Claiming his Secret Baby_One night and a lifetime of consequences...

by Clare Connelly

  “Yes,” he said with a nod, the word throaty. “I will.”

  She stayed downstairs, pretending to read a book of her own. An hour after disappearing together, Xavier appeared. “He’s asking for you.” He didn’t meet her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she acknowledged stiffly and made to leave the room. But Xavier arrested her when she was almost at the stairs.

  “I will have dinner ready when you’re done.”

  She stayed still, frozen to the spot, then finally acknowledged him with a swift, curt nod.

  Josh was in bed when she walked into his room, a smile on his face, like a perfect little angel.

  “Good night, my darling.”

  “Buenas noches, mama,” he grinned smugly, and her heart turned over, both at the softly spoken Spanish and the beatific look on his handsome little face.

  “Buenas noches,” she repeated, sitting on the side of his bed, taking his little paw in her hand.

  “Xavier says I can paint the room whatever colour I like.”

  Ellie’s pulse throbbed. “I see.”

  “And that he is going to take me to a toy store and let me choose whatever I want to fill that shelf.” He nodded across the room to a large, empty unit.

  “And he says he likes to read me books very much.”

  Ellie’s heart tugged. “Mmm,” she said, stroking his hair.

  “I like him,” the little boy said. “I want to stay here.”

  Ellie nodded, emotions throbbing in her gut. She leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to his forehead then stood, spinning away before her perceptive little son could notice her turmoil for himself. “I’ll see you in the morning, darling.”

  “Si.”

  She ground her teeth together and pulled the door shut softly as she left, bracing her back against it for several seconds before pushing away and padding, with a heavy sigh, towards the grand and intimidating State room.

  It was no less intimidating the second time she entered, though it did smell utterly delicious. Her stomach growled and she realized she hadn’t eaten all day – not more than an egg for breakfast, but she didn’t think she’d actually finished it.

  Xavier was sitting on one side of the table and he’d set the place directly opposite. A bottle of red wine was between them, a glass poured for each.

  His eyes bore into hers as she swept into the room, a look that was impossible to interpret, impossible to meet, so she glanced away, feigning fascination with the food.

  It looked to be some sort of crumbed chicken, and crispy potatoes.

  Her tummy groaned again.

  She took the seat opposite him, and he continued to watch her, so that her skin prickled all over with goosebumps and her cheeks flushed pink. She reached for the glass of wine and, despite not being a big drinker, took a large gulp. She needed the fire of courage.

  “He is a remarkable child,” Xavier drawled, and though it was a compliment, there was a warning in the praise too, something that made her breath heavy in her lungs.

  “Thank you,” she said stiffly, placing the wine glass down and tracing her fingertip distractedly around the bottom rim.

  The air seemed to crack with words they weren’t speaking. Tension zapped at Ellie’s spine and she expelled a soft, gentle sigh, then sipped her wine once more. This time, when she laid the glass down on the table, she lifted her gaze to his face.

  “What happened in the accident?” She asked, as her attention slid to the scars on his cheek, then back to his eyes.

  A muscle throbbed in his powerful jaw and for a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then, with a sigh of his own, he leaned forward and templed his fingers beneath his chin, speaking in a graveled voice. “A truck crossed to my side of the road. I saw it and slowed, but couldn’t swerve out of his way.” He frowned. “My car was totaled.”

  Ellie’s eyes jammed shut as the vision from the news replayed in her mind’s eye. She remembered the crash just fine. “You were in a coma,” she said, the words dragged from the past. “Was anything else broken?”

  “Besides my mind?” He asked, lifting a finger and tapping the side of his head.

  She nodded awkwardly.

  “Six ribs, my sternum, a vertebrae. I’m lucky I wasn’t paralysed.”

  A shiver ran down her spine as she imagined this very virile, very active man being unable to walk. “And your back?”

  “Burns.”

  “God, Xavier,” she shook her head.

  “That’s almost exactly the phrase I used,” he said, and there was – for the first time – a hint of something like a smile around his face. Her pulse went into overdrive at this ghost of their past – when smiles and laughter had been second nature.

  “You must have hated that. The recovery, I mean.”

  “I was grateful to be alive,” he said with an assumed air of non-concern. But it was a lie. Ellie had spent only forty eight hours with this man four years earlier but she knew him inside out. Every flicker of his face, every twist of his lips – she knew him.

  “No, you weren’t,” she hazarded, putting her elbow on the table top and resting her chin in the palm of her hand.

  His eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “Why do you say that?”

  “I can tell,” she said simply. “You hated being injured.”

  “Of course. Who wouldn’t?”

  “You hated it and wished, sometimes, that you had died…”

  His eyes were guarded, his expression carefully blanked of any emotion. “Why didn’t you talk to Bella, at the hospital?”

  Ellie’s eyes drifted to the table and he laughed, a harsh, throaty sound.

  “You close your eyes or turn away from me whenever I ask you a question you do not wish to answer. Are you so afraid of the truth, Elizabeth?”

  She forced herself to raise her attention to his face, and stared at him in defiance of his cynical – yet accurate – observation. “Didn’t you just do the same thing by changing the subject?”

