Forgiveness. His lips twisted with the bitter irony. The very thing he’d refused to give her all these months, he would now be begging for...
But for her, he’d do anything. He set his jaw. With the same total focus he’d built his empire, he would win back his wife.
Over the next month, he tried everything.
He respected her demand that he stay away from her, even after his friend Velazquez sent him a link to a birth announcement, and he saw his son had been safely born, weighing seven pounds and fourteen ounces. Both mother and baby were doing well.
Darius had jumped up, overwhelmed with the need to go see them in the hospital, to hold them in his arms.
But he knew bursting into her room against her express wishes would have only made things worse, not better. So he restrained himself, though it took all his self-control. He cleaned out a flower shop and sent all the flowers and toys and gifts to her maternity suite at the hospital. Anonymously.
Then he’d waited hopefully.
He’d found out later that she’d immediately forwarded all the flowers, toys and gifts straight to the sick children’s ward.
Well played, he’d thought with a sigh. But he wasn’t done. He’d contacted Mildred and she’d sent him via courier the jewelry bag he’d left in his office. He’d sent it to Fairholme, again anonymously.
A few days later he received a thank-you card from Mrs. Pollifax, stating that the earrings had been sold and the money donated to the housekeeper’s favorite charity, an animal shelter on Long Island.
He’d ground his teeth, but doggedly kept trying. Over the next week, he sent gifts addressed to Letty. He sent a card congratulating her on the baby. On Thanksgiving, he even had ten pies from her favorite bakery delivered to her at Fairholme.
Pies she immediately forwarded to a homeless shelter.
As the rain of November changed to the snows of December, Darius’s confidence started to wane. Once, in a moment of weakness, he drove by Fairholme late at night, past the closed gate.
But she was right. He couldn’t even see the house.
After the pie incident, Darius gave up sending gifts. When she continued to refuse his calls, he stopped those, too. He kept writing heartfelt letters, and for a few weeks, he was hopeful, until they were all returned at once, unopened.
His baby son was now four weeks old. The thought made him sick with grief. Darius hadn’t seen him. Hadn’t held him. He didn’t even know his name.
His wife wanted to divorce him. His son didn’t have a father. Darius felt like a failure.
In the past, he would have taken his sense of grief and powerlessness and hired the most vicious, shark-infested law firm in Manhattan to punish her, to file for full custody.
But he didn’t want that.
He wanted her.
He wanted his family back.
Finally, as Christmas approached, he knew he was out of ideas. He had only one card left to play. But when he went to see his lawyer, the man’s jaw dropped.
“If you do this, Mr. Kyrillos, in my opinion you’re a fool.”
He was right. Darius was a fool. Because this was his last desperate hope.
But was he brave enough to actually go through with it? Could he jump off that cliff, and take a gamble that would either win him back the woman he loved, or cost him literally everything?
The afternoon of Christmas Eve Darius got the package from his lawyer. He was holding it in his hands, pacing his penthouse apartment like a trapped animal when his phone rang. Lifting it from his pocket, he saw the number from Fairholme.
His heart started thudding frantically. He snatched it up so fast he almost dropped it before he placed it against his ear. “Letty?”
But it wasn’t his wife. Instead, the voice on the line belonged to the last person he’d ever imagined would call him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“IT’S YOUR VERY first Christmas,” Letty crooned to her tiny baby, walking him through Fairholme’s great hall. She was already dressed for Christmas Eve dinner in a long scarlet velvet dress and soft kid leather bootees. She’d dressed her newborn son in an adorable little Santa outfit.