Читать книгу The Best Of February 2016 - Catherine Mann - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTHE SKY WAS pewter and drizzling when Cesar parked his car outside the hospital. His phone buzzed again, coming up to twenty messages from his parents. Now his brother was on the trail.
Call me. I want to discuss options.
Cesar dismissed it and thumbed through the rest, marking them to trash.
He’d gone to the clinic with only an abrupt apology, but it had given him time to come to some decisions. On his return, he’d taken Diega aside and explained what had happened.
“We can’t marry before the paternity results are in. I’m sorry. Obviously I don’t remember doing it, but it’s within the realm of possibility that I slept with her. I have to go to London. See her and sort this out.”
The concept of having fathered a child was something he was holding at bay, finding it more than he could take in until the tests confirmed it. However, as much as he wanted to be suspicious of Sorcha’s claim, he couldn’t discount it. If it turned out he had a son, and he was already married to Diega...
Well, he didn’t know how he would react to being a father, but he knew in his gut he didn’t want to be married to another woman while he processed something like that.
Disturbingly, Diega hadn’t been terribly shocked. She’d tried to talk him out of going. “Querido, this isn’t a deal-breaker for me. I knew that day that you had had an affair with her. We don’t have to put off the wedding because of it.”
That had taken him aback. “You said I came to ask if our marriage was really what you wanted,” he said. “That I gave you the chance to back out and you didn’t have any doubts.”
That was why she was calling herself his fiancée even though the banquet and formal announcement had never happened. He hadn’t questioned her claim that he’d gone to her for a final, private affirmation that she wanted to move forward. Given all the conflict he’d been feeling in recent months, he had easily seen himself driving out to Diega’s home days before they locked themselves into this arrangement, secretly hoping she would call it off.
This sudden new information, that he had confessed to having an affair and had “begged her forgiveness” for it, didn’t ring as true.
“She was planning to stay until we married,” Diega said. “You didn’t want me finding out at some awkward moment in your office, having doubts about your fidelity. I said I would prefer she wasn’t lingering in our lives through our engagement and you left to terminate her so we could start our life together without her presence clouding things.”
None of that sounded like him, especially the groveling. While he hadn’t planned to sleep with anyone else once he and Diega were engaged, he hadn’t expected either of them would apologize for anything they’d done previous to their union. Why then, would he have felt such a burning need to go to her after sleeping with Sorcha? Since when did he run from any woman’s bed? Lingering and keeping things friendly, leaving on good terms, was his signature move.
If he had stayed with Sorcha, he would remember that day.
Sitting in the parked car, he pinched the bridge of his nose, reminding himself to stop trying to go back in time and change what had happened. He needed to deal with the reality he faced.
But what was that reality?
If Diega had been so offended by his affair with Sorcha, why hadn’t that shone through when they’d spoken of it today? She’d been trying to placate him, encouraging him to believe their wedding could go ahead.
“I understand you might have to take certain measures if the baby proves to be yours, but none of that has to affect plans that have been in the works for years.”
Her tone had been persuasive, which set off all his inner lie detectors.
He just didn’t see himself sleeping with Sorcha after three years of anticipating it, then firing her within hours. He wouldn’t do that to her. Over the years, when he had contemplated becoming sexually involved with her, he’d expected it would put an end to her employment with him, but via a lengthy affair that involved cruising on his yacht. Perhaps a visit to his place in Majorca.
Despite entertaining that fantasy more or less daily, he hadn’t wanted to lose her at work. She was the best damned PA he’d ever had. So he’d fought his attraction and kept his hands off her for three long, interminable years.
It had been a delicate balance.
And with that much sexual tension built up, it was no surprise he had eagerly pounced if she had proved agreeable, but it didn’t make this situation any easier to understand or navigate.
Especially when his phone was blowing up with messages from his family that he didn’t have to cancel his wedding.
Damn it, it was done. Perhaps too summarily, and with too much relief, but it was done.
Pocketing keys and phone, he left the car and strode single-mindedly into the hospital—and recoiled at the smell.
It was dinner hour. He’d had enough of that generic hospital-food aroma while recovering from his crash, but determination to get to the bottom of things propelled him through his repulsion to ask for Sorcha’s room number.
Seconds later he took the stairs in swift leaps, paced quickly down the hall, had to identify himself to a guard—what the hell was that?—and finally pushed through her door.
To find her sleeping.
