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“Why?” he demanded, staring at me with a sudden suspicious glitter in his eyes that I did not understand.
“After the beautiful city that took me in—San Miguel became our home!”
He relaxed imperceptibly. “Ah.”
Now I was the one to frown. His reaction to our baby’s name had been so fierce, almost violent. Had he wondered if I’d named him after another man? “Why do you care so much?”
“I don’t,” he said coldly.
My baby whimpered in my arms. Fiercely, I shook my head as I hugged him close, breathing in Miguel’s sweet baby scent, feeling his tiny warm body against me. I nuzzled his head and saw tears fall onto his soft dark hair. “If you didn’t get me pregnant on purpose, if it happened by accident and you don’t want a child...just let us go!”
His jaw tightened. “I have an obligation....”
“Obligation!” I cried. “To you, he’s just someone to carry on your title and name. To me, he’s everything. I carried him for nine months, felt him kick inside me, heard his first cry when he was born. He’s my baby, my precious child, my only reason for living.” I was crying openly now, and so was my baby, either in sympathy or in alarm or just because it was past his nap time and all the adults arguing wouldn’t let him sleep. Miguel’s chubby cheeks were red, his eyes swimming with piteous tears. I tried to comfort him as I wept.
Alejandro’s expression was stone. “If he’s my son, I will bring both of you to live with me in Spain. Neither of you will ever want for anything, ever again. You will live in my castle.”
“I’d never marry you, not for any price!”
“Marriage? Who said anything about that?” His lips twisted. “Though we both know you’d marry me in a second if I asked.”
Stung, I shook my head furiously. “What could you offer me, Alejandro? Money? A castle? A title? I don’t need those things!”
He moved closer to me, his eyes dark.
“Don’t forget sex,” he said softly. “Hot, deep, incredible sex.”
In the shadowy hacienda, Alejandro looked at me over the downy head of the baby that we had created. My breasts suddenly felt heavy, my nipples tightening. My body felt taut and liquid at once.
“I know you remember what it was like between us,” he said in a low voice. “Just as I do.”
I lifted my gaze to his.
“Yes,” I whispered. “But what use are any of those things really, Alejandro? Without love, it’s empty.” I shook my head. “You must know this. Because the money, the palaces, the title—and yes, even the sex... Have those things ever made you happy?”
He stared at me. For a long moment, there was only the soft patter of the rain against the roof, our baby’s low whimper, and the loud beat of my aching heart.
Then abruptly, for the first time, Alejandro looked, really looked, at our son. Reaching out, he stroked Miguel’s soft dark hair gently with a large, powerful hand.
As if by magic, our baby’s crying abruptly subsided. Big-eyed, Miguel hiccupped his last tears away as father and son took measure of each other, each with the same frown, the same eyes, the same expression. It would have been enough to make me grin, if my heart hadn’t been hurting so much.
Suddenly our baby flopped out a tiny, unsteady hand against Alejandro’s nose. Looking down at him in surprise, Alejandro snorted a laugh. He seemed to catch his breath, looking at Miguel with amazement, even wonder.
Then he straightened, giving me a cold glare.
“There will be a DNA test. Immediately.”
“You expect me to allow a doctor to prick my baby’s skin for a blood test, to prove something I don’t want to be proved? Forget it! Either believe he’s your son, or—better yet—don’t! And leave us in peace!”
Alejandro’s face looked cold and ruthless. “Enough.”
He must have pressed a button or something—or else he had some freaky bodyguard alert, like a dog whistle I couldn’t hear—because suddenly two bodyguards came in through the front door. Without even looking at me, they kept walking through the foyer, headed across the courtyard toward the bedroom I shared with Miguel.
I whirled on Alejandro. “Where are they going?”
“To pack,” he replied coolly.
“Pack for whom?”
A third bodyguard who’d come up silently behind me suddenly lifted Miguel out of my arms.
“No!” I cried. I started for him, arms outstretched, but Alejandro held me back.
“If the DNA test proves he is not my son,” he said calmly, “I will bring your son back to you, safe and sound, and I’ll never bother either of you again.”
“Let me go!” I shrieked, fighting him—uselessly, for with his greater power and strength, his grip was implacable. “You bastard! You bastard! I will kill you! You can’t take him from me—Miguel! Miguel!”
“You are so sure he is mine?”
“Of course he is yours! You know you were my only lover!”
“I know I was your first....”
“My only! Ever! Damn you! Miguel!”
Something flickered in Alejandro’s eyes. But I was no longer looking at him. I was watching as the bodyguard disappeared through the door, my baby wailing in the man’s beefy arms. I struggled in Alejandro’s grip. “Let me go!”
“Promise to behave, Lena,” he said quietly, “and I will.”
How I wished I could fight him. If only I had the same power he did—then we’d see who gave orders! If I had his physical strength, I would punch him in the face! If only I had a fortune, a private jet, my own bodyguard army...
My lips parted on an intake of breath.
Edward.
Would he help me? Even now?
That wasn’t the question.
Would I be willing to pay the price?
“I don’t want to separate you from the baby,” Alejandro said, “but I must have the DNA test. And if you’re going to fight and scream...”
I abruptly stopped struggling. Nodding, I wiped my eyes. “I’ll come quietly. But please,” I said softly, looking up at his face, “before you take him to Spain, could we stop in London?”
He frowned. “London?”
I nodded, trying to hide my eagerness—my desperation. “I left something at Claudie’s house. Something precious. I need it back.”
“What is it?”
“My baby’s legacy.”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “Money?”
“And also,” I said on a wave of inspiration, “if we could talk to Claudie, together, we could force her to admit how she played us both. Then maybe we could actually trust each other, going forward....”
