After My Guardian Found Out I’m Carrying His Child

I bought the dress for the gala three weeks in advance.

A deep navy slip dress, simple and clean, nothing like the architectural gowns the other women would wear. I stood in the boutique dressing room and thought about Alexander's face when he saw it. Whether his eyes would do that thing — that half-second pause before he looked away.

They did.

He was waiting by the elevator when I came downstairs, already in his tux, already composed. Alexander Knight was always composed. Thirty-one years old, six feet of controlled authority, the kind of man who made a room rearrange itself around him without trying. He looked at me and something moved behind his eyes — quick, contained, gone.

"You look nice," he said.

Nice. Seven years of living under his roof and I had learned to translate his silences better than his words. Nice meant something else. I just never let myself figure out what.

"Thanks." I grabbed my clutch off the console table. "Let's go."

The gala was at the Mandarin Oriental. Knight Capital had just closed a nine-figure acquisition — some tech firm in Austin that Alexander had been circling for two years — and the ballroom was full of people who wanted to be near the man who pulled it off. I watched him work the room. Handshakes, measured smiles, the occasional low laugh. He was good at this. He had always been good at this.

Valeria Fernandez materialized at his elbow around nine.

She was his executive assistant, which was a title that didn't quite cover what she actually did. She managed his calendar, his correspondence, his public image, and — I had always suspected — his perception of himself. She was thirty, polished, and beautiful in the way of someone who had decided beauty was a professional asset and invested accordingly. She touched his arm when she spoke to him. She had been doing it for years.

I watched her lean in to say something in his ear and I turned away.

I found the bar.

By midnight, the formal portion was over and the after-party had migrated to the penthouse. Alexander's penthouse. Our penthouse, technically, though I had always been careful not to think of it that way. A smaller crowd, better whiskey, the city spread out below the floor-to-ceiling windows like something that belonged to us.

I should have gone to bed.

Instead I stayed on the periphery and watched Alexander drink. He didn't drink like this usually. Champagne during the toasts, then whiskey, then more whiskey. Marcus Webb — his lawyer, his oldest friend — caught my eye across the room at some point and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. I didn't know either.

The crowd thinned. Then it was just us.

I don't know who turned the music on. Something slow and old, the kind of song that exists specifically to make you feel things you've been avoiding. Alexander was standing by the windows with a glass he'd stopped drinking from, looking out at the city, and then he turned and looked at me instead.

"Dance with me."

It wasn't a question. It never was with him.

I should have said no. I had a whole list of reasons to say no, reasons I had been maintaining for years like a garden I couldn't let go wild. Instead I crossed the room and let him pull me in.

His hands were warm on my waist. He smelled like whiskey and cedar and something underneath that was just him, just Alexander, the smell I had grown up with and learned to stop noticing because noticing it was dangerous. I kept my eyes on his shoulder.

Then he said my name.

"Evie."

Just that. But the way he said it — like something he'd been holding in his mouth for a long time and finally let go — made me look up.

His eyes were dark and close and not composed at all.

The garden went wild.

What happened after that came in pieces. The dark hallway. His mouth finding mine like he already knew the way. My name again, rougher this time, his hands in my hair. I knew he was drunk. I knew it clearly, the way you know something and choose to walk toward it anyway. He wouldn't remember. I told myself that was fine. I told myself one night was enough.

I was wrong about both things.

I woke at four in the morning with his arm heavy across my waist and the city still dark outside the windows.

The terror came fast and total. Not because of what we'd done — I had wanted that for years, wanted him in a way I had never said out loud to anyone except Jazlyn, and even then only once, at two in the morning after too much wine. The terror was simpler than that. It was the morning. It was Alexander waking up sober and looking at me and knowing.

I lay still for ten minutes. I memorized the weight of his arm. The sound of his breathing. The particular warmth of him.

Then I got up, dressed in the dark, and left.

I was almost to the door when I realized I'd lost an earring. Small gold hoop, one of a pair my mother had given me. I looked back toward the bedroom and didn't go back. I left it.

I told myself it didn't mean anything.

I came back that afternoon because I lived there. Because I had nowhere else to be and no reason to stay away that I could explain without explaining everything.

Valeria's lipstick was on a coffee mug in the kitchen. Coral pink. I stood there and looked at it for a moment.

Alexander was in the living room. He stood when I came in, which he never did, and that small thing told me everything before he opened his mouth.

"Evie." He looked uncomfortable in a way I had never seen on him. "I need to tell you something."

I sat down on the arm of the sofa. "Okay."

"Valeria and I —" He stopped. Started again. "After last night, I think it's only fair to be honest. We're going to see where things go. I wanted you to hear it from me."

The room was very quiet.

I looked at his face. He was watching me with that careful attention he always gave me, the kind that felt like being held and kept at arm's length at the same time. He looked like a man doing the right thing. He always looked like that.

"That's great," I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that. "I think she's great. Really."

Something shifted in his expression. Too fast to read.

"You're sure you're —"

"I'm fine, Alexander." I stood up and smiled at him. "Congratulations on the acquisition."

I went to my room and closed the door.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time. The city hummed outside. Somewhere in the penthouse, I could hear him moving around, the familiar sounds of his evening routine, the sounds I had memorized without meaning to.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and waited for the feeling to pass.

It didn't.