Chapter 1004: Unexpected At the Estate 2

Patt, who hadn’t even stepped foot on the estate. Who hadn’t contacted me. Who hadn’t replied when I’d reached out.

I asked ARIA.

"She’s busy,"

ARIA had said, in that tone she used when

busy

was a polite translation for something more complicated.

"And also experiencing a midlife crisis of sorts.

The sex was good

. Everything was good. But now

there are feelings involved

, and she feels alien to herself. Her old independent self—

no attachments, no feelings, no man with any kind of claim on her

—that woman is looking at the new version and doesn’t recognize her.

"She needs time to reconcile the two."

So I’d let her take her time. Reach out softly from afar—a message here, a small gesture there.

Not overwhelming. Not pressuring.

But also not disappearing entirely. Walking the razor’s edge between space and neglect with the kind of care most men reserve for defusing bombs and I intended to walk it carefully.

Patt was worth the patience.

The most stubborn ones always are. Especially when they’re finally learning they don’t have to win every war alone.

The most stubborn of my mature women was still

Margaret

.

Okay—stubborn was overselling it. Margaret wasn’t stubborn. She was

cautious

.

Specifically cautious about Charlotte.

Her daughter.

The woman who—

in one of the more beautifully fucked-up overlapping circles of my existence

—is in love with me without knowing her own mother is carrying my child.

Margaret was pregnant.

Very

pregnant. And she still hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Still hadn’t told Charlotte about our relationship. Still hadn’t told Charlotte about the baby.

When we spent time together, it was in the guest mansion.

Or at the estate when Charlotte was at work—

doors closed, curtains drawn,

stolen hours that felt like a secret we were both tired of keeping but too careful to drop.

The kind of afternoons where the light leaked in anyway and we pretended it was normal to be this careful with something this dangerous.

And

private dates.

Yes, I did so many private dates with all three of my pregnant women—

They’d insisted on spending time together, even dragging me into it, and since all three of my children would be roughly the same age... they wanted the

bond

to start now.

Before birth. Before names. Before the world got complicated and tried to decide what any of this meant.

They spent time together while the babies were still inside them. And the mothers

created

something between themselves that was unbreakable—a

sisterhood

forged in shared cravings, shared complaints, shared wonder at the absurdity of all three of them being pregnant by the same man at the same time and somehow being

fine with it

.

The unhinged ARIA had even declared she’d make sure they all gave birth almost simultaneously if they wanted to.

The fact that nobody told her no said everything about the kind of world we were living in.

Dominique

and

Catherine

had joined this pregnancy group when they weren’t busy—bringing food, rubbing feet, offering the kind of practical, unsentimental support that women who’d been through it understood instinctively.

I usually wasn’t there when they visited.

It felt like

their

space.

Sacred in a way that didn’t need me in it.

But unlike what I’d expected, Catherine

wasn’t asking

me for a child.

She just continued her relentless, steady support for the three women—organizing doctor visits, managing schedules, being the logistical backbone of a situation that would’ve overwhelmed anyone less capable.

If she wanted a baby, she kept it to herself.

And Catherine keeping something to herself meant it would surface exactly when she was ready and not a second before.

Dominique usually had that look, though.

The one that said

I’d love a baby too...

if only I wasn’t running seventeen things for the agency, at once and sleeping four hours a night.

She’d glance at the pregnant women, something would flicker in her eyes—soft, longing, quickly buried—and then she’d check her phone and the moment would pass.

Someday. Not today.

The day was here.

Paris.

This very evening, we’d be heading to the Ghost Mansion, where ARIA had finished—whatever the fuck she’d finished.

The jet upgrade.

The thing she’d been working on with the obsessive, manic energy of a divine intelligence who’d decided that air travel wasn’t good enough and needed to be reinvented from scratch.

I didn’t know what that beautiful lunatic had created.

All I knew was that she’d bought two jets—one assigned to Meridian Agency, straightforward, functional, a business tool.

The other she’d taken to the Ghost Mansion and

rebuilt

. From

A to Z.

Stripped it down to the rivets and reimagined it as something that probably shouldn’t exist and definitely violated several international aviation regulations.

I was looking forward to seeing it. That mix of excitement and terror that came with any ARIA creation—the certainty that it would be extraordinary and the equally strong certainty that it would be

unhinged

.

But the day wasn’t close to ending despite it being evening.

We arrived home. Vanessa and me. Together.

In the kind of post-sex, post-confession,

everything-has-changed

quiet that made the air between us feel new.

I was still drinking a carton of strawberries—picked up on the way back.

I walked through the front door.

And stopped.

Luna was waiting for me in the living room.

But she wasn’t alone.

Standing beside her—same height, same bone structure, the kind of resemblance that wasn’t just familial but

genetic blueprint

—was another woman.

Older.

But the word

older

was doing some very heavy and very

misleading

lifting here, because this woman looked like Luna had been sent back in time to show the world what her DNA was capable of at full maturity.

Dr. Maria.

Luna’s mother.

No one had warned me. Not Luna. Not ARIA. Not a single member of my extensive network of women who usually communicated every relevant detail of my day down to the minute. Not one heads-up.

Not one

hey, by the way, Luna’s bringing her

impossibly hot mother

to the house tonight, maybe don’t show up looking like a man who just fucked someone in a penthouse suite for three hours.

Not one.

The strawberry carton slipped from my fingers.

The Homebot caught it—smooth, silent, efficient—before a single berry hit the floor. Cradled the carton in its mechanical grip and glided it safely to the kitchen counter without a sound.

At least something in this house had its reflexes intact.

Because mine were gone.

Fuck.

She was hot.

Not Luna-hot, which was its own category.

This was not the borrowed-beauty of a woman who resembled her daughter.

This was independent, standalone, fully realized hot—the kind that had been refined by years and experience into something that a younger woman’s body couldn’t replicate because it hadn’t earned it yet.

Dr. Maria stood there in the living room of my estate, looking at me with eyes that were Luna’s but deeper, a mouth that was Luna’s but knew more, a body that was Luna’s but Latina fuller—and my brain, which had been functioning at approximately twelve percent capacity since Vanessa had climbed into my lap four hours ago, simply shut down.

Fuck! She’s HOT!