Page 35 of Bossh*le Daddy
He caught me before I hit the floor, scooped me up and took me to a rocking chair. Its old wood creaked under my weight. My body folded into it without grace, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around myself like I could hold the pieces together through sheer pressure.
The tears came in earnest now—not the pretty, delicate tears of movie heroines but ugly, body-shaking sobs that echoed off the nursery walls. Because this room, this impossible room hidden beneath the city, was everything I'd never dared dream of. A physical manifestation of the need I'd carried since childhood, the desire to be small and safe and held. And he'd built it before he'd even met me.
"Silas found me."
The words tore from my throat between sobs, raw and desperate. I watched through blurred vision as Damian's entire body went rigid, every muscle locking with the kind of stillness that preceded violence. His hands, those elegant hands that had mapped every inch of me, curled into fists at his sides.
"He told me about them. Rebecca and Melissa." The names tasted like poison, like betrayal, like every fear I'd never wanted confirmed. "How you hire assistants to play your fiancée. How you call them all 'little one.' How I'm just the latest—"
"Stop."
The command cut through my rambling with surgical precision. His hands captured mine despite my attempt to pullthem back, his grip firm but not painful. This close, I could see the storm building in his eyes, the careful control fracturing at the edges. His thumbs brushed over my knuckles with devastating gentleness, a counterpoint to the tension radiating from every line of his body.
"Silas told you enough truth to sell his lies."
The words came out measured, but I heard the fury underneath. Not at me—somehow I knew that with certainty—but at the man who'd planted these doubts with such calculated precision.
"Yes, I hired Rebecca for the Brennan deal. Yes, Melissa helped with the Scandinavian investors." Each admission felt like another nail in the coffin of what I'd thought we had, but his grip on my hands never wavered. "But Isla—"
My name on his lips made fresh tears spill over.
"I never touched them."
The words hung between us, simple and devastating. I searched his face for the lie, for the polished deception of a man who'd built an empire on knowing what people needed to hear. But all I found was raw honesty that looked almost painful for him to voice.
"Never kissed them. Never called them anything but Ms. Patterson and Ms. Brown. They were employees playing a role, nothing more."
His hands tightened on mine, grounding me as my world tilted and reorganized around this new information. Not lovers. Not predecessors in his bed and heart. Just employees with clear boundaries and contractual obligations and last names he'd never replaced with endearments.
"I built this room because I've been looking for something I couldn't name."
His voice had gone rough, sandpaper over silk. One hand released mine to gesture at the space around us—the crib, thecarefully chosen stuffies, the LED window creating perpetual gentle daylight in this underground sanctuary.
"Someone who needed what I needed. A little one who could be mine completely."
The confession sounded like it was being dragged from somewhere deep, some hidden vault he'd never intended to open. This was Damian Stone stripped of his armor, kneeling on soft carpet in a nursery he'd built for a dream he'd never expected to find.
"I've had this fantasy for years, but I never—" He stopped, swallowed hard, that tell-tale muscle jumping in his jaw. "The arrangement with Rebecca and Melissa was purely business. Two public appearances each, generous severance, everyone walks away clean. I never took them to galas where people I knew would see them. Never fed them by hand in my kitchen. Never gave them rules or punishments or—"
His voice cracked on the next word, and my heart cracked with it.
"Never loved them."
The words fell between us like stones into still water, sending ripples through everything I thought I knew. Because Damian Stone didn't do love. Everyone knew that. The gossip blogs, the business magazines, even his own ex-fiancée had confirmed it. Stone Cold, they'd called him. Emotionally unavailable. Incapable of real feeling.
But the man kneeling before me with shaking hands and fractured control looked anything but cold.
"What?" The word came out breathless, disbelieving.
"I love you," he said, steadier now but no less intense. "Not as a convenient solution. Not as a temporary arrangement. I love your stubbornness and your need to be held. I love how you organize my chaos and still need your bunny to sleep. I love thatyou call me Daddy like it's a prayer and submit to me like it's worship."
My chest felt too small for my heart, for my lungs, for everything expanding inside me. "You love me?"
My voice broke on the words, cracking like ice under spring sun. Everything I'd believed for the last twenty minutes—Silas's poison, the LinkedIn profiles, the terrible logic of being temporary—fractured against this impossible declaration.
Damian shifted, and for one horrible moment I thought he was pulling away. Instead, he reached into his pocket, pulling out a small velvet box that made my heart stop. Actually stop. I was pretty sure I died for a second, soul leaving my body at the sight of that little black cube.
"I've been carrying this since Sunday," he admitted, flipping it open with fingers that weren't quite steady.
