She blinked tiredly. “For the birth certificate?”
He laughed. “No, just because I’m curious.”
She swallowed. “We didn’t really pick a name yet.” But she remembered James Tiberius Kirk. There were some times Dom could be so much fun, so loving, that she knew this war had to be god-awful to keep him away from his son’s birth.
The doctor placed her little boy, her little king, in her arms, and the tears that fell this time were happy tears. “Look at him, Mom.” But she wished she was saying that to Dom. She should be saying, “Look at your son.”
But they were at war. And he was needed.
Still, the sting of giving birth to their child alone caused tears to prick her eyelids.
“He’s beautiful.” Her mom kissed her cheek. “But you’re tired.”
“Have you heard from Sally?”
“Not a peep.”
“Okay.”
The doctor walked to the head of her bed. “The nurses need to take your son to be cleaned up and examined. You can have him back in an hour or so.”
“You’re taking him?” She hadn’t been told this protocol, but it just didn’t seem right to hand over the future king to people who were essentially strangers.
The doctor laughed and pointed outside the delivery room doors where her security detail stood guard. “Don’t worry. He’s already been assigned security. He might be leaving your sight but he won’t be leaving the royal family’s sight.”
Her mom took the future king from her arms. “Why don’t you go to sleep, honey?”
She said, “Okay,” and felt herself drifting off as her mom handed her little boy to the doctor.
When she woke forty minutes later, she took off the ugly hospital gown they’d insisted she give birth in, and with her mom’s help put on a pretty nightgown. She prayed Xaviera’s war didn’t last long, and also knew that when he could Dom would slip out and see his son. She wanted him to see she’d done okay. That she was fine. She was being the stiff-upper-lip princess she needed to be in this difficult time.
Nurses brought her baby back almost exactly an hour after he’d been taken away. The royal pediatrician came in and told her that her son was in good health, but he was small, so a few precautions would be taken.
The pediatrician returned the next morning and gave her the same report. She squeezed her hands together nervously. With her mom there, security outside her door and very attentive nurses, she shouldn’t feel alone, but she did. They wouldn’t let her see a newspaper so she knew whatever was going on had to be terrible.
She wondered how safe the war room was—how safe the palace was? The sheikh had barrels of money, and money bought weapons and soldiers. She knew very little about Xaviera’s army and worried that Dom would have to bomb his own ports.
The next day she noticed security outside her room had been doubled. That’s when it dawned on her that she hadn’t seen any press. When she got out of bed and looked out her window, the world looked calm. Peaceful. Knowing that everybody in the kingdom was waiting for this baby, it seemed odd that the press wasn’t climbing the walls, trying to get pictures.
She asked her mom about it when she arrived for a visit and her mom said the baby’s birth hadn’t been announced.
She gave Ginny a weak smile. “If anyone knew he’d already been born, he would be a target. The king told Sally he believes it’s for the best that this news not yet hit the press.”
She swallowed, but her fears mounted. “So things are bad?”
“Actually, things aren’t bad at all. The way I understand it, the whole mess involves one port and some hostages. Which is why Sally thinks the king believes it’s so important that we protect the baby. He would be the kind of leverage the sheikh needs to get himself out of this mess.”
“So it’s a standoff?”
“According to Sally, it’s hours of drinking coffee and waiting.”
Incredulous, Ginny gaped at her mom. “They’re waiting, but Dom hasn’t been able to get away to see me...to see his son?”
“Honey, I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this, but I could tell you were worried and it’s not right for you to worry.”
She fell back on her bed. “No. It’s better for me to feel like a complete idiot.”
Her mom fluffed her pillow. “You’re not an idiot. Anybody would have worried.”
“That’s not the part that makes me feel like an idiot. I’ve been sitting here for three days, waiting for my husband, who apparently doesn’t care to show up.”
“He’s dedicated.”
“So is the king, but he’s talked to Sally, who’s gotten messages to you.”
“Have you checked your cell phone? Maybe he’s tried to call?”
She gasped. “I never thought to take it. I was in so much pain I just left the apartment.”
Her mom pulled out her phone. “I’ll call security and have someone bring it over.”
That brightened her spirits for about an hour. But when the cell phone arrived and there were no calls, they sank like a rock.
“How could he not care?”
Rose busily, nervously, tucked the covers around her. “I’m sure he cares.”
“No, Mom. He doesn’t.” And it took something this extreme to finally, finally get that through Ginny’s head. Her husband did not love her. He probably didn’t really love their child. He most certainly wasn’t curious about their child, who had been born early and who could have had complications.
But a war came first—
Didn’t it?
Not when the war wasn’t really a war. When there were stretches of time and waiting. When her husband wasn’t even king yet. When there was a king who should be doing the decision making but he had time to call one of his staff—not even a family member.
She got out of bed. “Help me pack my bag.”
“Ginny, you can’t go home yet! You just had a baby.”
“My friend, Ellen, had a difficult birth and was home in forty-eight hours.”
