Page 90 of Baby Surprise for my Brother's Best Friend

I watch her move through the apartment like everything is already slipping through our fingers. The quiet, the closeness, the illusion that nothing outside matters.

“Don’t go disappearing on me today,” I say, half-joking.

She pauses in the hallway. “I have work, Alessio.”

I nod, but the tension’s there. Thin, but growing.

She comes back to kiss my cheek. “I’ll be in the office corner. Just... try not to be too distracting.”

I raise an eyebrow. “No promises.”

She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes this time. And I don’t miss the way she clutches her phone tighter when it buzzes again. Work. Pressure. Expectations.

And just like that, reality is knocking.

While Sophie disappears behind her laptop, I pace the living room with a restlessness I can’t shake.

I pick up my phone and thumb through missed messages, mostly updates from Nikolai. Nothing urgent, but enough to remind me the peace I’ve been clinging to is fragile. Conditional. Borrowed time.

Then comes the text that punches through the quiet:

Unknown Number:

You look comfortable. Enjoy it while it lasts.

My stomach knots.

I stare at the screen, rereading the line as if it’ll make more sense the second time. Or the third. But it doesn’t.

I don’t tell Sophie.

Instead, I delete the message and toss my phone face down on the coffee table. The hum of her voice from the corner, confident, professional, feels like a wall between us.

And I get it. She has a world to run.

But damn it, I’m terrified of slipping back into mine.

***

Later that day, she changes for a high-level investor meeting, and I swear, every time she walks out of that bedroom in full power mode, it knocks the breath out of me.

She’s wearing a slate-gray dress that hugs her curves like a whispered promise, elegant, precise, and dangerous in all the right ways, heels that make her legs look like they could bring nations to their knees, and a sleek bun that screams don’t fuck with me.

But it’s her, my Sophie, underneath all that. And I can't look away.

I lean against the doorframe as she clips on a pair of earrings. “You’re going to ruin lives walking in there like that.”

She smirks at me in the mirror. “I ruin balance sheets, not lives.”

I cross the room slowly, pulling her gently by the waist until she’s angled toward me.

“You look hot.” The words come out raspier than I intend.

It’s more than attraction, it’s awe. Because no one’s ever made me feel this undone just by standing there.

She hums. “You’d better behave while I’m gone.”

I grin. “No promises.”

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