Power Play

by Mallery Malone

  Another deep breath, but this one sounded perilously close to a sob. He raised his head so that he could see her better. “Mace?”

  To his absolute horror, she burst into tears.

  He immediately hauled her onto his lap, caging her in his arms. “Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he crooned as he rocked her and ran a hand along her spine. “I didn’t mean to push you. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to.”

  “I-I want to tell you,” she cried against his shoulder. “I need to tell you. I’ve been trying to all week, but I just couldn’t get the words out.”

  “Tell me what, sweetheart?”

  “What happened in Paris. Why I disappeared.”

  Tension coiled in the pit of his stomach. Finally. The answer to the question he hadn’t dared asked though the need to know burned through him like bad whiskey. Recognizing that she was close to losing it again but needing to know, he pitched his voice as soft as he could. “What happened, Macy? Did someone hurt you?”

  That someone would die, no matter how long it took for Raphael to hunt him down. He was sure he could get Gabriel to help.

  “No,” she whispered. “No one hurt me in Paris.”

  “Then why did you disappear?”

  “I was pregnant!”

  His mind and body froze with shock as her words hit him. “Pregnant?”

  “Y-yes.”

  Christ. He loosened his hold on her, staring blankly as she slid off his lap and to her feet. His heart thudded sluggishly in his chest as he struggled to make sense of her words. Macy, pregnant in Paris. That meant there was a chance that he’d been the one who’d gotten her pregnant, despite how careful they’d been. But she would have told him, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t have kept something so world-changing from him.

  His gut clenched. “Was I— Am I—”

  “Yes,” she confessed, her voice thick with tears. “I found out about two months after I got there. I-I tried to reach you, but I couldn’t.”

  Raphael stumbled to his feet with a groan, shoving his hands into his hair as pain and grief and guilt assaulted him. Macy had been alone and pregnant in Paris while he’d been running, shedding his responsibilities so he could get lost in Muay Thai. She’d been alone and hurting and trying to reach him, and he hadn’t been there for her.

  “Wait. You couldn’t reach me? What do you mean, you couldn’t— God. Two months after you left, I turned the company back over to the interim CEO, sold the house, and disappeared into Thailand. But I went to Paris first. I couldn’t find you. I called your father, thinking you’d been abducted or something. He said you were fine, but you didn’t want to see me.”

  Old anger stirred, anger he’d tried to bury for years. He’d needed her, needed to see someone who’d believed in him, who’d supported him unconditionally. But she hadn’t. She’d turned her back on him, and she’d been pregnant. With his child.

  “You were carrying my baby, and you didn’t want to see me?” he roared. “You know how things were with my dad. How could you keep something like this from me?”

  She flinched in the face of his anger, huddling in her robe. “I thought you didn’t want me. I tried to reach you when I found out. I tried your mobile phone but it was disconnected. I tried your old apartment and your father’s house.” She swallowed audibly. “I called JerTech, but no one there would give me any information on you, nor would they put me through to you. Finally I gave up. I thought … I thought you’d ordered them not to.”

  His chest tightened. Was he a father? Had he been a father for the last eight years and hadn’t known? Had she given up their child for adoption and never intended to let him know?

  Pain and anger seared his vision. It didn’t matter. He had money, he had resources. If his child were out there, he would move heaven and earth to find him. There was no way in hell he’d let a child of his think his birth parents had abandoned him.

  He straightened, clamping his hands onto her biceps. For several heartbeats he had to focus only on breathing until he quelled the bitterness. “Where is he? What happened to our child?”

  Another sob tore from her. “I lost the baby. I was in the hospital when you came to Paris.”

  I lost the baby.

  Pain blasted through his chest, followed swiftly by a dull roar that numbed his brain and dulled his senses. Dimly he was aware of jerking away from her, walking past her and heading for the bedroom, stumbling a bit as heat and cold and grief and rage all battled for domination inside him, desperate for an outlet. All he knew was that he had to get out before he exploded.

  “Raphael.” Macy followed him, hovering in the doorway as he shoved into his clothes. “Talk to me. Don’t leave like this. Please.”

  He ignored her tearful pleas because he had to. He couldn’t face her, couldn’t see her tears, couldn’t do anything but clamp down tight on everything that wanted to break him open and consume him alive. Somehow, he made it out of her condo, down the stairs, and to his car. It was only when he’d left the city in his rearview that he gave vent to the rage and grief drowning him, his roar of pain swallowed by the roar of the car’s engine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “You know, we might be able to get the pop singer Karina to do a hometown benefit concert for the foundation,” Renata said. “I could probably lean on Sebastian to make that happen.”

  “Hhm,” Macy nodded in agreement, though she was only half focused on her friend’s words.

  “Of course, since I’m pregnant with Gabriel’s love child, asking Sebastian might not go over so well. I guess I’ll just ask whichever one of them survives their reenactment of the Thrilla in Manilla.”

  “Okay.”

  Renata slammed her notepad down onto the table, making Macy shriek in response. “God, Renata, you almost made me jump out of my skin! What’s wrong?”

  Renata leveled a glare her way. “I could ask you the same thing. You haven’t paid attention to a single word I’ve said.”

