he said. “Four and a half months. From what I’ve been reading, you should be due for your first ultrasound. I want to make that trip to the doctor with you.”
She tilted her head. “You’re asking for that to be our first date?”
There was a certain wry amusement in her words. He touched her lips with a forefinger. “Your first ultrasound is only one part of this negotiation. Dating is another matter. When we go on our first date, there’ll be no doubt that it’s just between you and me.”
Heat smoked along the edges of her expression and her mouth softened, but then she asked, “What would you do with the eighteen weeks?”
He could see that what he said next mattered a great deal. But just as he was willing to make massive changes, he also couldn’t water himself down to make things more palatable.
He said without hesitation, “Try to find the witch. You should know, we intend to kill him. That’s the best solution to everything. The Elder Races have a tribunal, but we have no intention of pursuing justice that way—not when there’s a chance he might go free. As a district attorney, I can pursue certain legal strategies, but we have only ever intended those as one possible method to reach a final end.”
She closed her eyes. “You’ve been hunting him a long time. What if you can’t do it?”
“I would also use the time to extricate myself from the coven in a way that won’t harm them. If it looks like we’ve hit a dead end, one of the coven members mentioned doing something to provoke a reaction that might get him to reveal himself. But whether we finally manage to take him down in that time frame or not, I’ll give them notice I’m leaving.”
Angling her jaw out, she tapped her fingers on her chin as she thought it over. She looked remarkably unpredictable in that moment, and he tensed.
“You’ve got eighteen weeks,” she said. “After that, all bets are off.”
“What does that mean exactly?” He narrowed his gaze. She had thought of something, and suddenly he felt certain he wasn’t going to like it.
She gave him a thin smile. “You’re not the only one with loose ends that need to be tied up before this baby is born. In eighteen weeks, I’m coming home to meet with the police and to claim my estate.”
* * *
If she’d thought she’d seen Josiah angry before, it was nothing compared to the rage that transformed his face now. He snapped, “The hell you will!”
“Yes. I will.” She stopped to consider him. “Did you really think this was all about you—your coven, your needs, your enemy, your transformation, your timetable? Oh, bless.”
“Of course it isn’t all about me,” he said savagely. His eyes flashed yellow fire. “Why do you think I needed to talk to you? But this idea is unacceptable!”
“Then you and I have a fundamental difference of opinion,” she bit out. “Because I think it’s the only thing that makes sense. I’m not going to live out the rest of my life in hiding, and I’m not going to idle passively on the sidelines when I can do something to make the world safer for this child. And I have material assets I need to claim, not least because they mean independence.”
“The money doesn’t matter,” he snarled.
She raised her eyebrows. “I’ve found that’s easy to say when you have money. It’s not quite so easy when you don’t—and when you start thinking about things like the medical cost of giving birth and needing to put a child through college.”
“You don’t need to pay medical bills, and I will never let our child want for anything!”
She sighed. “It speaks so well of you that you have no intention of being a deadbeat dad. But on the other hand, that would foster an even greater dependence on you, and I don’t want to need you because of your money.” She rubbed her forehead where a headache had started to bloom. “Also, I have a mother who’s been a bitch to me, but she’s getting elderly. Maybe she’s thought better about how she’s always taken Austin’s side. I don’t know, because I don’t have my old phone, and I haven’t dared to access my email. And I lived in Atlanta a long damn time. I have friends, and I know people. They deserve to know what happened to me, and I should be able to use my real name