Novels by Okechukwu Munachi

Aria was six months along now, her bump impossible to hide and no longer something she wanted to, and her colleagues had started talking about it openly enough that she couldn't avoid hearing them. By the water cooler one afternoon, Marcy was loudly speculating that it had to be Max's baby, that they'd been together forever, while someone else pointed out that Max had never had the kind of money that could afford the driver and the car that dropped Aria off every morning. Aria had gotten good at ignoring things over the years, so she clocked in, did her work, and clocked out without offering anyone an explanation she didn't owe them.She was crossing the parking lot toward the car that afternoon, her mind already on dinner, when a hand closed around her arm hard enough to bruise and yanked her backward. Max's face was twisted and red, spit flying as he demanded to know how she could be this far along only months after their separation, accusing her of cheating throughout their entire

Aria was in the first month of her second trimester. Her baby bump had started to show. When everything about her body seemed to start aching at once, her back and her feet and her hips protesting every hour she spent upright. She'd been trying to read in the study one evening, the words blurring together no matter how many times she blinked them back into focus, when Colton walked in and stopped short at the sight of her."You're in pain," he said, kneeling in front of her chair before she could argue otherwise. "I can see it." She insisted it was nothing, just pregnancy things, but he reached for her feet anyway, lifted them gently into his lap, and began working his thumbs into the soles with a firm, careful pressure that made her gasp from the sudden relief of it. When she told him he didn't have to do this, he said quietly, without looking up, that she'd been carrying his child for months and the least he could do was make her feel better. Aria felt tears prick at her eyes and le

The first few days at the villa passed quietly while Aria learned the rhythm of a house built for people who had never had to think about grocery lists or unpaid bills. Emma, the head housekeeper, turned out to be the easiest person in the building to talk to, a warm, sharp-eyed woman in her fifties who insisted on calling her Miss until Aria finally talked her down to just Aria, and who mentioned once, gently, that she'd take very good care of her since she was carrying the young master. The maids were polite but distant, the marble floors and museum-quality art still made Aria feel like she was trespassing in someone else's life, and Colton himself was nowhere to be found for two full days, which left her equal parts relieved and unaccountably disappointed. She found his study by accident on the second afternoon, drawn in by a door left open and a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves that turned out to be packed with everything from history and philosophy to battered paperback novels t

Colton was born into wealth, but what he remembered most about being young wasn't the money. It was the way his parents looked at each other at a dinner table twenty years into their marriage, as though they'd only just met. Richard and Anna built an empire together from nothing, and somehow neither of them let it harden them. His father used to come home from closing million-dollar deals and still stop in the kitchen doorway just to watch his mother cook, like the sight of her never got old. His mother touched his father's arm the same easy, familiar way whether they were alone or hosting a room full of investors, and they finished each other's sentences so often that Colton grew up thinking that was simply what marriage was supposed to look like. They were partners in every sense the word could carry, building the company side by side, raising their only son side by side, and facing every setback the business ever handed them without once turning on each other. He was seven the da

Colton did not believe in love anymore, and he had the proof to back it up. Years earlier, the woman he'd planned to marry had walked into his penthouse, told him she'd ended a pregnancy he hadn't even known about, and walked back out without a single tear or a moment's hesitation. He remembered the exact quality of the afternoon light in the room that day, the way her heels had clicked down the hallway afterward, the way he'd stood frozen and silent while the only future he'd let himself imagine dissolved in front of him. He spent months afterward trying to find the warning signs he must have missed, replaying every tender moment between them, and never found a single one. She had seemed to love him completely, right up until the moment she proved she hadn't.After that, he buried himself in work, because numbers didn't lie and contracts didn't walk out on you without warning. He built his company into an empire that spanned three cities and was pushing into a fourth, working eightee

Aria told Bella everything the moment the door to her office closed, the words about Max and Joyce spilling out faster than she could organize them into anything coherent. Bella's face moved through shock and disgust before settling into something harder, and she admitted she'd never trusted Joyce, that she'd tried to say so more than once over the years without ever quite finding the right moment. Aria apologized for not listening sooner, and Bella reached across the desk and squeezed her hand, telling her none of it was her fault, that some people were simply gifted at hiding who they really were. The conversation softened from there, Bella pointing out that at least the promotion was real proof that not everything in Aria's life had fallen apart at once, and Aria managed a small, genuine smile at that, grateful for one person in the building who still felt entirely safe.The rest of the meeting with Colton had gone better than Aria expected, though she still couldn't quite believe