After My Guardian Found Out I’m Carrying His Child

I bought the dress for the gala three weeks in advance.

A deep navy slip dress, simple and clean, nothing like the architectural gowns the other women would wear. I stood in the boutique dressing room and thought about Alexander's face when he saw it. Whether his eyes would do that thing — that half-second pause before he looked away.

They did.

He was waiting by the elevator when I came downstairs, already in his tux, already composed. Alexander Knight was always composed. Thirty-one years old, six feet of controlled authority, the kind of man who made a room rearrange itself around him without trying. He looked at me and something moved behind his eyes — quick, contained, gone.

"You look nice," he said.

Nice. Seven years of living under his roof and I had learned to translate his silences better than his words. Nice meant something else. I just never let myself figure out what.

"Thanks." I grabbed my clutch off the console table. "Let's go."

The gala was at the Mandarin Oriental. Knight Capital had just closed a nine-figure acquisition — some tech firm in Austin that Alexander had been circling for two years — and the ballroom was full of people who wanted to be near the man who pulled it off. I watched him work the room. Handshakes, measured smiles, the occasional low laugh. He was good at this. He had always been good at this.

Valeria Fernandez materialized at his elbow around nine.

She was his executive assistant, which was a title that didn't quite cover what she actually did. She managed his calendar, his correspondence, his public image, and — I had always suspected — his perception of himself. She was thirty, polished, and beautiful in the way of someone who had decided beauty was a professional asset and invested accordingly. She touched his arm when she spoke to him. She had been doing it for years.

I watched her lean in to say something in his ear and I turned away.

I found the bar.

By midnight, the formal portion was over and the after-party had migrated to the penthouse. Alexander's penthouse. Our penthouse, technically, though I had always been careful not to think of it that way. A smaller crowd, better whiskey, the city spread out below the floor-to-ceiling windows like something that belonged to us.

I should have gone to bed.

Instead I stayed on the periphery and watched Alexander drink. He didn't drink like this usually. Champagne during the toasts, then whiskey, then more whiskey. Marcus Webb — his lawyer, his oldest friend — caught my eye across the room at some point and raised an eyebrow. I shrugged. I didn't know either.

The crowd thinned. Then it was just us.

I don't know who turned the music on. Something slow and old, the kind of song that exists specifically to make you feel things you've been avoiding. Alexander was standing by the windows with a glass he'd stopped drinking