by Maisey Yates
Jada leaned against the wall in the empty hallway and gasped for breath. No matter how much air she took in she was still suffocating. Her chest was locked tight, and she tried to breathe in, but her lungs wouldn’t expand. She wondered if her heart had stopped beating, too.
Her knees shook, gave way, and she slid down the wall, sitting with her legs drawn up to her chest, not caring that she was in a skirt, not caring if anyone saw. She hated that this feeling was so familiar. That it slipped back on as easy as an old pair of jeans. Shock. Grief. Loss.
Losing Sunil had been hard enough. Unfair. Unexpected. No one planned to be a widow at twenty-five. Coming to terms with it, with being alone, when she’d leaned on her parents, and then her husband, for all of her life, had been the hardest thing she’d ever gone through. She was still going through it.
Losing Leena on top of it…it wasn’t fair. How much was one person expected to lose? How long before she was simply gutted, left empty, with nothing and no one to care for her? No one to care for. And then what was she supposed to do with herself?
Her shoulders shook and a sob worked its way up her throat, her body shuddering with the force of it. People were walking by, trying not to stare at her as she dissolved, utterly and completely, in the hall of the courthouse.
And she didn’t care. What did it matter if a bunch of strangers thought she was losing her mind? She might very well be. And if they felt uncomfortable being in the presence of her grief, she didn’t care. It was nothing compared to trying to live inside her body. Nothing compared to contending with the pain she was dealing with.
“Ms. Patel.” That voice again.
She looked up from her position on the floor, and saw the man, the man who had taken her baby from her. There was only one thing that stopped her from going for his throat. Only one thing stopping her from opening her purse, finding her mace and unleashing her fury on those stormy gray eyes.
Leena.
He was holding a squirming Leena in his arms. And she was squirming to try to get to Jada. She could only stare at her daughter for a moment, hungry to take in every detail. To remember every bit of her.
Jada scrambled to her feet and extended her arms. Leena leaned away from Alik’s body, and he had no choice but to deposit the fussing, wiggling child into her arms.
Jada clung to her daughter, and Leena clung to her. Jada closed her eyes and pressed her face into her daughter’s silky brown hair, inhaled her scent. Lavender shampoo and that sweet, wonderful smell unique to babies.
She didn’t feel like she was drowning now. She could breathe again, her heart finding its rhythm.
“Mama!” Leena’s exclamation, so filled with joy and relief. And Jada broke to pieces inside.
“It’s okay,” she whispered, more for her benefit than her daughter’s. “It’s okay.” And she knew she lied. But she needed the lie like air and she wouldn’t deny herself.
“She does not like me,” Alik said, his voice frayed. For the first time since she’d seen him, he was betraying his own discomfort with the situation.
“You’re a stranger,” she said.
“I’m her father.” He said it as if a one-year-old child cared about genetics.
“She doesn’t care if you’re related to her or not. Not in the least. I am her mother as far as she’s concerned. The only mother she knows.”
“We need to talk.”
“What about?”
“About this,” he said, his voice slightly ragged, a bit of that smooth charm of his finally slipping. “About what we need to do.”
She didn’t know what he meant, but she knew that right now she was holding Leena, so the rest didn’t matter.
“Where?” she asked.
“My car. It is fitted with a car seat.”
“Okay,” she said. Going with him should feel strange; after all, she didn’t know the man. But the court had found no reason he couldn’t be a fit father. That meant they were going to send her baby off with this man, by herself. So she was hardly going to hesitate over getting in his car with him, all things considered.
She swallowed hard. There was no one else to do this. She was the final authority here, the only one who could change things. And she would take every second with Leena she could get.
She followed him out of the courthouse and down the steps. He pulled out his phone and spoke into it. She wasn’t sure what language he was speaking. It wasn’t Russian, English or Hindi, that much she knew. A man of many talents, it seemed.
A moment later a black limousine pulled up against the curb and Alik leaned over, opening the back door. “Why don’t you get her settled.”
She complied mutely, putting Leena, who was starting to nod off after her traumatic afternoon, into the seat and then climbing in and sitting in the spot next to hers. She hadn’t wanted to take any chances that he might drive off while she was rounding the car. Paranoid, maybe, but there was no such thing as too paranoid in a situation like this.
She was momentarily awed by the luxuriousness of the car. She’d ridden in a limo after her wedding, but it hadn’t been anywhere near this nice. The seats lined the interior of the limo, leaving the middle open. There was a cooler with champagne in it.
That made her bristle. Had he been planning on celebrating his victory over champagne? A toast to stealing her child away? She wanted to hit him. To hurt him. Give him a taste of what she was dealing with.
“What is it you wanted to speak to me about?” she asked, her voice sharper than she intended.
He closed the door behind him and settled into place. “Drink?”
“No. No drink. What is it you wanted to talk about?”
“How did you meet the child’s mother?”
“Leena,” she bit out. “Her name is Leena.”
“What sort of name is that?”
“Hindi. She’s named for my mother.”