“But the baby—”
“Is fine. You heard the pediatrician this morning. He’s gained the two ounces he needed to put him over five pounds.” She grabbed her suitcase and tossed it to the bed. “If he’d been full-term he probably would have weighed eight pounds.”
Her mom put her hand over Ginny’s to stop her from opening her suitcase. “You cannot leave.”
“The hell I can’t. And let them try to stop me from taking my own child.” She motioned around the room. “As long as I take the thirty bodyguards, I’m fine.”
Rose grabbed her cell phone and hit a speed-dial number.
Ginny snatched her phone out of her mother’s hands and disconnected it. “What are you doing? Tattling on me to Sally?”
“Ginny, you can’t just leave.”
“Mom, this isn’t about Xaviera or my baby someday being a king. This is about me knowing that if I don’t get out of this country with my baby, I’m going to be stuck here forever with a guy who doesn’t love me and a king who thinks he’s God.” She tossed her mom’s cell phone to the bed and took her hands. “I have a baby to protect. I’ll be damned if my child will grow up to be a man so stuck to his duties that he can’t even see his own babies born or love his wife.”
She took a long breath and stared at her suitcase. “To hell with this junk! I didn’t want these clothes in the first place.”
She poked her head out the door and motioned for the two bodyguards to come inside. “I want a helicopter on the roof of this hospital in five minutes. Then I want flown to the nearest safe airport and one of the royal jets waiting for me there.” She sucked in a breath. “I’m going home.”
* * *
The buzz of the king’s cell phone had all heads in the war room turning in his direction. Cell phones had been banned. Too many opportunities for picture taking, voice recordings and just plain dissemination of their plans. In fact, no one but the king had left these quarters.
They
slept on cots in a barracks-like room, ate food that was made in the attached kitchen and hadn’t had contact with the outside world except through the video feed they stared at.
He missed Ginny. More to the point, he worried about Ginny. Something had been wrong the night they came here and he just wanted to fix it. But he knew he couldn’t, so maybe it was better that he spend three days cut off from her so he didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep.
His father walked over to where Dom sat in front of a computer, staring at the feed of the port, feed that hadn’t changed in twenty-four hours.
His father sat. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“Undoubtedly, trying to figure out how to distance themselves from the sheikh since he seems to have deserted them.”
“Should we give them a chance to surrender?”
He caught his father’s gaze. There was a look in his eye that told Dom this was a test. A real-life hostage crisis for sure, but a chance for his father to test him.
“I’d say we offer them generously reduced prison terms for surrender and testimony against the sheikh, and go after the sheikh with both barrels.”
“You want to kill him?”
“I’d rather arrest him and try him for this. I think making him look like a common criminal rather than a leader who’d started a war he couldn’t finish sends a stronger message to the world.”
His dad laughed unexpectedly. “I agree.” He bowed, shocking Dominic. “Now what are you going to use to negotiate terms?”
He pointed at his father’s cell phone. “This might be appropriate. Except I think we should get hostage negotiators from our police to do that. Once again making it look more like a criminal act that a military one.”
“Agree again.”
Dom called Xaviera’s police commissioner and within the hour the rebels had surrendered, all hostages safe. The sheikh was in hiding, but he was too accustomed to luxury to stay underground for long. Dominic had every confidence they would find him, and when they did, he would stand trial.
The fifty military and security personnel in the war room cheered for joy when they received the call that all rebels were safely in jail.
But Dominic didn’t want to stay around for the party. He might not be able to love Ginny, but she was pregnant with his child and not feeling well. He needed to get back to her.
He tapped his dad’s shoulder. “I’m going to get going.”
“Tired?”
“And I need a shower but I need to see Ginny.”
As Dom turned to walk away, his dad stopped him. “Dom, there are a few things you need to know.”
Expecting more details or facts about their problem, he faced his dad again.
“Ginny has gone home.”
“What? Of course, she’s home. She’s in the apartment.”
“No. She’s gone back to Texas.” He shrugged. “Some women can’t handle war. She got a helicopter to take her to a safe airport this morning and took a jet back to her old hometown.”
He gaped at his dad. “She’s never mentioned wanting to leave before. She was committed—”
“Like I said, some women can’t handle war. We’ve never been at war when she was with us.”
“This is absurd. This was hardly a war. It was an ill-conceived attempt to take over our country by a guy who we clearly gave too much credit to.”
“She didn’t know that.”
“How could she not know that! It’s been all over the papers!”
“We weren’t letting her see the papers.”
“What! Why?”
“Because she had the baby the first day we were in here.”
This time, Dom fell to a chair in disbelief. Absolutely positive he had not heard right, he looked up at his dad. “She had the baby?”
“Yes.”
His kept his voice deceptively calm as he said, “And you didn’t think to tell me.”
“Duty comes before family.”
Anger coursed through him. “But I notice you had your phone.”
“I did.”
“You talked to staff.”
“Quite often. I had to keep track of the baby. Because he was born too soon, he was small. They monitored him. I made decisions.”
