He continued to stare at her.
She drew in a breath, stilling her nerves in that moment, before speaking words she was certain she’d come to regret. “We find a way to raise him together.”
Fiero shook his head. “Impossibile.”
“It can’t be impossible,” she responded tautly. “You’re angry with me, fine. But we’re his parents, and we owe it to him to find a way to do this. I’m willing to make concessions, to meet you in the middle. I can move to Italy, Jack and I can find a place near your home –,”
“No.” His eyes were loaded with grim determination. “My son is living with me.”
The edge of the world seemed very close, and just over that edge, there was a pit of despair she was close to tumbling into. “He’s too young. He needs his mother.”
“He has a nanny,” Fiero shrugged.
Elodie had never hit anyone in her life, but she threw herself across the room now and pushed at his chest, hard, and when he didn’t so much as flinch, she pushed him again. And then her hands, shaped into small fists, were raining down on him, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. The pit of despair had claimed her.
“Don’t you dare say you can replace me with a nanny!” She threw the words at him. “I’m his mother and I am going to raise him. I will fight you, I will fight you with everything I have.”
He grabbed her hands, holding them against his chest, his nostrils flaring as he looked down at her. “You would lose.”
“No! I have money, I could hire a great lawyer –,”
“And I will hire ten for every one of yours, and I will drown them in paperwork, and I will win, Elodie, because that’s what I do. And meanwhile, our son will grow up to read stories about how his mother wanted to take him away from his own father—,”
“He’ll grow up to see how much I loved him and wanted him.”
Fiero kept her hands pressed to his chest, his eyes locked to hers. “You will not be able to fight me and win.”
“I have to. I can’t let him go. And he can’t live without me.”
“But he could live withoutme?”
She gasped, his words so filled with grief, and damn it, she felt a twist of sympathy for him even then, when he was threatening to take Jack from her. He had missed so much, and he’d learned of his son’s existence in the most painful of ways. Fiero was living some kind of nightmare, trying to make sense of it as he went along, and his reactions were proof of that. Knee jerk and rash.
“I made a mistake.”
“Christo,si,you made a mistake. And now you’re asking me to forgive and forget.”
She swept her eyes shut, knowing what a monumental task that would be for him. “For Jack.”
“Yes, for Jack.” He ground his teeth together, and she was conscious, out of nowhere, of how close they were to one another. His long fingers were curled around her wrists, and every time he sucked in a breath his chest moved forward to brush against her nipples.
The last thing she’d expected to feel for this man ever again, and especially in that moment, was desire, but there it was, turning her blood to lava and her knees to jelly.
Something in the air around them shifted, changing so that she was conscious of him in a way that was all-consuming and definitely not one-sided. She saw the way his eyes changed, his pupils flexing, his lids lowering; she saw his lips part and felt his warm breath fan her temples and her own lips mirrored his, separating and pushing a soft breath from her lungs.
“You should have told me about him.” And despite the anger he’d thrown at her, the fury, the threats, her stomach looped because she felt what was at the root of everything he’d said and done: devastation.
He was devastated.
She sobbed, but he lifted a finger to her lips, and she gasped in surprise, the touch totally unexpected.
“Stop crying.”
She shook her head a little. “I can’t.”
His hands cupped her face then, holding her completely still, and her hands, now free, dropped to her side. “I will never forgive you for keeping my son away from me.”
His words were like acid and his touch was like silk. She couldn’t fathom how she felt.