The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 174

Chapter 158: Two Lines

Bella pov

We officially merged all our businesses a few days after we got back, on a Thursday, in a conference room full of lawyers and paperwork.

Caleb signed everything without reading it because I’d already reviewed it all. Black Enterprises and Hart Worldwide folded together in an equal partnership. Our lawyers called it unusually clean and refreshingly non-adversarial.

We’d worked out the details on the island, at the kitchen table one afternoon. Neither of us found drafting business agreements during our honeymoon strange.

The media called us a power couple headline after headline. Photos showed us at the press conference, standing together exactly as we were.

At breakfast the next morning, Caleb scrolled through the coverage on his phone.

“Power couple,” he said.

“I saw.”

“They’ve used that phrase fourteen times.”

“I counted eleven.”

He set the phone down. “How do you feel about being half of a power couple?”

“I was a power on my own for years. Adding you has complicated my brand.”

“I’m an asset,” he said.

“You’re a liability with good cheekbones,” I said.

He laughed as Tom appeared and asked what a power couple was. We spent the next few minutes explaining it in simple terms. Caleb said it meant I ran everything as Tom replied, “I know that already,” and went back to his cereal.

ľ

I read the coverage once again and closed the tabs. The real point wasn’t the headlines. It was this: our home where Tom was explaining anglerfish to Caleb from an illustrated book.

Caleb listened with full attention, asking real questions, letting a four-year-old teach him about deep-sea creatures like it was the most important thing on an evening.

I stood in the doorway and watched them. This was what I’d had to learn to let myself have, not the empire, not the conquest. Just this-two people I loved the most in the warm light of our home, talking about fish.

I took the pregnancy test on a Sunday morning, weeks after we got back. I knew before I opened the box, but I did it anyway.

I sat on the edge of the bath and watched two lines appear as my heart did something huge and

Chapter 158-we Lines

complicated.

Fear came first-the old memory of sitting alone in a shelter bathroom with nothing and no one. But underneath it was something warmer, this time was different. I wasn’t alone.

The man in the kitchen wasn’t the same man who had laughed at me on our wedding night. Everything between us now was earned and solid.

Claim

I set the test on the basin and looked in the mirror then I picked up the test again and said softly, “Hi. I’m your mother, I know that’s not news to you.” I pressed a hand to my stomach. “Your brother is going to be unbearable about this-in the best way, your father is going to fall apart and pretend he isn’t.” I paused. “I’m scared. But I was scared having Tom too, and he turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. So we’ll figure it out. Together.”

I stood up and went to find my husband.

Caleb was at the kitchen counter when I came out, still in the grey t-shirt he’d slept in, coffee in hand, the Sunday paper open in front of him that he wasn’t actually reading because Tom had already claimed a corner of it for a drawing.

He looked up when he heard me “Bella,”

I crossed the kitchen and set the test on the counter in front of him without saying anything, because I genuinely wasn’t sure yet what would come out of my mouth if I opened it.

He looked down at it. Then up at me, then back down at it, and I watched the comprehension move across his face – the single blink of processing, the jaw tightening.

Tom, at the corner of the counter, looked up from his drawing and looked between us. “What’s that?”

“A test,” Caleb said, his voice slightly different from usual.

“What kind of test?” Tom asked. “Like a spelling test?”

“Sort of,” I said as my voice came out steadier than I’d expected.

Tom accepted this and went back to his drawing, which was something with a great many tentacles.

Caleb put his coffee down and came around the counter to stand in front of me, and he looked at my face as his hand came up and touched my jaw.

“Tell me where your mind is right now,” he said quietly.

It was the right question, it was always the right question with him now, and even now, even standing in my kitchen with a positive pregnancy test on the counter, part of me registered the distance between this man and the one I’d first come back to. This version of him who cared more about my overall wellbeing

“Scared,” I said, honestly. “And “I paused, finding my words. “Something else, I just don’t have the words for it.”

“Okay,”

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