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Her nose was small and straight, her cheekbones were on the plump side these days, and her mouth wasn’t exactly a supermodel mouth. Her lips weren’t luscious. They were average. Two pink lines that formed a pretty pout if she pursed her lips.
Her eyes were blue, but not spectacular. They weren’t cornflowers or sapphires or any of those other things. They were just blue. Maybe sky-blue. Maybe just plain blue.
Holly brushed her hair into a ponytail and went to check on Nicky. He was awake, looking up at the mobile above him and kicking his little legs. Holly took him out of his crib and went into the kitchen to fix his bottle.
Drago looked up as she entered. He was sitting at the tall table facing the view, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Her heart flipped at the sight of him. She was getting a little tired of reacting so strongly to him, but she knew it wasn’t going away. It had been there from the first moment, and would likely always be there.
“Buongiorno, cara,” he said.
“Good morning,” she replied. Nicky pumped his arms and made a loud noise, and she laughed, unable to help herself. When she looked at Drago, he was smiling, though he looked tired. Perhaps he’d had trouble sleeping, too.
“He is rather, uh, energetic, yes?”
Holly nodded. “Oh, yes. He keeps me on my toes.”
She rummaged in the refrigerator for the formula she’d mixed in the wee hours. Nicky hadn’t drunk it all, so she’d put it away. Now she needed to heat it up. Which was hard to do with a squirming baby in her arms. She tried to shift him around, but he kept wiggling.
“Let me,” Drago said, coming over and holding out his hands.
Holly’s heart skipped several beats as she gazed up at him. Then she handed over his son. It felt as if someone had wrenched her child from her arms, so much did it hurt to give him to Drago at this very moment.
A ridiculous notion, but there it was. And then it was gone as Drago stood there with Nicky in his arms, looking suddenly uncertain. He held the baby out from his body with both hands, and Nicky kicked his legs back and forth.
“You won’t break him,” Holly said. “Cradle him to your chest and be sure to support his head.”
Drago dragged his gaze from the baby to her. “That’s it?”
Holly nodded. “That’s it.”
Drago did as she said, and she turned back to the counter, getting a bowl and filling it with water. She popped it into the microwave to heat and turned back to where Drago stood, looking down at Nicky warily.
She would have laughed if her heart hadn’t been breaking.
“He’s so small,” Drago said.
“But getting bigger every day.”
Nicky started to fuss and Drago shot her a panicked look.
“Bounce up and down a little bit,” she said. Drago looked doubtful, but then he started to do as she said, and Nicky quieted. Holly bit her lip to keep from smiling at the sight of strong, handsome Drago di Navarra—playboy, billionaire cosmetics king—bouncing awkwardly with a baby in his arms.
But then her smile faded when she considered that Nicky was his baby and she still needed to tell him so. After last night, after she’d understood how lonely his life had been, it felt terribly wrong not to tell him he had a son.
But the moment had to be right. And it wasn’t now.
She turned to the microwave and took the water out, setting the bottle inside and then reaching for her baby. Drago seemed relieved as he turned him over. Holly bounced Nicky and said nonsensical things to him while Drago went back to his coffee and paper. But rather than pick up the paper, he watched her. She met his gaze, saw the confusion and heat in his beautiful gray eyes.
“You make me want the strangest things, Holly Craig,” he said softly, and a hot feeling bloomed in her belly, her core.
“It’s probably just indigestion,” she said flippantly, and he laughed. But her heart thrummed and her blood beat and a fine sheen of sweat broke out on her upper lip and between her breasts.
What she really wanted to know was what kind of things. That was the question she wanted to ask, but was too scared to. Coward.
Yes, she was a coward, at least where Drago was concerned. Because there was something about him, something she desperately desired. And if she angered him, if he sent her away, then she wouldn’t get that thing, would she? It wasn’t just sex, though it was that, too.
It was...something.
He folded the paper and sat back to sip his coffee with one arm folded over his body. He wore faded jeans and a dark button-down shirt, and his muscles bulged and flexed as he moved his arm. Her knees felt weak.
“Yes, perhaps you are right,” he said. “Perhaps I just haven’t had enough coffee yet.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. “We need to leave for the airport in an hour. Will you be ready?”
Her stomach spun. “Yes.”
“Good.” He stood then. “I have some paperwork to attend to first. I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
He left her in the kitchen alone, and she fed Nicky while looking out over the early-morning mist wreathing Central Park. She grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel from the bag of fresh ones sitting on the counter.
Soon, they were in the car and on their way to JFK airport. Traffic was insane in New York and they spent a lot of time sitting still. Drago worked on his laptop, and Holly gazed out the window while Nicky slept.
