Page 36 of Secret Baby Daddy

“I have shared smaller spaces with worse company. I once spent nine days in a surveillance van with a man who ate tuna out of the can with his fingers. I think we’ll manage a sitting room.”

“That’s not remotely reassuring.”

“It wasn’t meant to be reassuring. It was meant to be accurate.”

He rolls the schematic closed.

“You can requisition a cot for the sitting room if the arrangement offends you. I don’t particularly care where either of us sleeps, as long as we’re both inside that door by the time the temperature in the west wing drops.”

I want to argue further, mostly because ceding a point to Dominic Calder still feels like handing him a weapon he’ll use against me later.

But the wind has already picked up, rattling the old windows, and somewhere down the hall Sloane is shivering in a guest room that used to be someone’s nursery, and I am, underneath the reflexive resistance, tired enough to recognize a decision the weather has already made for me.

There is also, if I am being honest with the version of myself that only exists at one in the morning over a glass of wine I have not yet earned, a smaller and far less strategic reason I stop arguing.

Some tired, unguarded corner of me does not entirely mind the idea of one locked door standing between the world and both of us at once.

“Fine,” I say. “But I get the side of the bedroom farthest from the door.”

“Why?”

“Because if someone comes through it, I want the extra two seconds to decide whether to be brave or to hide behind you.”

I say it lightly, and it isn’t entirely a joke, and something in the way his expression shifts tells me he heard the honest part underneath it.

“I’ll take the door side,” he says, quiet enough that it isn’t really an argument anymore. “Every time.”

There is something unnervingly settling about the way he says it, no performance in it at all, just a plain fact about the shape of his own priorities.

I have spent a year assuming Calder’s competence was armor, the same way mine is volume.

I am beginning to wonder if his armor and his actual nature stopped being different things long before I arrived to notice.

We move our things into the suite an hour before sunset, the two of us and a detail that clears the corridor twice before Calder is satisfied enough to seal the inner door.

The room smells of cedar and old varnish, the scent of a space built to last decades and used only in emergencies.

There’s a narrow sitting area with a fireplace that actually works, a bedroom beyond it with heavy curtains and a bed that is, undeniably, singular, and a security panel by the door that Calder checks three times before he lets himself sit down.

“You’re doing the thing,” I tell him, settling into the one decent armchair, pulling my knees up despite the blazer I’m still, technically, wearing like a woman who refuses to admit she’s off duty.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you check a locked door a fourth time because some part of you doesn’t trust the first three checks.”

“I trust the checks. I don’t trust the people this property has recently employed.”

He finally sits across from me, close enough in the small room that there’s no pretending we’re keeping professional distance.

Outside, the wind finds a gap somewhere in the old stonework and moans through it, low and constant.

“We’re stuck in here together,” I say eventually, mostly to break the silence before it becomes something else. “You do understand that means actual conversation, not just tactical briefings.”

“I’m aware,” Calder says, and for the first time since I met him, he looks less like a man bracing for a fight and more like one warily curious about what happens if he doesn’t.

I busy myself with the fire instead of answering, because I don’t entirely trust what I’d say if I kept looking at him.

The wood catches slowly, and I crouch in front of it longer than necessary, feeding it kindling one piece at a time.