“Fuck,” he said against her. The shot of his breath gave her a jolt of pleasure and her hand fell to his head.

But he shoved her leg aside and shunted to the edge of the bed to reach over and grab up his jeans. Fishing his phone from his pocket, Archer looked at it once and swore again before he answered.

“What the fuck do you want?” he snapped down the line.

But he wasn’t the one who had just been teased with the beginning of something that wouldn’t be finished while he was on the phone. Closing her eyes, Nya massaged her breasts, keeping her simmer going while he had his conversation.

“No,” he barked into the phone. “I’m tongue-fucking Nya.”

Her eyes opened. She sat up to shove his shoulder and frown at him. “What the fuck?” she hissed.

He kept the phone at his ear, but lowered the mouthpiece a fraction. “It’s Ester,” he said, climbing up the bed to fall on his back beside where she sat. “Yes.” He was talking into the phone again. “No. What?”

Nya lay on her side and drew her fingernails up his torso and down. Grasping his dick, she squeezed his girth hard, but he lifted a hand to the back of his head, nonplussed that she was being so familiar.

“I’ll be as rough as I fucking like, Ester,” he said. “Stay the fuck out of our bedroom.”

Archer seized her wrist so tight that she whimpered. At first, Nya thought he was objecting to her pleasuring him while his mother’s voice was in his ear. But the glare he landed on her destroyed her desire to torment him.

“Pregnant?” he snarled. “When the fuck…” Ester had to still be talking. Nya sat up, although she couldn’t straighten because of the way he held her wrist. “No, she didn’t fucking tell me.”

“Give me the phone,” Nya said, trying to reach for it.

“No, Ester, fuck off,” he said, hanging the phone up and tossing it to the floor like he didn’t give a damn if it broke or not. “You’re fucking pregnant? Who the fuck got you pregnant?”

If someone had asked her, she’d have given Archer more credit and asserted that he wouldn’t believe Ester’s allegations without any proof. But that wasn’t what got her angry. “First off, I’m not pregnant,” she said. “And second, if I was, who the fuck do you think the father would be?”

“We haven’t fucked for forty days.”

“Forty-four,” she corrected. “Pregnancy lasts more than a month and a half. In case you forgot, we did quite a lot of fucking before we broke up.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” he said, his eyes dropping to her belly above her crossed legs. “Have you been to a doctor?”

Taking her hips, Archer guided her around to place her on her back more carefully than he’d ever done in the past. Nya couldn’t hold onto her frustration. He kept straightening her legs and pushing her down whenever she tried to move.

“No, I’m not pregnant.”

“You’ve skipped a period,” he said. “At least one. You should’ve started—”

“Stop monitoring my cycle, Archer,” she said. “It’s all in Ester’s head, I promise. She came up with the idea when I got lightheaded. She’s been at me to get pregnant since the night I first met her. I told her I wasn’t. She asked about antibiotics and contraception—”

“Fuck,” he said. “What did I give you?”

“Would you calm down?” she asked, taking both of his hands. “I absolutely promise you, I’m not.” Cupping his hands in hers, she slid them up to her cleavage. “I took a test, Arch. I’m not. Sometimes when I get stressed, I skip periods, it’s not unusual.”

“Are you stressed?” he asked, but glazed over that to get annoyed again. “Why the fuck are you taking tests without me?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “ ‘Cause we were in exactly the right place where I could’ve knocked on your door with a pregnancy test and told you we had to watch it together? I was already crazy, stalker ex-girlfriend enough without becoming bunny boiler too. It’s not a big deal.”

“It was a big enough deal for you to buy a test,” he said.

“Only because Ester kept going on about it. She made me paranoid.”

His mind was working fast. “You were gonna skip town,” he said. “Is that ‘cause you thought—”

“No.” He let her sit up again, and crossing her legs, one of her knees came to rest against his lap that was tilted toward her. “I would never have run off without telling you.” Nya smiled. “This reaction is much better than the one I thought you might have. It’s good to file that away for future reference.”

