you signed.”

Sophia is already gathering her things with the energy of a woman who has celebrating to do. “Done. Absolutely done. Harper, come on, we need to⁠—”

“Actually.” I keep my voice level. “Harper, if you have a few minutes, I’d like to talk through something with you.”

She looks up from the table. Her eyes move to Asher, then Maddox, then back to me, a quick read of the room. She chews her bottom lip, brief and unconscious, and I put the observation somewhere I’m not examining right now.

“Sure,” she says.

She turns to Sophia. “We’ll celebrate later. Go. You’ve earned it.”

Sophia does not read the room. This is one of her more reliable qualities. She practically skips to the door, squeezes Harper’s arm on her way past, and pulls it shut behind her. Asher follows, quiet and unhurried. Maddox is last, and as he passes me he doesn’t say a word, just looks at me with an expression I’ve been on the receiving end of for twenty-some years and know better than to misread.

The door closes.

The conference room is very quiet.

I stand from my chair and move to the one to Harper’s right, the one nearest her, and pull it out from the table. She watches me do it.

“Please,” I say.

She sits.

I push the chair in gently behind her and straighten up and something settles in my chest that I have no intention of naming.

Good girl.

I move to the chair across from her and sit and I fold my hands on the table and I look at her directly for the first time since she walked in this morning, which is a mistake I’ve been putting off making because I knew, the moment I let myself actually look at her, that the self-discipline I’ve been running on for the past four days was going to start costing me more than it was worth.

I was right.

I look anyway.

“You salvaged that presentation,” I say. “You knew exactly when to step in and exactly how to do it without making Sophia look like she needed saving. That’s a specific skill and it doesn’t come from nowhere.”

She holds my gaze steadily. “Sophia didn’t need saving. She just needed a second.”

“I know.” I pause. “Which is why I didn’t ask you to stay behind to talk about Sophia.”

Something shifts in her expression. Alert, but not alarmed. Waiting.

I keep my hands folded on the table and I keep my voice exactly where it belongs and I say what I asked her to stay behind to say.

8

HARPER

Ididn’t ask you to stay behind to talk about Sophia.

Those words are still doing laps in my head when Killian moves to the chair across from mine and sits down and folds his hands on the table and looks at me, and I mean really looks at me, for what feels like the first time since I walked in this morning. Not the restrained, carefully managed not-looking he’s been doing during the presentation. Actually looks at me, directly, and it’s significantly worse.

I keep my hands in my lap and my expression neutral and I wait.