  A tilt of his head showed his acknowledgement of her statement. “I never wished I was dead,” he said seriously. “But I hated the state I was in. I had never known despair, not for a day in my life. And then I had it in spades.” He grunted, but she thought he had intended it for a dismissive laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly, shaking her head. It was a platitude that was offered often, but for Ellie, it came from deep within her.

  He dipped his head in acknowledgement, or was that dismissal?

  “What happened, when you came to the hospital?” He asked, reaching for a serving spoon then passing it to her. She held it in her fingertips without using it.

  “I was showed to your room by a nurse. I never knew her name, but she was kind to me. She’d asked if I was family and I obviously wasn’t, but I was…” her eyes lifted to his, and there was so much pain in them that he felt an answering hurt deep inside his chest.

  “I was obviously desperate to see you. I was beside myself with worry. They’d played the aerial footage of the crash scene on the news and your car was just completely destroyed. I couldn’t imagine how you’d survived.” She shivered, as though to erase the memory. “Anyway, she showed me to your room, and there was a big window on the outside,” she said, remembering it as clearly as if she’d gone to the hospital that same day.

  Everything she’d felt then was still inside of her, heavy and immovable. She couldn’t tell him how she’d sat with him all night, how she’d stared at him and prayed for him, and spoken to him in the hopes that her voice alone would bring him to life. She couldn’t tell him how she’d made deals with God all night, hoping only that he would live. It was too raw. Too painful. “And she was there,” Ellie said, cutting to the end of her time at the hospital.

  Xavier’s lips tightened and his expression was one of utter determination. “You weren’t angry with me?”

  “Angry?” It was her turn to laugh, a strangled, manic sound. “I felt every emotion under the sun. I was fu
rious at you, of course, but God, what I wouldn’t have done to swap places with you.”

  His frown was etched across his face. “It was just one weekend,” he said, prompting her with curiosity. “You truly felt so much for me?”

  She jerked in a sharp breath; it didn’t help. It was as though he’d slapped her face. She lifted potatoes and chicken onto her plate, simply for something to do with her hands. “I thought I did,” she said stiffly, then smiled weakly. “It was just a foolish girlhood dream.”

  He nodded, his expression impossible to interpret.

  “I didn’t know you, really. It was all an illusion. You were very, very good at the whole seduction thing.”

  He had the decency to look momentarily embarrassed, but he recovered quickly. “I wasn’t your first lover,” he said, his frustration obvious. And she understood what it must mean to a man like Xavier Salbatore, used to being in command of all situations, to have holes in his memory.

  “No,” she agreed, cutting a piece of chicken and lifting it to her mouth. It was delicious, buttery and cheesy inside, crumbed crisp on the outside.

  “So you were experienced? Worldly?”

  Her lips twisted with self-deprecation. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Then what would you say?” He asked in exasperation, reaching for the serving spoon and dishing his own meal out.

  She sighed. It was no secret. They’d talked about this back then, but it had all been so different. Conversation had been easy and natural, it had flowed as though they had been best friends for years. Now she felt like every word was weighted, every question an interrogation, and there was a world of mistrust between them.

  “I’d had a boyfriend in high school – if you could call him that,” she said slowly, reaching for her wine glass and cradling it in her palm without lifting it to her lips. “He was older,” she said tentatively.

  He seized on the ambivalent, guilty tone in her voice. “Much older?”

  She nodded slowly. “He was thirty.”

  “thirty?” his brows lifted. “And you were?”

  “Sixteen.” She swallowed.

  “Jesucristo,” he swore angrily. “He was old enough to be your father.”

  “Yes,” she admitted with a soft shift of her body, uncrossing and then crossing her legs beneath the table. “But I didn’t care. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met. Smart and funny and sophisticated and so interested in me.” She grimaced. “I was an idiot. I fell for his lies completely.”

  “What happened?” Xavier asked, the question strangely urgent.

  Ellie could remember the bitterness of the day with clarity. “He lost interest after we slept together,” she said stiffly. “He dropped me home the next morning and didn’t even say he’d call me.” Her face was pale, her eyes showing remembered hurts. “My parents were livid. They couldn’t believe I’d spent all night out. My dad threatened to press charges but I was sixteen. Our being together wasn’t criminal. It was just… criminally stupid.”

  “Yes,” Xavier agreed, the word bit from between his teeth.

  “Apparently I have terrible taste in men,” she said in a watery attempt at humour. He didn’t find it amusing. He was all ice and stone, staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

  But what more was there to say? On a small sigh, she pressed her fork into a crispy piece of potato.

  “From then on, any boy that I so much as talked to, my parents presumed I was sleeping with. They were so embarrassed by my actions and convinced I had chronically ‘loose morals’. So when I came home pregnant and refusing to tell them who the father of the baby was, they weren’t exactly surprised. Nor were they in any mood to be sympathic and supportive.”

  “So they kicked you out,” he surmised grimly.

  She nodded, that painful weekend one she didn’t like to revisit.

  “And now? What part do they play in your life? In my son’s life?”

