Page 1 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

HARPER

The marble is cold under my bare feet and I've been pacing this bathroom for so long that I've memorized every vein in it.

Cream and gold and white. Soft luxury lighting that makes everything look expensive and forgiving. The kind of bathroom that exists in a life I didn't grow up in and don't technically belong to.

The kind of bathroom where a girl like me absolutely should not be taking a pregnancy test.

I glance at my phone on the counter. The timer is still counting down. Two minutes and forty-three seconds left and I'm going to lose what's left of my mind before it goes off.

I resume pacing.

My reflection catches in the mirror every time I pass it and I look insane. Hair in a messy bun, mascara I didn't wash off last night still smudged faintly under my eyes, wearing an oversized sweater and absolutely nothing else because it's barely seven in the morning and I woke up nauseous again and my body apparently decided that today was the day we were going to stop pretending everything was fine.

Everything is not fine.

I spin at the wall and pace back the other direction.

Three weeks ago I slept with three men in one night.

Not sequentially. Not accidentally-ended-up-in-the-same-bed-once. Not a misunderstanding that can be chalked up to wine and poor lighting and a complete lack of moral infrastructure.

And then I kept doing it. Not as some isolated, forgivable lapse I could file away and never repeat. As a pattern. As an actual, ongoing, four-person situation that has somehow become the realest thing in my life, three weeks of falling asleep in one suite and waking up in another and never quite making it back to my own bed before someone's hand finds my waist and convinces me to stay. I knew exactly what I was doing every single time, and I kept doing it anyway, because apparently the universe decided that my life hadn't been interesting enough after the job loss and the parental disaster and the cross-Atlantic relocation. Apparently what I needed was a relationship so spectacularly complicated that there's no version of this where I come out looking like the reasonable one.

Two minutes, eleven seconds.

“Okay,” I say out loud to no one, because I've been talking to myself for the last twenty minutes and at this point it's the only thing keeping me from sitting down on the bathroom floor. “Okay. So. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's stress. Maybe my cycle is just completely wrecked from the time zone change and the emotional whiplash and the fact that I haven't eaten a full meal without feeling sick in almost two weeks.”

My reflection stares back at me.

She doesn't look convinced.

“Or maybe,” I continue, stopping in front of the mirror, “maybe you're a complete and total idiot and you should have kept your feelings and your body and your increasingly terrible decision-making skills to yourself and literally none of this would be happening right now.”

My reflection nods slightly. Or maybe that's just me nodding. Hard to tell.

I press both hands flat against the cool marble edge of the sink and breathe.

One minute forty seconds.

Here's the thing. Here's the actual thing, the one I've been circling around since I woke up this morning and sprinted to the pharmacy in the village before anyone in the main house could see me: if I'm pregnant, and that is a massive if that I am not ready to confirm, it might not be the apocalypse.

It depends entirely on who the father is.

Because here's where the math gets genuinely interesting.

Asher. If the baby is Asher's... okay. That's complicated. He's Sophia's godfather. He's forty-six years old and built like the universe spent extra time on him and three nights ago he made me a grilled cheese at midnight when I couldn't sleep and sat across the kitchen island from me and listened to me talk about nothing for two hours. He looked at me the whole time like I was saying something important, the same way he looks at me every single time, which is part of the problem. If Asher is the father, Sophia is going to need some time. A significant amount of time. Maybe a year. Maybe several. But she would come around. Eventually. Probably.

Maddox. If the baby is Maddox's, it's still complicated. He's also Sophia's godfather and forty-eight years old and he flirts like it's involuntary and he made me laugh so hard at the festival that wine came out of my nose and he didn't even flinch, just handed me a napkin and kept talking, and he's been finding reasons to touch the small of my back at least once a day ever since. Maddox as the father is a crisis, genuinely. But it's a survivable crisis. Sophia would be horrified. She'd scream. She'd probably cry a little. But Maddox is Maddox and even Sophia knows that Maddox has always operated at a frequency that's completely his own. There's a universe where Sophia eventually forgives me for Maddox.

And then there's Killian.

One minute, two seconds.

Killian Thorne. Billionaire. Vineyard owner. The man who commands every single room he walks into without raising his voice or trying. The man with the muted green eyes and the silver at his temples and the tailored suits that make my brain malfunction on a consistent basis. The man who looked at me across a crowded wine festival three weeks ago and made me feel like the only person in southern France, and who has been quietly, deliberately unable to keep his hands off me ever since in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with being subtle about it.

Sophia's father.

Her actual biological father.