by Dani Collins
“Nothing,” he bit out. No more foot dragging. He was still reeling from her coy remark about paternity, played out so well he was entertaining a shred of uncertainty. He couldn’t begin to consider what he’d do if he wasn’t the father.
The not knowing made him restless, especially because he couldn’t understand why she was tormenting him. Yes, his position would be strengthened if she admitted he was the father, but so would hers. He would do anything for his child. One glimpse of a pregnant belly shouldn’t affect him this deeply, but all he could think was that his entire life had changed. Every decision from now on would be weighed against its effect on that tiny being in Sirena’s center.
She took her frosted glass and plate of sectioned orange to the table, opening a file as she sat down. One glance invited him to take the chair across from her. They didn’t stand on ceremony. He didn’t hold her chair; this wasn’t a date. It was reminiscent of the times they’d planted themselves on either side of a boardroom table and worked through projects and tasks until he’d cleared his plate and loaded hers full, confident it would all be completed to his exacting specifications.
He tightened his mouth against a blurted demand for answers. Why? If she had needed money, why hadn’t she asked him for a loan? A raise? The salary he’d been paying her was generous, but he’d seen she was ready for more responsibility and the compensation that went with it. Had this been her plan all along? Pregnancy and a custody settlement?
The thought occurred as she opened the file and he glimpsed a copy of a contract filled with notations and scribbles.
“You have read it,” he said with tight disgust.
“I do my homework, same as you,” she retorted, ice clinking as she sipped. Her skin, fine grained as a baby’s, was pale. Weren’t pregnant women supposed to glow? Sirena didn’t look unhealthy, but there were shadows under her eyes and in them. She touched her brow where she used to complain of tension headaches. He could see the pulse in her throat pounding as if her heart would explode.
The precariousness of his position struck him. He wanted to be ruthless, but not only was he facing a woman in a weakened condition, her condition affected a baby. As he absorbed the raised stakes, his tension increased. The scent of the fresh orange seemed overly strong and pungent.
“I want medical reports,” he said with more harsh demand than he would typically use at the opening of a negotiation.
Sirena flinched and laced her fingers together. Without looking at him, she said, “I don’t have a problem sharing the baby’s health checkups. So far it’s been textbook. I have a scan on my laptop I can email you once we’ve signed off.” Now her eyes came up, but her gaze was veiled. She was hiding something.
“Who are you?” he muttered. “You’re not the Sirena I knew.” His PA had been approachable and cheerful, quick to smile, quick to see the humor in things. This woman was locked down, serious and more secretive than he’d ever imagined.
Like him, which was a disturbing thought.
“What makes you think you ever knew me, Raoul?” The elegant arches of her dark brows lifted while bitter amusement twisted her doll-perfect lips. “Did you ever ask about my life? My plans? My likes or dislikes? All I remember is demands that revolved around your needs. Your intention to work late. Your bad mood because you hadn’t eaten. You once snapped your fingers at me because you wanted the name of the woman you’d taken to dinner, maybe even bed, the night before. She needed flowers as a kiss-off. On that note, as your former PA I’m compelled to point out that your new one dropped the ball. I didn’t get my lilies.”
Her audacity tested Raoul’s already dicey mood. His inner compass swung from contempt to self-disgust that he’d slept with her at all to a guilty acknowledgment that no, he hadn’t spent much time getting to know her on a personal level. He’d wanted too badly to take things to an intimate level, so he’d kept her at a distance.
Not that he had any intention of explaining when she was coming out swinging with two full buckets of scathing judgment and brutal sarcasm.
“That ice water seems to have gone directly into your veins,” he remarked with the smoothness of a panther batting a bird from the air.
“Yes, I’m a kettle and so much blacker than you.” She pivoted the file and pushed it toward him. “You might as well read my notes and we’ll go from there.”
Cold. Distant. Unreachable. She wasn’t saying those words, but he’d heard them from enough women to know that’s what she was implying.
Oddly, he hadn’t thought Sirena saw him that way, and it bothered him that she did. Which made no sense, because he hadn’t cared much when those other women said it and he hadn’t once put Sirena in the same category as his former lovers. She was never intended to be his lover at all. When he took women to his bed, it was without any sort of expectation beyond an affair that would allow him to release sexual tension. Sirena had already been too integral a part of his working life to blur those lines.
Yet he had. And she seemed to be holding him to account for his callous treatment of her—when she had only slept with him for her own gain! Possibly for the very baby they were fighting over.
Drawing the papers closer, he began taking in her notations. The first was a refusal to submit to paternity tests until after the birth, at which point this contract would come into effect if he was proven to be the father.
He didn’t like it, but in the interest of moving forward he initialed it.
Things quickly became more confusing and audacious. Distantly he noted that she’d circled a formatting error—one more eagle-eyed skill he regretted losing from his business life.
“Why the hell is everything to be held in trust for the baby?”
“I don’t want your money,” she said with such flatness he almost believed her.
Don’t get sidetracked, he warned himself. Obviously she had wanted his money or she wouldn’t have stolen from him, but arguing that point was moot. Right now all that mattered was getting paternity resolved and his right to involvement irrevocable.
