Page 63 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

I stood very still as the brush dripped violet paint onto the windowsill.

I should have been only happy for her. I was happy for her. But grief opened quietly inside me, so soft it almost felt polite.

I’d never have anything like that.

Not that exact thing. Not Maeve’s thing, with her giant Russian husbands and tiny ridiculous dog and children in the garden. But something close enough to hurt. Someone walking beside me as if my sharp edges weren’t an inconvenience. Someone laughing with me because life had become safe enough for laughter to last.

I looked down at my stomach. “Well,” I said softly, “you and I will have each other.”

The words should have comforted me. They did, a little. It also made a lump to build at the back of my throat.

I cleaned the paint from the windowsill before anyone could discover evidence of my emotional incompetence, then went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Hot water filled the room with steam. I stripped carefully, avoiding my reflection until avoidance became more dramatic than looking.

My body still mostly looked like mine. Curves. Breasts too large for my liking. Soft stomach. Blue eyes too bright in a tired face. Dark hair falling loose around my shoulders.

But something had changed. Not enough for anyone else, but enough for me.

I stepped under the water and let it soak my hair.

I had to tell them. Maeve was right, they had a right to know. Even if they decided I was too young. Even if they were horrified. They deserved the truth. The baby deserved to know their fathers.

I rinsed the conditioner from my hair and shut off the water. My hand settled over my stomach as steam curled around me.

“All right,” I whispered. The bathroom was silent except for the drip of water from my hair to the tile. “We tell them.”

Chapter 12

Hudson

The meeting was about to start. Ten people sat around the table in my London office. Five investors, two solicitors, a planning consultant, Lincoln, and me. Rain moved down the windows behind them in silver lines. The Thames sat beyond the glass, gray and heavy beneath an overcast sky.

The investors wanted to build an out-of-town shopping center outside a market town in Perthshire.

“The traffic reports suggest minimal disruption,” Harland said from the far end of the table.

Lincoln shifted beside me. “Minimal disruption to whom?” he asked.

Harland glanced at his papers. “The council figures are optimistic.”

“Council figures are often optimistic,” Lincoln said. “That’s how villages end up with a bypass, three roundabouts, and nowhere to buy a loaf of bread that isn’t wrapped in plastic.”

One of the investors smiled as if Lincoln had made a joke.

I looked down at the proposal, at the columns of numbers, projected returns, access roads, possible tenants, and planning phases. Normally, I could hold every moving piece of a deal in my head at once. I knew the money, the risk, any political appetite or community resistance, and I knew the timing. More than anything, I always had an exit strategy.

Today, the page blurred. It did a lot these days. I couldn’t get her out of my head. Not just her sweet blackberry scent, mixed with wild violet, whiskey and rain. Her. Though her scent seemed to be buried deep inside me.

My hand stilled on the pen. Memory could be cruel. The perfume was stronger today, and it didn’t usually come into the room with such presence.

I inhaled again. It was faint under the smell of polished wood, coffee, expensive perfume and the strange paper smell of legal documents. Not strong, not heat-heavy, not the lush, unbeatable scent of Mary in our hotel bed.

But it was hers…not ours.

My body knew it before my mind could make a sensible objection.

Across the table, Lincoln’s attention also sharpened.

His head didn’t turn. He was too controlled for that in front of investors. But his hand flattened on the table, and the storm note in his scent rose so abruptly that the solicitor beside him looked up.