Little Romance

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 that looked read rather than displayed. She pulled one down, curled into the window seat, and lost track of time completely, so absorbed in the pages that she didn't hear him come in until his voice cut across the room asking why she was there.

He looked tired standing in the doorway, tie loosened, sleeves pushed up past his elbows, and Aria sat up too fast, nearly dropping the book. "I like reading," she said. "And I'm impressed by your collection. When it comes to books, you have amazing taste." He studied her for a long moment without answering, a look she still couldn't quite read, and when she asked if he wanted her to leave, he told her no, that she was welcome to stay on the sofa as long as she left the desk free for his work. He crossed the room a moment later and sat at the other end of the window seat instead of at his desk, close enough that the distance between them felt less formal than it had in Cathy's office days earlier.

"Can I ask you something?" she said, and when he told her anything, she asked why he'd chosen surrogacy instead of adoption, or simply trying for a relationship the ordinary way. His jaw tightened and his gaze drifted to the window, and for a moment she thought she'd pushed somewhere he wasn't going to let her follow. Then he spoke anyway, quiet and clipped, telling her he'd been betrayed once by someone he'd trusted completely, someone he'd believed loved him, and that it wasn't something he liked revisiting in detail. Aria told him she was sorry, that she hadn't meant to pry, and he softened enough to admit the rest of it unprompted: that he'd always wanted to be a father, that surrogacy had felt like the only safe way to get there without risking his heart on another person who might destroy it the same way.

"That sounds lonely," she said, and he agreed that it was, that it still was, before admitting, almost to himself, that he'd thought controlling every variable would be enough to protect him and hadn't accounted for how much that same control would cost him. When she asked, gently, whether he still felt that way now, he looked at her long enough that the question started to feel like it meant something larger than either of them had said out loud, and told her he wasn't so sure anymore.

Something shifted in the room after that, a new, careful understanding settling between them that neither of them tried to name. Aria thanked him for telling her, and he thanked her, in turn, for listening, and the walls he'd spent six years building didn't come down exactly, but she could see the first hairline cracks running through them. She returned to her book and he moved to his desk and began typing, and the silence that followed wasn't uncomfortable at all, just the soft rustle of turning pages under the steady click of his keyboard while the sky outside slowly burned orange and then pink behind the gardens.

She meant to keep reading. Instead her eyes grew heavy somewhere in the last chapter, and without deciding to, she fell asleep against the cushions with the book still open in her hands. The sound of it slipping to the floor was what finally pulled Colton's attention away from his screen, and he found her curled on the sofa with her cheek pressed into the pillow, her dark hair spilling loose across the armrest, breathing slow and even and completely unguarded in a way she never let herself be while she was awake. He sat watching her longer than he meant to before he finally stood, crossed the room, and lifted her carefully into his arms, surprised by how little she weighed and how easily she settled against his chest without waking, murmuring something he couldn't quite make out.

He carried her down the hall to her room, laid her gently on the bed, and pulled the covers up over her shoulders, lingering at the doorway a beat longer than the moment strictly called for before he made himself leave and pulled the door quietly shut behind him. Standing alone in the hallway afterward, he had to admit to himself that the careful, contained arrangement he'd built to protect his heart was already coming apart in ways no contract had prepared him for, and that some part of him, however cautiously, didn't want to stop it.