He lowered his gaze to the pages in front of him, trying to make sense of her changes when they all favored the baby’s financial future and left her taking nothing from him. Raoul cut her a suspicious glance. No one gave up this much...
“Ah,” he snorted with understanding as he came to the codicil. “No.”
“Think about it. You can’t breast-feed. It makes sense that I have full custody.”
“For five years? Nice try. Five days, maybe.”
“Five days,” she repeated through her teeth, flashing an angry emotion he’d never seen in her. Her eyes glazed with a level of hatred that pierced through his shell with unexpected toxicity, leaving a fiery sting.
And was that fear? Her generous mouth trembled before she pressed it into a firm line. “If you’re not going to be reasonable, leave now. You’re not the father anyway.”
She rose and so did he, catching her by the arms as she tried to skirt past him. The little swell at her belly nudged into him, foreign and disconcerting, making his hands tighten with a possessive desire to keep her close. Keep it close, he corrected silently.
“Don’t touch me.” Fine trembles cascaded through her so he felt it as if he grasped an electric wire that pulsed in warning.
“Sure you don’t want to try persuading me into clemency again?” he prodded, recognizing that deep down he was still weakly enthralled by her. If she offered herself right now, he would be receptive. It would change things.
“I didn’t sue you for sexual harassment before, but I had every right to.”
Her words slapped him. Hard.
Dropping his hold, he reared back, offended to his core. “You wanted me every bit as much as I wanted you,” he seethed. His memories exploded daily with the way her expression had shone with excitement. The way she’d molded herself into him and arched for more contact and cried out with joy as the shudders of culmination racked them both.
“No, you were
bored,” she shot back with vicious fury that carried a ring of hurt.
It shouldn’t singe him with guilt, but it did. He’d been saving face when he’d said that, full of whiskey and brimming with betrayal. The news that she had been released had been roiling in him like poison. Having her show up at the end of his drive had nearly undone him.
Now he teetered between a dangerous admission of attraction and delivering his brutal set-down for a second time.
“Get out, Raoul,” Sirena said with a pained lack of heat. She sounded defeated. Heartbroken. “I’m sorry I ever met you.”
The retort that the feeling was mutual hovered on his tongue, but stayed locked behind teeth clenched against a surprising lash of...hell, why would he suffer regret?
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he reminded himself the woman he’d thought he’d known had never existed. He threw himself back into his chair. “We’ll hire a panel of experts to work out the schedule of the baby’s first five years based on his or her personal needs. At four years we’ll begin negotiating the school years.”
“A panel of experts,” she repeated on a choking laugh. “Yes, I’ve got your deep pockets. Let’s do that.”
“If you’re worried about money, why are you refusing a settlement?”
Her response was quiet and somber, disturbingly sincere. “Because I don’t want money. I want my baby.” She moved to the window. It was covered in drizzle that the wind had tossed against the glass. Her hand rested on her belly. Her profile was grave.
Raoul dragged his eyes off her, disturbed by how much her earnest simplicity wrenched his gut. It made him twitch with the impulse to reassure her, and not just verbally. For some reason, he wanted to hold her so badly his whole body ached.
That wasn’t like him. He had his moments of being a softy when it came to his mother or stepsister. They were beloved and very much his responsibility even though they weren’t as helpless these days as they’d once been. He still flinched with guilt when he remembered how he’d been living it up his first year of college, drinking and chasing girls, completely oblivious to what was happening at home. Then, despite how brutal and thoughtless his stepfather’s gambling had been, the man’s death had shattered the hearts of two people he cared for deeply. Faced with abject poverty, it had been easy for Raoul to feel nothing but animosity toward the dead man, but the unmitigated grief his mother and Miranda had suffered had been very real. He’d hated seeing them in pain. It had been sharply reminiscent of his agony after his father’s suicide.
But as supportive as he’d tried to be while he took control and recovered their finances, he’d never been the touchy-feely sort who hugged and cuddled away their pain.
Why he craved to offer Sirena that sort of comfort boggled him.
Forcing himself to ignore the desire, he scanned the changes she’d made to the agreement, thinking that perhaps he was more self-involved than he’d realized since he had been focused this entire time on what the child meant to him, how his life would change, how he’d make room for it and provide for his progeny. What he wanted.
Suddenly he was seeing and hearing what Sirena wanted and it wasn’t to hurt him. She had ample ways to do that, but her changes to this document were more about keeping the baby with her than keeping it from him.
“Did you think about termination at all?” he asked with sudden curiosity.
“Yes.”
The word struck him like a bullet, utterly unexpected and so lethal it stopped his heart. Until his mind caught up. Obviously she’d decided to have the baby or they wouldn’t be here.
He rubbed feeling back into his face, but his ears felt filled with water. He had to strain to hear her as she quietly continued.
“I was only a few weeks along when I found out. There’s a pill you can take that early. You don’t have to go into hospital, there are fewer complications... There seemed to be a lot of good reasons not to go through with the pregnancy.” Her profile grew distressed and her fingertips grazed the pulse in her throat.
