Page 61 of Secret Baby Daddy

He doesn’t argue, which I file, at the time, under consideration rather than what it actually is, which is a man letting me manage a fact because I asked him to.

I trace an idle line along his forearm.

“We work together. We have a client whose life might depend on us functioning as a unit tomorrow morning. This complicates things considerably.”

It’s the kind of complication I have spent a decade building strategies specifically to avoid, and I find, lying here with his heartbeat slowing under my palm, that for possibly the first time in my professional life, I don’t actually want the strategy.

“I’m aware.”

A pause, and I feel him turn his head toward me in the dark.

“I don’t have a plan for this, Piper. I have a plan for almost everything. I don’t have one for this.”

“Good,” I say, surprising myself. “I’m tired of being the only one in the room without a script.”

He laughs, low and startled, like the sound caught him off guard as much as it does me, and something about hearing Dominic Calder actually laugh, unguarded, in the dark, settles a little of the chaos still humming under my skin.

We lie there a while longer, close enough that I can feel every place our bodies still touch, and I don’t have language yet for whatever just cracked open between us, something bigger than adrenaline, bigger than a year of professional friction finally boiling over.

I only know that when I close my eyes, the last thing I think about isn’t the case, isn’t Roman, isn’t even the fear that clawed through me on that gravel drive.

It’s the particular way his hands finally stopped shaking, right before they found me instead.

18

DOMINIC

There is a certainty that arrives quietly, without fanfare, the way a door simply clicks shut instead of slamming.

I have spent a career learning to recognize that sound.

Tonight it comes from a phone screen instead of a lock.

Piper is asleep in the next room, or close enough to it.

I checked twenty minutes ago, her breathing slow and even in the gray predawn light, one arm thrown across the space where I’d been lying before I couldn’t sleep any longer and gave up trying.

I sit in the small alcove off the sitting room, laptop open, the ordinary machinery of my own guilt keeping me awake long after the reason for it went quiet beside me.

I log into Blackline out of habit more than intention.

Cassandra: I did the thing I told you I wasn’t ready for. With him. Tonight.

I go very still.

Atlas: How do you feel?

Cassandra: Like something finally broke that had been under too much pressure for too long. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t supposed to be. We’d both been circling an argument for weeks and it finally caught fire instead of just smoldering.

Something cold and enormous begins assembling itself at the base of my spine, piece by piece, the way it does when a case finally resolves into a shape I can’t unsee.

Atlas: Do you regret it?

Cassandra: No. I think I’m frightened of how much I don’t regret it. Truth without timing is just another kind of weapon, and I think I’ve been sitting on this one for longer than either of us realized.

I stop breathing.

Truth without timing is just another kind of weapon.