Harlequin Presents: Once Upon A Temptation June 2020--Box Set 1 of 2

by Dani Collins

“Your father was extremely ill when I heard,” Scarlett continued in that subdued voice, making it impossible for him to remain detached—not that he’d ever exceled at ignoring her. “I was keeping everything running in his stead and coordinating all his care workers.”

  “You didn’t have time. I understand.” He kept his tone arid and emotionless yet conveyed how pathetic he found her excuses to be.

  She flinched.

  Good. He wasn’t about to sympathize or forgive her choice to continue working for a tyrant.

  “And I was—” he heard her swallow “—showing.”

  “You’re something else,” he muttered on a cynical laugh. “You want me to empathize with what a difficult position you were in? Because coming to the hospital would have revealed to me that you were carrying my child?” He’d been at his absolute lowest! Today wasn’t much better. “Did you get pregnant on purpose?” It was the one question that kept pounding behind his brow. “To deliberately try to get your hands on his money?”

  “If that’s all I wanted, I could have slept with Val,” she threw at him.

  “Have you?” He would kill him. He really would.

  “No. And Niko’s money isn’t coming to me. I’m entitled to an allowance to raise the baby in suitable comfort and I earn a salary for managing Niko’s estate, but the bulk will be held in trust for—”

  Her mouth tightened, and she sucked in a great breath, holding it.

  Concern breached his wall of anger as he watched the color in her cheeks fade. Perspiration appeared in a sheen on her upper lip.

  “Aren’t you supposed to breathe or something?” he asked gruffly. That’s all he knew from the few programs he’d happened across that had featured a birthing scene. Usually it was a comedy that played the whole thing as a roaring joke.

  She flashed him a glare of outrage, but after a moment her breath hissed out and her tension began to ease.

  “You refused to see your own father,” she bit out. “How would I know your feelings on becoming one?”

  “Ask,” he muttered, accosted by too many emotions to identify.

  Did he feel guilty at not going to see his father? Not at all. Niko had cost him too much of his youth. All of it. Not just the innocence of childhood or the hardship his extended family had suffered after his mother divorced Niko, either. There had been the engineered conflicts with Val and the responsibilities he’d had to shoulder while watching his grandfather fail. The bleakness of a mother who was embittered and broken, incapable of being a real mother.

  Now Niko had denied him his own child.

  Javiero wanted to roar out his anger. He was furious that Scarlett had been by Niko’s side all these months. Niko should have died alone, the manipulative son of a bitch.

  They arrived at the hospital. His driver had called ahead, and a nurse was waiting with a wheelchair.

  The nurse glanced at him with startled apprehension as he stepped from the car, a reaction he was getting used to, but it still made him want to snarl. He turned his back on her as he leaned in to help Scarlett shift across and out.

  Bureaucracy ensued. Questions were asked and forms completed. Nurses took Scarlett’s blood pressure and temperature, and helped her change into a hospital gown.

  It gave him time to absorb that he was about to become a father. He trusted Scarlett on that with instinctive certainty. She was too distraught to scheme. Besides, the timing worked, and his father wouldn’t have named her baby his heir if he hadn’t been convinced that baby was his blood.

  With acceptance of that came an avalanche of duty and anticipated sacrifice, the weight of it so heavy and voluminous that Javiero’s chest felt tight. He didn’t have room in his life for more. Time wasn’t a commodity in a well he could draw on when he needed more. How was he supposed to fit child rearing into his already tightly packed days? The physiotherapy after his attack was a challenging addition to his calendar.

  And what did he know of fathering? He spent the occasional hour with children of his cousins and other relatives, but they had proper, decent parents to go home to. The only example he’d had, an acrimonious mother and a domineering father, would have him breaking his child’s spirit before it could talk. Damn that old man and his continued manipulations!

