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
