“My children are not,” he stated, tone as hard as his expression. “Interchangeable. And he had better be my son, Sorcha. If those tests come back telling me I’ve been had, I won’t be happy.”
“As opposed to now, when you’re ecstatic?”
“Less sarcasm once we’re married, hmm? More sweetness.”
She snorted. “We’re not getting married, Cesar.”
“Sorcha,” he said in that terrible voice he used when he was about to annihilate someone. She had always excused herself from the room so the poor sod wouldn’t have a witness to his or her dressing-down.
Her stomach curdled, but she tightened militant fingers into the blanket across her waist and said, “No.”
He came over to clench his hands around the rail of her bed.
“You know how I feel about thieves,” he said in that deadly tone. “You were going to keep my son from me. You were going to do that to me. I may never forgive you for that.”
I trusted you. That’s what he was saying and now that trust had been impacted.
A sob formed in her diaphragm and sat there as an aching lump. She’d been self-protecting.
How could she explain that she’d grown up tarred by what had been seen as her mother’s failed attempt to better herself in the dirtiest, craftiest way? Sorcha could not bear to be viewed in the same light. Her pride had demanded she take all the responsibility for her actions.
“How could I tell you? You were engaged to the woman you had always planned to marry. This is what I expected.” She flicked the check with her finger, sending it helicoptering off the bed onto the floor. “That’s not who I am. I don’t get pregnant to make money. Or to force men to marry me.”
“Nevertheless, we will marry.” He folded his arms.
“You don’t want to marry me! You don’t love me. You don’t even see me as a friend! You didn’t call after I left Spain. You didn’t care that I was out of your life.”
If she had hoped he would protest that she was wrong and he did care, she was sorely disappointed.
“I don’t love Diega, either,” he asserted. “Love isn’t a requirement for my marriage.”
“It is for mine!”
They battled it out with a silent glare for a few seconds before she tore away her gaze, flinching at what he was offering: a knockoff of the designer marriage she had fantasized. Yes, she had imagined marrying him, but in her vision, love was the stitching that held it together.
“You’re telling me you’re not too proud to accept a onetime slice of my fortune, for the sake of our son, but you’re too proud to marry so Enrique can inherit all of it. Do you really want to raise him in Ireland, away from his birthright? To have him one day discover I have children with another woman and those children are living the life he should have had?”
Sorcha sucked in a breath as though he’d stabbed her. “You do remember,” she said through numb lips, swinging her gaze back to him.
“Remember what?” His face blanked.
“What I told you about my father that day. That I have half siblings who inherited his wealth and we were left with nothing.”
He shook his head, irritation flashing as he said through his teeth, “No. I remember nothing of that day. I never will.” His face spasmed into tortured lines before he shrugged off the dark emotion. “But I’m capable of extrapolating the outcome if I marry another woman. She will expect her children to inherit. That’s all you would ever see.” He pointed to the far side of the bed, where the slip of paper had fallen to the floor.
All those ugly zeroes felt like bullet holes through her heart every time she looked at them.
“You just said you don’t want him thinking his father didn’t care enough to provide for him. I care enough to give him everything that should be his! Try telling me that you, a woman who feels as strongly about her family as you do, will do anything less than the same. How could you justify raising him alone, on a shoestring, when he could have two parents with every advantage provided for him? He deserves to inherit his title, Sorcha.”
Okay, she hadn’t mentioned that part to him, that her father’s title had gone to his legitimate English son while his illegitimate Irish daughters had been turned out like squatters. It was horrible to think of Enrique one day feeling as she had—not only dismissed and overlooked, but also treated like trash consigned to the curb.
He doesn’t love me, her heart cried. But her own upbringing had taught her that as wonderful as love was, you couldn’t eat it. Should she really dismiss his attempt to offer the support she’d always wished her father had provided?
Thinking about her father and that awful realization that he’d ultimately abandoned them to their own resources brought back all her old feelings of inadequacy, the ones she couldn’t put voice to because they were so lowering. Cesar really would think she was trying to trap him into marriage.
Lifting a cautioning hand, she said, “Think about that title of yours. I’m not like you. I’m working class.” Gutter class, more like.
“As the mother of the heir to my title, your stock improves. Certainly with my mother.” The look on his face told her he wasn’t saying that to be insulting. It was a fact. Status mattered to his mother.