to look at him, but she made herself do it. Made herself look him in the eye and face his hatred with stillness and calm while she wrapped tight inner arms around her writhing soul.
“I wish it was that simple.” He surged forward to grip the back of his chair. “I want to hate you, but now I understand why you felt you couldn’t come to me. You didn’t know I was acting uninterested to curb my attraction, but it was there all along.”
She recoiled, swinging from disbelief to heart-pounding excitement to intense hurt that he had treated her the way he had regardless of having feelings for her. They weren’t very strong if he could behave like that, were they?
Speaking very carefully, crushing her icy fingers together in her lap, she stated the obvious. “Lust is not caring, Raoul.”
He straightened to an arrogant height.
“No, listen,” she rushed on, fearing he thought she was begging for affection. “I didn’t think one hookup meant we were getting married and living happily ever after. I’m just saying I thought you had some respect and regard for me. But even a dismissal slip would have been better than having me arrested without speaking to me. That was...”
She faltered. He was staring at her with an expression that had gone stony. Steeling herself, she forced herself to continue, even though her voice thinned.
“Discovering I was pregnant, knowing they’d take the baby from me in prison—” She stood in a shaken need to retreat, very afraid she was going to start to cry as the memories closed in. “Even my stepmother didn’t go that far to hurt me.”
“I didn’t know you were pregnant,” he reminded her ferociously.
“Exactly! And if you did, you would have gone easy for the baby’s sake, not mine. You didn’t care about me. Not one bit.”
RAOUL FELT AS though he was pacing in London’s infamous fog. The walls of his penthouse were clear enough, the sky beyond the windows dull with a high ceiling, but his mind wouldn’t grasp a lucid concept. He kept replaying everything Sirena had said last night, which had him writhing in a miasma of regret and agitation.
Lucy squirmed in his hold.
He paused to look at her, certain she must be picking up his tension. That’s why she was so unsettled. He was pacing one end of his home to the other trying to soothe her, but neither of them was finding any peace.
How peaceful would Sirena have felt pacing a twelve-by-twelve cell?
His stomach churned.
He hadn’t let himself dwell on that picture when he’d been trying to put her away, but now he couldn’t get it out of his head. Vibrant Sirena who craned her neck with excited curiosity from the airport to the business center in every city they visited, locked in a cage of gray brick and cold bars.
You hate me and I’m fine with that because I hate you, too.
“What are you doing in here?”
Her voice startled him, causing a ripple of pleasure-pain down his spine. He blinked, becoming aware he’d wandered into the small flat off the main one. It was meant for a housekeeper or nanny, but stood empty because his maid service came daily to his city residence.
“Just something different for her to look at.” He stopped rubbing Lucy’s back and changed her position so she could see her mother. “She’s fussy.”
Sirena’s brow crinkled as she took in the rumpled clothes he’d been wearing since their unfinished dinner by the pool.
His neutral expression felt too heavy on his cheekbones, but he balked at letting her see the more complex emotions writhing in him—uncertainty and yearning that went beyond the simply sexual. Pain. There was a searing throb inside him he couldn’t seem to identify or ease.
“Have you been up all night? You should have brought her to me.” She came forward to take the baby and was greeted with rooting kisses all over her face. She laughed with tender surprise, a sound that his angry attempt to jail her would have silenced forever. His heart shriveled in his chest.
“Did Daddy forget to feed you?” she murmured as she moved to the sofa.
“I tried a few minutes ago. She wasn’t interested.” His voice rasped.
She flinched at his rough tone, and flicked him an uncertain glance. “Giving him a hard time, are you?” She shrugged out of one side of her robe and dropped the strap of her tank top down her arm to expose her breast.
He had walked in on her feeding so many times she was no longer self-conscious about it. He didn’t think of it as sexual, but seeing her feed their daughter affected him. It was the softness that overcame Sirena. Her fingers gently swirled Lucy’s dark hair into whorls as the baby relaxed and made greedy noises. Her expression brimmed with such maternal love his breastbone ached.
He hadn’t known she was pregnant when he’d pushed for jail time, but she had. She must have been terrified. While he, the first person she should have been able to rely on, had been the last person she would ever consider calling.
She glanced up. Her smile faded. Last night’s enmity crept back like cold smoke, suffocating and dark. “I’ve got her,” she said, dropping her lashes to hide her eyes. “You can get some sleep or go in to the office like you planned.”
“No. I can’t.”
He ran a hand through his hair, becoming aware of a persistent headache and a general bruised feeling all over his body. His breath felt thick and insufficient. He spoke in a voice that very reluctantly delivered what he had to say.
“Sirena, you know I lost my father. What I never tell people...I found him. I came home from school and there he was, overdosed. Deliberately. He’d been having an affair with his secretary.” He paused. “I called an ambulance, tried to revive him, but I was only nine years old. And it was too late.”
Sirena’s eyes fixated on him, the green orbs wide with shock. “I had no idea.”
“I hate talking about it. My mother doesn’t speak of it either.”
“No, the few times she mentioned your father she sounded as if...”
“She loved him? She did. I only know about the affair because I found the note in the safe when we moved. It was full of assurances that he loved us both, but he still chose death because he couldn’t live without this woman. I can’t help blaming her.” He knew it wasn’t logical, but nothing about his father’s death made sense to him.
“The note was the only thing left in the safe,” he continued. “My stepfather had emptied it of everything else. My mother loved him, too, and he appeared to love her back. I thought she’d found some comfort with him after our loss, but my stepfather was using her. He gambled away every cent we had. I came home from university because he’d had a heart attack and that’s when I found the phones were about to be cut off and the electricity was overdue. We lost him and the house in the same month. My mother was a mess, grief stricken, but also feeling guilty for having trusted him and giving me no indication things were sliding downhill so fast.”
He pushed his hands into his pockets, seeing again his mother’s remorseful weeping and hearing her broken litany of, He said he would turn it around.
“You mentioned last night he was the reason you started over. I didn’t realize it was that grim. What did you do?” Her voice was all softness and compassion, her bared shoulder enhancing the picture of her as vulnerable and incapable of causing harm.
“I developed a deep animosity toward anyone who tries to rob me,” he admitted with quiet brutality.
She paled. Her gaze fell and her expression grew bleak.
“Maybe it doesn’t excuse my having