Chapter 3 - What the Snow Hides
Dinner stretched for three excruciating hours — course after course of food Harper barely tasted, conversation laced with double meanings she was only beginning to learn to decode. She smiled when Dominic squeezed her hand under the table. She laughed at the right moments, deflected questions about children with practiced ease, and all the while felt Carmine Falco's gaze settling on her like a weight she couldn't shake.
After dinner, the men retreated to a private study to discuss "business," leaving Harper alone in a drawing room full of wives who eyed her with the particular hostility reserved for outsiders who'd married in above their station. She excused herself as soon as she reasonably could and wandered onto a stone terrace overlooking the snow-blanketed grounds, grateful for the cold and the silence.
She didn't hear Dominic approach until his jacket settled over her shoulders.
"You'll freeze," he said.
"I needed air. Your friends in there look at me like I'm something they scraped off a shoe."
"They're not my friends." He came to stand beside her at the railing, close enough that his sleeve brushed hers. Snow caught in his dark hair. For once, he didn't look like the untouchable king of an empire — he looked young, and tired, and human. "Carmine's already decided I'm unfit. Tonight's about giving him a reason to say it out loud."
"Then give him a reason not to."
Dominic turned to look at her, and something in his winter-ocean eyes had thawed, just slightly, just enough that Harper felt the shift like a change in air pressure before a storm. "You've been remarkable tonight," he said quietly. "More than I had any right to ask of you."
"I had good motivation." She tried for lightness and missed. "Two million reasons, actually."
"Is that all it is?"
The question hung between them, unexpectedly sincere, and Harper found she didn't have a glib answer ready. The snow fell around them in silence. Somewhere behind the tall windows, violin music drifted from the great hall, and for one unguarded moment neither of them moved to break the stillness.
"Dominic—"
He kissed her.
It wasn't performance. There were no cameras on the terrace, no commission members watching from the windows, no reason at all for the rules to bend except that neither of them wanted them to. His hand came up to cradle her jaw, and Harper's fingers curled into the lapel of the jacket he'd draped over her shoulders, and for the first time since she'd signed her name to his contract, Harper Hayes forgot she was being paid for any of this.
When they finally broke apart, Dominic's forehead rested against hers, his breath unsteady.
"That wasn't part of the arrangement," he said.
"No," Harper agreed. "It wasn't."
Neither of them moved away.
---
They didn't discuss the kiss the next morning, though Harper caught him watching her twice across the breakfast table with an expression she couldn't name — something careful, something that looked almost like fear, on a face built for fearlessness.
That night, Dominic came to her wing of the house.
He didn't say much. He didn't need to. The rules they'd built to protect themselves — separate wings, no questions, no touching without witnesses — dissolved somewhere between the doorway and the bed, and for one night, Harper Hayes and Dominic Russo stopped pretending to be strangers who'd made a business arrangement.
In the morning, he was gone before she woke, back to being the ghost who left before sunrise. But something had shifted between them, invisible and undeniable, like a fault line finally giving way after months of pressure.
---
They returned to Manhattan three days later. Carmine hadn't given his verdict outright, but Elias reported quiet murmurs among the commission that the Russo marriage looked, for the first time, believable. It should have felt like a victory.
Instead, Harper spent the following weeks in a strange, unsettled fog. She told herself the Catskills had been an aberration — stress, cold, proximity, nothing more. She told herself Dominic's rules still applied, that nothing had fundamentally changed just because they'd broken one of them in a moment of weakness.
She stopped believing her own excuses the morning she threw up twice before 8 a.m. and realized her period was five weeks late.
She sat on the edge of her bathtub for a long time after the second test confirmed the first, staring at two pink lines that would upend everything she thought she understood about her carefully contained, carefully compensated arrangement.
She was pregnant. With the heir to a criminal empire her husband hadn't even wanted to build.
If Carmine Falco found out before Dominic decided how to handle it — if the commission learned Dominic Russo's marriage of convenience had produced an unplanned, uncontracted heir — Harper had no idea what that would mean. For her. For Madison. For the baby now growing inside her, born into a world of wolves in good suits, before it had even drawn its first breath.
May you like
She pressed a hand to her still-flat stomach, and for the first time since Elias Montgomery had slid an envelope across a coffee shop table, Harper Hayes felt truly, completely afraid.
---
