Rolling her head away, she swallowed, her fear so palpable the hair rose on the back of his neck.
Advantage to me, he thought, trying to shrug off the prickling feeling, but guilty self-disgust weighed in the pit of his stomach. All he could think about was the hours he’d spent right here, telling her how unfair it was for a child to grow up missing a parent. The questions Lucy would have, the empty wedge in the wholeness of her life, would affect the child forever.
Blood ties hadn’t mattered at that point. He and Lucy had been linked by the prospect that she would suffer his pain—an unthinkable cruelty for an infant just starting her life. The whole time he’d been urging Sirena to pull through, he’d been mentally cataloging everything he knew about her, wanting to be Lucy’s depository of information on her mother.
While all he’d heard in the back of his mind had been Sirena’s scathing, What makes you think you ever knew me, Raoul?
His heart dipped. She wanted her baby. He knew that much. As he’d gleaned all the details of this pregnancy that had nearly killed her, he’d wondered about her feelings for the father. Did the lucky man even know how stalwartly determined she’d been to have his child?
If that man was him... His abdomen tensed around a ripple of something deep and moving, something he didn’t want to acknowledge because it put him in her debt.
The specialist swept in, taking in the charged tension with a somber look. “Good morning. I know you’ve been waiting, Raoul. Let me put you at ease. You are Lucy’s biological father.”
Relief poured into him like blood returning after a constriction, filling him with confidence and pride in his daughter, the little scrap with such a determined life force.
No reaction from Sirena. She kept her face averted as though he and the doctor weren’t even in the room.
“I don’t have plans to take her from you,” Raoul blurted. The impatient words left him before he realized they were on his tongue, leaving him irritated by how she weakened him with nothing but terrified silence.
She gave him a teary, disbelieving look that got his back up.
The physician distracted her, asking after her incision and leaving Raoul to face a cold, stony truth: he couldn’t separate mother from daughter.
Her accusation when she’d woken yesterday that he would have wished her dead had made him so sick he hadn’t had words. His own father’s absence had been self-inflicted—he’d left Raoul and his mother—but it didn’t make the idea of Sirena’s baby accidentally being motherless any less horrific. Raoul wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he was the instrument that divided a parent from a child.
“When can I take her home?” he heard Sirena ask the doctor.
An image flashed into Raoul’s mind of her collapsing the way she had at the courthouse, but without anyone to catch her or the baby in her arms.
“You’re not taking her to your flat,” he stated bluntly, speaking on instinct from the appalled place that was very much aware of how ill and weak she was.
Sirena’s gaze swung to his, persecuted and wild. “You just said—”
“I said I wasn’t so low I’d steal your baby from you. But you’re more than prepared to keep Lucy from me, aren’t you?” That reality was very raw. “You’re the one who steals, Sirena, not me.”
A humiliated blush rolled into her aghast face.
The physician broke in with, “Let’s get you and Lucy well first, then we’ll talk about where she’s going.” It was a blatant effort to defuse their belligerent standoff.
The doctor departed a few minutes later, leaving Sirena trying to decide which was worse: having Raoul in the room, where his presence ratcheted her tension beyond bearing, or out of the room, where she didn’t know what he was up to.
“The contract is in effect now,” she reminded him in a mutter. “I’ll adhere to it.”
“Will you? Because you’ve done everything possible to keep me from even knowing she’s mine.” His temper snapped. “How could you do that? I lost my father, Sirena. I know how it feels to grow up without one.”
“And I lost my mother,” she cried, then cringed as the force of such harsh speech sliced pain across her abdomen. “Why do you think I stood up to the most pitiless man in the world?” she asked in a thick voice, clenching her eyes shut as she fought for control, so emotional from everything that she verged on breaking down. “You really know how to put a woman through hell, Raoul. I can’t even get myself down the hall to her and you’re playing stupid mind games. I won’t take her, but you can’t have her. Maybe you would deserve a place in her life if you just once showed an ounce of compassion.”
Silence.
