Page 73 of Secret Baby Daddy

I tell myself it’s because the moment is moving too fast to interrupt cleanly, because breaking this particular news in the middle of a case breakthrough would be its own kind of cruelty.

Both of those things are true.

Neither is the actual reason.

The actual reason is smaller and more selfish than I want to admit even to myself: I want, for one more hour, to be chosen without the complication.

I want to know what it feels like to have her pick me, this version, the concrete and exhausting one, without the truth standing between us, rearranging everything she thinks she understands about her own heart.

I hear myself construct the justification in real time and recognize it, even as I’m building it, as the exact kind of convenient story I’ve spent a career warning clients against telling themselves.

I build it anyway.

Some hungers are apparently louder than twelve years of professional discipline.

So I let her kiss me again, and I let myself believe, for one more borrowed hour, that this is simple.

It is the worst decision I have made in twelve years of careful, controlled decisions, and I make it with my eyes open.

Hayes finds us an hour later, still catching our breath over the recovered data, and the ordinary machinery of the case reasserts itself fast: a call to Cordelia’s attorney, a secure copy of the server contents sent to three separate locations before anyone can think to scrub it, the beginning of a plan to present the evidence in a way that survives whatever legal challenge Roman’s people will inevitably mount.

Piper works beside me with the fierce, focused energy of a woman who has just watched a year of dread finally start converting into leverage, and I match her pace, grateful for the cover of urgent, undeniable work.

It doesn’t quiet the guilt.

If anything, the adrenaline sharpens it, makes the unspoken truth sit heavier with every hour that passes without me correcting what she believes about the last twenty minutes.

Late that night, once the data’s secured and Cordelia’s been briefed and the house has gone quiet again, Piper finds me on the terrace, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, watching the tree line the way I’ve started watching it since the attack.

“You went somewhere else back there,” she says, settling beside me. “After the kiss. You started to say something and then you didn’t.”

“It wasn’t the right moment.”

“It’s never going to feel like the right moment with you, is it?”

She says it gently, without accusation, and the gentleness makes the guilt worse, not better.

“Whatever it is, Calder, I meant what I said. I’m not choosing an idealized version of anyone. I’m choosing you. Whatever that turns out to include.”

I want, more than I have wanted almost anything in twelve years, to believe that promise will still hold once she learns the whole of what it includes.

I don’t answer her.

I just take her hand, quietly, and hold on, borrowing one more hour of a truth that isn’t fully mine to claim yet.

23

DOMINIC

I wake before dawn with the hollow clarity of a man who has finally run out of excuses.

Piper is asleep beside me, one arm flung across my chest, her breathing slow and even, entirely unaware of the war being fought two feet above her head.

Last night we hadn’t managed anything more complicated than sitting on the couch tangled together, talking until well past midnight about nothing in particular and, somehow, everything: her disastrous summer of competitive swimming, my inexplicable hatred of cilantro.

I don’t remember when the conversation stopped feeling like effort.

It simply became the only place I wanted to be, hours passing without my usual accounting of them.