  “I’m sorry.” Macy looked down at her own notes for the Girls Up! Foundation’s Night of Stars gala fundraiser, but didn’t recognize any of the scrawling as anything remotely useable. “I-I’ve been a little out of sorts lately.”

  “Out of sorts is one way to put it,” Renata observed. “Heartbroken seems to hit the nail on the head though. So can we cut through the bullshit and get to your telling me what happened so I can go kick Raphael’s ass?”

  Macy laughed despite herself, exactly as Renata had no doubt intended—though she sounded completely serious. Once again, she was grateful that she’d reached out to the champion boxer when Renata had returned to New Orleans a few months back. Not only were her contributions to the foundation vitally important, she was also worth her weight in gold as a friend.

  Renata gave her a stern look. “I know that after a whole week of dancing around the issue you finally had ‘dinner’ with Raphael a couple of nights ago. When I called you yesterday, you said you didn’t want to talk about it. And you sounded like hell. Now, I can only conclude that your night with Raphael was awful—in which case, we should totally hire his PR team, because the dude has a serious reputation as a sex god—or something else happened. I was a good girl and waited a whole other day, knowing I’d see you this afternoon, but I can’t go one more minute pretending everything is all right when you look so damn devastated. So spill it. What the hell did Raphael do?”

  “He didn’t do anything.”

  Renata folded her arms across her chest. “Somebody did something. You look like you’re about to burst into tears at any moment!”

  “It’s not his fault,” Macy said, damning herself with an errant sniffle. “I messed up.”

  Despite her best effort, tears pricked her eyes. God, three days and it still hurt as bad as when he’d walked out on her. “We had a beautiful night together, and then I ruined it.”

  She gave Renata an abbreviated account of her night with Raphael, leaving out the more intimate details. “Then I
had to tell him something. Something I’ve been holding inside for almost a decade.”

  “What? That you love him?”

  “No.” Macy shook her head. “He already knew that, he just refused to acknowledge it.”

  Renata moved to sit beside her on the comfortable couch tucked into one corner of the home office she shared with her husband, former boxer and local billionaire Sebastian Delacroix. Macy knew the sprawling mansion in the ritzy and gated Audubon Place community had plenty of rooms that could have been converted for Renata’s office use, but the couple enjoyed each other so much they maximized the chance to be together whenever they could.

  They had the office to themselves today, with Sebastian working in the DJD Holdings offices in Place St. Charles. Macy didn’t know where Raphael was, and she was too embarrassed over what had happened to ask Renata to ask Sebastian. She had the day off from her restaurants and in search of much-needed peace away from the public, had agreed to meet Renata at home.

  “Macy.” Renata waited until she refocused. “What could you have possibly said to Raphael that would make him run out on you, especially after that amazing night you shared and a week rebuilding your relationship?”

  Macy reached for the box of tissues on the low table. “Not only did I have to tell him that he’d gotten me pregnant before I left for Paris, I also had to tell him that I’d had a miscarriage a couple of months later.”

  “Oh my God, Macy!” Renata gripped her hand. “You told him this now? He never knew? Why didn’t you tell him back then, when you needed his support?”

  “I tried to reach him every way I knew, but I couldn’t,” she answered, dabbing at her eyes with the tissue. “When we parted back then, it felt permanent, and when I couldn’t reach him, I thought it was because he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore.”

  She sighed shakily as she reached for a fresh tissue. “He told me a few days ago that he’d sold his childhood home, turned the company back over to the interim CEO with the intention to go to Thailand to study Muay Thai. But I’d thought that he’d deliberately cut me out of his life.”

  “God.” Renata reached for her own tissue. “You guys are star-crossed. So when you told him this the other night—”

  “It was like it had just happened for him.” Macy twisted the paper between her fingers. “I hurt him so badly, Renata. Even right after his father’s death I don’t think I saw him look so torn up, so grief stricken. He was angry, too. So very angry with me. I tried to get him to stay and talk to me. He just took off without a word as if he couldn’t bear to be in the same room with me. I haven’t heard from him since. He hasn’t acknowledged my texts or returned my phone calls. The only reason I know he’s not dead or injured is because it would have been all over the local news.”

  “You know Bas and I would have told you in person if something had happened to him. I don’t know if this helps or not, but Bas told me that Raphael was up in Baton Rouge.”

  “No, it doesn’t help. Baton Rouge isn’t some backwater without cell towers. He could have reached out to me if he wanted to, but he didn’t. I may have been wrong about him not wanting me all those years ago, but I think it’s painfully obvious now. He probably feels like I betrayed him.”

  “Maybe he just needs some time,” her friend suggested. “That can’t be easy news to deal with.”

  “I know.” While she was relieved she no longer had to bear the weight of her tragedy alone, she almost wished she hadn’t told Raphael. She shook her head. No, that wouldn’t have been fair to either of them. There was no way she could be in his life now and keep that kind of information from him. For better or worse, he’d needed to know. Now she just needed to live with the consequences. She just wasn’t sure that she could live without him again.

  “You need to decide if you’re going to tough it out or walk away,” Renata told her. “What did you do when he got the news that his father had died?”