“She should have a Russian name. I’m Russian.”
“And I’m Indian, and she’s my daughter. And really, aren’t you some kind of arrogant, thinking you can come and just take my child away from her home, away from her mother and then, on top of it all rename her?”
His dark brows shot upward. “I will not rename her. It is not a bad name.”
“Thank you,” she said, cursing her own good manners. She shouldn’t be thanking him. She should be macing him.
“Now,” he said, straightening, his posture stiff, like he was about to start a business meeting, “how did you meet Leena’s mother?”
“Just…through an adoption agency. She told me the baby’s father was dead and that she couldn’t possibly raise the child on her own. It was a semi-open adoption. She was able to choose the person she wanted to take her. It wasn’t easy for her.” She remembered the way the other woman had looked after giving birth, when she’d handed Leena to Jada. She’d looked so tired. So sad. But also relieved. “But it was right for her.”
“And the adoption?”
“Normally they’re finalized within six months of placement. In Oregon the birth mother can’t sign the papers until after the birth, which makes it all take a bit longer. And we were held up further because…because while she listed the birth father as dead, it wasn’t something that was confirmed. She had your name, but there was no record of your death, and neither could you be found to sign away your rights. And it hadn’t been long enough for you to simply be declared absentee.”
“And then they found me.”
“Yes, they did. Lucky me.”
“I am sorry for you, Jada. I am.” He didn’t sound it at all. He sounded like a man doing a decent impression of someone who might be sorry, but he personally didn’t sound sorry at all. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Leena is my daughter. I can’t simply walk away from her.”
“Why not? Because you’re just overcome by love and a parental bond?” She didn’t believe that for a moment.
“No. Because it is the right thing to do to care for your children, your
family. Leena is the only family I have.”
At another time she might have felt sorry for the man. As it was, she felt nothing.
“Caring for her would mean having her with me,” she said.
“I can understand how you might see it that way.” He looked out the window. “She does not like me. She cries when I pick her up. And frankly, I don’t have the time to be a full-time caregiver to an infant.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Because the other alternative was having nothing to do with her, and that was not a possible solution in my mind.”
“So what does that mean then? You’re just going to hire nannies?”
“That was my thought. I was wondering if you would like to take a position as Leena’s nanny.”
“You what?”
Jada couldn’t believe the man was serious. The nanny? To her own child? An employee of the man who was stealing everything from her?
Leena was her light in the darkness. She was everything to her. Being her mother had become the entirety of Jada’s identity. And her daughter had become her whole heart.
And he wanted her to be an employee. One he could fire at a moment’s notice. A termination he could delay until a later date. A date he saw fit.
“Did you just ask me to be the nanny to my own daughter?”
“As a court ruling just declared, she is not your daughter.”
“If you say that one more time so help me I will—”
“It is up to you. Hang on to your pride if you wish, but I’m offering you a chance to see your daughter. To be a part of her life still.”
“How can you do this to me?” she asked, the words scraping her throat raw. Everything in her hurt. Everything. He had come in, taken her newly repaired life and shattered it all around her again, and she didn’t know how she would reclaim it. It had taken so long to rebuild, to repurpose, to find out what she would do, who she would be.
She’d loved her husband, but he couldn’t give her children. And every time other options came up, he shut down. It was a reminder, he’d told her, of all he could not give her. Of what she would have to get from someone else. No, there would be no artificial insemination. She wouldn’t carry another man’s baby. Adoption had been something he’d said they’d consider, but he never truly had. All the brochures she brought him, all the links to websites she sent him, went ignored.
When the dust had settled after her husband’s death, it had been the thing she’d latched onto. She wasn’t a wife anymore, but she could be a mother.
And now he was ripping it from her hands. Leaving her arms empty.
“I’m not doing anything to you. Leena is my child and I am claiming her, as is the responsible and right thing to do.”
“You have a warped sense of right, Mr. Vasin.”
“Alik,” he said. “You can call me Alik. And my sense of right seems to match that of the justice system, so one might argue that it is you with a warped sense of justice.”
She blinked. “My sense of justice involves the heart, not just laws written on paper, unconnected to specific people and events.”
“And that is where we differ. Nothing I do involves the heart.” She looked at his eyes, black, soulless. Except for that moment in the courthouse when he’d been holding Leena. Then there had been emotion. Fear. Uncertainty. A man who clearly knew nothing about children.
And he wanted her to be the nanny. He wanted to assume the position as Leena’s father and demote her to staff. This man who had been living his life, a full complete life apart from Leena, now wanted to come and take the heart from her.
“She’s all I have,” Jada said, her voice trembling, emotion betraying her now “All I have in the world.”
“So you say no because of pride?”
“And because I am not my child’s nanny! I am her mother. The idea of simply being treated as though I’m paid to be there…” It hit at her very identity, who she was. She had been Sunil’s wife, and then she had become Leena’s mother. She couldn’t be nothing again. Not again.
“I would pay you to be there. I can hardly ask you to forfeit whatever job you might have and come be her nanny for free now, can I?”
