He protected her

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 marraige while his grip dug deeper into her skin. She managed to tell him, voice shaking but steady, that at least now they both knew she hadn't been the reason they couldn't have children, and the words seemed to send him further over the edge. He raised his free hand to strike her while a small crowd of coworkers gathered near the entrance and did nothing but watch, Marcy among them, muttering that she'd known something was off about that car all along.

The blow never landed. Aria heard the impact before she understood it, a heavy thud and a grunt, and opened her eyes to find Max on the ground clutching his jaw while Colton stood over him with his fist still clenched, his voice low and colder than shouting could ever be as he asked who hits a pregnant woman and called him a coward to his face. He turned next to the crowd of employees who'd stood by watching, and more than one of them took an involuntary step back under his glare before he ordered his assistant James to take every name present and process their termination on the spot, then had his security drag Max out of the building entirely. Aria stood shaking as they hauled him away, her arm throbbing where his fingers had dug in, and when she asked if Colton owned the company, he told her no, that he was only a shareholder, and that he hadn't done any of this only for her sake but partly for his own, a comment she was too exhausted to ask him to explain.

The fallout followed her into the office the next morning, some coworkers crossing the hallway to avoid her entirely while others cornered her in the break room to tell her that good people with families had lost their jobs because she'd caused a scene. Aria reminded them, evenly, that she'd been the one attacked while they stood there and watched, and that the choice to do nothing had belonged to them, not her, before picking up her coffee and walking away without the energy left to argue further. The hostility weighed on her all the same, and she was grateful, by the time the driver brought her home to the villa that evening, for a house quiet enough that no one there looked at her like she was something to resent.

She found some peace the next afternoon sitting in the garden near the rose bushes, one hand resting on her belly while the baby moved constantly inside her, and didn't hear Colton approach until he was already asking if she was all right. She told him yes, that the baby was simply very active that day, and watched something soft and uncertain cross his face as his eyes dropped to her stomach. He asked, almost shy about it, whether he could feel her move, admitting he hadn't yet because he wasn't sure it was appropriate, and Aria took his hand without hesitating and pressed his palm gently against the fabric of her dress. They waited together in silence until a small flutter answered him, and his eyes went wide with something close to wonder as he breathed that she was moving, that she was saying hello to her father.

His hand stayed there a long moment, and when Aria looked up she saw an openness in his face she'd never caught there before, a crack running straight through the armor he wore so carefully everywhere else. He thanked her, quietly, for all of it, and when she told him their daughter was his too and he didn't need to thank her for that, something passed between them that felt less like gratitude and more like the beginning of something neither of them had signed up for. He admitted, almost too quiet to hear, that he was afraid of being a father, afraid of getting it wrong, and when she told him firmly that he cared too much to ever mess it up, he looked at her the way a man looks at someone he's just realized he can't stop thinking about.

Neither of them moved to break the moment. The garden stayed quiet around them, his hand still resting where their daughter kept turning and kicking beneath it, and Aria understood, sitting there in the fading afternoon light, that whatever this arrangement between them had started out as, it wasn't only business anymore for either one of them.