Chapter 2: Six Reasons to Panic

Three years later.

"Breakfast! Now or never!"

Sloane set the last of the six bottles on the kitchen table, stepped back, and braced herself.

The bedroom door exploded open.

Six children hit the hallway at full sprint, a stampede of tiny feet and shrieking voices, and Sloane had approximately two seconds to regret every decision she'd ever made before they were on her.

"Mom—"

"Mama—"

"I got here first—"

"That's my seat—"

Dash, her smallest and most dramatically inclined, launched himself at her hip, missed, and rolled three full rotations across the kitchen tile. He came to rest against the cabinet, blinked at the ceiling, and looked deeply betrayed by physics.

Meanwhile, Cole and Cassidy had claimed her arms. The twins — Jax and Juliet — were wrapped around her midsection like barnacles, and little Ava had planted herself directly on Sloane's left foot and was riding it like a parade float.

Five babies hanging off her body. One on the floor questioning his life choices. Sloane stood in the middle of her kitchen, completely immobilized, a human jungle gym in a blazer she'd spent twenty minutes ironing.

"Down," she said. Then, when nobody moved: "Down."

She put on the voice. The one that meant business.

Six sets of wide eyes locked onto her.

One by one, like leaves falling from a tree, they detached themselves and shuffled to their chairs. Cole smoothed his shirt like he hadn't just been dangling from her elbow. Cassidy adjusted her ponytail. Dash climbed up from the floor with enormous dignity.

They grabbed their bottles. Drank. Watched her with the careful, assessing eyes of tiny attorneys.

Sloane exhaled. Her chest loosened.

God, I love these ridiculous people.

She pressed her fingers to her mouth to hide the smile, because if they saw it, the authority was gone and breakfast would never end.

---

This was her life, and she had walked into it with both eyes closed.

Three years ago, she'd had too much whiskey, too much heartbreak, and about thirty seconds of reckless clarity in an elevator with a stranger whose face she still couldn't fully forget. She hadn't expected consequences. She certainly hadn't expected six.

When the ultrasound tech had gone very quiet and then called in two additional colleagues to stare at the screen, Sloane had known something was wrong. When the doctor said the word sextuplets, she'd hit the floor before he finished the second syllable.

She'd considered every option. She'd cried in every bathroom in the greater Chicago area. And then she'd looked at that grainy black-and-white image — six tiny impossible heartbeats — and understood that the choice had already made itself.

She finished her degree. She had her babies. She came home.

Cole, Cassidy, Jax, Juliet, Ava, and Dash. Three boys, three girls. One shared set of her dark eyes and, she suspected, the same jaw as a man whose last name she still didn't know.

He wasn't just good at breaking hearts, she thought, not for the first time. He was terrifyingly good at everything else too.

Six at once.

---

After breakfast, Sloane handed off the chaos to Nina — saint of a woman, underpaid, impossibly patient — kissed every small forehead exactly once, and got out the door before her resolve could crack.

She had an interview.

Not just any interview. PIERCE Group.

Chicago's most powerful corporation. The kind of company that appeared in every business magazine, every Forbes list, every hushed conversation between desperate graduates who'd spent four years trying to earn their way through the door. The running joke among Sloane's classmates was that you'd rather be a receptionist at PIERCE Tower than a VP anywhere else. The company was that untouchable.

Sloane had applied for a front desk position.

It was not beneath her. She had six children and a nanny to pay and exactly eleven months of savings left. Pride was a luxury she'd surrendered around the third trimester.

She squared her shoulders as PIERCE Tower came into view, all steel and glass and intimidating vertical ambition, and told herself she wasn't scared.

You pushed six humans into the world without anyone holding your hand. You can handle a job interview.

---

The lobby was marble and silence and the quiet hum of money. A receptionist with a headset and the energy of someone who had already ended three careers before lunch directed Sloane to the forty-second floor and handed her a numbered placard.

Fifteen.

She counted the chairs in the waiting area. There were fourteen people ahead of her, most of them clutching leather portfolios and wearing the haunted look of people who had been waiting too long near greatness.

Sloane had barely found a seat when the conference room door swung open and a woman stumbled out — blouse crooked, mascara fractured, moving at the speed of pure humiliation.

A man in a slim-cut suit followed her into the hallway. His voice was measured and cold as lake water in January.

"This company selects candidates based on merit. Anyone who misunderstands that policy is welcome to show themselves out."

The waiting room went very still.

The woman next to Sloane leaned close and whispered, "I heard the president is personally running the interviews today. That girl just tried to — you know." She mimed something eloquent. "With him."

Sloane blinked. "The president is in there?"

"Pierce himself." The woman's voice had taken on the reverent, slightly unhinged quality of a true believer. "Declan Pierce. Thirty-four, single, richer than God, and — I am not exaggerating — the most beautiful man anyone in Illinois has ever seen. If I don't get hired today, I'm framing my rejection letter."

Sloane almost laughed. Almost.

Something uncomfortable moved through her chest. Probably nerves.

Declan Pierce. She'd seen the name on the building but had never connected it to an actual person. Never seen a photo. She didn't read business magazines; she barely had time to read menus.

"Number fifteen. Sloane Carter."

She stood. Smoothed her blazer. Walked to the door.

You've survived worse. You've survived everything.

She pushed it open.

The room was quiet, clean, expensive — a long table, two interviewers on one side, and at the head of it, a man looking down at a document, his face angled away.

Then he looked up.

Sloane's hand went ice-cold on the door handle.

The sharp jaw. The dark, unreadable eyes. The particular stillness of someone who had never once been uncertain about anything.

No.

The air left the room completely.

No. No, that's not—

It was him.

The stranger from the elevator. The man she'd given herself to three years ago and never seen again. The man whose face had haunted her dreams and whose children were currently destroying her apartment on the North Side.

Declan Pierce wasn't a stranger.

Declan Pierce was the father of her six children — and he was staring at her like he recognized every single thing he saw.