midwife, but it’s been eight months since my accident, not nine. You were dating that artist. Is it his?”
Three dates with the painter nearly two years ago, thanks very much to her work schedule, and he still thought it was a thing.
“I went into labor early.” She shifted to alleviate the pain in her torso. It was coming from his reaction, though, not her recent surgery. His lack of reaction. She’d always thought there was a hint of attraction on his side. He’d said that day that he’d always felt some, but maybe that had been a line.
This was too incredible, not just having to convince a man that he was a father, but that they had had the sex that conceived his son.
“I explained my reasons for quitting and then, um, we slept together. You really don’t remember that day?” she persisted.
He stood with his arms folded and his gaze never wavering, but revealed a barely perceptible flinch. “No.”
The way he was looking at her, like he was waiting for her to expound on the slept-together details made the pain squeezing her lungs rise to pinch her cheeks. A mix of indignation and agony and plain old shyness burned her alive.
She glanced at the clock, recalling that the nurse had said she’d wake her when Enrique needed to be fed, but that they wouldn’t let him go more than four hours. It had been three since he’d last been placed in the incubator.
“When I committed to five years, I didn’t know you’d be marrying before that.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, as I explained that day...” Oh, that day had been bittersweet, starting with their customary champagne toast to a project completed. She always loved that time. They so rarely relaxed together, but that was typically when they were both in good spirits. A real conversation about personal things might arise. She’d always felt close to him, then. Valued.
She cleared her throat.
“I realize one of the conditions of your taking over from your father was that you would marry the woman your parents chose for you. I just didn’t realize, when you hired me, how the timing would work. That you would get engaged before the five years of transitioning into the presidency were up.”
“So you gave notice because I was getting engaged. What did you think was going to happen between us, Sorcha?”
“Nothing!”
“And yet I’ve been named the father of your newborn. Keep talking.”
Pity he’d lost a week’s worth of memories instead of that habit of demanding his time not be wasted.
She dragged her gaze off his folded arms and the line of his shoulders. His nostrils were flared. He never lost his temper, but that contained anger was worse. She knew him. She knew with a roiling dread in her belly exactly how much he hated learning of any sort of perfidy. Keeping her pregnancy from him had been a massive act of self-preservation, but there was no way to protect herself now.
“Wives are different from girlfriends.” She licked her lips, aware that his sharp gaze followed the action. An internal flutter started up under his attention, but she ignored it. “I wanted to work for you, not her.”
“How were you working for her?”
“Little things.” She shrugged. “If she wanted tickets for the theater, she asked me to buy them.”
“That happened once! You bought them for me all the time.”
“Exactly. For you.”
He narrowed his eyes. “So when you told me in your interview that you would never become possessive, that was a lie?”
“I wasn’t being possessive,” she insisted. Okay, she’d been a little bit possessive. Maybe. “It wasn’t just buying the tickets. It meant I was expected to put that event into your schedule regardless of anything else you might have planned.”
“You rearranged my calendar a hundred times a day anyway. Did you need a raise for this extra responsibility?” That was pretty much what he’d said that day, right down to the facetious tone.
“Changing your timetable on her instruction is not a responsibility. It’s playing politics. She was the one being possessive, showing me that she had the power to direct me, which tells me she saw me as a threat. So I chose to remove myself.”
“Odd that she would feel threatened, when you, apparently, let our relationship blur into personal?”
“I didn’t sleep with you to get at her, if that’s what you’re suggesting! It just happened. Is that so hard to believe?”
“No,” he said with clipped firmness and a hint of self-condemnation.
Her question was supposed to be a knock back, but his response, and the way their gazes locked, kept them firmly in the center of the ring. She could feel him trying to dig past her defensiveness to the truth, trying to see exactly how their lovemaking had happened.
Naked and earthy and, in her case, complete abandonment to something that had been building for years.
Her layers of composure began falling away like petals off a rose. A fresh wave of heat rose from her chest, up her throat, into her cheeks. His gaze slid down, scanning like an X-ray, trying to see not through fabric, but through time. He was trying to remember what she looked like, nude and flushed with desire, then pink with recent climax and supreme satisfaction.
The night nurse came in, making them both jerk guiltily.
“Hello,” she said cheerily, unaware of the thick sexual tension. “Are you the father? I hope you have identification. The guard at the nursery door will need it. We have strict orders to be vigilant with your two sons.”
“Two?” Cesar snapped his head around.
Sorcha caught back a laugh.
“Just one,” she assured him. “She means Octavia and I. Our sons. The mix-up.”
His brows crashed together. “Yes. Explain that.”
“Talk while you walk.” The nurse brushed him aside so she could assist Sorcha from the bed. “No limo service this time. Dr. Reynolds wants you moving.”
Cesar stepped to her other side as she struggled off the edge of the bed.
He reached to flick her gown down her bare thighs before she could, telling her his gaze had been on her legs.
This was such a peculiar situation. She’d slept with him in her mind long before she’d done it in real life, yet the experience remained only in her mind. He didn’t share it.
But he brought her shaky grip to his arm to steady her as she stood, acting like intimacy between them was established. She licked her lips, stealing a wary look up at him.
His expression was hard and fierce, impossible to interpret, but when had he ever been easy to read? He was capable of charm, had a dry sense of humor and was incredibly quick to understand almost anything. This situation, however, defied understanding. No wonder he’d retreated to his most arrogantly remote demeanor.
“I was planning to be home when I delivered,” Sorcha explained. “But I went into labor early and the cord was in the wrong place. His blood supply would have been cut off if I delivered naturally.”
She didn’t have a choice about leaning on him. The nurse moved ahead to hold the door into the hall, leaving Sorcha to shuffle from the room by clinging to Cesar’s warmth, surrounded in the nostalgic scent of his aftershave.
“They did an emergency C-section and there was a mix-up. Octavia and I knew right away they’d handed us the wrong newborns, but no one believed us. Although...”
She eyed the guards—plural—at the nursery door. One for each baby.
“I guess they believe now that something happened. They’re