She must have dozed, because suddenly Drago was shaking her awake and she was clawing back the fog in her brain while trying to process what he was saying.
“Passports,” she finally heard him say. “I need your passports.”
She fished in her bag and dug them out. Drago took them from her and then she leaned back and closed her eyes again. It was several minutes before the uneasy feeling in her belly finally grabbed her brain and shook hard enough to drag her into alertness.
But it was already too late. She sat up ramrod straight to find Drago looking at her, his gaze as hard as diamonds, his face some combination of both disgust and rage.
She’d had every chance in the world, and she’d blown it. Drago wasn’t stupid. He would have realized by now she hadn’t told him the truth. And he would never believe she hadn’t meant to deceive him.
He held a blue passport in his hand, opened to the first page. He turned it toward her. She didn’t need to look at it to know what it said.
“Tell me, Holly, precisely how old your child is again. And then I want you to tell me once more about this married man you had an affair with.”
* * *
Drago felt as if someone had put a vise around his neck and started twisting. He couldn’t breathe properly and he had to concentrate very, very hard on dragging each breath in and then letting it out again. It was the only thing keeping him from raging at her and demanding a definitive answer right this instant.
He held the passport in a cold grip and watched the play of emotions across her face. Her eyes were wide, the whites showing big and bright, and her skin was flushed. Her mouth was open, but there was no sound coming out.
Then she went deadly pale as all that heat drained away. He kept waiting for her to explain. To tell him why her baby was three months old and not two. Not that it meant anything that the child was three months old. It didn’t make the boy his. He kept telling himself that.
Drago hadn’t noticed the baby’s real age at first. Hadn’t realized the implications. She’d been soft and sleepy and he hadn’t wanted to wake her, but he’d needed the passports for when they went through the checkpoint to reach the private jets. She’d handed them to him and gone back to her nap, and he’d flipped them open, studying the details as the car crawled closer to the guard stand. He was a detail-oriented man.
Holly was twenty-four, which he already knew, and she’d been born in Baton Rouge. Nicholas Adrian Craig had been born in New Orleans a little over three months ago.
That detail had meant nothing to him at first. Nothing until he started to think about how long ago it had been that he’d first met Holly when she’d come to New York. It was a year ago, he remembered that, because he remembered quite well when he’d had to scrap all the photos from the false shoot and start over. The numbers were imprinted on his brain.
Even then, he’d had a moment’s pause while he’d pictured pretty, virginal Holly rushing home to Louisiana and falling into bed with another man. He didn’t like the way that thought had made him feel.
But then, as he’d pondered it, as he’d watched her sleep and let his gaze slide over to the sleeping baby in his car seat—the baby with a head of black hair and impossibly long eyelashes—another thought had taken hold.
And when it did, Drago felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. He’d struggled to breathe for the longest moment.
There was no way. No way this child could be his. Black hair and long lashes meant nothing. He’d used protection. He always used protection.
But there’d been that one time when the condom had torn as he was removing it, and he started to wonder if it had perhaps torn earlier.
And as that thought spiraled and twisted in his brain, doubt ignited in his soul. If it were true, how could she do such a thing? How could anyone do such a thing?
But he did not know that she had, he reminded himself. He did not know.
“Whose child is he, Holly?” Drago demanded, his voice as icy cold and detached as he could make it. Because, if he did not, it would boil over with rage and hurt.
She’d lied to him. And she’d used him, used the opportunity to get what she wanted from him. He thought of the contract she’d insisted on, the money he’d agreed to pay her, and his blood ran cold.
Her gaze dropped and a sob broke from her. She crammed her fist against her mouth and breathed deeply, quickly. And then, far quicker than he’d have thought possible, she faced him. Her cheeks and nose were red, and her eyes were rimmed with moisture.
“I tried to tell you,” she said, and his world cracked open as she admitted the truth. Pain rushed in, filling all the dark and lonely corners of his soul. The walls he’d put up, the giant barriers to hurt and feeling—they tumbled down like bricks made of glass. They shattered at his feet, sliced deep into his soul.
“What does that mean?” he snapped, still hoping she would tell him it was a mistake, that this child was not his and she hadn’t kept that fact hidden from him for the past three months. For nine long months before that.
But he already knew she wouldn’t. He knew the answer as certainly as he knew his own name. This child was a Di Navarra, and Drago had done exactly as his father had done—he’d fathered a child and abandoned it to a mother who thought nothing of living in squalor and leaving her baby with strangers.
He wanted to reach out and shake her, but he forced himself to remain still.
“It means,” she said, her voice soft and thready, “that I wrote you a letter. That I called. That you turned me away and refused all contact.”
He was still reeling from her admission.
“And I will wager you didn’t try hard enough,” he growled. “I never got a letter.”