  Niko must have known what sort of hornet’s nest he was building by leaving his money to his grandchildren, but when had Nikolai Mylonas cared one iota for the suffering he caused? Javiero’s grandfather had been on the ropes, barely hanging on to his properties in Spain when he had brokered the marriage of his eldest daughter to Niko. Paloma had been young and naive and beautiful, and determined to save her family.

  Niko, however, hadn’t given up his mistress while they’d been engaged. In fact, he’d kept seeing Evelina right up until the night before his wedding. He hadn’t seemed terribly concerned about birth control either, trusting Evelina’s attachment to her modeling career to keep her from getting pregnant.

  Evelina had conceived Val with malice aforethought and turned up pregnant with her hand out as Paloma was testing positive with Javiero.

  “You were setting me up for the same nightmare I grew up in,” he accused Scarlett, when she was settled on the bed and the nurse had left them alone. “Were you going to wait until I was married before you told me I had a child on the way?”

  “Your wedding wasn’t scheduled until next year,” she mumbled, throwing off the blanket and swinging her legs to the edge of the bed. “Niko asked me to wait until he’d passed before I told you. It was essentially a dying wish and he needed me there, running things while he declined. He knew you’d insist I leave if you found out. I knew he would be gone sooner than later so I did as he asked.” She tried to keep her gown from riding up while her foot searched blindly for a slipper.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want my phone. Kiara is probably worried.”

  “Screw Kiara.” But he fetched Scarlett’s handbag from the cupboard, waited while she rummaged in it and returned it after she’d retrieved her phone.

  She glanced at the screen and quickly dropped it to the mattress as her expression crumpled. She groaned with suffering, doubling forward over the ball of her belly.

  Despite his foul mood, his heart lurched in alarm.

  “Should I get the nurse?” He moved to open the door, prepared to yell the place down.

  “She won’t do anything. I said I want to deliver naturally. She said this is normal,” she groaned, her knuckles sticking out like broken teeth as she gripped the sheet beneath her.

  This didn’t look very damned normal to him. He hovered in the doorway feeling uncharacteristically useless.

  “Why the hell would you want to put up with that? Take something.”

  After a moment, her tension dissipated. She released a pent-up breath with a few pants, but she was trembling and licking her dry lips.

  “Kiara delivered naturally.” She rattled a paper cup and shook an ice chip into her mouth, holding it between her teeth as she spoke around it. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  Even so, her hands bracketed her belly as though trying to keep it from splitting while a keening noise emanated from her throat.

  The pain that gripped her was so visceral he felt it twist through him. He stood there in empathic torment, paralyzed by the tension of watching her expression flex in agony, waiting for it to ease. He didn’t breathe again until she did.

  “I don’t understand how this is happening,” he muttered, referring to the entire event. Not in his wildest dreams had he seen this coming when he had climbed out of bed this morning.

  She shot him an incredulous look and pushed her hair off her face. “You didn’t use protection. Not every time. You know you didn’t.”

  That last time.

  Stay, he had ordered. Pleaded, maybe. Either way, he hadn’t wanted her to go back to his fa
ther, and she had worn a look just as conflicted as the one on her face right now.

  I can’t.

  Their final kiss had turned into something that had nearly pulled the soul from his body. She’d moved her clothing aside. He’d wound up thrusting into her against the wall of his entryway.

  He’d been so shaken by the experience he’d still been hot under the collar half a year later, loosening his tie as he overlooked the cat pen at his fiancée’s home, hoping the breeze would clear his head of Scarlett. The jaguar had leaped at his tie and dragged him into a fight for his life.

  “I didn’t mean to sleep with you,” she said in a subdued voice. “Niko took a terrible turn when I got back. Things were very unsettled, and I didn’t even think about repercussions until I was facing a positive test.”

  He dragged his mind back from the brink of death to Scarlett on the edge of the bed. She looked incredibly fragile, as though she hugged a cushion rather than his unborn child against her middle.

  “Why did you come to me at all? You had to know I wasn’t interested in seeing him.”