The rush of adrenaline that had been coursing through his arteries since he’d taken the call from the hospital pooled into a full body burn. It wasn’t so much the angelic look of her that brought him up short, although that had always fascinated him when she’d fallen asleep on planes and curled up in break rooms. She wasn’t wearing makeup, which was an oddly vulnerable look for her, blond lashes and brows barely visible, lips a pale pink, translucent skin the color of freshly poured cream.
No, the intravenous tube attached to her wrist and the wheelchair next to the bed stunned him. A prickling uneasiness stung his back and gut and limbs.
He had visited a woman in hospital after childbirth exactly once: when his sister had been born. His mother had sat on the bed looking as flawless as she had on every other occasion of his life. His six-year-old brain hadn’t computed that the baby in the tiny bed on wheels beside her would turn into a child like himself. The room had smelled of flowers and he had not been allowed to take one of the colorful balloons suspended above them. They were just for looks. His parents had been as calmly satisfied as they were capable of being, having produced a third child as scheduled and without setbacks.
There was no baby in Sorcha’s clinically barren room, however. No flowers. No balloons.
His heart lurched. He stepped closer to read the labels on the IV bags, one saline, the other an antibiotic. A breast pump had been unpacked from its box and the instructions left on her food tray. She’d been given consommé and gelatin for dinner. Liquids after surgery, he distantly computed, tempted to brush that strand of blond hair from where it slashed in stark contrast across the shadow beneath her eye.
Sorcha had had a baby.
Despite all that had happened, his brain was still trying to absorb that much and couldn’t make sense of the rest. Paternity test? Him? A father?
Three years ago, she had landed her position as his PA with a claim that should have made his fathering her baby impossible.
He’d wanted her from the moment she’d entered his office wearing a pencil skirt and a fitted jacket, both moving like a caress on her slender curves as she walked toward him. She’d had just enough of her throat exposed to avoid being either prudish or inviting. Her blond hair had been held in a simple clip at her nape, her makeup subtly highlighting her pure features. Her smile had only faltered for one blink before it became pleasant and confident. She’d shaken his hand as though they were equals, smoothly pretending her tiny start of sexual awareness hadn’t happened.
He’d seen it, however. After a lifetime of always seeing it, he was far more surprised if a glimmer of attraction didn’t happen in a woman’s face. He was marginally surprised that Sorcha suppressed and set aside her response so well. In his experience, women were either disconcerted by his male energy and became flustered, or quickly tried to find an answering reaction in him by flirting and growing supple with their body language.
Adept at compartmentalizing his own rise of attraction, particularly in the workplace, he’d taken her hand and invited her to sit, ignoring the sizzle in his blood. But the fact it was there, and so strong, had him deciding against her before she’d bent her narrow waist and pressed her delightfully flared hips into the leather of the interview chair. As much as he preferred his surroundings to be aesthetically pleasing, he’d learned beautiful women could be a detriment in the office, creating politics and causing colleagues to behave badly.
He’d gone through the process of listening to her pitch, however, since he’d promised he would, and she had captured his attention with her wrap-up.
“Finally, I have a solution to a problem that has impacted your productivity for several years.”
“What problem is that?” he’d asked with forced patience, thinking drily, Dazzle me. He knew all the challenges he faced as he expanded from running his own chemical engineering firm into heading the Montero conglomerate. He’d already made plans for every single pothole in the road.
“You’ve been running through personal assistants at three and four a year,” she said matter-of-factly. “Stability at your base will be paramount as you pick up and run with all your added responsibilities. I’m prepared to offer you a five-year commitment and a promise that I won’t sleep with you.”
He’d leaned into the backrest of his executive chair to take a fresh assessment of the admittedly competent PA from his father’s London office whose brazenness was astonishing. He incinerated powerful men in seconds with this battle-ready stare, but if she was shaking under its laser heat, she was remarkably good at maintaining her demeanor.
“Please take that as a statement of my suitability, not a challenge,” she added with a tight smile.
“‘Excellent communication skills’ also means knowing what not to say, Ms. Kelly.” He flicked his we’re-done glance from her to the door and tapped his keyboard to bring up the next applicant’s file.
“Whether you actually slept with your PAs isn’t the issue. The perception that you do is an image problem and will persist if you hire one of my older, male competitors.” She thumbed toward the roomful of hopefuls beyond his office door. “Hire me, and I’ll actively put rumors to rest. Furthermore, I won’t throw myself at you or pitch a jealous fit at having to pamper the women who are in your life. I won’t hit on them, either. Or on any of your associates.”
