Javiero’s hand smacked on to the marble that surrounded the sink, making her jump. He leaned into her space, looming like a terrifying raptor as he thrust his marred face up close to hers.
“Look me in the eye, Scarlett.” His breath was dragon fire against her cheek. “Is that my baby?”
His eyes had always been so fascinating to her, sea green with flecks of blue. Shifting and moody. So beautiful.
Now there was only one. She’d been in agony since she’d learned the extent of his injuries, desperate to go to him. If he hadn’t survived...
She pushed back desolation and bit her trembling lips, huskily saying, “It’s yours.”
He snorted with skepticism and shoved to straighten away from her, his retreat so full of contempt it felt as though he took a layer of her skin with him.
“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but the DNA test had better prove that baby is mine. And if that is my child, there is no way it will start its life defiled by that misbegotten half brother of mine. I’ll take you to the hospital. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWO
“I’M SORRY I didn’t come to the hospital after the attack,” Scarlett said in a low voice when they were in the back of his car.
Mentally, Javiero was in the pen, her pregnancy having struck him as unpredictably as that big cat, leaving him wrestling under the bite of words like his, trying to evade the claws of The money goes to...
As her apology penetrated, he bristled and sat straighter, refusing to let her see how much her indifference had stung. He shouldn’t have cared either way.
“Why would you?” he asked distantly. He had asked her to stay and she’d made her choice, turning their torrid encounter into a one-afternoon stand. He knew how those worked.
And he hadn’t been fit company in hospital any more than he was today. That hadn’t stopped his mother from showing up every day, but as her only child—and her only link to his father’s fortune—Javiero had no illusions about the breadth of her maternal concern. Paloma was no Evelina Casale when it came to unadulterated greed; nor was she willing to let go of something she believed wholeheartedly belonged to her.
Paloma had gone to her hotel in a huff after they emerged from the ladies’ room and told her the terms of the will. She’d been very unimpressed by her entitlement to one million euros. It was nothing after all these years, but Javiero supported her financially. She wouldn’t go without. Any incidental funds she received from Niko were hers to throw away on an impulse trip to the Riviera or a vanity purchase in Paris. She could do the same with today’s top-up.
“Your father was extremely ill when I heard,” Scarlett continued in that subdued voice, making it impossible for him to remain detached—not that he’d ever exceled at ignoring her. “I was keeping everything running in his stead and coordinating all his care workers.”
“You didn’t have time. I understand.” He kept his tone arid and emotionless yet conveyed how pathetic he found her excuses to be.
She flinched.
Good. He wasn’t about to sympathize or forgive her choice to continue working for a tyrant.
“And I was—” he heard her swallow “—showing.”
“You’re something else,” he muttered on a cynical laugh. “You want me to empathize with what a difficult position you were in? Because coming to the hospital would have revealed to me that you were carrying my child?” He’d been at his absolute lowest! Today wasn’t much better. “Did you get pregnant on purpose?” It was the one question that kept pounding behind his brow. “To deliberately try to get your hands on his money?”
“If that’s all I wanted, I could have slept with Val,” she threw at him.
“Have you?” He would kill him. He really would.
“No. And Niko’s money isn’t coming to me. I’m entitled to an allowance to raise the baby in suitable comfort and I earn a salary for managing Niko’s estate, but the bulk will be held in trust for—”
Her mouth tightened, and she sucked in a great breath, holding it.
Concern breached his wall of anger as he watched the color in her cheeks fade. Perspiration appeared in a sheen on her upper lip.
“Aren’t you supposed to breathe or something?” he asked gruffly. That’s all he knew from the few programs he’d happened across that had featured a birthing scene. Usually it was a comedy that played the whole thing as a roaring joke.
She flashed him a glare of outrage, but after a moment her breath hissed out and her tension began to ease.
“You refused to see your own father,” she bit out. “How would I know your feelings on becoming one?”
“Ask,” he muttered, accosted by too many emotions to identify.
Did he feel guilty at not going to see his father? Not at all. Niko had cost him too much of his youth. All of it. Not just the innocence of childhood or the hardship his extended family had suffered after his mother divorced Niko, either. There had been the engineered conflicts with Val and the responsibilities he’d had to shoulder while watching his grandfather fail. The bleakness of a mother who was embittered and broken, incapable of being a real mother.
Now Niko had denied him his own child.
Javiero wanted to roar out his anger. He was furious that Scarlett had been by Niko’s side all these months. Niko should have died alone, the manipulative son of a bitch.
They arrived at the hospital. His driver had called ahead, and a nurse was waiting with a wheelchair.
The nurse glanced at him with startled apprehension as he stepped from the car, a reaction he was getting used to, but it still made him want to snarl. He turned his back on her as he leaned in
