“Can we finish this tomorrow? I’m beat.” He turns for the bedroom without waiting for my answer, then stops halfway there. “What time do we need to leave?” I frown, and his gaze flicks down to my belly. “Don’t we have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”

And suddenly, I realize why he hasn’t slept, why he busted his ass to make it back tonight instead of stringing his hammock between two trees. So he could be here for my doctor’s appointment. The one that, thanks to the eight inches of snow, has been rescheduled. The office left a message on my cell this morning.

“It’s moved to next week.”

He nods and turns for the bedroom, dropping the towel on the rack on his way out of the room, leaving me alone—yet again—with more questions than answers.

The first thing I think when I open my eyes is Paul. He’s tangled in the covers beside me, his breathing deep and even. He didn’t stir when I crawled in beside him, at some time just past one, which could have been thirty minutes or three hours ago. I feel around on the nightstand for my phone, check the time. 3:34 a.m. A sliver of a milky moon lights up the glass of the window.

I push back the covers and slide out of bed.

It’s not the thought of Paul that woke me, actually, but two little words that pressed up from somewhere deep, creeping through my subconscious to poke me awake. Extenuating circumstances. Paul used those words to explain away the things I don’t understand, secrets from his past he tends to keep locked up tight. In his head, on his laptop, behind the three hundred pounds of solid steel bolted to the wall in his study.

The safe was the one place that I didn’t look, a place I didn’t even think about looking. Paul’s mention of it was too hasty when he left, and so insulting I’d shoved it to the back of my mind. If it weren’t for his emergency chase after Jax, I’d never know the code. Whatever secrets Paul might be harboring, he’d stash them there, the only private place in this palatial home, stowed away behind a five-digit combination lock.

I slink down the stairs in my nightgown, not bothering to remember the code Paul rattled off on his way out the door. Not since he followed it up by telling me where he wrote the combination, on the inside flap of the Le Corbusier. The book Paul once told me he comes to regularly for inspiration.

“‘Mass. Surface. Plan,’” Paul had quoted, flipping proudly through the pages, and I nodded like it made any sort of sense. “‘The house is a machine for living in.’”