It staggered him to think she’d spent all those months carrying his child, and he hadn’t even known it. He hadn’t specifically refused contact with her, but he had a long-standing policy of not accepting phone calls from people—especially women—not on his approved list of business associates. As for the letter, who knew if she’d even sent one?
“Well, I sent it. It’s not my fault if you didn’t get it.”
His vision was black with rage. “How convenient for you,” he ground out. “You say you sent a letter, but what proof do I have? You could be lying. And you could have done more, if you’d really wanted to.”
“Why would I lie about this? I was alone! I needed help! And not only that, but what else would you have had me do?” she snapped tearfully. “Fly to New York with my nonexistent credit cards and prostrate myself across the floor in front of your office? I tried to get in touch with you, but it was like trying to call the president of the United States. They don’t just let anyone in—and no one was letting me in to you!”
The moment she finished, her voice rising until it crackled with anger, the baby started to cry. Drago looked at the child—Nicky, Nicholas Adrian—and felt a rush of confusion like he hadn’t known since he was a boy, when his mother would come into his bedroom and tell him they were leaving whatever place he’d finally gotten settled into.
He didn’t like that feeling. If they were still in the apartment, he would have stalked out and gone for a run in the park. Anything to put some distance between him and this lying, treacherous woman. But he was stuck in this car and his head was beginning to pound.
Holly bent over and started trying to soothe the baby, ignoring him as she did so. She talked in a high voice, offered the child a pacifier and made shushing noises. A tear slipped down her cheek, and then another, and her voice grew more frantic.
“Holly.”
She looked up at him, her eyes so full of misery. He felt a rush of something akin to sympathy, but he shoved it down deep. Locked it in chains. How could he feel sympathy for her when she’d lied to him? When she’d used him?
He hated her. And he would not let her get away with keeping his child from him. Not any longer.
“Calm down,” he ordered tightly. “He senses your distress.”
“I know that,” she snapped. She turned back to the baby—his son—and began to unbuckle the straps holding him in the seat. Then she pulled him out and cradled him against her, rocking and shushing until his tears lessened. Finally, he took a pacifier and Holly seemed to wilt in relief.
“You’ve been in my house for nearly a week now,” Drago said, his voice so icy it made him cold. “And you’ve kept the truth from me. You had every chance to tell me, Holly. Every chance. Just like before.”
She didn’t look at him, and he wanted to shake her until she did. The violence whipping through his body frightened him, though he knew he would never give in to it.
But he’d never been this shocked, this betrayed, before. His mother had sold him in the end, sold him for money and freedom to do as she liked, and even the pain of that didn’t quite compare to this.
He had a child, a baby, and the only reason he knew it was because he could do math. If he hadn’t figured it out, would she have ever told him? Or would she have done the job, taken the money and disappeared with his child?
Until she’d spent it all and needed more....
Drago shook himself. “You have nothing to say to me?” he demanded. “You would sit there after what you’ve done and refuse to explain yourself?”
Her head came up then. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I thought you might throw me out again.”
He reeled. She was unbelievable. A user. A schemer. First it was perfume; now it was a child.
He despised her.
“I might still,” he growled. He wouldn’t be as tender as his uncle had been. He knew what could happen when you let a woman keep a child she couldn’t take care of properly, and he would never allow that to happen to his own son. He would use the might and money at his disposal to make sure she never saw this boy again.
Her eyes widened with fear. God help him, he relished it. He wanted her to wonder, wanted her to suffer as he was suffering.
“You would do that to your own son?” she asked, her voice wavering.
The violence in his soul whipped to a frenzy. “Not to him, Holly. To you.”
* * *
Fear was an icy finger sliding down her spine. It sank into her body, wrapped around her heart and squeezed the breath from her. Drago sat beside her, his handsome face far colder than she’d ever seen it before.
He hated her. She could see it clearly, and her heart hurt with the knowledge that any sort of closeness they might have been building was lost. Crushed beneath the weight of this new reality.
She was frozen in place, frightened with the knowledge that he could kick her out of his life and keep her son. That he would even try.
And then, like the sun’s rays sliding from behind the clouds to melt an ice-encrusted landscape, the first fingers of flame licked to life inside her belly. They were weak at first, vulnerable to being crushed out of existence.
But Nicky stretched and reached up to curl his fingers into the edge of her cardigan, and a wave of pure love flooded her with strength.
She met Drago’s cold stare with a determined look of her own. Her heart was a fragile thing in her chest, but she didn’t intend to let him know it. “You will not separate me from my son. Not ever.”
“You forget who has the power here, cara,” he said tightly.
“And you forget who Nicky’s legal parent is,” she threw back at him.
