The Alpha Signed Away His Pregnant Luna novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Warm Your Own Side

By the third night I had eaten nothing in that house but food I cooked myself, standing in the dark kitchen after everyone slept.

Delaney's thermos came every morning anyway.

Every morning I poured it into the garden.

Gideon came to bed at ten.

He had not come to bed before midnight in months.

He stood in the bedroom door, gray in the face, one hand pressed under his ribs.

"Laney's cooking," he said. "It's rich. My stomach's been in knots since lunch."

"It's been three days," I said.

"I know."

He sat on the edge of the mattress and bent forward, and I watched him decide whether to ask.

"You used to put your hand there," he said. "When it got like this."

For five years I had done exactly that.

I sat up in the dark and thought of the ledger, the keys, the six weeks of tea.

Then I thought of my husband in pain, and I hated that it still moved me.

"Lie down," I said.

He lay on his back. I knelt beside him.

I slid my hand under his shirt and pressed my palm flat against his stomach.

His skin was hot. The muscle under it was clenched hard.

He let out a long, shaky sound.

"There," he muttered. "That's it. That's the spot."

I rubbed slow circles with the heel of my hand, the way I always had.

It was only a cure for a stomachache. I told myself so twice.

The tightness eased under my hand.

His eyes closed.

"Maeve."

"Hmm."

"Don't stop."

I should have stopped. A stomachache doesn't need a palm that long.

His breathing slowed, but my own did not.

I could feel the whole length of him beneath my hand, ribs and heat and the steady beat of a man I had touched a thousand times and never once been touched back.

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