Unmatched Wife: Not His To Claim Anymore novel Chapter 161

Chapter 161

Chapter 161

RIVERA

“That was good thinking,” she said.

“I know.” He settled back against her with the satisfactory air of someone who’d completed a necessary check and found things in order. “Are we going home today?”

“Not today,” I said, from my side of the table. “Maybe in a few days. We have some things to do first.”

Louis accepted this with the equanimity of a child who’d learned that grown–up schedules were frequently complicated and resistant to his preferences. “Are the things dangerous?”

“Some of them might be a little bit,” I said. “But we’re being very careful.“!

“Is that why there are men outside walking around the garden?”

“Yes,”

“I thought so.” He looked at the Ankylosaurus in his hand. “Can we have eggs? The ones Mummy makes with the cheese inside?

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I looked at Bianca.

She was already shifting him off her lap with the smooth efficiency of someone transitioning from comfort to function, standing up and moving toward the refrigerator. “Go wash your hands,” she said to Louis. “And put the night watch on the table so they can watch while you eat.”

“They like watching me eat,” Louis confirmed, and went to wash his hands.

I watched Bianca move around the unfamiliar kitchen–opening the refrigerator, finding the eggs, checking the pan situation with the particular assessing look she gave any cooking surface she hadn’t used before. She found a pan she considered adequate and set it on the burner.

She looked tired. That was the thing I kept coming back to when I looked at her. Not just the shadows under her eyes but something in the way she moved, a slight effortfulness that wasn’t usually there. The night in the car, the weight of the decision she’d made, the weeks of everything building to this point–it was sitting on her in a way that was visible if you knew what to

look for.

I made a note to make sure she ate something and rested if there was any window at all before tonight.

Louis came back with clean hands and arranged the night watch on the table with military precision, then climbed onto his chair and watched the egg preparation with the focused interest of someone who’d been promised a specific dish and intended to verify it was being executed correctly.

“You’re putting cheese in at the right time,” he observed.

“I know how to make your eggs,” she said, without turning from the stove.

“I know you know. I’m just watching.” He picked up the Triceratops. “Dad, did you eat?”

“Not yet.”

“You should eat,” he said, with the authority of someone who’d heard this advice delivered to others and had decided it applied universally. “You look tired too. Both of you look tired. Everyone is tired.”

“Everyone is a little tired,” I agreed. “We’re all going to feel better after breakfast ”

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“That’s what you say every morning,” Louis said.

“And every morning I’m right.”

He considered this. “That’s true,” he admitted.

Bianca brought two plates to the table, then went back for the third. She sat down and we ate together, the three of us, in the small kitchen of the safe house with the morning light slowly improving outside the window and the sounds of Klaus’s security team moving in the background.

Louis talked about the night watch and their patrol formation strategies and a theory he’d developed about which dinosaurs would make the best guards in different weather conditions. Bianca listened and responded at the right moments and asked the questions that made his theories more elaborate. I drank my coffee and watched them and let myself be glad, just for these few minutes, that she was here. That she’d come back. That this was what the table looked like with all three of us at it.

She’d sat outside Matthew’s house and made the call she could live with and driven back.

She was here.

I caught her eye across the table at one point, and she looked at me with the steady, tired gaze of someone who was holding things together through the morning.

I nodded slightly. She nodded back.

After breakfast, while Louis was occupied with the dinosaurs and a complex scenario that apparently involved the safe house being a prehistoric island, Bianca and I stood at the kitchen counter with second coffees and she said, quietly, “I want to look at Roy’s anchor documentation before the Klaus briefing.”

“I’ll get it.” I paused. “Are you okay?”

She looked at her coffee. “I’m functioning.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.” She looked house and seeing M still in it. And th

“Klaus

“I’m sad about last night. Not the decision–the decision was right. But sitting outside that

stopped. “He’s still in it. Whatever she’s doing to him, whatever she’s holding over him, he’s

more complicated than it would have been if I’d been able to talk to him.”

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