Reasons like the threat of prison and having a man she didn’t want in her life demanding access to her baby. Raoul’s sharp mind pinned up the drawbacks as quickly as her own must have. His blood ran cold at how close he’d come to not knowing about this baby at all.
“I couldn’t bring myself to...expel it from my life like that. I want this baby, Raoul.” She turned with her hand protectively on her middle again, her eyes glittering with quiet ferocity. “I know it’s foolish to let you see how badly I want it. You’ll find a way to use it against me. But I need you to believe me. I will never let anyone take my baby from me.”
His scalp tightened with preternatural wariness and pride and awe. Sirena was revealing the sort of primal mother instinct their caveman ancestors would have prized in a mate. The alpha male in him exalted in seeing that quality emanating from the mother of his child.
While the cutthroat negotiator in him recognized a tough adversary.
“You’re trying to convince me I can’t buy you off,” he summed up, trying not to let himself become too entranced by her seeming to possess redeeming qualities. She had fooled him once already.
“You can’t. The only reason I’m speaking to you at all is to give my baby the same advantages its father might provide its future siblings, whether that’s monetary or social standing or emotional support. Consider what those things might be as you work through the rest of that.” She nodded at the contract and slipped into the powder room again.
Future siblings? Raoul’s mind became an empty whiteboard as he bit back a remark that he hadn’t expected this child; he certainly wasn’t ready to contemplate more.
* * *
Three months later, Raoul was taking steps to ensure he was prepared for the birth, looking ahead to clear his calendar in six weeks. He rarely took time off and found even Christmas with his mother an endurance test of agitation to get back to work. Anticipation energized him for this vacation, though.
Because it was a new challenge? Or because he would see Sirena?
He shut down the thought. The baby was his sole interest. He was eager to find out the sex, know it was healthy and have final confirmation it was his.
Not that he had many doubts on any of that. True to their agreement, Sirena had sent him updates on the baby’s progress. Nothing concerning her own, he had noted with vague dissatisfaction, but he expected he would be informed if there were problems. The second scan later in the pregnancy had not revealed an obvious male, so he’d assumed the baby was female and found himself taken with the vision of a daughter possessing dark curls and beguiling green eyes.
As for paternity, to his mind, the fact Sirena had signed made the baby his. The final test after the birth was a formality that would activate the arrangements, that was all.
But that was a month and a half from now and he had people to organize. People who were abuzz with the news that the driven head of their multinational software corporation was taking an extended absence.
Only a handful of his closest and most trusted subordinates knew the reason, and even they didn’t know the mother’s identity. The scandalous circumstances of his father’s infidelity and suicide had made Raoul a circumspect man. Nothing about his involvement with Sirena, their affair, her being fired for embezzlement or her pregnancy was public knowledge. When people asked—and she’d made enough of an impression on associates and colleagues that many did—he only said she was no longer with the company.
Part of him continued to resent that loss, especially when the assistants he kept trying out turned out to be so trying. The highly recommended Ms. Poole entered the meeting with a worried pucker in her magic-marker brows.
“I said life or death, Ms. Poole,” he reminded, clinging to patience.
“She’s very insistent,” the spindly woman said, bringing a mobile phone to him.
“Who?” He tamped down on asking, Sirena? Her tenacity was something he’d come to respect, if not always appreciate
.
“Molly. About your agreement with Ms. Abbott.”
He didn’t know any Molly, but something preternatural set an unexpected boot heel on his chest, sharp and compressing, causing pressure to balloon out in radiant waves. Odd. There was no reason to believe this was bad news. Sirena hadn’t contacted him directly since he’d left her looking wrung out and cross at her flat that day, neither of them particularly satisfied with the outcome of their negotiations, but possessing a binding document between them.
“Yes?” He took the phone in a hand that became nerveless and clumsy. As he stood and moved from the table, he was aware of the ripple of curiosity behind him. At the same time, despite everything that had passed between them, he experienced a flick of excitement. His mind conjured an image of Sirena in one of those knitted skirt-and-sweater sets she used to wear.
“Mr. Zesiger? I’m Sirena Abbott’s midwife. She asked me to inform you that the baby is on its way.”
“It’s early,” he protested.
“Yes, they had to induce—” She cut herself off.
He heard muffled words and held his breath as he strained to hear what was said.
She came back. “I’ve just been informed it will be an emergency cesarean.”
“Where is she?” he demanded while apprehension wrapped around him like sandpaper, leaving him abraded and raw.
“I understood you were only to be informed and that a paternity test be ordered, not that you would attend—”
“Save me the phone calls to find her so I can come directly,” he bit out.
A brief pause before she told him. “But the results won’t be known for days.”
“Tell her I’m on my way,” he said, but she was already gone.
CHAPTER FOUR
A WOMAN MET him in the hospital reception area. She wore red glasses and a homespun pullover. Her ditch-water hair was in one thick plait, her expression grave.
“Raoul? Molly.” She held out a hand and offered a tight smile. “Sirena told me I’d know you when I saw you. The baby is a girl. They’ve taken the samples and should have the results in a few days.” Her manner was disconcertingly strained.
