บททั้งหมดของ Pregnant For The Wrong Brother: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

Caspian's POV She found the money.She never said a word about it, but I knew.I notice the small things, and I notice the drawer that closed a quarter inch off from where I left it, the plastic sleeve turned the wrong way, the way her eyes moved over me at dinner that night, searching.And I noticed the fear.She was afraid of the answer. That was why she didn't ask. Some part of her had done the math the same way I would have, and had decided that not knowing was safer than knowing, and so she folded the question up and swallowed it.I understood that better than she could ever guess.I am a man who swallows questions too.°°°°°°°°°°My mother didn't raise me. She trained me.There's a difference, and I learned it before I was seven years old. The house we lived in when my father was still ours had a small bedroom at the top of the stairs, and I can still tell you everything about that room, because I spent more hours in it than anywhere else on earth. A desk. A lamp. A door tha

Ana's POV ‘We know what you are.’That was all. Neat handwriting, neat spacing. No name, no threat spelled out, nothing I could carry to anyone and say look what they did. Just four words and the cold understanding that whoever wrote them had stood at my desk in the dark and wanted me to know they could deal with me here.I read it twice. Then I folded it in half, and in half again, and I slid it into my bag where no one could see my hand shake, and I sat down at my desk and turned on my screen like it was any other morning.I wouldn't give them the reaction because that was the whole point of the note, to buy a flinch. But I had none to spare.°°°°°°°°°°Marissa didn't come near me again.She had learned her lesson from Caspian, whatever he had said to her in that room. She kept her distance, polished and pleasant, nodding at me in hallways. She had just found a safer way to get to me, one that left no fingerprints, one that ran through everyone else.She didn't need to hurt me h

Ana's POV After that night, I made a decision, and the decision was distance.If the office wanted to believe I had slept my way into my chair, I would give them nothing further to chew on. No shared exits. No rides. No closed-door meetings with the boss. I would be so cold, so correct, so relentlessly professional in public that even Marissa Kane would run out of things to whisper.So that was what I did.I stopped meeting his eye in meetings. I sent my updates through email instead of walking them to his office. When we passed in the hallway I nodded the way I nodded at anyone, polite and blank, and kept walking. I built a wall in daylight, and I told myself it was survival.It worked. A little.The whispers thinned. Not gone, never gone, but starved down to something I could walk through. And for the first time in weeks I got through a whole day without hearing the nickname.But there was a cost, and the cost was him.°°°°°°°°°°"You didn't look at me once today."We were in t

Ana's POV "Are you pulling away from me, Anastasia?""No." The word came quickly, and I heard how it sounded. "I'm setting boundaries. At work. That's all this is.""Boundaries." He said the word like he was tasting something bitter. "That's a clean word for it.""It's the true word for it. There's a difference between work and this, between the office and here, and I'm trying to keep them separate so I can survive the office. That's not the same as pulling away from you.""Isn't it?" He slowly came around the counter, that unhurried way he had that made my heart speed up whether I wanted it to or not. "I have seen people set boundaries my whole life. Do you know what a boundary is, really? It's a fence you build one panel at a time so that when you finally walk away, you can tell yourself the fence was always there. That you never really let them in at all.""That's not what I'm doing.""Then why does it feel exactly like that.""Because you can't tell the difference," I said, sharp

Ana's POV Three days later, I was standing in the middle of Caspian's bedroom, staring at the dress someone had delivered that morning, wondering when exactly my life had stopped feeling like my own.It was midnight blue, and it cost more than I used to make in a month, and it fit like it had been sewn on me, because of course it had, because a man who taped torn money back together doesn't guess at a size. I put it on. I looked at the stranger in the mirror. And I let him take me to the gala, because I had said yes in the lamplight at three in the morning, and because some tired part of me wanted, just once, to stop hiding.°°°°°°°°°°The room was gold and big and full of the most powerful people I had ever been near.I felt it the moment we walked in. Not the wealth, though the wealth was everywhere, dripping off wrists and hanging from ears. Something else. The way the whole room turned, like flowers to a light, the second Caspian stepped through the door with his hand at the s