She was well-informed. The previous male assistants he’d tried had done exactly that, offering “consolation” to the women he’d broken off with. The married women hadn’t been able to keep up with the demands of his travel schedule while the one matronly woman he’d tried had brought a lot of judgment with her. The rest had been a mix of what Sorcha had just described: women given to flirting or openly inviting him or his fellow executives into their beds, searching for a more comfortable situation than working for a living. Even if they hadn’t gone that far, they’d too often grown possessive and resentful of his dates.
As for sleeping with any of his PAs, it had happened once in his early years, before he had realized such mistakes could leave him with exactly what Sorcha had just called it: an image problem.
She hadn’t won him over that quickly, however.
“I might be inclined to accept your word, Ms. Kelly, if you hadn’t slept your way into being granted this interview.” Barton Angsley, the middle-aged CEO running the London office, had given her a very glowing reference and pressed hard for her to be considered for this promotion. Despite her solid qualifications, this was an enormous step up in salary and responsibility.
“I don’t sleep with anyone to advance my career, Señor Montero. I don’t have to,” she dismissed without batting an eye.
He had to admit she was solid under pressure.
“Angsley is taking a stress leave because he’s in the middle of an ugly divorce. Infidelity is usually the source of that kind of ugliness, Ms. Kelly. Did you threaten to give his wife the details? Is that why he’s so eager to send you to Spain?”
“I don’t talk about my employer, ever.” Her face became a haughty mask. “As evidenced by the fact you only found out about his divorce when he requested his leave and asked you to interview me. You’ll recall that he said they’d been in trouble for nearly a year. I was in the room when he was speaking to you or I wouldn’t repeat that much.”
Perhaps she’d covered up Angsley’s infidelity. Maybe that’s why he was so eager to recommend her. Maybe she’d covered his job. Cesar recalled a brief comment by his father, as they were discussing possible replacements for Angsley, that the man’s work had been exemplary the past few months, despite his personal issues.
Sorcha could be using that as a lever, but she didn’t seem prepared to throw her employer under a bus for any reason, even to advance herself.
He’d closed their interview with an assurance that he would give her application due consideration, which had been a lie. He’d had no intention of hiring her, but as her older, male competitors had failed to impress him, he’d found himself thinking about her. Sorcha was the kind of woman he wined and dined. He didn’t need the distraction of sexual attraction as he began taking on the role he’d been working toward all his life.
When the time came to make his final decision, however, he’d found himself placing a fresh call to Angsley. He’d learned she had not only rescued some important deadlines on Angsley’s last project, avoiding millions in overruns, but she’d also put in her notice once she realized Angsley was using her to cover his cheating.
A few minutes later, he’d found himself dialing her number. “I understand you’ve been asked to stay on to transition Angsley’s replacement, but are working out your notice anyway. Frankly, I would expect more loyalty from an employee seeking to climb our corporate ladder.”
A surprised pause, then she said, “Pay me what the position earns and I’d be happy to show his replacement how to do his job. Frankly, given the loyalty I have demonstrated, I’d expect not to be overlooked for a promotion just because I’m a woman.”
Astute, tough, competent, devoted. Beautiful.
“Five years, no sex,” he heard himself say.
“Not with you,” she confirmed.
“You’re underestimating your workload if you think you’ll have time for sex with anyone, Ms. Kelly. Be here Monday.”
So he found her attractive, he’d mentally scoffed. He knew how to keep his hands to himself. Nothing would happen between them.
* * *
A tickle on her cheek pulled Sorcha from sleep. She brushed at it, bumping against a warm hand that moved away as she opened her eyes.
Cesar.
A sensation of falling hit her, like the mattress was gone and she was falling, falling, falling into an abyss.
While his aqua eyes stayed on her, like he was falling with her as she plummeted, a bird of prey pursuing her, taking his time about snatching her out of the air, letting her feel the tension between temporary avoidance and anticipated capture.
She had expected, if she ever saw him again, that it would be a sweet dawn of sunlit warmth, angels singing and flowers opening. There was none of that. Oh, she was happy, so happy to see him well and strong and looking as fit and commanding as ever. She wanted to smile.
But this man was far too impactful for something so fairy-tale and romantic as merely “happy” feelings. He was a manifestation of a crash of thunder and a streak of lightning, his wide forehead and dark brows stern over those intense eyes that always met hers with such force. His cheeks wore his customary groomed stubble, framing an upper lip that was whimsically drawn and a thickly drawn lower one that had been a sensual delight to suck.
Sex. Oh, this man oozed sex.
