Page 58 of Secret Baby Daddy

This one starts with a leak investigation and ends with both of us finding out exactly how much we’ve been lying about everything else.

“It has to be someone with property access and Northbridge ties,” I say, pacing the length of the sitting room while Calder stands by the cold fireplace, arms crossed, jaw set in the hard line he’s worn since the attack. “Contractor badges don’t fabricate themselves. Someone on staff is feeding Roman real-time information.”

“I’ve run background on every person with clearance twice. Nothing flags.”

“Then run it a third time, because someone knew that vehicle switch within the hour, and someone knew exactly where to position a van on the north access road.”

My voice is sharper than the conversation requires, adrenaline still working its way out of my system hours after a stranger’s hand closed around my wrist.

“This isn’t a paperwork problem, Calder. Someone almost took me off that gravel drive tonight.”

I hear my voice climbing toward something I don’t usually let it reach in front of anyone, and I don’t pull it back.

I am tired, suddenly, bone-deep tired, of being the only person in every room who isn’t allowed to sound afraid.

“You think I don’t know that?”

His voice cracks, just slightly, the first real fracture I’ve heard in it since Roman said Jonah’s name.

“You think I haven’t run every scenario where my men were four seconds slower?”

“I think you’re standing there interrogating spreadsheets instead of admitting you’re terrified, because feeling something inconvenient doesn’t fit into whatever system you’ve built to survive the last twelve years.”

“And you’re standing there turning your own near-abduction into a strategy memo because God forbid you sit with an emotion long enough for it to actually touch you.”

He steps closer, and there’s nothing controlled left in his expression now.

“You do it with everything, Piper. You did it with your grandmother. You did it with the footage. You take the rawest thing that could possibly happen to a person and you turn it into a sentence you can manage, because managing it is safer than feeling it.”

“At least I feel things, Calder. You treat every single person in your orbit like a future corpse. Like the only question worth asking is how they die and whether you could have stopped it. You’ve spent twelve years so busy grieving people in advance that you’ve forgotten how to actually be with them while they’re still alive.”

I hear myself say it and feel the vertiginous thrill of having found the sentence that cuts exactly as deep as I intended.

I do not take it back.

Something goes very still in his face, and I know, the second the words leave my mouth, that I’ve found the exact place it hurts most.

“That’s not fair.”

“No,” I agree, breathing hard, closer to him now than I meant to get. “It’s not fair. None of tonight was fair. You don’t get to stand there being furious at spreadsheets when what you actually want to do is put your fist through a wall because a man almost took me, and I don’t get to keep turning my own fear into press strategy just because it’s easier than admitting I was terrified too.”

He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence between us is charged with everything neither of us has said out loud in the two weeks since Cordelia first put us in a room together.

“Piper—”

There is a version of tonight where I let him finish that sentence, whatever careful, controlled thing he was building toward, and we both retreat back into the roles we’ve spent a year perfecting.

I have spent enough of my life waiting for the safer version of the truth.

I kiss him before he can finish the sentence, and for one suspended second he goes rigid with surprise before something in him simply breaks open and he kisses me back like he’s been waiting for permission he never thought he’d get.

It isn’t gentle.

Neither of us has the patience left for gentle tonight, not after the tackle and the footage and Roman’s voice dropping Jonah’s name like a knife, not after four seconds of watching a stranger’s hand close around my wrist and Calder’s hands shake afterward like something in him had finally, permanently cracked.

His mouth is hard and certain against mine, one hand fisting in my hair, the other flat against the small of my back, dragging me in until there’s no pretending this is anything but exactly what it looks like.

“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth, voice wrecked, giving me the exit even now, even wound this tight.