  “None.” She sipped her wine. “Nell and I don’t speak to them. They couldn’t forgive me for getting pregnant and refusing to have an abortion, and they couldn’t forgive Nell for supporting my decisions.”

  His face was like iron, all harsh angles and planes, strong and fierce. “They wanted you to terminate?”

  “Yes. Or even put him up for adoption. And I thought about that. I really did.” She lowered her gaze, feeling anxious at the very idea now. “But the moment I felt Josh move in my tummy, I knew he was my baby. That I’d keep him no matter what.”

  His eyes were narrowed as they rested on her face, his bitterness impossible to miss.

  “I was twenty years old and terrified. But I knew I would love our baby with all my heart, and I did. I have. I do.”

  Xavier was very quiet while these statements met his ears, and then he nodded. “I believe you love him.” He said finally. “I think you are a good mother and that he’s very attached to you. It’s the only reason I’m seeking to marry you rather than eviscerate you in family court and take him away.”

  Now it was Ellie who flinched, his words like lashes of burning rope against the base of her spine. “You’d never succeed,” she said with more bravado than she felt. Her insides were quivering. She was a mess. She remembered the threat of the ambassador, talk of the embassy, and knew he had every gun in his arsenal to do exactly as he’d threatened.

  His smile was grim, a cynical gash that did nothing to soften the vice-like grip of disapproval on his handsome face. “If I had died in that accident,” he said, the words calm despite their alarming content, “would you have told my parents about the child?”

  She startled, thinking of Maria and Roberto with renewed anxiety. “How would I know who your parents were?” She asked, dropping her hands to her lap and fidgeting them there.

  “They were at the hospital with Arabella. I presumed you’d seen them?”

  “I… no,” she lied, her eyes unable to meet his. “Perhaps they’d stepped out. I wasn’t there that long.” She was agitated and uncertain, trying to keep track of all the things that were in her head. Why hadn’t she told him the truth about his parents? Why didn’t she do so now? Why didn’t she throw it at his feet that she had been warned off, offered money in exchange for silence, by his parents, and that when she called to tell them she was, in fact, pregnant, they’d made it almost impossible?

  Because she knew the pain of parental estrangement. She knew that every day started with a keening sense of regret and grief – to mourn parents who are still living is something she wouldn’t wish on anyone. Even Xavier.

  “If you were dead,” she returned to the original question rather than go down a road that would lead to more lies and evasions. “I imagine I would have told them, yes. There would have been no marriage to protect. And I could have told them without having to live with the consequences,” she added, as an afterthought.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, suffering this fate.” And she pushed her chair back, too upset now to eat, despite the ravenous hunger that had set upon her when first she’d entered this mausoleum. “I was twenty years old and terrified,” she said, swallowing hard. “You were a billionaire who used me for sex and then went off and got married. What the hell was I meant to do?”

  A muscle jerked in his jaw and despite the hard set of his features, she knew that her words hit their mark. But then, he leaned back in his chair, a study in lazy indolence. “Keeping a man from his child is never a good idea, querida.”

  “And nor is threatening a mother,” she said, a defiant tilt to her chin.

  She was terrified. Her body was shaking and yet he couldn’t stem the anger that was rushing through him. Having spent the day with Joshua, all he could think about was what he’d missed. How much he’d lost, and all because this woman had been too afraid to do the right thing.

  So he’d been married. That didn’t negate his rights, and didn’t give her open slather to make such an enormous decision.

  Their son had been denied a father as well.r />
  “It is not a threat when the intention is there to go through with it,” he said, watching as his words landed on her shoulders.

  Her glare was a juxtaposition of fear and aggression.

  “I would fight you every step of the way.”

  “And I would win,” he said, standing and moving towards her. She was frozen to the spot.

  “You think that makes you a good father?” She whispered, shaking her head softly and surprising him by meeting his eyes with a look that was loaded with determination. “You think wanting to terrify Joshua’s mother proves that you love him?” She straightened, pulling away from the door and jerking it inwards. “Any decent human being would know that one of the best ways to show you love Joshua is to at least respect the woman who’s raising him – even if you don’t like her. He’s going to be happiest of all if he thinks we’re at peace, not war.” She turned and moved through the door but then, paused, and threw over her shoulder: “But I guess we both know you’re a long way from being a decent human being.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HE DIDN’T GO TO bed until the early hours of the morning and he knew why. He was avoiding her. He was avoiding having to face the truth of her parting barb.

  Because there was truth in those words. Nothing could absolve her of her crimes in keeping Joshua from him, but what of his own actions? What of the fact that he’d been engaged and set out to seduce a young woman? Had overpowered her with his flattery and experience, had made her think he was free and available, had even made her love him, and then he’d left her, intending to marry Bella, as planned.

  Hell, when she’d told him the story of the man she’d lost her virginity to, he’d been livid! Outraged that any man could use a young woman so badly.

  But was Xavier any different? She’d been twenty, not sixteen, but even now at twenty four she had the innocence of a woman who had been sheltered all her life. At that same age, Xavier had been running his branch of the company, in charge of billions of euros worth of investments, and he’d had more lovers than he could remember. There was no comparing him to her.