She automatically closed her eyes, trying to fight the swell of attraction that lit in her nerves, firing through her system, but it had been far easier to control this response in those three years when she hadn’t known how he smelled and tasted. The pattern of hair on his chest flashed into her mind’s eye, arrowing a path down his sculpted abdomen to the turgid organ that had speared out shamelessly, thighs tense as he’d stood over her.
Then he’d covered her, powerful arms gathering her beneath his heat as he’d thrust deep, that erotic mouth making love to hers—
“Sorcha.” Even his voice made love to her all over again, suffusing her with remembered pleasure.
I’m not ready for this!
She looked through her lashes at him, trying to form some defenses against his effect while searching his expression for the languid, satisfied, tender man who’d kissed her before she’d snuggled against his nudity and fallen asleep.
She closed her eyes again, telling herself she’d fallen asleep in Valencia, had a long, fraught dream and was now waking to...
She opened her eyes to a gaze that had grown steely, absent of humor or warmth. His jaw was clenched. They weren’t even back to his customary good-morning, let’s-get-started, businesslike demeanor. This was the man who had dismissed the idea of hiring her at all before he’d even shaken her hand.
“Hello, Cesar,” she managed to say, voice husked by sleep and emotion. “It’s good to see you’ve recovered.”
“I assumed you expected the worst, given you quit before your contract was up.”
A strangled laugh cut her throat, but she was grateful to him for going on the attack. Nothing gave her the ire to fight like being accused of behaving with anything less than integrity.
“I gave you my reasons and you accepted them,” she said, reaching for the button to bring up her bed, then wincing as her abdomen protested. She fought not sliding into the footboard as the mattress rose behind her and used one hand to keep the blanket over her chest. “Do you really not remember that week?”
His expression flattened, like a visor had come down to disguise his thoughts and feelings. She had spent three years earning his trust and wasn’t used to being shut out like that. Not anymore.
“No. I don’t.” And he hated it. That much she could tell as she searched his expression.
She didn’t know if she was relieved or crushed. The idea that he might remember their intimacy and hadn’t bothered to call had tortured her at her lowest points. His not remembering exonerated him to some extent, but it told her the closeness she’d felt, the connection, was all in her mind. Her memories. As far as he was concerned, they’d never progressed past the incidental touch of fingertips when passing a pen back and forth.
And despite spending way too much time running through the million potential conversations she would have if she ever met him again, she didn’t know how to proceed. Especially when, in all of her imagined scenarios, she had at least washed her hair and worn real clothes.
“Are you recovered otherwise?” she asked.
“Completely. What was this reason you gave me for quitting?” he asked with brisk aggression, like his patience had been tested too long. “That you were pregnant?”
She flashed a glance upward. “How would that be possible?” He’d gotten her pregnant after she put in her notice.
“I’m no midwife, but it’s been eight months since my accident, not nine. You were dating that artist. Is it his?”
Three dates with the painter nearly two years ago, thanks very much to her work schedule, and he still thought it was a thing.
“I went into labor early.” She shifted to alleviate the pain in her torso. It was coming from his reaction, though, not her recent surgery. His lack of reaction. She’d always thought there was a hint of attraction on his side. He’d said that day that he’d always felt some, but maybe that had been a line.
This was too incredible, not just having to convince a man that he was a father, but that they had had the sex that conceived his son.
“I explained my reasons for quitting and then, um, we slept together. You really don’t remember that day?” she persisted.
He stood with his arms folded and his gaze never wavering, but revealed a barely perceptible flinch. “No.”
The way he was looking at her, like he was waiting for her to expound on the slept-together details made the pain squeezing her lungs rise to pinch her cheeks. A mix of indignation and agony and plain old shyness burned her alive.
She glanced at the clock, recalling that the nurse had said she’d wake her when Enrique needed to be fed, but that they wouldn’t let him go more than four hours. It had been three since he’d last been placed in the incubator.
“When I committed to five years, I didn’t know you’d be marrying before that.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, as I explained that day...” Oh, that day had been bittersweet, starting with their customary champagne toast to a project completed. She always loved that time. They so rarely relaxed together, but that was typically when they were both in good spirits. A real conversation about personal things might arise. She’d always felt close to him, then. Valued.
She cleared her throat.
“I realize one of the conditions of your taking over from your father was that you would marry the woman your parents chose for you. I just didn’t realize, when you hired me, how the timing would work. That you would get engaged before the five years of transitioning into the presidency were up.”
“So you gave notice because I was getting engaged. What did you think was going to happen between us, Sorcha?”
“Nothing!”
“And yet I’ve been named the father of your newborn. Keep talking.”