“What did you think I would do?” he asked and had to have accepted her denial because he lay down and tucked a hand behind his head.

“I don’t know. But if I had been, and we weren’t together… I don’t know how I’d have dealt with that.”

Archer didn’t offer any suggestions and Nya didn’t blame him for coming up short. She’d actually had time to think about it and hadn’t managed to reach any conclusions herself. “I was trying to work out what to do about the renovations,” she said, not wanting to dwell on a non-existent pregnancy. “I figured if I was selling, I might get more if the place was newly renovated. But whoever buys it might do it themselves, so would it be a waste of money?”

“You’re not selling now though,” he said. “You’re sticking around.”

Still with her legs crossed, she shuffled higher. “You dumped me, Archer.”

He curved an arm around to her back. “I’m so fucking in love with you, and that never went away.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope if you do it again.”

“I won’t,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much sense it makes to keep you out of my life. I would never have been able to let you walk away. I knew it before tonight; I was never gonna let you leave town.”

“What was your plan?” she asked. “Chain me to your bathroom?”

With complete conviction, his eyes locked to hers. “If it came to it, that’s exactly what I would’ve done, Ny. I can’t figure out the balance between needing to protect you and my craving to love you and keep you. Those first few days I think I managed to be so cold because I didn’t know if I was gonna forgive you or not. I hated myself because it was selfish to want you. I wanted to say ‘fuck it, it doesn’t matter’ but I knew you’d always be at risk as long as you were with me.”

“And then you realized it didn’t matter if I was with you, I was still gonna love you and protect you.”

“You’re tenacious, Squirm, I’ll give you that. I couldn’t get rid of you.”

Pressing a palm to his heart, she lowered to kiss him. “When I watched Ester and Derren argue in Louie’s, I wondered if that would be you and me in twenty, twenty-five years.”

“Fuck no,” he said. “I mean, yeah, they fight, and I know they fuck, but they live separate lives. If the last forty days showed you and me anything it’s that we can’t stay the fuck out of each other’s lives.”

That was a truth she couldn’t deny. “I do need you, Arch. I know I’m a burden and a pain in the ass. But whenever anything goes wrong or I’m scared, you’re the first person I think of. If you’re around, all that goes away. Even when I was sure I’d lost you, when I thought we’d never be together again, everything in my mind…” she said. Pressing the heel of her hand into her forehead, her elbow landed on her bended knee to support her head. “I thought of everything in terms of you, in terms of us. It was before the break-up or after the break-up, or ‘how will Archer feel about this?’ ‘What would he tell me to do?’ I don’t know how to get you out of my head, it’s like you’re a part of my consciousness.”

“And that’s why you thought you should run?” he asked. “Fuck, Nya, I was in Vegas, thousands of miles from here, surrounded by liquor and naked women, and all I could think about was if you’d taken your pill or if you were getting enough sleep.”

So they were each engrained in the other. “How are we gonna work this out now? Do we go back to the way things were? What did Ester say?”

“I shouldn’t be too rough with you because of the baby,” he said.

She cringed. “I meant when you said the other thing. Did she ask if we were back together?”

“No,” he said. “She’ll figure it out. I don’t give a fuck about anyone except us. We can go back to the way things were. You tell me what will make you happy. If you want to blow out of town, we’ll do that. Fuck this place, fuck them all. You just tell me—”

Nya put her fingers to his lips and climbed over to straddle him. “I was happy with you. Always happy. We don’t have to make big changes, what we had worked for me. Although I don’t know how it’ll be now that we’re in the same building,” she said, because technically, they hadn’t been in a relationship while both living in this building. He’d broken up with her as soon as he got back from Columbia. “You always said you won’t live with me.”

“I won’t. This is a safe place for you. It works to have you close.”

“So we can hang out together and then if you have guests,” she said, meaning captives, “you can send me on my way.”