  Guilt creased her expression. “I knew Niko planned to leave everything to Aurelia. I was sworn not to tell anyone about her, but if you had come to the island, you would have met them and learned everything.”

  “Seems a dirty trick on Kiara. I thought she was your friend.”

  “She is. And I only wanted to give you the chance to learn what he planned so you could make an informed decision about rejecting his money. My conscience demanded I do that much! What happened between us was completely unexpected.”

  “It was unexpected?” he scoffed.

  The sexual tension between them had simmered for years. He had ended a longtime relationship immediately after the first time he’d met her, convinced he would sleep with Scarlett by the end of that week. He’d been too proud to chase her, though, and she’d been tied too tightly to Niko to visit him more than once or twice a year. Each time she had left a wake of what-ifs until that last time when their chemistry had burst into flames.

  Then she had still gone back to Niko.

  “Ask yourself how you would be feeling right now if everything was going to Val’s daughter,” she challenged softly.

  “I’d feel great.” But his mother would have had a stroke. Even so, he said, “Don’t pretend you did me a favor, Scarlett. You’re as bad as he is, making choices for people that change lives.”

  “I’m being punished for my poor judgment, trust me,” she choked. “Maybe if you’re lucky, I won’t survive, and you can ride your high horse forever.”

  “Too far,” he snarled, appalled she would think he wanted her to die. He wasn’t enjoying her suffering. He sure as hell didn’t want anything tragic to happen to her or his unborn child.

  Her phone rang.

  “Kiara,” she said as she answered with shaking hands. “I’m in labor, what do you think? How did you do this?” That might have been an effort to make light, but her arm was trembling as though the phone was too heavy for her to hold to her ear. Her voice didn’t disguise her fretfulness as she added an urgent, “No, wait.”

  She glanced at him, doubt and distress clouding her blue eyes along with a question.

  “Javiero wants to stay with me.”

  He did. He stepped closer without hesitation, as if he could physically oust anyone from trying to get between them. He wasn’t sure where that compulsion came from. So far this had been a hellish reunion for both of them and it didn’t promise to get better, but this was exactly where he would stay until his baby was born.

  Then he didn’t know what he would do.

  He was close enough to hear the woman’s voice ask, “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know.” Scarlett rubbed at the crinkle of anguish between her brows. “I had to tell him everything. Now he thinks you shouldn’t be here. Because of Val.” She sounded bereft. Anxious and deeply vulnerable and… Was she crying?

  Scarlett was tough as nails. She argued with reason, stuck to her guns and kept her cool. That was why he had always found her so infuriating. And compelling.

  The sight of a tear leaking from the corner of her eye down her cheek snapped his roiling emotions into a new pattern, one that drew her firmly behind the shield of protectiveness he’d been wielding against her.

  The flip of mind-set happened so fast it made him dizzy, but one thought crystalized—whatever else was going on between them had to wait. Right now, Scarlett was in genuine distress.

  He touched her bare knee to get her attention. She apprehensively met his gaze and he held it. He shoved all his anger and resentment into compartments behind his breastbone and deep in the back of his throat. He conveyed confidence he had no right to because he had no idea what they were in for, but here he was and here he would stay.

  A fraction of her tension eased, and her mouth trembled while the woman’s voice softened. He only caught the gist that Kiara was promising to book into a nearby hotel. She said that Scarlett should call her if she wanted her.

  “Thank you,” Scarlett said in a quavering voice. “I’m a wreck and—Oh, here comes another one.”

  He gently took the phone. “Breathe?” he suggested gently.

  “I am breathing.” She sounded petulant. Persecuted. “What do you know about it? Oh, my God, I hate you for doing this to me.”

  That stung, but he ended her call and set the phone aside. Then he stepped between her knees and took her weight as much as he could while she pinched his biceps in biting fists and pressed her forehead into his shoulder.

