For a moment she thought her knees would give out. She could see herself in her head, sliding to the floor in a kind of puddle of despair and staying there until the hotel’s housekeeping team swept her out with the trash. Her breath came hard and harsh, loud against the sink’s hard walls.
But her knees didn’t give out, somehow. Slowly, surely, she straightened. She braced herself against the sides of the sink and then she ran the water cold. She splashed it on her face and rinsed her mouth and slowly, slowly fought back the panic so she could think this through.
Dario wouldn’t hurt Damian. That was the most important thing. He might be a terrible bastard to her, but he wasn’t a monster. The worst-case scenario was that her baby might be scared, might want her and not be able to find her—she let out a ragged sob at that thought—but Dario had nothing but stacks of money at his disposal. Damian’s physical and material needs would be met, no question.
She tried to take a moment to feel thankful for that. To remind herself how many women—many of whom she’d had as clients as part of her pro bono work on the islands—couldn’t allow themselves that same confidence in their exes.
But the thought of her little boy afraid, however well Dario might treat him, made her shake again. She fought it back, and that dizzy, swimming thing in her head that was so much worse than a mere sob...she thought it might take her to the ground, after all.
But it didn’t. She didn’t let it.
She’d been prepared to do what she could to ease Dario’s access to Damian. She’d wanted her son to have his father in his life, no matter her complicated feelings about that father. Despite what he’d thought, she’d never wanted to conceal Damian from him in the first place. She shouldn’t have slept with him, certainly, but that was a minor misstep, all things considered. She wasn’t sure she’d have forgiven herself for succumbing to that old addiction so easily, but she’d have handled it, somehow. She still would have done what she could to make things work well enough that Damian and Dario could build some kind of relationship between them.
He, meanwhile, had deliberately misled her and then kidnapped her child.
Which made what she had to do easy, she decided then and there, braced against an unaffordable sink in this outrageously luxurious resort villa on the edge of the vast, uncaring Pacific.
It felt a little bit like a death, but it wasn’t. It was a declaration. He’d made it, but she could answer it—and much, much louder.
Dario wanted a war, apparently.
And this time, she’d damn well give it to him.
* * *
It should probably not have come as a surprise to Dario that the child—his child, if any of what Anais had said to him in Hawaii could be believed—was an utter terror.
There was no other word for it.
On the fourth day of his surprise fatherhood, Dario stood in the foyer of his sprawling Upper West Side penthouse apartment with its three stories of sweeping views over Central Park, and watched the little demon who supposedly bore his DNA run in screaming circles for no apparent reason, putting priceless artifacts at risk with each lap around the expansive living room.
“I don’t understand why you haven’t handled this,” Dario said coldly to the nanny who’d come with the highest of references from the most prestigious Manhattan agency, which normally boasted a waiting list years long. “Why you haven’t done whatever it is I’m paying you to do to stop this kind of insanity at six-thirty in the morning.”
“I’m a nanny, Mr. Di Sione,” the woman replied crisply, with the hint of an English accent Dario was ninety percent convinced she faked for effect and her arms crossed over her ample bosom. “Not Albus Dumbledore.”
The tiny creature, who was, as far as Dario had been able to tell, made entirely of howls and fists and a boundless, terrifying energy, stopped of his own accord then and shouted something incomprehensible at Dario.
“Can you translate that?” Dario asked the nanny in the same cold tone. “Because if you can’t, I might as well fire you and locate a zoologist.”
“I’ll handle him,” the woman said with a sniff.
“See that you do,” Dario gritted out, and then he stalked for the door.
None of this was going according to plan.
You do understand that he’s an entire little person all his own, don’t you? Anais had asked him back in Hawaii. If you have some fantasy in your head about an angelic creature who will gaze at you and call you Daddy and serve as some kind of appendage to your whims, that’s probably not Damian.
It was definitely not Damian.
“Go to hell,” he gritted out as he stabbed at the button of his private elevator, and he hoped Anais heard that, wherever she was. Lying in a heap on some Hawaiian floor, he hoped—and he told himself that pang he felt at the thought was the thrill of his victory over the woman who had wronged him, not something a whole lot more like shame.
He felt slightly more in control when he got to the ground floor of his building and pushed his way out into the sweltering heat of another Manhattan late-summer morning. He waved off his driver and walked instead, thinking the exercise would clear his head. Something had to, or he thought he might implode.
The child—his son—was only part of it. The truth was, he’d expected Anais to appear on his doorstep within twelve hours or so of that morning-after phone call, and she hadn’t. He didn’t know what to make of that. Or, to be precise, one irrepressible part of his body knew exactly what to make of it now it had tasted her again—it counted this as an unacceptable loss and wanted her even more—while the rest of him was as close to confused as he’d been in years.
Not confused, exactly, he corrected himself as he strode down Central Park West toward the ICE headquarters farther south. He was only dimly aware that the other pedestrians cleared the way before him, which probably meant he was scowling ferociously. But he refused to call it confusion, this heavy, spiked thing in him. It was anger. It was self-righteous indignation, and he’d earned it, by God. It had nothing at all to do with the bright images of their night together that coursed through his head and made him worry he might embarrass himself in the middle of corporate meetings. Nothing to do with that at all.
It came down to one simple point, he told himself as he walked toward his office. If it was all right for Anais to raise their child without him, well, then, that must mean it was all right for him to do the same thing.