Page 125 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“I knew Killian was doing what Killian does,” I tell her. “I didn’t know every detail. I didn’t ask for every detail. What I did know was that whatever he was running with your parents wasn’t him joining their side. So I made sure your path and theirs didn’t cross while he worked it out.”

She goes still. “How.”

“I cross-referenced your schedule with Evelyn’s confirmed estate appearances. Made sure the mornings she was in the east wing with the Millers were mornings you were in the tasting room or off-property with suppliers.”

She turns to look at me fully. “For how long?”

“Over a month, give or take.”

The suite is quiet for a second.

“Asher,” she says.

“I know,” I tell her, steady, because I’m not going to pretend I don’t. “I’m not going to tell you it was wrong because I think given what I knew at the time it was the right call. I’ll also tell you I understand completely why it doesn’t feel that way from where you’re sitting and I’m not going to ask you to not feel it.”

She holds my gaze for a long moment and then exhales and the specific tension that means she’s deciding whether to fight something eases out of her, not all of it, but enough.

From the end of the sectional, Killian says, “So he explains it gently and doesn’t get yelled at?”

Harper turns to look at him with the patience of a woman who already fought this battle today and won it. “He wasn’t yelling when he explained it. And he didn’t come in with the I-am-the-law-of-this-land energy you had going on.”

I lift both hands. “It’s not my fault your approach runs hot. I’ve been around you long enough to know how to work around the edges of it. I didn’t think she’d find out about everything the way she did, but we can’t change that now, and it’s not like the two of you walked out of that office in worse shape than you went in.”

Maddox makes a sound from the armchair.

Harper says, in a perfectly reasonable tone, “Are the documents I signed even valid if I was coerced?”

“Coerced?” Maddox says.

“He had me bent over his desk and wouldn’t give me what I wanted until I signed them.”

I actually laugh, and Maddox’s expression moves through about four stages, and Killian looks like a man with precisely zero regrets.

“Mon coeur, you would have signed those documents in any circumstance and you know it,” I tell her. “You signed them because you love this baby and you love him and you knew his heart was in the right place even when you were furious about the method. He played his hand. That’s strategic relationship resolution.”

“Am I that predictable?” she says.

All three of us say “yes” simultaneously and she crosses her arms over her chest and tips her chin toward her bump and says, to her stomach, “Maybe I should just tell people Raph’s the father. At least he can’t keep a secret.”

“Excuse you,” Maddox says, sitting up. “Did you say Raph is the father?”

Harper examines her nails and says nothing, which is more provocative than anything she could have said out loud.

“Not even I can save that man if you say that anywhere with witnesses,” I tell her.

“It was just a suggestion. Once. When I told him I was pregnant.”

“You told Raphael?” Killian’s voice goes up half an octave in a way I haven’t heard in fifteen years.

“I had to tell someone. It wasn’t like I’d worked up the nerve to tell Sophia. Do you know how that conversation starts? Hey, you know how I’ve been sleeping with your dad and your godfathers? Also one of them got me pregnant. That doesn’t exist in any friendship handbook.”

And here’s where Killian goes very still in the specific way that means he’s holding something he’s about to have to let go of, and I see it before Harper does, and I say, “Killian. You already told Sophia.”

Harper’s head swings toward him.

“I didn’t have a clean moment to redirect her,” he says, with the precision of a man who has been rehearsing this sentence for two months. “She came into my office while I was on the phone with Thomas. She saw the legal documents. And then Camille came in with the ultrasound frames and there was no version of that situation I could manage.”

The pillow catches him in the chest before he finishes the word manage.