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It was not an invitation. It was an order. He took his place beside her, careful not to crowd her, and fell into step.
They moved in silence for half a block. He kept himself between her and the traffic out of old habit, and when he realized he was doing it, shame pricked him. He had once shielded her from curbs and doorways and winter wind while refusing to let her stand beside him where it mattered.
“How far along?” he asked at last.
She kept her eyes ahead. “Far enough.”
That answer would have irritated him from anyone else. From Evelyn, it only made his chest tighten.
“Is it mine?”
She stopped so abruptly he almost overshot her. When she looked at him, the control in her expression cracked for the first time. Just a hairline break, but enough.
“Do you really think,” she asked very quietly, “that I would let some random man touch me?”
A hot, stupid jealousy rose in him anyway, because jealousy did not care about logic and Dominic had never claimed to be noble where she was concerned.
Her mouth hardened. “But don’t mistake that for permission to claim anything.”
He stared at her. “I’m trying to understand.”
“That’s convenient,” she said. “Understanding. Now.”
A gust of wind stirred the loose ends of her hair, and suddenly he remembered another cold day, two years earlier, when she had stood in the kitchen of their penthouse making pancakes in one of his shirts and laughing because she had burned the first batch. He remembered thinking then that nothing in his empire mattered as much as the woman in front of the stove. He had been right. He had simply behaved like a coward afterward.
She resumed walking.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
That made her hesitate. “Yes.”
The word landed heavily. He did not know whether the pain it caused was guilt or protectiveness or both tangled together until they were indistinguishable
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