by Jianne Carlo
“He’s mine,” Rolan gritted, and suddenly yearned for a long pour of brandy.
“I suppose there’s no sense in denying it,” she said, her tone firm, quiet, spoken with a queenly dignity he wanted to shatter.
“He’s ten,” he said, doing a quick mental calculation. “You didn’t figure on telling me about his existence?”
“Please don’t shout,” she replied, and her calm demeanor spiked his rising temper. “I wrote you twice.”
“Blasted hell, you did. The last time I saw you was that night on the football field. I tried to see you the next day, but your mother wouldn’t let me in the house.”
“You,” she said, and both eyebrows lifted. “You tried to see me after we, um, you know…”
Cheeks coloring a dark pink, her voice trailed off, she ducked her head and studied the tiled floor with an intensity most people reserved for lottery tickets while the winning numbers were called.
His stomach listed. Surely, she hadn’t thought…no, she had thought it was a one-night stand. He could tell from the slumping of her shoulders, the way air seemed to deflate that defiant body posture.
Jesus.
“Of course I tried to see you, Sarita. I’d received my draft notice that morning. I knew you’d be excited for me and I wanted to share the news with you. I went to your house even before I told my parents.”
“You did?” Pupils dilated, eyes rimmed with amber, she stared at him.
“I wanted to let you know that I had to leave the next day, but that I’d call and I would be back in six weeks.”
“Why?”
Rolan itched to smooth the lines between her auburn eyebrows, stop the slight quivering of her lower lip with his. She hadn’t believed him that night when he’d kissed and told her, “I’m falling for you, honey.”
It didn’t matter now.
Tony mattered.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, and slumped back onto the barstool. “I have a son.”
“He’s mine. I raised him. He’s mine. You were only there for the conception. He’s not your son.”
“He’s mine,” he roared and shot to his feet. “And if I have to blast it on the cover of every newspaper, every gossip rag, I will. You hid him from me for ten years, and get this straight Sarita, it stops right now. I’m his goddamned father and that’s it. You owe me. Big time.”
With that pronouncement, too perplexed, too overflowing with emotion, he stalked out of the tiny room, only managing to resist shaking her by plunging his hands into his pants pockets. He caught up with his son seconds later. Apparently, the boy didn’t take orders to heart.
“My dad’s dead.” The flat statement didn’t go with the boy’s wavering voice. “You leave my mom alone. If you hurt her, I’ll hurt you.”
His fury trickled away, replaced by a peculiar pride at his son’s protective words. “Go above deck, son. Your mom will come and get you when we’ve finished our discussion. She’ll be okay, I promise. Tell the captain we’ll be staying a few days here in Monte Carlo. Ask him to have my Lamborghini brought around.”
Those emerald eyes sparked and eyebrows the color of wheat almost met the boy’s hairline, yet he didn’t move, just chewed his lower lip.
“I look like you,” Tony said and he crossed his arms. “Why do I look like you? And why is your name the opposite of mine?”
Damn. Rolan tunneled both hands through his hair.
“I don’t want you to be my dad. I don’t like you. You yell at Mom and she looks like she wants to cry.” Tony jammed two clean hands into his jeans’ back pockets, lips sneering down. “And I’m not doing anything you say. You can’t make me. I’m going to get Captain Terry to make you go away. You don’t own this boat, Geoff and Captain Terry do. And Geoff wants to marry Mom. So does Harry, and he’s from Texas. He’s a cowboy.”
With that pronouncement, the boy glared at Rolan, spun around, and raced down the hallway.
His Sarita?
Geoff and Harry?
He saw red.
Damn, damn and blast it. He stalked back to the kitchen to stake his claim. Sarita was his, and if either Geoff or Harry had so much as touched her, they’d pay. He knuckled his throbbing temple and took deep breaths determined to regain his famous control. He never lost his cool, not once in ten years on the football field, but he’d never had to fight so hard to regain his composure. His feet plodded forward as if mired in a bog.
