by Aiden Bates
“But?” I said, sensing that there had to be one of those coming along shortly.
“But when you put the two of you together, it’s like whatever idiot part of you both just fucking amplifies.”
I narrowed my eyes, feeling them glint in amusement.
Again, he wasn’t wrong.
“Is he coming out or not?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity any further.
“Oh, yeah. He’s coming out all right,” Blake revealed. “Might be more pissed than a cat in a bag over it, but… Eh. From what I reckon, when it comes to you, I don’t think he’s able to keep himself away.”
Just as hard as my heart had plummeted into my gut just a few moments ago, at Blake’s words, it soared. I rode that high for as long as I could feel it—for all I knew, the second Noah laid eyes on me, it would all come crashing down on me all over again.
But then I saw him in the doorway, lips pressed together into a thin line and blue eyes washing over me like a wave. It made my heart stop and my cock leap up and my stomach turn like a wire cage in a bingo hall.
It nearly damn killed me—not because he looked angry, or in love with me, or like he was going to kiss me or kill me himself, but because it was every one of those things all at once, and all I could do was stand there and wait for him to open those perfect lips of his once he’d found an emotion to settle on.
“Hey,” he finally said, stepping out the door like the sidewalk beneath his boots was built on old graves and broken glass.
“Hey,” I said back to him.
Behind Noah, there was a flash of a photograph being taken. It rendered me dizzy for a second, that bright explosion of light that backlit him like a piece of renaissance art. He wore a blue shirt with a collar, chino pants and a brown belt. When my gaze fell to his abs, I knew better than to expect him to be showing yet. But the knowledge that beneath the fabric of his shirt and the muscles of his abdomen, my child was in his womb, was enough to make me want to drop to my knees then and there.
He wasn’t exactly a Madonna, no, but that didn’t mean I didn’t still want to beg for redemption at his feet.
We stood there in silence for a moment, and I was suddenly aware of exactly how many people were standing behind him, craning their necks as they waited to see how things would play out. I’d never been one for an audience, and despite Noah’s background as a dancer, he didn’t seem like he wanted one either. He cast a glance over his shoulder, a soft laugh escaping his lips as he realized he was accompanied by a peanut gallery of a retinue.
“Noah—” I started, but he shook his head.
“Do you want to go somewhere else to do this?” he asked.
I bit my lip, nodding in response. “Yeah. Yeah…that would be fine, I think.”
Instead of dropping to my knees, I offered him my arm. Half-expected him to sneer at it—but of all the things Noah was, cruel wasn’t one of them. He took it gingerly, winding his fingers around the crook of my elbow. It set my flesh aflame just to feel him touch me. Maybe because he really was made of white-hot fire—maybe because I’d half-expected that I’d never feel his touch again.
“Sounds like we’ve got a lot to talk about,” I choked out, not willing to say the word in front of all these people.
“Do we?”
“Well…about the…” I could show up at Noah’s baby shower, unwelcome and unannounced, but apparently I couldn’t force myself to say three fucking syllables.
Pregnancy.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Yeah, let’s talk then.”
He half-laughed as he cocked his head to the sidewalk across the street, and I guided him across the crosswalk, that dangerous little word floating behind us as we left his party behind.
18
Noah
“Didn’t realize your strip club hosted baby showers.” The gruffness in Ace’s voice was joined by the gentle sounds of the East River lapping against its concrete shores as we strolled along it.
He was hurting. I could tell. Over the breakup, maybe, or maybe just over the fact that he’d learned I was pregnant somehow and the news hadn’t come from me.
“I’d hardly call it a strip club anymore,” I pointed out. “That little burlesque idea that you put in my head—”
He laughed, sharp and dry. “Don’t tell me you and Foster are really picking that up.”
“And why not?”
He shrugged. “It was a bad idea.”
“You’re the one who gave it to me.”
“Intentionally,” he said, looking down on me with an honesty in his eyes I still wasn’t accustomed to. “Another one of Harmon’s schemes to fuck the Ballroom over. If you were smart, you wouldn’t listen to it.”
“But where would we host my baby shower then?” I found myself laughing, even though there wasn’t anything particularly funny about any of it. Of course Wesley Harmon had sent Ace to try and run the Ballroom into the ground one last time. Of course Ace had carried out the order to do so. Fortunately for the Ballroom, though—and unfortunately for the Backdoor—even when Harmon thought he was winning, I knew he’d already lost. “Good idea or bad—it doesn’t matter. We’ve lost too many dancers lately to keep up the golden thongs and lap dances. Something had to change.”
“I’m sorry.” The apology sounded like the obligatory kind, but it was nice to hear from Ace’s lips anyway.
“Don’t be,” I said, a soft smile rolling the corners of my lips upward. “We have our first official show booked at the end of the month. Singing, dancing—a little Celine Dion, a little Cirque du Soleil.”
“The times, they are a-changin’,” Ace quipped. “It’s going to bomb, you should know. Harmon was sure of it.”
My smile widened. “Too bad for him. The tickets have already been booked. We’re sold out for the entire night.”
Ace’s eyebrows raised, the only betrayal on his face of how impressed he was. “Poor Harmon. He’ll be pissed.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He’ll probably want a refund.”
