Beauty And Her One-Night Baby

He cocked his head, widening his one eye, not sure he was seeing this correctly.

He yanked his gaze back to her face. Her expression was frozen in horror as she took in his shaggy hair and eye patch and gashed face poorly hidden by an untrimmed beard.

The word pregnant landed in a pool of comprehension deep in his brain, sending a tidal wave of shock through his entire psyche.

Scarlett dropped her phone with a clatter.

She had been trying to call Kiara. Now she was taking in the livid claw marks across Javiero’s face, each pocked on either side with the pinpricks of recently removed stitches. His dark brown hair was longer than she’d ever seen it, perhaps gelled back from the widow’s peak at some point this morning, but it was mussed and held a jagged part. He wore a black eye patch like a pirate, its narrow band cutting a thin stripe across his temple and into his hair.

Maybe that’s why his features looked as though they had been set askew? His mouth was...not right. His upper lip was uneven and the claw marks drew lines through his unkempt stubble all the way down into his neck.

That was dangerously close to his jugular! Dear God, he had nearly been killed.

She grasped at the edge of the sink, trying to stay on her feet while she grew so light-headed at the thought of him dying that she feared she would faint.

The ravages of his attack weren’t what made him look so forbidding and grim, though, she computed through her haze of panic and anguish. No. The contemptuous glare in his one eye was for her. For this.

He flicked another outraged glance at her middle.

“I thought we were meeting in the boardroom.” His voice sounded gravelly. Damaged as well? Or was that simply his true feelings toward her now? Deadly and completely devoid of any of the sensual admiration she’d sometimes heard in his tone.

Not that he’d ever been particularly warm toward her. He’d been aloof, indifferent, irritated, impatient, explosively passionate. Generous in the giving of pleasure. Of compliments. Then cold as she left. Disapproving. Malevolent.

Damningly silent.

And now he was...what? Ignoring that she was as big as a barn?

Her arteries were on fire with straight adrenaline, her heart pounding and her brain spinning with the way she was having to switch gears so fast. Her eyes were hot and her throat tight. Everything in her wanted to scream Help me, but she’d been in enough tight spots to know this was all on her. Everything was always on her. She fought to keep her head and get through the next few minutes before she moved on to the next challenge.

Which was just a tiny trial called childbirth, but she would worry about that when she got to the hospital.

As the tingle of a fresh contraction began to pang in her lower back, she tightened her grip on the edge of the sink and gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the coming pain and hang on to what dregs of dignity she had left.

“I’m in labor,” she said tightly. “It’s yours.”

Fresh shock flickered over his scarred face, and his gaze dropped to her middle again. “I’m supposed to believe that?”

“My water broke. It’s a textbook sign.”

“You know what I mean.” His aggressive stance didn’t soften, but a tiny shadow flickered in his eye as he watched her draw in a long breath.

She was trying to bear the growing intensity of her contractions without a grimace, but it wasn’t working.

“Is it my father’s?”

“No!” She should have expected that, she supposed. Pretty much everyone believed she was more than Niko’s long-suffering PA. She closed her eyes, wincing in both physical and emotional anguish as the pain peaked. “I don’t have time for a lot of explanations.” She tried for calm when her voice was still tight from the fading contraction. “Whether you believe this baby is yours by my word or after a DNA test doesn’t matter.” It mattered. She hated that he was so skeptical of her. It ground what little self-esteem she possessed well into the dust. “I have to go to the hospital, but I wanted to be the one to tell you that this is your baby. That’s what you would have learned in today’s meeting, along with the fact that...”

He would never forgive her. She had known it even as she was staring at the positive test. Even as she was telling Niko and watching his eyes narrow with calculation. Even as she had sat in meetings that secured her baby’s future and her own.

Even before she told Javiero what Niko had done with his will, she could see stiff resistance taking hold in Javiero’s expression. He would never forgive her for any of this, including abiding by Niko’s wish that she hide her entire pregnancy from him. She hadn’t wanted to, but Niko had been dying at the time. She had agreed to delay telling Javiero because revealing her pregnancy would have caused the sort of war that Niko wouldn’t have been able to handle in his weakened condition. She had known that everything would come out now, after his death, anyway.

So what was one more secret kept for nearly three years?

It was one more. When it came to Niko’s relationship with his two sons and the two women who had birthed them, every misdeed was a blow against someone. Getting between them meant getting knocked around herself.

It was going to hurt no matter what, so she waded in.

“You won’t inherit anything,” she said bluntly. “Exactly as you wished. Instead, Niko has split his fortune equally between his grandchildren.”

“Grandchildren.” It was strange to see his brows rise unevenly, one broken by the claw mark, the other still perfect and endearingly familiar. “Plural.”

“Yes. He has a granddaughter. Aurelia.” Who was adorable, not that Scarlett could say so. “She’s Val’s.”

Javiero’s gaze turned icy at the mention of his half-brother. “Since when does Val have a daughter?”

“Since her mother, Kiara, gave birth to her two years ago. They’ve been living on the island with us since the middle of her pregnancy.”

“That’s not possible.” Javiero spoke with the cynical confidence of a lifetime of dealing with his father’s other family. “Evelina would have used a baby to influence Dad. You haven’t shown up with any equal opportunity checks for Mother.”

“Evelina doesn’t know about Aurelia.” Scarlett didn’t bother explaining how Evelina had dropped the rattle and Niko had picked it up. “Val doesn’t know, either. Niko didn’t want any of you to know. It would have caused fresh battles and he was too sick to weather them. Evelina and Paloma will each receive one million euros and the rest goes to Aurelia and...” She set her hand on her belly, willing the tingle in her back not to manifest into a fresh contraction.

