He was a father.
CHAPTER ONE
“DID YOU REALLY THINK you could keep my child from me?”
Jada stopped on the courthouse steps, the hair on her arms standing on end, the back of her neck prickling with cold sweat. It was the voice of her most dreaded nightmare. A voice she’d never heard before outside of her dreams, and yet she knew that it was him.
Alik Vasin.
A stranger. The man with the power to come in and rip the beating heart from her chest if he chose to do so. The man with the power to devastate her life.
The father of her daughter.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jada said, inching up the stairs that led to the courthouse. But she knew. She absolutely knew, and apparently he did, too.
“You had the court date changed.”
“I had to change it,” she said, defiant, confident in her lie. It didn’t feel wrong, or even like a lie, not when she’d told it to protect her child. Jada had spent her life behaving, following the rules, but there were no rules for this situation. There was no right, no wrong. There was only need. The need to keep Leena with her.
“And you thought that since I had to travel halfway around the world on short notice, I would be forced to miss it. Too bad for you I have a private jet.”
He didn’t look like the kind of man who owned a private jet. He didn’t look like a man ready for a court hearing. He was wearing low-slung jeans, held onto his lean hips with a thick belt. He had a rumpled button-up shirt on that somehow looked all the better for being wrinkled, the sleeves pushed up past his elbows, revealing muscular forearms. And aviator sunglasses. Like he was some sort of rock star or something.
He turned his hand and adjusted the buckle on his watch, revealing a dark tattoo, an anchor, on the underside of his wrist. She wondered, briefly, how much something like that had hurt. She wondered what it said about him. He was danger personified, and just looking at him made a shiver course through her body.
On the plus side, his blatant lack of regard for convention made her feel more and more confident about her chances. She’d had Leena in her custody for a year, after all. And this man, her father, had no claim on her beyond the genetic.
Blood was certainly thicker than water, but dirty diapers trumped blood. And she had changed more than her share of those over the past year.
He looked at his watch. “Looks like I’ve made it with time to spare. I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Don’t rush,” Jada said. She took a seat in one of the chairs that lined the door outside of the family courtroom. She wished she could hold Leena right now, but Leena was with the social worker. Jada’s arms felt empty. She picked her purse up from the floor, her phone out of one of the pockets, opened an app and played it mindlessly. She just needed to keep her hands busy. And her mind vacant.
“Good. I didn’t miss anything.”
She looked up and a swear word rushed out of her mouth. He looked…it wasn’t fair how he looked. He was in a black suit, open at the collar, everything fitted perfectly to his well-muscled physique. The dark fabric poured over him like liquid, flowing with his movements, revealing strength, power. He looked like the sort of man who got what he wanted with the snap of a finger. The kind of man who had women falling at his feet with a glance.
He’d gone from rumpled traveler to James Flipping Bond in ten seconds flat.
Although, Bond was always fighting the Russians, so maybe he was more of a Bond villain.
“I see you decided to dress for the occasion,” she said.
He’d removed the sunglasses, and for the first time she could see his eyes. They were somewhere between blue and gray, like the sea during a storm.
“It seemed the thing to do,” he said, his lips quirking up into a smile. He seemed entirely unruffled, as if the outcome of this didn’t matter to him at all. It meant everything to her. This, Leena, was her entire life. All she had left.
“It seemed the thing to do? Well, I suppose it’s good that going out for Chinese food didn’t seem the thing to do at the moment instead. Is that all she is to you? Just…is this just an experiment for you? Why did you even bother to show up?”
“She’s my daughter,” he said, his tone betraying no emotion, no concern. Just stating a fact. “That means I must claim responsibility for her.”
“Responsibility? Is that what she is to you?”
She caught a hint of steel in his eyes. “She’s my blood. Not yours.”
Jada snorted and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “I’ve only raised her from the time she was born. What do I matter?” She didn’t know where this strength was coming from. She only knew she had it, and she had to use it. There was no one standing behind her. No one on her side. No one but herself.
“I didn’t know about her,” he said.
“Because her mother thought you were dead. And why did she think that? Did you tell her you were going off on some secret mission? That’s the sort of thing a man like you might say to get a woman into bed.”
“If I told her that, it was true,” he said.
She blinked. “If? You don’t remember?”
He shrugged. “Not specifically.”
And then her brain caught up with the rest of his claim. “And you were on a mission of some kind?”
“How old is the child?”
Jada blinked. “You don’t know?”
“I know nothing about this,” he said. “I got a phone call while I was in Brussels, telling me that if I didn’t come and claim a child I didn’t know I had by a certain date, I would lose my rights to her forever. Then I went and got testing done to confirm that I am in fact the father, and I am, just so you know. Then yesterday I got a letter saying my parental rights would be terminated and she would be adopted to someone else if I failed to come to a hearing that had been moved to today.”
“She’s one. She just had her birthday.” Just the two of them in Jada’s little house, on the same street where she’d lived for eight years. “Where were you a little over a year and a half ago?”
His mouth twitched. “Near here. I was in Portland seeing to some business.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Ah. Business.”
“I can’t talk about the exact nature of it.”
Disgust filled her. He was the sort of man she’d been blessed never to have had any interaction with. She’d married too young and her husband had been completely decent. She didn’t think men like this, men who bed-hopped with zero discrimination, were real outside of terrible movies. “I can guess. I’ve been caring for the results of that business.”
One brow shot upward. “Just an added bonus to my trip. I’m not a sex tourist.”
Jada blinked, heat rushing into her cheeks. “You are direct, aren’t you?”
“And you are prickly. And extremely judgmental.”
And not accustomed to people who were so comfortable talking about their bad behavior. He seemed to wear it like a badge of honor. “You’re here to take my child from me—what reaction did you want me to have to you?”
He looked at their surroundings. They were the only two people in the antechamber. “I didn’t anticipate being stuck in the lobby with you, I have to say.”
“And yet you are. Answer me this…what does a man who travels the world, doing Lord knows what, want with a baby? Do you have a wife?” She hoped