Pity he’d lost a week’s worth of memories instead of that habit of demanding his time not be wasted.
She dragged her gaze off his folded arms and the line of his shoulders. His nostrils were flared. He never lost his temper, but that contained anger was worse. She knew him. She knew with a roiling dread in her belly exactly how much he hated learning of any sort of perfidy. Keeping her pregnancy from him had been a massive act of self-preservation, but there was no way to protect herself now.
“Wives are different from girlfriends.” She licked her lips, aware that his sharp gaze followed the action. An internal flutter started up under his attention, but she ignored it. “I wanted to work for you, not her.”
“How were you working for her?”
“Little things.” She shrugged. “If she wanted tickets for the theater, she asked me to buy them.”
“That happened once! You bought them for me all the time.”
“Exactly. For you.”
He narrowed his eyes. “So when you told me in your interview that you would never become possessive, that was a lie?”
“I wasn’t being possessive,” she insisted. Okay, she’d been a little bit possessive. Maybe. “It wasn’t just buying the tickets. It meant I was expected to put that event into your schedule regardless of anything else you might have planned.”
“You rearranged my calendar a hundred times a day anyway. Did you need a raise for this extra responsibility?” That was pretty much what he’d said that day, right down to the facetious tone.
“Changing your timetable on her instruction is not a responsibility. It’s playing politics. She was the one being possessive, showing me that she had the power to direct me, which tells me she saw me as a threat. So I chose to remove myself.”
“Odd that she would feel threatened, when you, apparently, let our relationship blur into personal?”
“I didn’t sleep with you to get at her, if that’s what you’re suggesting! It just happened. Is that so hard to believe?”
“No,” he said with clipped firmness and a hint of self-condemnation.
Her question was supposed to be a knock back, but his response, and the way their gazes locked, kept them firmly in the center of the ring. She could feel him trying to dig past her defensiveness to the truth, trying to see exactly how their lovemaking had happened.
Naked and earthy and, in her case, complete abandonment to something that had been building for years.
Her layers of composure began falling away like petals off a rose. A fresh wave of heat rose from her chest, up her throat, into her cheeks. His gaze slid down, scanning like an X-ray, trying to see not through fabric, but through time. He was trying to remember what she looked like, nude and flushed with desire, then pink with recent climax and supreme satisfaction.
The night nurse came in, making them both jerk guiltily.
“Hello,” she said cheerily, unaware of the thick sexual tension. “Are you the father? I hope you have identification. The guard at the nursery door will need it. We have strict orders to be vigilant with your two sons.”
“Two?” Cesar snapped his head around.
Sorcha caught back a laugh.
“Just one,” she assured him. “She means Octavia and I. Our sons. The mix-up.”
His brows crashed together. “Yes. Explain that.”
“Talk while you walk.” The nurse brushed him aside so she could assist Sorcha from the bed. “No limo service this time. Dr. Reynolds wants you moving.”
Cesar stepped to her other side as she struggled off the edge of the bed.
He reached to flick her gown down her bare thighs before she could, telling her his gaze had been on her legs.
This was such a peculiar situation. She’d slept with him in her mind long before she’d done it in real life, yet the experience remained only in her mind. He didn’t share it.
But he brought her shaky grip to his arm to steady her as she stood, acting like intimacy between them was established. She licked her lips, stealing a wary look up at him.
His expression was hard and fierce, impossible to interpret, but when had he ever been easy to read? He was capable of charm, had a dry sense of humor and was incredibly quick to understand almost anything. This situation, however, defied understanding. No wonder he’d retreated to his most arrogantly remote demeanor.
“I was planning to be home when I delivered,” Sorcha explained. “But I went into labor early and the cord was in the wrong place. His blood supply would have been cut off if I delivered naturally.”
She didn’t have a choice about leaning on him. The nurse moved ahead to hold the door into the hall, leaving Sorcha to shuffle from the room by clinging to Cesar’s warmth, surrounded in the nostalgic scent of his aftershave.
“They did an emergency C-section and there was a mix-up. Octavia and I knew right away they’d handed us the wrong newborns, but no one believed us. Although...”
She eyed the guards—plural—at the nursery door. One for each baby.
“I guess they believe now that something happened. They’re running the DNA tests to confirm it.”
“I didn’t believe it when I came on shift,” the nurse said, tagging her card against the reader to let them into the nursery. “We’re all waiting on the results. A mix-up should be impossible.”
Sorcha glanced at Cesar to see his mouth tighten again. As the door opened, she held back to let Cesar go in first, asking, “Do you, um, want to see him?”
