Page 66 of Pregnant After One Forbidden Night

The streamlined contours of his car promised speed and intensity, the color that tempted you to look past it only to dare you to look away once you peeked. It blended in, even while it stood out. It kept secrets and watched with a thousand eyes. It was a spy, just like its creator.

It was a truly fantastic car, just like the man inside.

But she wasn’t going to backtrack because he had a nice car.

She was thoroughly soaked to the bone and extremely sensitive to the fact that today pregnancy seemed to have stolen her soldier’s toughness. Or perhaps that toughness had never been more than a thin facade. Maybe she was always a marshmallow.

She was a defender, there was no doubt of that, but maybe that was as far as it extended. Maybe she had never been hard, or smooth, or impenetrable, or whatever else it was people in the capital admired. And maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she could be a guard and still be soft, because that wasn’t where her value and skill came from.

It had to be. Because that was who she was.

And she was both good enough and deserving.

The car doors hinged upward, and a dark figure stepped out.

“Jenna?” Sebastian asked.

“Sebastian.” She lifted a hand to block the light from her eyes and watch the figure by the vehicle.

He stood there in the rainy, overcast afternoon, his clothes disheveled, face ravaged, but for the light that shone in his eyes. The same burning intensity that had changed her life that long-ago day on the balcony.

He opened his arms and she ran to him, sobbing once again as he picked her up, wrapped her in a hug so tight, she couldn’t breathe and didn’t care.

“I’m so sorry, Jenna. There’s no excuse for leaving you like that, for what I said. I was a fool, and I’m sorry. I love you, Jenna. There is no other woman I would choose in the whole world to be the mother of my children, and no other woman I want, and therefore no other woman that I could possibly trust enough to spend the rest of my life with. Come back home with me. Be the mother of my child, yes, but more than that, be my wife.”

He wasn’t down on one knee. She didn’t imagine he ever would be—at least not in public.

He was not the kind of man who knew how to bend. And he might be a little ruthless.

But he was hers, her home in the world, irrevocably and absolutely.

She spoke into his neck, clinging to him not for dear life, but for dear love. “Yes.”

And then he was kissing her, long and hot and possessively, with so much passion she was surprised steam didn’t rise from their soaked bodies.

He kissed away her fears that she was too plain, too poor and too Priory to ever find love.

He kissed away her fears that she would never truly belong in the capital, carving and viciously protecting an irrefutable and powerful place for herself by his side in the glittering world of wealth—a place in which she could be herself, raise her child and return to her job, a lifetime in the company of her two dearest friends becoming just the icing on the cake.

He kissed away her fears that he couldn’t give them a real family, full of the kind of love that grew healthy, happy children, utterly obliterating every shadow of a doubt that haunted or lingered.

Sebastian loved her but didn’t only love her.

It went far deeper than that.

They kissed, standing in the pouring rain until she wasn’t sure where she ended and he began, and then he led her to the car that she wasn’t sure wasn’t a spaceship and drove them back home, to Redcliff.

There, they would make a home for their family—honest, wholehearted, and utterly unique. And for the times when work meant they would need to stay in the capital for a longer stretch of time, they could create a new private paradise, designed by Sebastian and brought to life by the energy that flared to life when two pieces that fit together found their perfect, destined whole.

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