The Consequence He Must Claim

by Dani Collins

  “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 s
adness 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.