He is a gentleman

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 let herself sink back into the chair, his hands warm and steady against feet that had ached all day, and when she thanked him he told her she didn't need to, that he wanted to take care of her, he just wasn't always sure how.

She woke the next morning in her own bed with no memory of getting there, and the realization that he must have carried her again, gently enough that she never even stirred, sent an unfamiliar warmth climbing up her neck into her cheeks. She told herself it didn't mean anything. He was the father of her child, nothing more, and yet she found herself smiling into her pillow anyway, thinking that whatever else he was, he was undeniably a gentleman about it.

The weeks that followed weren't quite so warm. Colton's business was expanding south, and Emma explained, wiping down the kitchen counter one morning, that he rarely stayed at the villa for long, sometimes disappearing for months at a stretch. Aria told herself she didn't mind, that she was used to being alone, and went on attending her antenatal appointments by herself, sitting in waiting rooms full of couples holding hands while she filled out forms with no one's name but her own. The disappointment she felt at his absence surprised her more than she wanted to admit.

It was during one of those solo appointments that she found out she was having a daughter, watching a tiny shape resolve into a head and a heartbeat and perfect, impossibly small fingers on the screen while the technician asked if she wanted to know the sex. She cried right there on the table with the cold gel still on her stomach, overwhelmed by a happiness so sharp it nearly hurt. But the joy dimmed once she was alone in her room that night, replaced by the quieter, harder truth of what she'd actually agreed to. She was a surrogate in Colton's eyes, and nothing more, and she could miss the bedtimes and the mornings and the first steps that should have belonged to a mother. Would Colton really keep his word? He could take her baby away forever if he pleased.

Colton returned three days later and announced, without preamble, that he'd be taking her to every appointment from now on, since the south side project was finally finished. Their first appointment together was stiff at first, Colton scrolling through his phone in the waiting room while couples murmured around them, but once the doctor checked the baby's heartbeat and glanced between the two of them, remarking that they made a beautiful couple, Aria's face went red and she turned to him expecting a correction that never came. He said nothing at all, and she decided, for reasons she didn't examine too closely, to let the comment stand uncorrected.

That same tenderness followed them into the baby aisles the following weekend, Colton pushing the cart and refusing to complain no matter how long she lingered over tiny onesies and blankets, insisting work could wait because this mattered more. When she held up a small pink dress and asked what he thought, he told her their daughter would look beautiful in it and instructed her to buy two in case one got dirty, and by the time they left the store the cart was overflowing with more than either of them could reasonably justify. Aria said it was too much, and Colton said quietly that it wasn't enough, that he wanted to give their daughter everything he'd never had growing up. When she pointed out that he'd had money and both his parents' love, he admitted, more softly than she expected, that maybe he had been lucky after all, and she reached for his hand without quite deciding to, telling him their daughter would have everything except a mother, since she was only a surrogate in the eyes of the contract they'd signed. Something in his face fell at that, like she'd taken something away from him he hadn't realized he wanted to keep, and he noticed, with a confusion he didn't voice, that she'd picked out both blue and pink without seeming to notice she'd done it.

Colton came home every night for the two weeks after that, and Emma noticed immediately, catching Aria in the kitchen one afternoon with a knowing smile and the observation that this was quite unlike him, that he usually vanished for months at a time and rarely stayed anywhere long enough to unpack. Aria insisted it was probably just about the baby, and Emma hummed a response that made it clear she believed nothing of the sort.

Aria lay awake that night thinking about the man who had carried her to bed without waking her, who studied her sometimes like he was trying to solve something he couldn't quite name, who now sat in his study every evening while she read on the sofa a few feet away. She didn't have an explanation for any of it that felt entirely honest, and the not-knowing followed her all the way into sleep, unresolved and impossible to set down.