She threw her heavy arm over her closed eyes, pressing back weak tears, concentrating on her breathing to pull herself together. The worst part was, she felt horrible about trying to keep him from Lucy. He had a right to be angry about that—along with the stealing—but she couldn’t undo any of it. Her life was a giant mess and she had no idea how she was going to fix it and carry on.
“Let’s go,” Raoul said in a gruff tone that was too close to the bed.
Sirena lowered her arm to eye him, startled to see he’d brought the wheelchair to her side.
“I’ll take you to see Lucy. We’ll both calm down and maybe start communicating like adults.”
“Don’t be nice,” she groaned. “It makes me feel awful.”
“You should feel awful.” He braced her as she slid off the bed and into the chair.
She slumped into it and dropped her face into her hands. “I love her more than you can know, Raoul. And you’ve been horrid, trying to take her from me the instant you heard I was pregnant. What else could I do except lie about paternity?”
The chair moved and she lifted her head, glad she didn’t have to face him, especially when he said with quiet sincerity, “You’re wrong. I do know how much you love her. I feel the same way. That’s why I’ve been so tough about it. I didn’t know about your mother. I thought this was all payback for the court case.”
“No,” she breathed, shoulders slumping. “I’m angry about that, but—” her voice hitched with yearning “—I just want to be her mum.”
“What happened to yours?” His voice sounded deeper and quieter than she’d ever heard it, making her feel small for trying to cut him from his daughter’s life. She didn’t know how he’d lost his father, but that nascent connection she’d always felt toward him over their shared grief extended from within herself, like a strand of spiderweb drifting behind her, searching to anchor itself to him.
“This.” She waved a trembling hand at her pathetic physical state. “Her complications were different so this wasn’t hereditary, but it was always in my mind that having a baby isn’t as simple for some as it is for others. I was only six when she died, so I don’t have a lot of memories, but that’s why losing her hurt so much. I can’t bear the idea of Lucy going through all her life markers of puberty and boyfriends and childbirth without her mother there for her.”
He stayed silent behind her, giving no indication whether her words had any impact. She wasn’t able to twist around and look and didn’t want to anyway. He might be interpreting her confession as a plea for sympathy when it was the kind of opening of her heart that left her feeling so raw and exposed she could hardly bear it.
She was grateful they entered the quiet warmth of the nursery at that point. Seconds later, as she cuddled Lucy into her chest, her world righted, becoming achingly perfect, even with Raoul’s commanding presence hovering over them. Maybe because he was here. Much as she resented him, she wanted Lucy to have her father.
After feeding and changing and getting an update on Lucy’s progress, Raoul returned Sirena to her room. She was quiet, visibly exhausted, their silence no longer hostile. When he helped her into bed, she only murmured, “Thank you,” before plummeting into sleep.
Such a ferocious scrapper and now he understood why. The way she’d talked about missing her mother had made something lurch in his chest. It was a renewed snag of guilt at not really knowing her. His resentful I never dreamed she was capable of stealing was shifting into still waters run deep.
The way his father had quit on him made him highly susceptible to exalting a woman who had fought so hard to give her child life and to be in it.
He didn’t like this shift in him. It made him wonder about her motives for stealing, and he didn’t want to develop compassion and forgiveness for that. Opportunists took advantage of weak emotions like affection and trust. Next thing you knew, you were on the streets with two dependents—a social pariah—and your path forward was a broken cliff into an abyss.
He couldn’t doubt Sirena’s love for their daughter, though. While in the nursery, the old Sirena had returned, all warm smiles and soft laughter, her expression open and her wit quick, making the nurses laugh. He’d had to bite back his own chuckle more than once, fighting a desire to let go of his defenses and fall under her spell again.
Scowling, he tried to imagine how this impossible situation would play out. A foolish idea was taking hold in the back of his mind, one that looked ridiculous as a thought bubble. It would be outrageous in real life. He needed distance, not more exposure to her, but they were both coming from the same place with regard to Lucy. He couldn’t ignore that. In fact, as the days passed, it was all he could think about.