Ace grunted, setting his gaze on a bench a hundred feet ahead of us. “Can’t exactly give him that.”
“No? All the money you earned seducing me has already been spent?”
“No.” A silence drew out between us, crescendoing soundlessly. “I already gave it back to him. He didn’t want to take it, ‘course, but…”
“Aw. Ace.” My grip tightened around his arm.
It hadn’t felt right, touching him like that. Not at first, anyway. I knew I should’ve been too pissed at him to do anything other than claw his eyes out, and he knew he probably deserved it, too. But it was hard to be angry with him when I’d known the stakes all along. We’d both been lying to each other from day one. We’d both been so wrapped up in playing our own stupid games, it had been hard to know what feelings were true, and what feelings were built on our mutual bullshit.
But now…
“You don’t have to forgive me, you know,” he said, his voice suddenly soft.
“I don’t,” I agreed. “But I already did. Ages ago. For the Harmon stuff, anyway.”
“Don’t know why.”
“Yeah…me either.” I sighed, releasing a breath from my lungs that felt like I’d been holding it in since I first laid eyes on Ace Winston’s stupid, handsome, scar-streaked face. “But I did. That night at the Italian place…”
Ace laughed. “I realized. You’d already forgiven me and all I managed to do was give you something new to hate me for.”
“You’ve always been a stubborn bastard. Can’t say I was surprised.”
“No,” he agreed. “But you left anyway.”
“You didn’t give me any other choice.”
“Guess it was by design.” A flock of seagulls stared up at us as we approached, surveying our hands to see if we had any French fries to feed them and scattering in a flurry of white wings when they realized we weren’t going to be a charitable source of food. “Guess I never felt like I deserved you in the first place.”
“And you think you deserve me now?”
“Oh, no. If anything, I reckon I deserve you even less.” He looked down at me, a brokenness in the dark mirrors of his deep brown eyes. “That night we broke things off…did you know you were…? You know.”
Pregnant. Neither of us seemed to be able to say that word. I wondered how long we’d be able to dance around it before one of us finally caved.
“Not really, no. Not for sure. Didn’t even suspect it, honestly. Not up here, at least.” I tapped my forehead with my index finger. “But my body…hell, it must have known. The cravings, the aversion to alcohol, caffeine…”
A sad smile played on his lips. “You’re going to be a good father, you know.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I will.” That left something else unsaid, though—he had to have realized it. If I was going to be a father, so was he. “Who told you, in the end?”
He laughed. “Harmon again. Heard it off that dancer he poached while I kept you distracted…”
“You were a very good distraction,” I admitted.
“I wasn’t trying to be. Didn’t realize that distracting you had always been part of his wicked little plans. But, yeah. Would have heard it sooner or later, probably. Guess the story is all over the city now.”
“It’s a compelling story.” The flash of the Times reporter’s camera as I’d stepped out to confront Ace lit up in my mind. “I’ll be interested in seeing how they spin it.”
“Oh, I already know that,” Ace confessed. “You’ll be the poor, single Omega and I’ll be the cruel Alpha who seduced you then left.”
“Not really an accurate account. I think technically I was the one who left.”
“Only because I drove you away.” He was quiet again for a moment. There was a tension in his shoulders that stiffened his muscles all the way down to where my fingers rested on his forearm. Palpable guilt. “Would you have told me eventually?”
I shrugged. “Not sure. It didn’t seem like something you’d want to know.”
“Dammit, Noah…” Ace closed his eyes, breathing in as the anger flared through him. “That story I told you about my dads wasn’t a lie.”
“I know,” I said softly. “Yeah, I know.”
“Do you want me to keep beating around the bush about it, or do you want me to say what I showed up at your party to say?”
“By all means,” I told him, my chest tightening at the anticipation of it.
He guided me to the bench he’d been eyeing as we came to it, holding onto my shoulders as he helped me down onto it. It was a silly thing to do, really—the gentleness he was taking with me. The way he treated me like something fragile, even though I wasn’t even showing yet. But it felt nice anyway, unnecessary as it was. Men like Ace…he didn’t look gentle. He looked big and strong, cocky and arrogant. Easy to anger. Prone to violence. It was strange to feel him being soft like that. When it came to being soft, men like Ace so rarely had to learn how.
Strange, but nice. I waited for him to take a seat next to me, but he stayed standing. Like the sidewalk was a stage, the river his backdrop.
My chest tightened even more as he prepared to give his soliloquy.
“Fuck,” it began, which made me laugh. Then: “I fucked up, Noah. I fucked up bad.”
“Could’ve been worse,” I pointed out.
“Could it? Because the way I see it, I lied to you, and then I kept lying, and then I lied some more and then…”
“It wasn’t all lies. Not all of it.”
“No. No,” he agreed. “The feelings—those were real. Couldn’t have been more real, really. The most real I’ve ever felt in my life.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I felt it too.”
“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he confessed. “You’re so fucking strong, you asshole. Too genuine to settle for anything less than the best and too stupid to have realized that you actually deserve the best. When you saw me outside of the Ballroom tonight, you should’ve fucking hit me.”