“It means if the fucker is up there, I can come down here and screw you, and catch him before he ever makes a break for it.”

Lying down, Nya put her hand to her temple, letting the underside of her arm rest against his chest. “Have you ever had a captive get free?” she asked. “You always talk about not having me around in case something goes wrong, but have you ever actually had one of your captives take advantage of you or manipulate you?”

He ran his fingers through the ends of her hair that were tickling his chest and let his fingertips brush the top of her breasts. “Squirm, we’re naked in an apartment I rent for you and you take advantage of me all the time.”

She laughed because technically he was lying with one of his captives now and he’d told her that she had the power to manipulate him. “I don’t count,” she said, and then drew a little higher. “Have you ever fucked any of your captives before?”

“You’re asking a lot of questions tonight, Squirm. Don’t you wanna talk about something Tag fucked up that you need me to fix?”

“No. I think you know more about what’s going on with Tag than I do. Although, I’ll have to tell him that I won’t be leaving town. I don’t know how nuts he was about the idea. But I guess that might change if Gio’s coming back into town. To be honest, I’m sort of disappointed. He’s always on something when I see him. I’m worried. I want to get him help, but I know he’ll never take it, and he pushes back so hard he becomes agitated and single-minded. I think he forgets how to treat people.”

“He never knew how to treat them good,” he said.

Archer wasn’t Mr. Congeniality himself, but getting into another debate about her friendship with Tag wouldn’t change anything, so she just enjoyed being in Archer’s arms. “I can’t believe how close we came to losing this,” she said.

Because if she’d managed to get out of town, she’d never have been able to come back to see how Archer’s life had moved on without her.

“I know I have a lot of apologizing to do,” he said, lifting her by her hips to put her on her back again. “I’m not gonna skip my Cheerios anymore.”

Archer slipped down her body to kiss her mound, then her clit. Slipping his tongue into her, he hummed with pleasure as he tasted her.

Someone started pounding on the front door.

It was Nya’s turn to say, “Fuck!”

“Expecting someone?” he asked, propping his chin on her.

“No,” she said, happy to close her thighs around his ears for a second. But she sat up in a panic. “Oh, God. You don’t think it’s Levi, do you? His bedroom’s right under here.”

A smug look spread on his face as he sat up. “Oh, baby, wouldn’t that be a gift?”

He shifted to sit at the end of the bed, snatched up his jeans, and pulled them on. “Where are you going?” she asked, trying to catch his shoulders as he stood up, except he was too quick for her.

“To tell our neighbor to watch a movie and stop listening to the show.”

“Archer,” she said, as he went through the door.

He stopped to twist, his hand on the handle as he hung back into the room. “Stay fucking here, I’ll handle this.”

He disappeared and Nya stayed on her knees in the middle of the bed wondering what the fuck she should do. If it was Levi, there could be a fight, but he had to know that Archer had got one up on him already. Not because of her, but twice now in the hallways he’d been pinned to the wall and threatened.

If Levi was the spiteful sort, he might have called the cops, but they wouldn’t do much without witnesses to the assaults. Despite the noise she’d made while they were screwing, it wasn’t like she and Archer were having a party, so the cops wouldn’t care about that.

Ester might have come to visit, but the apartment was in darkness and she wanted her son and maybe-one-day daughter-in-law to reconcile—and the woman appreciated the value of good sex. So Nya didn’t think that Ester would interrupt them.

She continued to consider possibilities and went toward the door that hadn’t quite caught on its latch. Voices drifted to her ears from beyond the room.

“Where the fuck is Nya?” Tag exclaimed. Oh no, Nya thought, and her head fell against the door frame. Archer might have told her to stay here, but she couldn’t, not now. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, you fucking prick. Don’t you pick up your goddamn phone?”

Nya had only managed to pull on Archer’s tee shirt, but it was enough, she had to get out there and between the men.