“Oh, yes,” he said darkly, flashing his passport at one of the guards. “If I have a son, I definitely want to see him.”
Octavia glanced up from where she was feeding Lorenzo as Cesar swept in. Sorcha only managed a weak, fleeting smile of greeting, too caught up in watching Cesar’s reaction to his first sight of Enrique.
Love him, she silently begged.
* * *
Cesar stared at the baby inside the dome, stirring and making noises like a fledgling bird. He flashed back again to the memory of his sister, after his mother had brought her home. He had a distinct memory of going in search of his mother to tell her “the baby is crying.”
“Yes, they do that,” she’d responded. “The nanny will take care of it.”
It. With a lifetime of observation behind him, Cesar knew how detached both his parents were from each other and their children. Their union had been a business decision, their conception of heirs a legacy project. On his mother’s side, titles and position had to be maintained. His father required sons to run the corporation while he moved into politics. Their daughter was a valuable asset they would leverage into the right position when it came along.
Cesar would swear on a stack of bibles that their dispassion hadn’t harmed him. When he’d gone to boarding school, there’d been no homesickness. He’d spoken to his parents exactly as often as he had while sleeping in his own bedroom. As an adult, there were never disagreements, only “further discussion.” There was absolutely nothing wrong with the way he’d been raised, or with his parents’ expectation that he would be equally practical in his choice of wife and life goals.
Those goals had included a type of payback to Diega’s family for stabilizing his situation when the espionage had happened. That mistake still haunted him, making him reluctant to accept he’d made another—one that would keep him from making good on a promise.
Was he a father? He found himself studying Sorcha as a mother. She awkwardly lowered herself into a rocking chair, sighing like she’d run a marathon. Her face was pale, attesting to her weakness, but she smiled as the nurse gathered up the fussing infant and brought him to her.
She greeted the boy with a sultry laugh that tightened Cesar’s abs and raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It was like hearing a song you’d first heard on a summer day, taking you back to a time when the weather was perfect and school was out and you had nothing to do for the afternoon.
“You poor thing,” she murmured, kissing her baby’s cheek, nuzzling him with the sort of affection one saw on nature shows, but that had never been present in his own childhood.
Her easy show of love affected him in a way he couldn’t even describe—not sexual, not intellectual. He was fascinated, not sad or happy, but something that teetered between the two emotions.
“Did you miss me? I missed you, too.” As her gaze came up, Cesar thought for a stunned moment she was speaking to him. “I named him Enrique,” she said, eyes bottomless, lips pink and shiny.
His middle name.
His equilibrium was further thrown off and his palms grew clammy. He wanted to clear his throat, but thought it would seem too revealing. He was suddenly aware of something his sister, the biologist, occasionally said in a dry, disparaging tone to their father. Emotions are called feelings because you feel them.
He shook his head, certain his father felt very little. His mother might show some warmth toward an old friend or pout over a favorite vase that toppled and broke, but his father never descended to sentimentality.
He was just like his father. Wasn’t he?
“Do you want to hold him?” Sorcha asked huskily.
“Don’t you have to feed him?” It was a reflexive response, a quick defense against revealing that he was suffering something he rarely experienced: a profound sense of inadequacy.
He didn’t know how to hold a baby. When he had thought about having children, it had always been a distant goal, a step in the process, something he would largely delegate to his wife and whatever staff she hired.
To take care of it.
He might as well have slapped Sorcha. She paled and set her chin. “Would you turn around, please?” she asked stiffly.
Because she needed to bare her breast.
If they’d slept together, he’d already seen them, hadn’t he?
He turned away, rattled.
He searched his mind for a confirmation of the vision he had conjured thousands of times, when he’d snuck a lecherous peek at her chest. A picture manifested in his mind’s eye of creamy swells and taut pink nipples the same shade as her lips. Was that really what she looked like? Or was it just his same detailed fantasy?
He wanted to look, damn it! He wanted to have something, anything, some sign of hope that the lost week was coming back to him. He was a strong, healthy, powerful man who relied on himself. To have his own mind let him down... It was the most gallingly helpless feeling he’d ever experienced. And the doctors didn’t expect he’d ever retrieve those memories.
And that thought might have been tolerable if it had been an ordinary week, but no. He had fathered a child during that blackout.
The other mother, Octavia, came to her feet, faltered briefly, then faced them.