“How can you…”
“I will of course allow you to live in whatever house I install her in. It will be simpler that way for all involved. I have a penthouse in Paris and one in Barcelona. A town house in New York, though I suspect you would find it rather too busy… .”
“And what about you? Where will you be in all of this?”
He shrugged. “I will go on as I have. But you have no need to worry about Leena. As the judge pointed out when he opened up my file—I am a wealthy man.”
“Somehow all of your wealth and power doesn’t impress me very much, not when your idea of raising a child is to install her in a house somewhere in the world while you leave her with staff!”
“Not just any staff. You. You would be very well-trusted staff.”
“You bastard!” No. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t allow this man who didn’t even want to live in the same home as his daughter to come in and steal everything she had built for herself. For Leena.
“No,” she said, the word broken, just like everything inside of her.
“Excuse me?”
“No. Stop the car.”
She didn’t know what she was doing. Until the moment the car pulled up to the curb and she looked at Leena, and back at Alik. She thought again of the fear in his eyes as he’d held Leena at the courthouse. Of the way Leena had struggled to escape his arms.
And she knew.
“No.” She opened the door to the car. “I am her mother. You can’t simply demand a change of job title. If you think you’re her father because of a magical blood bond then you go and you take care of her.”
Her heart was in her throat, her stomach pitching violently. But it was her hope. Her only hope. And it was all born out of some insane idea that what she’d witnessed in this hard, inscrutable man’s eyes was truly fear.
And if she was misreading him, there was every chance she would lose her child forever.
But if you don’t, he’ll always have the power. He has to know that you’re right. That he needs you.
She closed the door to the limo, the gray sky reflected in the tinted windows, obscuring Alik, obscuring Leena, from view. Panic clawed at her, tore her to shreds inside.
She turned away and closed her eyes, trying to breathe. She couldn’t. A sob caught in her chest. And then Jada started walking away. And she just prayed that Alik would follow.
CHAPTER TWO
ALIK HAD FACED DOWN terrorists hell-bent on blowing him into pieces and scattering his remains in the ocean. He’d dogged his way across enemy lines, into an enemy camp, to save the life of a friend. He’d spent hours calculating tactical strategies for nations at war, finding the smart way to get in and win the battle.
None of it had shaken him. A welcome burst of adrenaline, the rush of having survived, he got all of that from it. But never fear.
He felt it now. Staring down into the dewy eyes of his child. Her little face crumpled and she let out a wail that filled the inside of the limo.
“Don’t go yet,” he said to his driver. “Don’t go.”
Leena cried, louder and louder, and Alik had no idea what he was expected to do. He looked out the window, and he didn’t see Jada. She was gone. Somewhere into the shopping center they were near, he imagined, but he didn’t know where.
Unless she’d hailed a cab and simply left them both. It didn’t seem like something she would do, but he admitted, willingly, he knew nothing about emotion. About mothers who stayed with their children.
Jada wasn’t even Leena’s mother. But he was her father.
He didn’t know how to comfort a child. He didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. No one had held him. No one had sung him songs or rocked him until he stopped crying. It was very possible he had never cried.
Leena on the other hand, did. Quite well.
He had always intended to hire a nanny, and when he’d gone out into the hall he’d felt, for the first time in his memory, like he was in a situation he could not control. And when he had seen Jada slumped against the wall, crying into her hands, he knew he’d found the solution.
But then she’d left. She wanted more, and he had no idea what more it was she wanted.
Alik had given up on emotion long ago. His body had put all of that into a deep freeze, protecting him from the worst of his experiences while growing up. And by the time he hadn’t needed the protection anymore, it was far too late for anything to thaw.
He experienced things through the physical. Sex and alcohol, and, in his youth, various other stimulants, had done a good job of providing him with sensation where the frozen organ in his chest simply did not.
It was how things were for him. It was convenient too, because when he had to carry out a mission that was less than savory, whether on the battlefield, as he’d once done, or in the boardroom, as he did now, he simply went to his mind. Logic always won.
And after that, there was always a party to go to. He’d learned how to manufacture happiness from his surroundings. To pull it into the darkness that seemed to dominate his insides and light the way with it, temporarily. A night of dancing, drinking and sex. It created a flash, a spark in the oppressive dark. It burned out as quickly as it ignited, but it was a hell of a lot better than endless blackness.
Except he didn’t feel vacant now. He felt panicked, and he found it wasn’t an improvement. Without thinking, he undid Leena’s seat and pulled her into his lap. She shrieked and jerked away from him, and with that came a punch of something—emotion, pain—to his chest that nearly knocked him back.
As afraid as he was, she was just as scared. Of him.
“Mama! Mama mama mama.” The word, just sounds really, came fast and furious, over and over, intermingled with sobs.
He tried to speak. To say something. But he had no idea what to say. What did you say to a screaming baby? He’d never wanted this. Never imagined it. He truly might have turned away if not for Sayid. If not for the conversation they’d had when he’d left Brussels.