Leaning one shoulder into the kitchen’s doorframe, he studied Sarita once more. Perched on a bar stool, slender back facing him, she slashed a wicked carving knife through a bunch of parsley, mincing the verdant leaves while muttering under her breath. All at once, she stabbed the axelike tool into the wooden cutting board letting the handle vibrate, and bounded to her feet.
“I hate you, hate you, Rolan Anthony Paxton. You are not taking my son away from me.”
“Isn’t this just dandy? We’re already dysfunctional and the family nucleus is in its infancy,” he drawled, pleased when she turned to him, bronze skin paling, features caught in a grimace, one lone tear slipping to hover at a stubborn jaw line.
He snapped a paper towel off the under the counter dispenser and edged forward. “Here. Crying isn’t going to solve anything. We need to talk.”
She stumbled backward, the bar stool wobbled, and Rolan had to grab it with both hands to prevent a nasty spill. Wide almond eyes with spiky lashes blinked up at him, and he caught a flash of vulnerability before that Zen-like mask descended again.
It irked him.
She irked him.
She looked so fragile, so vulnerable.
Red hot fury faded.
Strands of sunset hair escaped her high ponytail, slipping forward onto her shoulders as she straightened and dashed away the moisture on her cheeks with the back of her hand. The childlike gesture melted the rest of his anger and banded his chest.
“What do you want?”
His senses remembered that low throaty purr and his cock came to life in an involuntary reaction. And it was like they’d never been apart, all the old protectiveness, possessiveness, and lightening lust flaring through his soul.
Sarita.
His.
Rolan rescued the vibrating knife and set it on the cutting board. He slid onto the other barstool.
“You said you wrote?” Praying for calm, he decided to start at the beginning.
“Twice, one to your home and another to the college.” One forefinger flicked the minced parsley, shuffling the leaves into a rough circle. “I never heard from you, so I figured I was on my own.”
“Obviously I never received either letter. You didn’t think about picking up the telephone?”
Their gazes locked and he read the fury in hers as those pupils dilated and darkened, making the honey tint into a mere halo.
“You went out of your way to avoid me, Rolan Paxton, and you can’t deny that. I was the mistake you wished you’d never made.”
“Jesus Christ, Sarita, I was embarrassed. I took your virginity with all the finesse of a stampeding bull. You cried, damn it, and my raging hormones didn’t give a crap.”
For a second, naked pain lanced those amazing eyes, but she dropped her lids and concentrated on the minced parsley, one pearl eyetooth gnawing on her lower lip.
“And before I could say anything, you ran away. Look at me, damn it.”
“I wasn’t crying because you hurt me, Rolan.”
She said the words so softly he had to strain to hear them.
“Why then?”
She shook her head and he thought blood would spurt she bit down so hard.
A stream of anger returned heating his skin, and frustrated by her unwillingness to communicate, he snapped, “Burying your head in the sand isn’t going to help resolve this situation. I want joint custody of our son.”
“What?” Her head whipped up then, one hand fluttering to her throat. “No. You don’t have the right to ask that.”
“You want to
take this to court?” Ah, rage again, good healthy anger. “One paternity test is all it takes. I’m his biological father. The courts will grant me joint custody. What have you got to offer the boy? I can afford full-time help, put him in the best private schools. I guarantee you ‑‑ you don’t want to take me on in a public battle for custody.”
“You always were a bully, especially on the football field.”
“And you’re hired help, plain and simple. One word to the captain and you’re out of a job. I bet your savings amounts to nil. I can ruin you, Sarita, and I will if that’s what it takes.”
Pounding footsteps preceded Tony’s skidding entrance, and he braked a tad short of them. Wary emerald eyes darted back and forth between the two adults.
“I asked you to stay above deck.”
“My son doesn’t take orders from you,” she spat out the words.
“Captain Terry says you’re to head to the deck. Your guests are here.”
Crap, he’d forgotten the primary purpose of this trip. “Ask Captain Terry to hang for a bit. I’ll be up in a second.”
“No, you tell him yourself. I’m staying with Mom.” Tony marched into the room.
