Page 31 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Don’t move,” he says, directly against my ear, low enough that it doesn’t carry.

“He’s going for Sloane, not me—”

“I know where he’s going.”

His voice doesn’t change pitch.

Somewhere above us, chaos: shouting, a chair going over, the shriek of a woman who has never seen real violence up close and is discovering she doesn’t care for it.

“I need you flat and I need you quiet for four seconds.”

I count.

One.

His heartbeat against my shoulder blade is slowing my own pulse, luring it into a calm I have no business feeling, and I hate how much that steadiness makes me want to stop fighting him.

Two.

His weight doesn’t feel like a threat.

It feels like a wall someone built specifically to stand between me and whatever’s coming.

Three.

I have spent a year believing this man doesn’t understand the value of anything that can’t be quantified, and right now he is quantifying exactly one thing, and it is whether I am breathing.

Four.

He’s up before I’ve finished the thought, hauling me with him by the wrist, and the room has already resolved into the machinery of a controlled scene: two of his men have the attacker face-down near the dessert table, Sloane is pale but upright behind a wall of security, and a very expensive ice sculpture is quietly weeping onto the parquet.

My hip throbs where the floor caught it.

My blazer has a long gray smear across one shoulder.

I am, by any professional standard, a disaster.

“You could have said duck,” I tell him, yanking my wrist free the second we’re clear. “You could have used words like a person who has access to language.”

“There wasn’t time for words.”

He is already scanning the room again, gray eyes moving in the clinical sweep I’ve watched a hundred times, except this time his jaw is tight in a way I haven’t seen before, and his hand is not entirely steady when he straightens his collar.

“I did the math. A word would have taken half a second. Half a second is the difference between you standing here complaining and you not standing here at all.”

“Sloane was the target. Not me.”

“I didn’t know that until three seconds after I was already moving.”

Something flickers across his face, gone before I can name it.

“I don’t get the luxury of confirming a target before I remove one of you from its path, Piper. I get a face and a trajectory and about a second and a half to guess right.”

I don’t have anything clever to say to that, which is unusual enough that I file it away to be alarmed about later.

He crouches by the man his team has pinned to the floor, and I follow, mostly because standing alone in the wreckage of my own press event holds no appeal.

The attacker is young, unshaven, breathing hard through his nose, and Calder goes through his jacket with brisk, impersonal hands until he finds a laminated badge clipped inside the lining.