“I should tell you... My husband told me that his cousin switched the baby tags during the births. There’s...” She shrugged, distress moving over her pretty face as she looked to Sorcha before she glanced back at Cesar with apology. “Jealousy, I guess. Rivalry. The police are involved. I’m sure you’ll be asked to make statements. I’m so sorry.”
Sorcha, being Sorcha, offered an assurance that it wasn’t Octavia’s fault.
Cesar couldn’t believe what a soft touch she was. Suppose Enrique had gone home with the wrong mother? His child would have been raised by strangers.
It was a chilling thought, one that disconcerted him because deep fury followed it. No one was allowed to steal from him and the idea he might have lost something as precious as his son...
Was Enrique his son?
Was he really wishing it to be true? A tide of...something was rising in him.
Octavia moved to tuck her baby into his bed, saying a sleepy good-night as she shuffled out, hand firm on her nurse’s arm.
Oddly drawn, Cesar went to the other baby and stared at him, not sure what he was looking for. Babies all looked the same, didn’t they?
He wanted another look at the boy Sorcha held. Would he find something of himself in his features? She’d draped a blanket over her shoulder, modestly shielding herself as she nursed.
“When do the DNA results come?” he asked her.
The nurse who had remained in the room looked up from her workstation. “They’ve rushed the tests. Early next week, we hope.”
Cesar clashed his gaze into Sorcha’s unreadable one.
He wouldn’t believe he’d fathered her baby until the test confirmed it, but he’d never known Sorcha to lie. Not about important things. Not when it came to her family.
The only time she had blown off an afternoon of work, her young niece had gone missing for a few hours. The seven-year-old had climbed onto a wrong bus. Sorcha had been a pale, shaking mess until the little girl had called home from a village two hours from her own.
It had been a disturbing few hours, watching his normally reliable PA fall apart. He hadn’t liked it. Not because she’d been inconsolable. She hadn’t. She’d gone into a near catatonic state, deeply withdrawn, white as a ghost, only looking at him to ask, “What if...?” He hadn’t had answers and he’d been powerless to resolve the issue. He typically mollified women with gifts and compliments and sexual pleasure. The best he’d been able to do was attempt to fly her home.
They’d received the call that the girl was safe before they’d reached the airstrip. Sorcha had hugged him, only then crying a few choked tears, then quickly apologizing and mopping up. Within twenty minutes, they’d been back to normal, working productively, pretending the embrace hadn’t happened, but he’d never forgotten the intensity of her emotions.
Or the feel of her pressed to his front, her shoulder so small under his hand, her blue jacket thin enough he’d felt the suppleness of her back. She didn’t wear perfume. Her scent was subtle, like those complex notes he used to try to identify with his father’s vintner. Crushed flower petals? A hint of anise?
His mind had turned to sex in that moment of holding her, not that making love to her was so very far from his private bank of fantasies from the moment he saw her in the morning to when he fell asleep at night. From her interview onward, he had accepted that he wanted her and couldn’t have her, so he’d briefly returned her embrace, then set her away.
That time.
But not the next time he’d held her, apparently.
He sighed impatiently, wanting to believe that if Sorcha had put his name down as the baby’s father for any reason beyond the truth, it was a damned good one. Not just money, either, no matter the fortune he had. Because if it was his fortune she was after, she wouldn’t have kept the baby a secret right up until the moment he was about to marry someone else.
Why then...?
“Why,” he said aloud, moving over to her and switching to Valencian so they could speak with some privacy. “If I’m his father, why did I find out like this? Why didn’t you say something sooner? Why not stay and force me to face it? Why not ask me for support?”
She’d always been good under pressure, rarely revealing her thoughts or feelings, but a vulnerable anger flashed across her expression.
“I tried to see you. I asked your father a dozen times, went to the hospital, but I wasn’t allowed up.” Her face hardened. “It was a difficult time for your family and you were in very bad shape. I wanted to be compassionate about that. When I heard you’d lost your memory...” She searched his gaze as though still having trouble believing it.
So did he. He flinched, angered all over again at his own fallibility. He turned away.
“The circumstances weren’t ideal,” she continued behind him. “You were engaged to Diega even if it wasn’t official—” She sighed. “We talked a lot that day and you confided your reservations about marrying. I thought it meant you were deciding against going through with it or I never would have...”
He glanced back to see her dip her head, smoothing her brow with a troubled finger.
He strained his brain, searching for what he might have said to her. Yes, he’d had reservations about his engagement from the time he was twenty and his mother identified Diega as a suitable future wife, but his parents had a perfectly civil, successful arrangement. This was how his family conducted themselves. You didn’t achieve long-term professional success by chasing “love.” You built a satisfying environment by partnering with people of similar minds and means. He had resolved himself to doing his part in expanding the family’s standing and fortune.
