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 to help Scarlett shift across and out.
Bureaucracy ensued. Questions were asked and forms completed. Nurses took Scarlett’s blood pressure and temperature, and helped her change into a hospital gown.
It gave him time to absorb that he was about to become a father. He trusted Scarlett on that with instinctive certainty. She was too distraught to scheme. Besides, the timing worked, and his father wouldn’t have named her baby his heir if he hadn’t been convinced that baby was his blood.
With acceptance of that came an avalanche of duty and anticipated sacrifice, the weight of it so heavy and voluminous that Javiero’s chest felt tight. He didn’t have room in his life for more. Time wasn’t a commodity in a well he could draw on when he needed more. How was he supposed to fit child rearing into his already tightly packed days? The physiotherapy after his attack was a challenging addition to his calendar.
And what did he know of fathering? He spent the occasional hour with children of his cousins and other relatives, but they had proper, decent parents to go home to. The only example he’d had, an acrimonious mother and a domineering father, would have him breaking his child’s spirit before it could talk. Damn that old man and his continued manipulations!
Niko must have known what sort of hornet’s nest he was building by leaving his money to his grandchildren, but when had Nikolai Mylonas cared one iota for the suffering he caused? Javiero’s grandfather had been on the ropes, barely hanging on to his properties in Spain when he had brokered the marriage of his eldest daughter to Niko. Paloma had been young and naive and beautiful, and determined to save her family.
Niko, however, hadn’t given up his mistress while they’d been engaged. In fact, he’d kept seeing Evelina right up until the night before his wedding. He hadn’t seemed terribly concerned about birth control either, trusting Evelina’s attachment to her modeling career to keep her from getting pregnant.
Evelina had conceived Val with malice aforethought and turned up pregnant with her hand out as Paloma was testing positive with Javiero.
“You were setting me up for the same nightmare I grew up in,” he accused Scarlett, when she was settled on the bed and the nurse had left them alone. “Were you going to wait until I was married before you told me I had a child on the way?”
“Your wedding wasn’t scheduled until next year,” she mumbled, throwing off the blanket and swinging her legs to the edge of the bed. “Niko asked me to wait until he’d passed before I told you. It was essentially a dying wish and he needed me there, running things while he declined. He knew you’d insist I leave if you found out. I knew he would be gone sooner than later so I did as he asked.” She tried to keep her gown from riding up while her foot searched blindly for a slipper.
“Where are you going?”
“I want my phone. Kiara is probably worried.”
“Screw Kiara.” But he fetched Scarlett’s handbag from the cupboard, waited while she rummaged in it and returned it after she’d retrieved her phone.
She glanced at the screen and quickly dropped it to the mattress as her expression crumpled. She groaned with suffering, doubling forward over the ball of her belly.
Despite his foul mood, his heart lurched in alarm.
“Should I get the nurse?” He moved to open the door, prepared to yell the place down.
“She won’t do anything. I said I want to deliver naturally. She said this is normal,” she groaned, her knuckles sticking out like broken teeth as she gripped the sheet beneath her.
This didn’t look very damned normal to him. He hovered in the doorway feeling uncharacteristically useless.
“Why the hell would you want to put up with that? Take something.”
After a moment, her tension dissipated. She released a pent-up breath with a few pants, but she was trembling and licking her dry lips.
“Kiara delivered naturally.” She rattled a paper cup and shook an ice chip into her mouth, holding it between her teeth as she spoke around it. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Even so, her hands bracketed her belly as though trying to keep it from splitting while a keening noise emanated from her throat.
The pain that gripped her was so visceral he felt it twist through him. He stood there in empathic torment, paralyzed by the tension of watching her expression flex in agony, waiting for
