Evenings in Charming could be stifling, even if the air was cool. Time slowed down then, stretching like cigarette smoke and lasting as if the world didn’t know what to do with the next day. The club would quiet down, the lights would slowly fade, conversations would become more and more superficial. And that’s when you felt it the most his presence. His gaze. That silence that meant more than a thousand words.

Clay sat across from you, seemingly absorbed in something a cigarette, a glass of bourbon, some nonsense from the bar. But he would look every now and then. With that gaze of his, full of a silent decision he hadn’t yet uttered. For days he’d been walking as if on stilettos, though his steps were as heavy as ever. But his gestures had changed.

They were quieter. More intimate. You noticed it for the first time when he passed you in the kitchen and his hand slid down your stomach. Not quickly, not reflexively. Smoothly, deliberately. As if he’d left something there more than warmth. As if there was a question in that touch. A dream. He did it more often from then on. Sometimes at night, when you were lying close and he thought you were asleep his hand would wander there. Not to your hip. Not lower. Just to your stomach. A warm, rough, heavy hand that held you like something precious.

As if his own body was searching for an answer. He didn’t speak. Because Clay didn’t talk about feelings. He showed them raw, hard, quiet. He wasn’t a man who asked. But his gestures were clear, almost intrusive in their gentleness. When you sat together on the couch, without a word, his hand wouldn’t leave yours. When you leaned against the kitchen counter, he’d come too quietly, too close, and again the same movement of his hand, the same weight of silence. You began to feel that every time he came closer, it wasn’t just longing, not just passion. It was something more. A need that didn’t yet have a name.

Tig had joked once that Clay looked like he wanted to plant something, not just plow a field. Everyone laughed. Clay didn’t. He smiled half heartedly, looked away, and inhaled like someone who had just been caught in something too real. But it was his eyes that spoke the most when Jax entered the room.

Your son. The son of John Teller the man you had once loved, whose loss had been the beginning of the end of everything.

Jax had been your child from that life. Clay had raised him, treated him like his own. But there was that thin, bitter layer in his eyes the knowledge that they were not of the same blood. Teller's blood. John's legacy. And not his.

Then Clay turned to you. He didn't say anything. But he ran his hand over your shoulder, then down again to your stomach. And that hand stayed there. Strong. Quiet. Domineering. As if he wanted to instill something with just a touch. As if he was saying, "With you. With me. My way." There was no question in his gaze. There was desire.

A simple, masculine desire to leave something behind him beyond burnt asphalt and dead enemies.

He wanted an heir. Of Morrow blood. Yours and his. Only yours.