“Anthony, it’s okay. Please go above deck and relay Mr. Paxton’s message.”
He waited until the boy’s long limbs vanished around a corner. “Joint custody, Sarita; I’ll settle for nothing else.”
Chapter Two
For what seemed like an eternity, Sarita traced Rolan’s retreating broad back. Her knees buckled when his pronouncement penetrated her stunned brain.
Joint custody.
Over her dead body.
Every instinct told her to take Tony and disappear, run to the farthest corner of the world.
She heard the familiar sound of her son skidding to a stop, his sneakers squeaking on the uncarpeted floor.
“Mom?”
A miniature of his father, Tony braced the doorframe. Each day he grew more and more like Rolan, in looks and in personality. She raked his features, taking in the wobbling lower lip, reading the unvoiced question in his dilated pupils. He knew. He’d overheard.
“He’s my dad, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I have a dad,” he said and clenched fingers into tight fists. He gave her the exact same lip-curled-at-one-corner cutting glance Rolan shot her not moments ago.
“You lied to me.”
The words sliced her heart apart and she dug fingers under her rib cage, the pain a physical one, stabbing at her diaphragm. Sarita didn’t even know when her son slipped out of the room, too caught up in misery to do anything but wallow in self-pity.
For years it had been just the two of them united against the cruel small-town mindset that favored the country club members, those tennis playing blondes with their perfect Kellogg’s families and husbands who tried to cop a feel at each high-falutin’ shindig she waitressed.
She’d had to drop out of high school a scant month before the year ended and long after the NFL drafted Rolan. No one knew about her pregnancy; not even her more drunk than sober mother suspected until the now-famous DUI pileup on the town’s main drag.
Scandalized by her mother’s affair with the bank’s president, the town ostracized Sarita. And the grieving widow vented her rage on Sarita with a vengeance. In less than a month, the bank repossessed the ramshackle cottage by the train station, her mother’s 99 Chevy, all the appliances, and the furniture. She didn’t have enough money to pay for her mother’s funeral.
“Sarita, get a move on, Rolan’s chafing at the bit. There are twelve high flyers on deck.” Austen, the bosun and chief steward, dwarfed the doorway. A veteran Navy SEAL, the man’s Popeye biceps rippled as he reached the top cabinet. “I’m tending bar, so you’ll have to do the serving. Any more of this brandy? They’re guzzling it like agua. Captain said to assume formal attire. Hey lovey, you going to wear that little black number?”
“It’s all I have,” she muttered, wincing, and wished the black cocktail sheath weren’t so revealing. “I’ll be right behind you. There’re a couple more bottles of brandy in the main dining room, cabinet under the TV.”
Scattering the minced parsley around the salmon rosettes, she washed her hands and rushed to her cabin, donning the spandex sheath. On impulse, she added a slash of scarlet lipstick and yearned for the requisite high heels to go with it. Back in the kitchen, she sliced black olives, garnished the antique pewter tray with them, nabbed a handful of decorative paper napkins, and stalked out of the confining room, shoulders squared.
Fortifying her courage, she flashed through the changes ten years had wrought. She knew she could survive almost any setback, and had almost saved enough for her own small bistro. Rolan Paxton wasn’t dealing with the naïve adoring teenager who had hung on his every word.
“I am a fool, a complete fool,” she said, hitting the doorframe so hard her palm stung. “Down girl, back to reality. What were the chances of me ever seeing Rolan again? Far less than him finding out about Tony. What did I do to call down this type of punishment?”
Those four Saturdays in detention with him had been the highlight of her life.
Since grade school, she’d been in love with him. Not that he ever noticed her existence. That first detention proved pure torture, and she had been sure he had clumped her into the nerd circle. Then that next Saturday, he’d thrown paper missiles at her and they’d spent six hours playing word games together.