“Well, isn’t that darling,” Javiero bit out. “He continues to treat us so fairly that he kept our own children from us and burdens them equally with his damnable fortune. No wonder Mother looked so thrilled when she walked out of here. Did you tell her Val’s kid is getting half and she’s only getting one million?”

“No.” She struggled to hold his venomous glare.

“Coward,” he pronounced, but laughed harshly and shook his head. “More of his stupid, stupid games, right to the bitter end! And you’re still helping him.” He pointed in accusation. “You knew all of this when you came to Madrid that day. That day.”

He pointed at her middle. His contempt was a knife to her heart, and despair threatened to encase her. She shoved it away.

“I don’t have time to justify his actions or mine.” She teared up as she said it though, doubting he would ever see her side. He hated her. She could taste it on the air. “I have to go to the hospital.”

She glanced at her phone on the floor, face down and possibly cracked, definitely a million miles away when she could hardly breathe let alone touch her toes.

“Kiara is my birth coach. Will you get her for me? She’s not answering my texts.”

“The mother of Val’s baby is your birth coach?”

His derisive tone got her back up. She might not have much moral high ground to stand on, but she would die on this particular mound.

“Don’t disparage either of them. Aurelia is an innocent child and Kiara is the best friend I’ve ever had.” Her only friend, really. Better than a sister because they’d chosen each other. “Hate Niko and Val if you want to, but don’t you dare attack my friend and her child.”

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 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 it to ease. He didn’t breathe again until she did.

“I don’t understand how this is happening,” he muttered, referring to the entire event. Not in his wildest dreams had he seen this coming when he had climbed out of bed this morning.

She shot him an incredulous look and pushed her hair off her face. “You didn’t use protection. Not every time. You know you didn’t.”

That last time.

Stay, he had ordered. Pleaded, maybe. Either way, he hadn’t wanted her to go back to his father, and she had worn a look just as conflicted as the one on her face right now.

I can’t.

Their final kiss had turned into something that had nearly pulled the soul from his body. She’d moved her clothing aside. He’d wound up thrusting into her against the wall of his entryway.

He’d been so shaken by the experience he’d still been hot under the collar half a year later, loosening his tie as he overlooked the cat pen at his fiancée’s home, hoping the breeze would clear his head of Scarlett. The jaguar had leaped at his tie and dragged him into a fight for his life.

“I didn’t mean to sleep with you,” she said in a subdued voice. “Niko took a terrible turn when I got back. Things were very unsettled, and I didn’t even think about repercussions until I was facing a positive test.”

He dragged his mind back from the brink of death to Scarlett on the edge of the bed. She looked incredibly fragile, as though she hugged a cushion rather than his unborn child against her middle.

“Why did you come to me at all? You had to know I wasn’t interested in seeing him.”

Guilt creased her expression. “I knew Niko planned to leave everything to Aurelia. I was sworn not to tell anyone about her, but if you had come to the island, you would have met them and learned everything.”

“Seems a dirty trick on Kiara. I thought she was your friend.”

“She is. And I only wanted to give you the chance to learn what he planned so you could make an informed decision about rejecting his money. My conscience demanded I do that much! What happened between us was completely unexpected.”

“It was unexpected?” he scoffed.

The sexual tension between them had simmered for years. He had ended a longtime relationship immediately after the first time he’d met her, convinced he would sleep with Scarlett by the end of that week. He’d been too proud to chase her, though, and she’d been tied too tightly to Niko to visit him more than once or twice a year. Each time she had left a wake of what-ifs until that last time when their chemistry had burst into flames.

Then she had still gone back to Niko.

“Ask yourself how you would be feeling right now if everything was going to Val’s daughter,” she challenged softly.

“I’d feel great.” But his mother would have had a stroke. Even so, he said, “Don’t pretend you did me a favor, Scarlett. You’re as bad as he is, making choices for people that change lives.”

“I’m being punished for my poor judgment, trust me,” she choked. “Maybe if you’re lucky, I won’t survive, and you can ride your high horse forever.”

“Too far,” he snarled, appalled she would think he wanted her to die. He wasn’t enjoying her suffering. He sure as hell didn’t want anything tragic to happen to her or his unborn child.

Her phone rang.

“Kiara,” she said as she answered with shaking hands. “I’m in labor, what do you think? How did you do this?” That might have been an effort to make light, but her arm was trembling as though the phone was too heavy for her to hold to her ear. Her voice didn’t disguise her fretfulness as she added an urgent, “No, wait.”

She glanced at him, doubt and distress clouding her blue eyes along with a question.

“Javiero wants to stay with me.”

He did. He stepped closer without hesitation, as if he could physically oust anyone from trying to get between them. He wasn’t sure where that compulsion came from. So far this had been a hellish reunion for both of them and it didn’t promise to get better, but this was exactly where he would stay until his baby was born.

Then he didn’t know what he would do.

He was close enough to hear the woman’s voice ask, “What do you want?”

“I don’t know.” Scarlett rubbed at the crinkle of anguish between her brows. “I had to tell him everything. Now he thinks you shouldn’t be here. Because of Val.” She sounded bereft. Anxious and deeply vulnerable and... Was she crying?

Scarlett was tough as nails. She argued with reason, stuck to her guns and kept her cool. That was why he had always found her so infuriating. And compelling.

The sight of a tear leaking from the corner of her eye down her cheek snapped his roiling emotions into a new pattern, one that drew her firmly behind the shield of protectiveness he’d been wielding against her.

The flip of mind-set happened so fast it made him dizzy, but one thought crystalized—whatever else was going on between them had to wait. Right now, Scarlett was in genuine distress.

He touched her bare knee to get her attention. She apprehensively met his gaze and he held it. He shoved all his anger and resentment into compartments behind his breastbone and deep in the back of his throat. He conveyed confidence he had no right to because he had no idea what they were in for, but here he was and here he would stay.