LITMIR.BIZ

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Sirena when they had feared she would slip into a coma. He’d only gone home for a shower and sleep now that Sirena had woken, nearly seventy-two hours after the birth.

      She told herself not to read it as a sign of caring. If Raoul was tending to Lucy, he was only stamping a claim while trying to prove Sirena was dispensable. To some extent she was. She quickly learned she could hold her baby, but she was too sick and weak for anything else. She was pumping her breasts, but only to keep her thin milk supply going while she waited for the cocktail of medications to leave her system. She couldn’t feed Lucy or do anything else a mother ought to do.

      Dejected, she was fretting over how useless she was as she headed back to bed the next morning, wiped out by the tiny act of brushing her teeth.

      Raoul walked in on her attempt to scale the bed, finding her with one hip hitched on the edge, bare legs akimbo as she quickly tried to stay decent under her hospital gown.

      Aside from faint shadows under his heavy eyes, he looked fantastic in casual pants and a striped shirt. He brought a wonderfully familiar scent with him, too. For a second she was back in the office welcoming her freshly shaved boss, sharing coffee with him as they discussed how they’d tackle the day.

      He eyed her balefully, but that might have been a reaction to the ferocious scowl she threw at him. She hadn’t been allowed coffee since early in the pregnancy and he was sipping from a travel mug tagged with a ProZess Software logo. He was a picture of everything she couldn’t have.

      “Why are you here?” she asked, struggling to use her severed stomach muscles to heft herself onto the bed.

      He smoothly moved to her side, set down his coffee and helped her.

      “I don’t—” She stiffened in rejection, but he bundled her into his crisp shirt anyway. The press of his body heat through the fabric burned into her as he used a gentle embrace to lift her. His free hand caressed her bare, dangling leg, sliding it neatly under the sheet as he slid her into bed as if she weighed no more than a kitten.

      Shaken, she drew the sheet up to her neck and glared at him.

      He picked up his coffee and sipped, staring back with his poker face. “Your doctor said he’d have the paternity results when he did his rounds this morning.”

      Her heart left her body and ran down the hall to bar the door of the nursery.

      She wasn’t ready to face this. Last night had been full of sudden jerks to wakefulness that had left her panting and unable to calm herself from the nightmare that Raoul would disappear with their daughter.

      That he would disappear from her life again.

      Why did it matter whether he was in her life? She felt nothing but hatred and mistrust toward him, she reminded herself. But the weeks of not seeing him while she waited out her pregnancy had been the bleakest of her life, worse even than when her family had left for Australia.

      Logic told her he wasn’t worth these yearning feelings she still had, but she felt a rush of delight that he kept showing up. When he was in the room, the longing that gripped her during his absences eased and the dark shadows inside her receded.

      She couldn’t forget he was the enemy, though. And she was running out of defenses.

      He must have seen her apprehension, because he drawled, “Scared? Why?” The question was like a throwing star, pointed on all sides and sticking deep. “Because I might be the father? Or because you know I am?”

      The stealthy challenge circled her heart like a Spanish inquisitor, the knife blade out and audibly scraping the strop.

      She noticed her hands were pleating the edge of the sheet into an accordion. What was the use in prevaricating? She licked her numb lips.

      “Are you going to try to take her from me if you are?” she asked in a thin voice.

      If? You bitch, he thought as the tension of not knowing stayed dialed high inside him. The last three days had been hellish as he’d grown more and more attached to that tiny tree frog of a girl while cautioning himself that she might belong to another man.

      Just like her mother.

      “I could have taken her a dozen times by now,” he bit out. “I should have.”

      It wasn’t completely true. The hospital had accommodated his visiting the baby, but only because he was the kind of man who didn’t let up until he got what he wanted. They wouldn’t have let him leave with her, though.

      If Sirena believed he could have, however, great. He wanted to punish her for the limbo she’d kept him in.

      Her hands went still and pale. All of her seemed to drain of color until she was practically translucent, her already wan face ashen. Fainting again? He shot out a hand to press her into the pillows against the raised head of the bed.

      She tried to bat away his touch, but in slow motion, her tortured expression lifting long enough to let him glimpse the storm of emotions behind her tangled lashes and white lips: frustration at her weakness, a flinch of physical pain in her brow, defensiveness that he had the audacity to touch her and terror. Raw terror in the glimmering green of her eyes.

      Rolling her head away, she swallowed, her fear so palpable the hair rose on the back of his neck.

      Advantage to me, he thought, trying to shrug off the prickling feeling, but guilty self-disgust weighed in the pit of his stomach. All he could think about was the hours he’d spent right here, telling her how unfair it was for a child to grow up missing a parent. The questions Lucy would have, the empty wedge in the wholeness of her life, would affect the child forever.

      Blood ties hadn’t mattered at that point. He and Lucy had been linked by the prospect that she would suffer his pain—an unthinkable cruelty for an infant just starting her life. The whole time he’d been urging Sirena to pull through, he’d been mentally cataloging everything he knew about her, wanting to be Lucy’s depository of information on her mother.

      While all he’d heard in the back of his mind had been Sirena’s scathing, What makes you think you ever knew me, Raoul?

      His heart dipped. She wanted her baby. He knew that much. As he’d gleaned all the details of this pregnancy that had nearly killed her, he’d wondered about her feelings for the father. Did the lucky man even know how stalwartly determined she’d been to have his child?

      If that man was him... His abdomen tensed around a ripple of something deep and moving, something he didn’t want to acknowledge because it put him in her debt.

      The specialist swept in, taking in the charged tension with a somber look. “Good morning. I know you’ve been waiting, Raoul. Let me put you at ease. You are Lucy’s biological father.”

      Relief poured into him like blood returning after a constriction, filling him with confidence and pride in his daughter, the little scrap with such a determined life force.

      No reaction from Sirena. She kept her face averted as though he and the doctor weren’t even in the room.

      “I don’t have plans to take her from you,” Raoul blurted. The impatient words left him before he realized they were on his tongue, leaving him irritated by how she weakened him with nothing but terrified silence.

      She gave him a teary, disbelieving look that got his back up.

      The physician distracted her, asking after her incision and leaving Raoul to face a cold, stony truth: he couldn’t separate mother from daughter.

      Her accusation when she’d woken yesterday that he would have wished her dead had made him so sick he hadn’t had words. His own father’s absence had been self-inflicted—he’d left Raoul and his mother—but it didn’t make the idea of Sirena’s baby accidentally being motherless any less horrific. Raoul wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he was the instrument that divided a parent from a child.

      “When can I take her home?” he heard Sirena ask the doctor.

      An

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