The anger in Dom’s blood went from blue to white hot. “You made decisions.”
“You were at war. And duty comes before family.”
Dominic bounced from his chair and punched his father in the mouth so hard the king flew into the wall behind him.
Fifty military men and ten bodyguards drew their weapons.
His dad burst out laughing. He waved his hands at the military and bodyguards. “Stand down.”
But nobody dropped his weapon.
Not giving a damn about the sixty-plus guns trained on him Domini roared, “You think this is funny!”
“No. I think it’s about time.”
He grabbed his father’s collar and yanked him off the floor.
“Dominic, you’re the one who’s always said duty comes before family.”
“So you kept my baby from me!”
“I was showing you that what you were doing with your life was wrong. What you thought you wanted didn’t work.” He calmly held Dom’s gaze even as Dom tightened his hold on his collar. “I’d tried hundreds of things over the years to get you to see that you couldn’t live the life you had all planned out. I thought Ginny would break you. When she couldn’t and the sheikh took our port and then Ginny went into labor, I saw a golden opportunity.”
Dominic cursed and squeezed his eyes shut.
“I loved my wife, your mother. And I was neglectful of my duties but I never dropped them the way you were so sure I had. All those months, we were in private negotiations, trying to avoid a confrontation with the pirates, trying to keep from going to war. Because of your mother’s death, they did get a few extra weeks. But in the end, I didn’t attack until I knew it was the right thing to do. Loving somebody didn’t make me weak. Your mother’s love made me strong. And you’re a fool if you think you can do this alone.”
“So you took my baby from me, made Ginny go through labor and childbirth alone.”
“For years I’d been talking to you and for years you’ve ignored me, treating me like somebody who only deserved respect because I had a title. I had to do something drastic or know you would ruin your life.”
He released his dad as if he were poison he didn’t want to touch.
“Maybe the lesson I learned, Father—Your Majesty—is that I no longer want to be connected to you.”
His dad very calmly said, “Go after, Ginny. Bring the baby home.”
“And then what? Let you torture him the way you tortured me and Alex?”
“When you see the lesson in this, you’re going to apologize. Not just for hitting me but for not trusting me.”
Dom sincerely doubted it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GINNY’S CONDO HAD long ago been sold. And because her mom had decided to move to Xaviera for the two years Ginny would live there, her mom’s house had also been sold. But the new owners hadn’t taken possession yet, so that was the sanctuary Ginny targeted. Unfortunately, when her bodyguard unlocked the front door, they found two women and a man, packing her living room lamps.
“Excuse me, this house has sold.”
Ginny patted her baby’s back. “I know. It was my mom’s. It doesn’t close for a few weeks. Until then I can use it.”
“Your mom hired us to sell the furniture.”
“Well, I’m sure by next week I’ll have my own house and you can do that. Until then, the house is mine.”
The tall woman looked ready to argue, but when she looked at Ginny with her twelve bodyguards and very tiny baby, she sighed.
“Fine.” Disgruntled, the two women and one angry man headed for the back door, clipboards in hand.
Ginny turned to Artemus, the leader of her detail. “I don’t even know if there’s food in the house.”
“Really? I ran away with the next heir to the throne and they’re feeding me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She glanced around at the small house that wouldn’t sleep herself and twelve bodyguards. Plus, she didn’t have a crib. And she was beginning to feel bad about taking the baby from Xaviera before Dom even saw him.
Worse, she missed Dom.
She wondered if her rash decision hadn’t been caused by postpartum depression, but reminded herself that her husband hadn’t wanted to see his child. He’d never loved her, didn’t want to. And he planned on bringing their child up to be just like him. She couldn’t let that happen.
Still, that didn’t mean this was going to be easy.
“This is a mess.”
Artemus agreed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Just as her mother said, she hadn’t really thought this through. But she had to forget about everything except setting up a household. She’d worry about Dom, what she would say to him, how she’d keep her baby safe from his ridiculous rule, when she had the house set up with beds and food.
“I guess I should feed the baby and get on the phone to find a crib.”
Artemus nodded. “And I’ll send two guys out for groceries.”
She took the baby into her mother’s small bedroom, breast-fed him and then made a bed for him out of a drawer from her mother’s dresser. With the baby secure, she went online and ordered a crib to be express delivered the next day, along with linens, baby clothes, diapers and some sweatpants and T-shirts for herself. Then she started exploring the real estate sites, looking for a house. The baby woke up twice and she fed him once, changed him the other time. Artemus came in and offered her food, but she refused it. She couldn’t eat until she got at least something in her life settled.
* * *
Dom showered on his father’s private jet. Taking the plane had been another way he’d vented his anger, but though he was bone tired he couldn’t sleep in the luxurious bed.
Even after a few hours for his dad’s duplicity to sink in, Dom still wanted to punch him. He couldn’t believe his father had treated Ginny so cruelly, but unexpectedly realized he’d been treating Ginny cruelly all along.
Harlequin Romance February 2016 Box Set Page 32