And doing right by Diega’s family.
So he had ignored the feeling in the pit of his gut and approved the plan to engage himself when his mother had pressed him.
Privately he acknowledged that in those weeks leading up to the party, he had begun to feel like the walls were closing in. He wasn’t sure why he would have opened up to Sorcha about it, though. Postcoital lowered defenses or not, that was a more personal thing than he would typically confide even to her.
“I wanted to tell you first, obviously,” she said with a despairing sigh. “But I couldn’t get in to see you. What was my alternative? Tell your father? He would have thought, at best, that I’d done this on purpose. I didn’t, Cesar. We used a condom. It failed. I can see you barely believe me. Your father wouldn’t have, either.” She looked away, cheekbones flushed with indignation while sadness tugged at the corners of her pretty mouth.
What had it felt like to kiss her? As good as he’d always imagined?
His hand closed into a fist and a fresh wave of feeling cheated gripped him.
“I didn’t expect you could believe me, if the memory was gone. In every scenario, when I imagined convincing you or anyone else that Enrique was yours, I saw myself being paid off. I don’t want your money.” Her eyes met his, as steady and truthful as he’d ever seen her. “The only reason I gave your name on the forms here was because it was an emergency. If I hadn’t made it through the surgery, I didn’t want my mother burdened with the cost of raising Enrique. At that point, yes, I would hope you would open your wallet.”
A chill moved through him at her saying “hadn’t made it through.” He brushed aside the thought of such a disturbing outcome and latched on to her other shocking admission. “So you never would have told me?”
She looked down, chewing the inside of her lip. “Never is a long time.” Her gaze flicked up uncertainly. “Enrique might have had questions. I was going to wait and see.”
He was flabbergasted.
He reminded himself the boy might not be his, but damn it, he’d spent three years entrusting Sorcha with confidential information, decisions that affected stock prices, personal opinions that he hadn’t shared with anyone else... Aside from leaving him when he’d been at his lowest point, she’d never let him down. From their first meeting, she’d been disarmingly frank, in fact.
So had he. She knew exactly how he felt about people who lied and kept secrets and messed with his scrupulously ordered life.
“I’m not ‘waiting to see,’” he growled, aware that despite a lack of hard evidence he did believe her. “I called off my wedding.”
She took that in with a stunned expression, then recovered with a shaken little shrug. “Well, I didn’t ask you to. I don’t have designs on you myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She made the claim firmly enough, but her lashes trembled as she flicked another look at him.
Like she was trying not to betray that, on some level, she’d entertained the idea.
That didn’t surprise him. He was a rich, titled, healthy man. All women took his measure and often made a play. According to his sister, it was basic biology. He had the kind of power and resources that appealed to fertile women looking for a mate to provide for her young.
And that was what Sorcha ought to expect if he was indeed the father of her child.
“Really,” he said skeptically, folding his arms, taken aback, but when had Sorcha not surprised him?
“Really,” she affirmed. “If you want to make provisions for your son, that’s your choice, but I will proceed as if I’ll be supporting Enrique alone.”
Of course he would support his child. That wasn’t even something he had to consciously decide, it was such a no-brainer. What kind of man failed to provide the basics of life to his offspring?
The natural progression of that thought—how he would provide for Enrique—was a more complex decision he was holding off contemplating.
All his life, he’d had a perfect defense against ambitious women: he was tied to an arranged marriage of his parents’ choosing. Now, for the first time in his life, he was free of that encumbrance, yet morally bound to at least consider marriage to Sorcha.
If Enrique was his.
That odd rush of longing for the boy to be his rose again, stronger this time, bunching his muscles with anticipation as though he could physically fight for the outcome he wanted.
“I wasn’t trying to trap you that day,” Sorcha continued, brow wrinkling. “We had some champagne and talked about personal things. I felt—” She flushed and swallowed, but forced her chin up to meet his gaze with defiance. “I felt like we were friends. That’s why I slept with you.” Her expression darkened to one of hurt and betrayal. “But when I came to the hospital to see you, Diega told me you called me your last hurrah.”
Sorcha’s gaze took a scathing sweep that sliced across him. Slash, slash, slash, like Zorro’s sword dissecting him into pieces.
“She said I had become a challenge. A conquest—her word—that you couldn’t stand to let get away. I’ve been so comforted all these months, Cesar, knowing you had a good laugh at my expense right before you nearly died.”
