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I flinch. My instincts rebel, but I force myself to bite back the retort on my tongue and get back up again.
My bare legs are almost touching his knees. Is that a bulge I see at this crotch? Don’t look. Don’t get distracted. My vagina would very much like me to lose myself completely in that particular distraction—but then again, she’s never been very good at making decisions, so I tell her to STFU and focus again on Dmitri’s burning silver eyes.
“Turn around.”
Excitement and anger flash through me. It’s amazing how close together those two emotions can travel. But with my endgame in mind, I rotate around. My ass is almost certainly staring him in the face. Why did I have to pick the see-through dress? And on a day where I’m not wearing underwear, no less.
But as much as I would like to flip him off and walk away, I don’t. Dmitri wants me to refuse to follow his orders so that he has an excuse to keep me trapped in this penthouse.
Well, if that’s the case, he’s severely underestimated how stubborn I can be.
I hear him moving behind me, the rustle of clothes, the ocean’s tide of his even breathing—but even when I feel the warmth of his proximity, he never actually touches me.
“Anything else, sir?” I ask over my shoulder.
That ‘sir’ was meant to be infused with resentment and anger. A real “fuck you” without actually saying the words. But it comes out sounding like something else entirely. Almost like I’m trying to lure him between my legs.
If my pussy throbs any louder, he’s gonna be able to hear it.
When he still says nothing, I pirouette slowly to face him once more. “Well?” I demand. “Do I have my job back?”
His eyebrows lift for just a second. At least he’s given me easy access: if he says no, I’ll just punch him in the nuts.
My hand is slowly closing into a fist when he nods. “Yes, you’ve got your job back.”
I exhale heavily, triumph flooding through me like a breath of fresh air. I’ve actually managed to move the metaphorical mountain. Put some points on the scoreboard. It’s still Wren: 1; Dmitri: A trillion, but that’s better than where we were before.
Yay for me.
I wriggle back out of his reach as the tension in the room eases, like the walls, the lights, the furniture itself is all taking a relieved breath.
Dmitri kicks one foot up onto the coffee table and sips his drink. “You’ll be showing soon. People will ask questions. Did you have a story in mind?”
I squirm in place. As nice as it would be to keep certain parts of my life private, it’s not exactly realistic. “The truth, more or less. I’m a surrogate for my sister and brother-in-law. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them that.”
“They’ll want to know more. That’s a lot to ask of someone.”
“It was,” I concede. “But you only ask a lot of the people you’re close to; the people you trust; the people you love.”
Those silver eyes soften. “Do you regret saying yes?”
That’s a tough one, especially considering the baby I thought I was making is not the one I ended up with. This baby won’t have Jared’s dark brown eyes or Rose’s soft smattering of freckles. Instead, he might have the shape of my face, lit up by the bright and penetrating silver eyes of the man sitting next to me.
Somehow, I don’t hate that as much as I thought I would.
“I don’t regret saying yes to them. I just regret everything that happened after.”
He finishes the rest of his drink and gets up heavily. “Goodnight, Wren,” is all he says before he slips out of the living room.
I stare after him, wondering why I feel so unsettled. I regret losing Rose and Jared the way I did. I regret that they never got to have the family they always dreamed of having. I regret that, for all their effort and prayers, it amounted to nothing in the end.
But as for the baby I’m carrying… He may not have come into being the way I planned, but it was Dmitri’s contribution that made this child mine. Truly mine.
And even though I probably should regret that…
I don’t.
I can’t.