  “Stayed by his side. It didn’t matter if he wanted me there or not. I went back home with him and was there for him. He needed me.”

  Renata smiled at her. “And this is different how?”

  Macy stared at her friend as the light bulb moment registered. “Do you automatically get the gift of wisdom when you get married?”

  “Only if you get the stupid mistakes out of the way before you do the deed.”

  “Apparently we’re still making mistakes,” Macy confessed. “This one may be too much for him to forgive.”

  “You’ll do whatever it takes if you want it bad enough.” Renata sighed with mock resignation. “There are days when Bas drives me crazy, but I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “My ears are burning,” the man in question said as he entered the office. “I sure hope that means you were saying nice things about your saint of a husband.”

  Macy didn’t hear Renata’s tart response. Her entire attention had been captured by the man who’d entered the room behind Sebastian.

  “Hi, Macy,” Raphael said.

  * * *

  She’d been crying.

  Raphael shoved his hands in his pockets, the only way he could stop himself from reaching for her. Macy’s tears had always hurt him, especially since he was usually the cause of them. As he certainly was now.

  “Hello, Raphael.” She crossed her legs and folded her arms about herself, a defensive posture it hurt him to his soul to see. Her voice sounded tight, her expression pinched and wary as if it took all her will to keep her emotions under control.

  He’d hurt her by walking out. He knew that, had known it the moment he’d gone for his clothes. Just as he knew he’d hurt her even more by not calling for the past three days. It had been necessary and it had killed him, but he’d needed time to process the news she’d given him, needed time to allow the emotional reaction to dissipate into something manageable. The one thing he did not want to do was take his emotional upheaval out on her. He’d hurt her enough.

  “Hey, babe,” Renata called out to Sebastian when the uncomfortable silence stretched on far too long. “Why don’t we go see what Connie’s planning for dinner?”

  “I want to stay and watch this,” Bas said, a wicked grin on his face. “Raphael Jerroult tongue-tied around a woman? It’s history in the making. Maybe I should post it to YouTube.”

  “Bas,” Raphael said, never taking his eyes off Macy. “Remember your reaction when I met your lovely wife the first time?”

  “Yeah,” his friend and business partner answered, a growl of menace seeping into the word. Bas hadn’t appreciated Raphael’s open admiration of Renata’s stunning assets when they’d met at a photoshoot for their Hard Knocks Athletics apparel line. Violence had been threatened.

  “Yeah is exactly right. So fuck off.”

  “Raffie!” Macy gasped, shocked.

  Sebastian burst out with guffaws of laughter. “Message received loud and clear. Good luck, man.” He swooped down on his wife and scooped her up. “Come on, babe, let’s go check on dinner. Or maybe we could start with dessert?”

  Raphael rolled his eyes as the female welterweight champion giggled like a teen at a boy- band concert and let her husband carry her out of the office. “Think they’re going to go upstairs and have sex?” he asked, hoping to lighten the tension.

  Macy offered a tentative smile in return. “Probably. They’re still in the honeymoon phase.” Her smile faded. “You didn’t tell him what I did to you?”

  “Did to me?” He frowned. Fuck, did she think that he blamed her for what had happened? “No. Guys don’t talk about stuff like that.”

  She nodded, her nervous fingers shredding the tissue. “Renata told me you went to Baton Rouge. Back to JerTech?”

  “Yeah, I did.” He ran a hand through his hair as he stepped farther into the room. “There were some issues at the old JerTech offices that required me to be on-site. I got back a couple of hours ago.”

  Actually, he’d gone to track down everyone who’d been in the corporate offic
e eight years ago, anyone who might have fielded and blocked Macy’s attempts to reach him. Those employees were now ex-employees and everyone at the executive level knew not to fuck around when it came to Macy Lovelace calling the office.

  He wouldn’t tell her that if he could help it, just hoped that his response was enough. She nodded, seeming to accept his lame-ass explanation. “I’m sure you did what you had to do.”

  “I did.” He sat down next to her on the sofa, nearly groaning out loud when she visibly tensed. “Macy—”

  “You left your duffel bag at my place,” she said then, her voice almost nonexistent. She wrapped her arms around her waist and hunched over, a protective gesture that damn near broke his heart. “I … I figured you weren’t coming back, so I was going to just leave it here with Renata and Sebastian. It’s in my car.”

  He stiffened in shock. “You thought I wasn’t coming back?”

  “What else was I supposed to think?” she burst out. “You left, despite me begging you not to. I understand why but it still hurt. It still felt like the end.”

  “It wasn’t good-bye.” Slowly he reached out to take her hand, expecting her to draw away. A tremble swept through her, but she didn’t reject him. Thank God. Somehow, he had to convince her that they could get through this, together.

  “Come home with me.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Come home with me.”

  It was his version of a request, one that sounded more like a demand. Yet Macy could see in the set of his shoulders, the carefully neutral expression, how much he wanted her to say yes. Perhaps he wanted to apologize for running out on her. She had dropped a verbal bomb on him; what was an eight-year-old pain to her was a fresh wound to him. He needed time to process it. She couldn’t expect him to recover in three days from what had taken her months to overcome.