  He rubbed her back, trying to ease the rigidity in her.

  After a full minute, she slumped weakly against him. Her hands still clung to his sleeves and her head rested against his heartbeat. Her tears dampened the front of his shirt.

  “We’re not going to fight anymore,” he promised as he continued to rub her back. “Not right now. Our baby won’t be born into a war zone the way I was.”

  * * *

  As far as Scarlett knew, Niko hadn’t been present for the birth of either of his sons. She hadn’t expected Javiero to be here for this. She probably should have drawn back when the pain passed, but she stayed leaning on him. It felt too good to be held by him.

  “I’m scared,” she admitted. Terrified, more like. “I was Kiara’s birth coach and thought that meant I knew what to expect. I convinced myself it would be different for me. I would handle it better because I’ve had more practice at keeping a stiff upper lip. She’s kinder and softer in all the right ways, but I’m starting to think she’s the bravest, strongest person I’ve ever met.”

  He continued the soothing run of his hand up and down her back. It felt really nice, but as she allowed herself to remember Aurelia’s arrival she knew it was only fair to let him off the hook. Witnessing a birth was pretty overwhelming.

  “Kiara said she would come if I need her. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to.” His tone was firm and sure. He didn’t ask if she wanted him there.

  She did. It didn’t make sense. Their relationship had been stoic, if laden with undercurrents. Then it had been volatile and intimate. Then radio silence while she’d been swimming in a miasma of mixed emotions for months. All of that had imploded in the last few hours, tearing her up while she headed inexorably toward the massive event that was taking over her body and her life.

  In this very moment, however, they occupied a serene pool of affinity. She sniffed, not knowing how to handle his tenderness.

  If anything happened… Well, she didn’t want to think of that. She was just glad he was willing to stay.

  “I should have asked Kiara how it went with Val,” she murmured to distract herself.

  A reflexive tightening in Javiero’s body rejected his half brother’s name.

  “Tell me what I can do t
o help. Do you like when I rub your back?”

  He was changing the subject and maybe that was a good thing. She nodded against his chest. Her hair was pulling at her scalp and falling apart, but when she reached to pull out the pins, he gently set her arms around his rib cage and removed the pins himself, pausing when a new bout of pain arrived.

  “Don’t be afraid of it,” he murmured. “That’s what I learned. Fighting pain makes it worse. When you accept it and let yourself feel it, you discover you can bear it.”

  Easy to say, but she tried not to tense up or worry about anything beyond taking slow, measured breaths as she waited for the contraction to subside. It helped a little.

  “Okay?” he asked when she was breathing normally again.

  She nodded and he resumed taking pins from her hair, then combed his fingers through the strands, making a soothing noise as he massaged her scalp.

  Time passed in a blur after that. She paced and had a shower and paced some more. She sat and knelt and stood and swore. She cried and said awful things to him about his libido and the patriarchy and that Niko’s money wasn’t even close to being worth what she was going through so how dare he accuse her of wanting a penny of it.

  Javiero patiently endured her vitriol, repeating stupid platitudes the nurse had given him to say like, “You’re doing so good. I’m so proud of you. I’m here for you.”

  “That’s a lie,” she said at one point, elbows on the edge of her bed, his palm making circles on her lower back. “No one has ever been here for me. Not when it counted. No one.”

  Even Kiara had abandoned her—which wasn’t fair since she had told her to stay away. Maybe she had pushed Kiara away so she wouldn’t risk being disappointed by the one friend she truly cherished. She could test that friendship—pick up her phone right now and beg Kiara to come—but Kiara couldn’t do anything to help her. Not really.

  No one could.

  Which was pretty much the way her entire life had gone. Her parents and her schoolteachers and social services had all let her down. She had always had to save herself along with everyone else. Maybe that had meant pledging undying allegiance to Niko, who had, at least, kept his promises. And if she hadn’t worked for him, she wouldn’t have met Javiero. Did he realize that?