Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 142

Chapter 142

Jaxon

I know within thirty seconds of walking through the front door of the Woolf estate. I’m a wolf. I can’t not know,

Skye carries Nicolai’s scent differently-not the layering that happens from proximity and shared space, not the. ambient mixing of two people in the same house. Deeper than that. The specific intermixing that happens when people have been fully intimate, repeatedly, over time. The kind of scent signature that means something has changed categorically, not just incrementally.

I know, because despite the distance I created between us, Skye and I were still intimate. Sex in the name duty, of creating an heir, because I could never let myself admit it was so much more. So I know, because she carries his scent the way she used to carry mine.

And Nicolai-His behavior has always been protective. Always contained that particular quality of a man who has made a decision about what matters to him and arranged everything else around it.

But something is quieter now. More settled. The possession that doesn’t need to announce itself because it’s not for show. It’s just true.

He passes Skye in the kitchen doorway and his hand finds the small of her back. Not deliberately. Just-finds it. The way your hand finds something it’s been reaching for long enough that reaching has become reflex.

And she leans into it. Barely perceptibly. But she does. Neither of them marks it as significant because to them it isn’t. It’s just what happens now.

I register all of it. I make myself register it without reacting.

This is the discipline I’ve been building since I drove away from the estate and sat in my car for twenty minutes in the dark: the muscle memory of watching my own face. Of knowing something and not letting the knowing run through me and out the other side where it can do damage.

But I also know myself well enough to recognize that balance teeters on the edge of a knife. So I pick up my son without a word and walk away before words I’ll regret leave my mouth.

I hold Benji and point at something in the garden visible through the window. “Bird,” I tell him.

He regards the window with a serious expression, like he’s hanging on every word.

“Your grandmother had birds at her pack,” I say, which is not true but he doesn’t know that. “Maybe we’ll take you to visit.”

Nicolai’s eyes find me from across the room. I don’t look away. Don’t make it competitive. Just meet the gaze and return it evenly. He’s assessing. Checking whether I’m managing or actually managed.

Skye’s expression when she watches me with Benji is warm. Genuinely warm. Glad.

That’s what I let myself have. I’m good with my son. That’s real. Whatever else is complicated, that much is real and certain and mine.

I focus on enjoying my time with my son until his eyelids drop and I’m forced to put him down for a nap. Being the coward I am, I’d rather hide in the nursery watching Benji sleep. Instead, I force my feet to carry me to the sitting room where Skye had been before I’d come upstairs.

Wordlessly, I take a seat across from her. Nicolai is in the doorway but not in the room-present enough to hear, removed enough to give us space. I still don’t trust myself to speak so I just sit quietly.

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“We talked about your proposal,” Skye announces out of the blue.

It’s a good space. I don’t say so.

I stand in the largest room when he’s gone back to the main house and I sit down on the edge of the bed and I allow myself, completely privately and completely alone, to fall apart.

Not dramatically. Jaxon Vale doesn’t do dramatic collapses. He does the quiet kind.

The kind where you sit on the edge of a bed in your son’s home-in a room in the estate of the man who is with your wife, your ex-wife, the woman you finally understood you loved approximately six months too late-and you let the shape of it be exactly what it is.

This is your life now. These are the terms you earned. You have no one to blame for any of it except yourself.

You could have been the person who knew what he had. Could have chosen, three years ago, to become the man who put his hand on her back and felt her lean into it. Could have decided that she was worth being afraid for, worth the vulnerability of loving her back.

You decided otherwise. And so you sit on the edge of a bed in the west wing of Nicolai Woolf’s estate and you let yourself break.

And then you pull your shit together and be the man your son needs.

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