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But things were different now. Esme was having his baby. He couldn’t leave her alone with the child. It was that simple. It was a deep, gut conviction, and in his life, he had had very few of those. The very first had been when he had met Alex and Esme. He had known that he needed to protect them. From all of the things that had hurt him in the world.

He felt it now. For Esme. For the baby. He felt it bone deep, even though he didn’t think that he was equal to the task. When they had been young, it had been simpler. The goal had been to protect them physically.

Life was different now. They had more money than they could ever spend. Physical protection hadn’t been an issue for a long time. Though now, he felt like it was more pertinent than it had been for a very long time. Some Neanderthal part of him that had been undiscovered until now felt a proprietary and primal urge to take her and claim her. As if she was his now.

If not for Alex, if not for Esme, if not for their coming into his life when they did, he would have driven himself to hell before he ever reached this point in his life. And if he wasn’t dead, he would probably be the sort of reprehensible human being that he had once hated.

The only people he’d had access to were bad. He had earned money doing things he wasn’t proud of, but he had wanted to get out, partly because Alex and Esme thought that he was a good person. It made him want to be something that he had never been before.

So now, with Alex looking at him with all that fury in his eyes, demanding that he be a better man than he had been born to be, he found he couldn’t deny him.

He simply couldn’t.

“Yes. I’ll marry her.”

“Good. Best you go inform the bride.”

Chapter Five

Esme was lying down on the floor in her office. She wasn’t proud, but the entire interaction with Adonis had left her feeling weak. She wasn’t weak. Not normally. She had survived a hellish and unprotected upbringing, she had clawed her way out of it, to the position that she was in now, and she would never characterize herself as somebody who wilted easily—or even at all.

This had her feeling a bit wilted.

Ever since she had gathered up the courage to take the pregnancy test, though, she had been feeling a little bit…

She just tried not to think about it.

It was this great and awful terror that she couldn’t really wrap her head around. Because she didn’t know how to be a good parent. She knew what a terrible one looked like. She knew what it was like to be alone and defenseless in the world, and whenever she thought about that, she had to put her hand on her stomach and pause for a minute.

Because the fierce, undeniable protectiveness she felt for the life growing inside of her was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. All of her childhood trauma seemed to have formed itself into a bright, burning ball of conviction. The conviction that when she had this child, she would protect it with everything she had.

Unfortunately, that same bright burning ball of childhood trauma made her feel like there was no way she could possibly be up for the task.

People were bad parents even when they had good examples. She didn’t have a good example. She had been panicking about that ever since the two pink lines had shown up on the test. It had taken a week or so for her to begin panicking about Adonis. How she would hide this from him forever. If she should hide it from him forever.

Alex had been furious.

He had offered to go hunt down whoever fathered the child and force him to step up. She had brushed him off, and told him that she didn’t have any use for a father figure for the child, at least not anyone other than her older brother.

That had appeased him somewhat, and she knew that part of it was the understanding that being a father genetically did not make someone good at it. Their own father had been selfish, abusive, useless.

When she had said that she wanted nothing to do with the father of the baby, Alex had dropped it.

But clearly, finding out that the father was Adonis had changed some things. She was mad that she felt guilty.

Adonis leaving had broken her into little pieces. The way that he had sent her from the room, cold and distant, the way that he had made it clear that he didn’t want to see her again, without outright saying it, had hurt her so badly that she’d ignored her pregnancy symptoms for longer than she should have because she had just thought she was depressed.

But no. She was an irresponsible idiot who’d had a one-night stand and hadn’t used a condom. She had comforted herself with the knowledge that that was pretty much the story of the human race. People doing dumb things because they were aroused and proliferating the species via their horny choices. She wasn’t alone.

Still, all of that, all of the rationales she had been stewing in, all of the ways that she had tried to make herself feel better, didn’t matter much now, and they certainly didn’t help. Because now Adonis was back and she had to face—

“We need to talk.”

She scrambled up quickly when her door opened and she heard his voice. She sat in her office chair, behind her desk, flattening her palms on the top of it, willing him not to have noticed that she had been lying on her back staring at the ceiling.

“What were you doing?”

“I was a little nauseous,” she lied.