It had all gone off the rails with the arrival of Scarlett’s sister. She’d been quite the piece of work, and he’d questioned the wisdom in tying his name to Scarlett’s.
He’d been trying to convince himself that Scarlett wasn’t anything like the people she’d come from, and then she’d thrown a tantrum, suggesting Paloma leave the only home she’d ever known.
That overstep had left him so incensed he had reciprocated her silence, giving them both time to cool off.
When he walked into the Madrid flat, he was prepared to address the whole thing with civility, but she wasn’t here. She wasn’t in Spain, he learned from the housekeeper. She had taken their son to Niko’s island villa.
All Javiero’s intentions to stay rational were incinerated in a bonfire of fresh wrath.
This was why he couldn’t trust her! His mother had warned him this would happen—that Scarlett would use their son as a hostage to get whatever she wanted from him. Damn her!
He called her, but it went to voice mail. She continued to ignore his calls and texts for two days. He grew more livid by the second. Finally, he tracked down the number for the landline and blistered the ear of a maid until she put him through.
“Hello?” a fresh female voice greeted warily.
“Get me Scarlett,” he said through his teeth. “Now.”
“Javiero? This is Kiara. How are you?”
“Devoid of patience. Put Scarlett on.”
“She’s asleep.” Her tone held rebuke. “Is this an emergency?”
He looked at the phone. No one said no to him. No one except—
“Is Val there?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“No.” She sounded defensive, though. “I’m here to pack up my studio.”
“And what is Scarlett doing there? Also packing?”
Kiara left a silence that made a howl lodge in his chest.
“Put her on the phone, Kiara. Now.”
“I’ll tell her you called, but I can’t make her talk to you. I’m not going to try. She—”
“She can talk to me in the morning. I’m leaving now,” he cut in with a snap. He had begun making preparations the minute he’d learned where she was, hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but apparently it had.
“You’re coming here?”
“Don’t bother preparing a room,” he said with distaste. “I have a yacht on standby in Athens. I swore I’d never sleep another night in that house and I refuse to start now.”
Besides, he wasn’t staying. And neither were they.
“I looked up postpartum symptoms,” Scarlett told Kiara the next morning. “I think you’re right.” Her eyes welled, but when had they not been soggy lately? Her inability to control her emotions added to everything else that made her feel like a giant failure. “But making an appointment with the doctor feels like one more thing to deal with.” She hated herself for sounding so miserable and weak.
Kiara, bless her, crinkled her brow in empathy and said, “I called already. I’ll take you this afternoon.”
“Your being here means the world to me, you know. Thank you.”
“Of course. There’s nowhere else I want to be.”
A slight shadow flickered across Kiara’s warm smile. She wasn’t being completely truthful. She wanted to be with Val. Scarlett had watched Kiara’s face soften and glow each time she spoke of him—which baffled her because Scarlett had always found Val to be very challenging. Sarcastic and superior and devoid of kindness. There was even less tenderness in him than Javiero, as far as Scarlett could discern.
Val had won the heart of his daughter, though. Aurelia had had a meltdown last night, missing her papà. Kiara was making a family with the father of her baby and Scarlett was envious as hell.
Kiara hadn’t heard from Val since yesterday, though. She had been talking to him on her mobile when Javiero’s call had come through on the line into the studio. Val had mistaken it to mean Javiero was there and had hung up on Kiara, furious. Kiara had been trying to get hold of him to explain, but he wasn’t responding.
“Oh,” Scarlett moaned as she saw the boat appear on the horizon. “That’s him.” She didn’t know how she knew it was Javiero, but she did.
“I’ll take Locke.” Kiara reached out her hands. “You can shower and dress.”
“I can manage,” Scarlett insisted, even though a simple shower felt like a marathon through quicksand.
“I want to hold him.” Kiara was the gentlest bully, taking the baby and enfolding him to her bosom as though he was her very own. “I’ll put him down when he falls asleep.”
And here came the tears again, these ones stemming from gratitude. Scarlett left for the shower if only to hide that she was such a complete wreck.
Twenty minutes later, as she stepped from the shower, she heard a helicopter approaching. She glanced out the window and saw Javiero coming off the yacht into shore, piloting a launch himself. So who was landing in the back—?
Oh, no. Val.
In all her years working for Niko, Scarlett had never seen the two men together, but Kiara had relayed the scene at the hospital as a narrowly averted clash of the titans.
Scarlett met Kiara on the stairs. They could already hear raised voices outside and hurried onto the terrace.
Val had indeed arrived. Rather than come into the house, he was confronting Javiero in the middle of the lower lawn.
“Javiero,” she called, but they didn’t hear her.
Harsh words were being slung between them. Blows were seconds away. They were a pair of territorial wolves thirsty for a taste of blood, neither likely to come away unscathed.
Kiara ran down to them as Scarlett stood paralyzed, fingernails scraping against the stone balustrade. A bleak blanket of despair, heavy as lead, pinned her in place.
She was so tired of the anger and blame. She couldn’t hear them, but she could see the bitterness and antipathy that permeated every cell of their beings.
Javiero hated this place. He hated being here, hated his brother and hated the man she had worked for. He could say he