“I considered it,” I admitted. “Not like the thought didn’t cross my mind.”
“Guess I’m even luckier than I already thought,” Ace said, cracking a smile.
“Lucky, huh?” Considering how things had played out between Ace and I so far, I couldn’t imagine luck having much to do with it—except for maybe the bad kind.
He shrugged, taking my hand in his. His thumb ran across my knuckles, tracing every ridge. “I’ve ditched my shitty boss, I’m known city-wide as the most virile Alpha scoundrel on all of Manhattan… And of all the Omegas I could’ve inadvertently knocked up, couldn’t have picked a handsomer one.”
“Is that what this is about? You’re proud that you’ve knocked up such a handsome thing and now you want me back?”
He met my eyes for a moment, then dropped his gaze to his boots. “That’s what it looks like, I bet.”
“A bit.”
“Yeah. Well, for the record—it’s not.” This time, when his eyes met mine, his gaze was steely. Determined. Set sharp and firm, like a knight galloping into battle, sword held high. “That first moment I saw you, I wanted you. The whole time we were doing our stupid bullshit espionage thing—I wanted you then, too.”
“The first night you fucked me?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Wanted you,” Ace confirmed.
“And the night we made love?”
“Wanted you.”
“And the night it fell apart?”
His laugh was half an octave higher than it normally was, slicing its way up out of his throat like if he didn’t release it, he’d be choking back a single manly tear. “Noah, I sat in that cafe and I drank that entire bottle of champagne you left me with, hoping to God that maybe by the time I found the bottom of it that I’d look up and see you sitting across from me again.”
“You would’ve been hallucinating.”
“Then you should’ve left me with absinthe instead of champagne.”
I rose slowly, feeling that same strange delicateness that I’d felt ever since Ace had first put his seed inside me. I’d been growing accustomed to it ever since, slowly acclimatizing to it over time. But Ace—there was no acclimatizing to him. Being close to him like this felt like stepping foot into a foreign city. Strange, but exciting—and the further I wandered down his meandering paths, the more I felt like I’d maybe visited there once before. In a dream, maybe. In another world. A past life.
“Say what you came here to really say, then,” I challenged him a final time.
“I came to say I was sorry.”
“No,” I said, inching a step closer. “You didn’t.”
His jaw tensed, eyes closing as he caught the feel of my breath so close to his neck. “I came to ask you to forgive me.”
“Lie,” I called it. “Try again.”
A low growl rose up out of his throat. “I don’t want to lie to you anymore. Not ever again.”
“Good. Then say it. Say it for real this time.”
Another growl, this one lower still as I took his hands in mine. I could smell him in near completeness now, that delicious scent that was some combination of his cologne and his laundry detergent, whatever crisp, clean shampoo he’d used in his hair and the scent of him.
My stupid pregnancy hormones roared in recognition of it—not the aftershave, not his deodorant, but the intoxicating aroma of the man who’d kissed me, made love to me, bred me and made me his without even fully knowing who he was. My cheeks were burning, not in a blush, but in want of him. I’d spent the last week needing nothing more to be held in Ace’s arms. Needing his lips, his tongue, his teeth, his taste— and all the while knowing that I’d never be able to feel his body this close to mine ever again.
“I want you in my life, Noah,” he finally admitted, his eyes still closed as if in prayer. “Baby or no baby. Truth or lies.”
“No. No more lies.”
His eyes flashed open, the dark pools even darker and more alluring than ever. �
�No more lies. You’ve already got me. Fully. Completely. I want you to be mine again.”
“And what will you do for it?” I teased, one last little twinge of cruelty flickering in my irises.
“Anything,” he swore. “Anything at all. You can ask anything of me you like.”
“Good,” I said, smiling softly. “Take me back to your place, then?”
He pulled back half an inch, startled and surprised. “Does that mean you—”
“We can figure that out later,” I promised, my every muscle as warm and fluid as Ace’s were tense. “But before that—fuck, Ace. You have no idea how fucking horny being pregnant is making me. I need you. …Right now, in fact.”
A wicked grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “Yeah. Okay then. My place it is.”
19
Ace
If my hands hadn’t been shaking so bad, I would have scooped him up into my arms and carried him across the threshold. When I saw the way he looked at me as I opened the door for him, I decided then and there that when I was more sure of my ability to touch him without my knees going out and less afraid of banging his head against the wall in my eagerness, someday I would.
“I shouldn’t have looked at your phone that morning,” I said. More apologizing, when everything about that look in his eyes demanded dirty talk and heavy petting—but much like Noah himself, it was something that needed to be put to bed.
“I wasn’t going to break up with you just because Foster said.” He wound his arms around my neck, tugging me across the threshold himself.
I stumbled in toward him, suddenly clumsy on my feet. Ever since I’d finally grown into my height, I’d never considered myself a bumbling kind of guy—but the second that I felt his fingertips against the back of my neck, I was suddenly falling over myself just to relish that touch again.
“Shouldn’t have taken that job with Harmon.” I blurted the words out like if I held them in for any longer, they’d implode inside me and rip me apart.
“No,” Noah agreed. “You shouldn’t have.”