Five weeks later, she’d waitressed on prom night, the event held at the town’s only country club. He’d arrived in the kitchen at midnight and insisted on driving her home. Flustered, flattered, in the throes of the worst adolescent crush, she accepted his offer of a ride. Then he’d kissed her in the car in the parking lot. She’d never been kissed before. The feel of his tongue sliding into her mouth, the way he’d growled and hauled her into his lap… Sarita shook her head and compressed her lips. Not going there, not making the same mistake twice.
Stiffening her spine, she took a deep breath, strode onto the deck, and spotted him speaking to one of those thin long-legged supermodels. Fool, fool to fall back into the fantasies of a sixteen-year-old doting girl.
She stepped onto the deck and into an episode of the rich and famous. Cringing inside, Sarita pasted a wide smile on her face. She served appetizers to Jessica Alba lookalikes, polished versions of Lindsay Lohan and Scarlett Johansson. By the time the tray held two lonely salmon rosettes, her self-confidence had flushed down the toilet. Rolan’s jade gaze stalked her every move and the flat line of his mouth intimidated her as much as his guests did. She made it back to the kitchen in record time and began preparing the six-course luncheon.
“Where the hell did you get those?”
She whirled around to face Rolan.
“Huh?” Apparently, intelligence vanished in his company.
“Jesus, you had little cupcakes. Where the hell did those come from?” He stared at her breasts.
She crossed her arms over them. “Go away. Why the hell would you follow me down here to ask that?”
“Because you flaunt those titties.”
“Oh,” she gasped, and her eyes narrowed. “How can you even say that? This happened after Tony was born. They…they just grew. I really hate you, Rolan Paxton.”
“Who told you to wear that number?” He was roaring by now, discombobulating her with every shout. “Cover up, for Christ’s sake. I won’t have the mother of my son dressing like some dime street whore. Don’t come back above deck until you’ve changed into something respectable.”
And he flounced, actually flounced out of the tiny kitchen.
Somewhere in her Salma Hayek imagination, she’d bought this little red number, little being the causative verb. Scarlet, just a tad below the ass, almost nipple baring, it was a dress that screamed the wearer’s intention. Temper fired, she marched to her cabin, shed the black sheath, and pulled the red spaghetti-strapped silk over her body. For a second she wavered, but
wearing the dress at this point symbolized thumbing her nose at him. Besides, wouldn’t it be wonderful if he drooled. Sarita’s lips curved into a sneer-smile. She smoothed the skirt down, plumped up her breasts, and applied mascara.
Running late, she assembled the first course, foie gras burnished by an apple-brandy cream sauce. No one would complain about the food, especially him. She plated twelve Limoges dishes with red pepper garnishes and a few perfect basil leaves.
Austen bulldozed into the room.
“Whoa! Where’d you get that number? Hello lovey! I’m up for it, and most times I feel like your dad, but this ain’t one of ’em!”
“You’re exaggerating, Austen. It’s just me.”
“Lovey, in that dress, there isn’t anything that’s just you. Sarita, what the hell are you proving and to whom?”
“Just help me serve the first course.”
“Can I place odds on who’s serving the boss?”
She scowled at him, mouth tightening.
Rolan didn’t take his eyes off her, not for a second. And his lips compressed into a fierce thin line. She bent low to serve him and felt the spandex creep up her ass, which was on show to all and sundry, and she didn’t give a damn. Satisfaction warmed her soul.
Sarita did a little stripper’s sway when she left the dining room, all aglow and thrilled to have thrown him a curveball. She didn’t even make through the kitchen doorway before he railroaded her into a corner, snatched the pewter tray from her hands, and tossed it onto the counter.
It clanged and thwanged, the noise matching the explosive tension sizzling in the compact kitchen.
“Rolan,” she said, the murmured protest bedeviled by the fear in her voice. “Stop, you’re scaring me.”
“Good. If you ever display those tits and that ass again, I will flay your backside until it’s raw.”
“Mom?”
They both turned to that whispered voice. Tony’s green gaze, wide and troubled, met theirs. “I don’t care if you are my dad, you can’t hurt my mom.”
Firm, growled, and oh so like Rolan.
Something in the back of her throat collapsed.