Alejandro rubbed the back of his head, then nodded. “That would be better. And to be honest, there are a few things I’d like to discuss with your cousin myself.”
His voice was grim. I believed him now when he said he didn’t want to marry Claudie. Maybe Alejandro hadn’t deliberately planned to get me pregnant after all.
But I’d been right about one thing. He still planned to steal my baby. He intended to keep Miguel at his side, to raise him as his heir in some cold Spanish castle, until he turned him into some heartless, unfeeling bastard like himself.
And Alejandro didn’t intend to marry me. So I’d be powerless. Expendable.
“So we have a deal?” Alejandro said. “You’ll allow the DNA test, and if he is my son, you’ll come with us to Spain?”
“With a stop in London first.”
“Yes. London. But after that, Spain. I have your word?”
“I honestly hate you,” I whispered with feeling.
“I honestly do not care. Do I have your word?”
I glared at him. “Yes.”
He looked down at me in the shadows. For a moment, there was a current of electricity between us, sparking in the shadows of the room. His fingers tightened. Then he abruptly released me.
“Thank you,” he said coldly, “for being so reasonable.”
Hiding the cold determination in my heart, I left him without a word, and nearly sprinted toward my baby.
Alejandro thought he owned me now. But I wasn’t as helpless as he thought. I had one card left to play, if I was willing to pay for it.
Was I?
For my son?
Yes. I was.
CHAPTER TWO (#u5e58498e-913f-5e1f-b0a6-0688a65fe213)
THE FIRST TIME I saw London, I was a grief-stricken fourteen-year-old, newly orphaned, just arrived from New York. My grandmother, whom I’d never met, sent her driver to collect me from Heathrow. The sky was weeping and gray. I remembered trembling as I walked up the steps of the tall white mansion in Kensington, a house roughly the same size as my entire apartment building in Brooklyn.
Brought in by the butler, I’d found my grandmother sitting at her antique desk in the morning room. I stood in front of the fireplace for some moments, my eyes stinging and my heart aching, before she finally looked up.
“So you’re Lena,” she’d said, looking me up and down, from the lumpy coat my mother had made before her hands grew frail in illness, wasting away like her heart since my father’s death six months previously, down to my feet crammed into cheap, too-small shoes that had been all my loving but sadly unskilled father had been able to afford. “Not much of a beauty,” she’d said crisply, with some regret.
It was raining in London today, too.
As Alejandro’s driver waited, holding open my door, I shivered, looking up at the white mansion. I felt suddenly fourteen again. Except now I was going to face my cousin.
Claudie and I were the same age, but she was so different in looks and manner that we could have been born on opposite sides of not just the Atlantic, but the universe.
When I’d first come to the house—devastated by the loss of both my mother and my father within six short months—I’d tried so hard to make my beautiful, spoiled cousin like me, but she’d scorned me on sight. She’d been determined to drive me from the house. Especially once grandmother died and she saw the terms of the will. And she’d finally gotten her wish. She’d won....
“What are you waiting for?” Alejandro said impatiently. “Get out of the car.”
“I changed my mind. I don’t need to go in.”
“Too bad. You’re going.”
He looked far too handsome and rested. He’d slept and showered on his private jet. He was in a fresh suit. I, on the other hand, hadn’t slept at all since yesterday. After an interminable visit to a private hospital in San Miguel de Allende, where he’d paid a small fortune for the DNA test, we’d gotten on his private 747 and I’d spent the long flight walking back and forth in the cabin, trying to calm Miguel enough to sleep. But the cabin pressure hurt his ears, and only my continual walking soothed him. So I’d gotten exercise, at least, using the aisle of Alejandro’s jet as my own private treadmill.
But there’d been no shower for me. I felt groggy, sweaty and dirty, and I was still wearing the same white cotton sundress I’d worn in Mexico. There was no way I was going to face my cousin like this.
It was bad enough letting Alejandro see me.
He’d barely said ten words to me on the plane; in fact, he’d said just five: “Want me to hold him?” Of course, I refused. I hadn’t wanted to give up possession of my baby, even for a moment. Even thirty thousand feet in the air, when there was no way for him to run off. The DNA test had proved the obvious—that Alejandro was Miguel’s father—but I was fighting his emotional and legal claim with every cell and pore.
Now, as Alejandro looked at me in the backseat, the difference between his sleek gorgeousness and my chubby unattractiveness was so extreme I imagined he must be asking himself what he could ever have seen in me. Which begged the question: If he hadn’t deliberately seduced me last summer to create an heir, then why on earth had he?
I licked my lips. “Alejandro,” I said hesitantly. “I...”
“Enough delay,” he growled. “We’re going in.”
I looked at my baby, tucked into a baby seat beside me in the back of the limo, now sleeping in blessed silence. “You go. I’ll stay here with Miguel.” Which would also be the perfect way for me to sneak to Edward’s house, at the end of the street.
“Dowell can watch him.”
I glanced at the driver doubtfully. “No.”
“Then bring Miguel with us.”
“Wake him up?” I whispered, scandalized. I narrowed my eyes. “Of course you wouldn’t worry about that. You’re not the one who spent the whole flight walking in circles trying to make him sleep.”
Alejandro set his jaw. “I offered to take him....”
“You could have offered again.” I was dimly aware that I sounded irrational. There was no way he could have taken Miguel from me on the jet except by force, which wouldn’t exactly have gone over well, either. My cheeks got hot. “It doesn’t matter.”
He lifted a dark eyebrow. “You do know how to take care of Miguel better than I do.”
His tone told me whom he blamed for that. “I had no choice. I thought you were going to steal him from me.”
“So you stole him first?”
I blinked. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
