Marion Lennox - Forbidden Desires - A Debt Paid in Passion / An Exception to His Rule / Waves of Temptation

“Exactly! And if you did, you would have gone easy for the baby’s sake, not mine. You didn’t care about me. Not one bit.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

RAOUL FELT AS though he was pacing in London’s infamous fog. The walls of his penthouse were clear enough, the sky beyond the windows dull with a high ceiling, but his mind wouldn’t grasp a lucid concept. He kept replaying everything Sirena had said last night, which had him writhing in a miasma of regret and agitation.

Lucy squirmed in his hold.

He paused to look at her, certain she must be picking up his tension. That’s why she was so unsettled. He was pacing one end of his home to the other trying to soothe her, but neither of them was finding any peace.

How peaceful would Sirena have felt pacing a twelve-by-twelve cell?

His stomach churned.

He hadn’t let himself dwell on that picture when he’d been trying to put her away, but now he couldn’t get it out of his head. Vibrant Sirena who craned her neck with excited curiosity from the airport to the business center in every city they visited, locked in a cage of gray brick and cold bars.

You hate me and I’m fine with that because I hate you, too.

“What are you doing in here?”

Her voice startled him, causing a ripple of pleasure-pain down his spine. He blinked, becoming aware he’d wandered into the small flat off the main one. It was meant for a housekeeper or nanny, but stood empty because his maid service came daily to his city residence.

“Just something different for her to look at.” He stopped rubbing Lucy’s back and changed her position so she could see her mother. “She’s fussy.”

Sirena’s brow crinkled as she took in the rumpled clothes he’d been wearing since their unfinished dinner by the pool.

His neutral expression felt too heavy on his cheekbones, but he balked at letting her see the more complex emotions writhing in him—uncertainty and yearning that went beyond the simply sexual. Pain. There was a searing throb inside him he couldn’t seem to identify or ease.

“Have you been up all night? You should have brought her to me.” She came forward to take the baby and was greeted with rooting kisses all over her face. She laughed with tender surprise, a sound that his angry attempt to jail her would have silenced forever. His heart shriveled in his chest.

“Did Daddy forget to feed you?” she murmured as she moved to the sofa.

“I tried a few minutes ago. She wasn’t interested.” His voice rasped.

She flinched at his rough tone, and flicked him an uncertain glance. “Giving him a hard time, are you?” She shrugged out of one side of her robe and dropped the strap of her tank top down her arm to expose her breast.

He had walked in on her feeding so many times she was no longer self-conscious about it. He didn’t think of it as sexual, but seeing her feed their daughter affected him. It was the softness that overcame Sirena. Her fingers gently swirled Lucy’s dark hair into whorls as the baby relaxed and made greedy noises. Her expression brimmed with such maternal love his breastbone ached.

He hadn’t known she was pregnant when he’d pushed for jail time, but she had. She must have been terrified. While he, the first person she should have been able to rely on, had been the last person she would ever consider calling.

She glanced up. Her smile faded. Last night’s enmity crept back like cold smoke, suffocating and dark. “I’ve got her,” she said, dropping her lashes to hide her eyes. “You can get some sleep or go in to the office like you planned.”

“No. I can’t.”

He ran a hand through his hair, becoming aware of a persistent headache and a general bruised feeling all over his body. His breath felt thick and insufficient. He spoke in a voice that very reluctantly delivered what he had to say.

“Sirena, you know I lost my father. What I never tell people...I found him. I came home from school and there he was, overdosed. Deliberately. He’d been having an affair with his secretary.” He paused. “I called an ambulance, tried to revive him, but I was only nine years old. And it was too late.”

Sirena’s eyes fixated on him, the green orbs wide with shock. “I had no idea.”

“I hate talking about it. My mother doesn’t speak of it either.”

“No, the few times she mentioned your father she sounded as if...”

“She loved him? She did. I only know about the affair because I found the note in the safe when we moved. It was full of assurances that he loved us both, but he still chose death because he couldn’t live without this woman. I can’t help blaming her.” He knew it wasn’t logical, but nothing about his father’s death made sense to him.

“The note was the only thing left in the safe,” he continued. “My stepfather had emptied it of everything else. My mother loved him, too, and he appeared to love her back. I thought she’d found some comfort with him after our loss, but my stepfather was using her. He gambled away every cent we had. I came home from university because he’d had a heart attack and that’s when I found the phones were about to be cut off and the electricity was overdue. We lost him and the house in the same month. My mother was a mess, grief stricken, but also feeling guilty for having trusted him and giving me no indication things were sliding downhill so fast.”

He pushed his hands into his pockets, seeing again his mother’s remorseful weeping and hearing her broken litany of, He said he would turn it around.

“You mentioned last night he was the reason you started over. I didn’t realize it was that grim. What did you do?” Her voice was all softness and compassion, her bared shoulder enhancing the picture of her as vulnerable and incapable of causing harm.

“I developed a deep animosity toward anyone who tries to rob me,” he admitted with quiet brutality.

She paled. Her gaze fell and her expression grew bleak.

“Maybe it doesn’t excuse my having you arrested without speaking to you first, but I felt justified when it happened. I was... Damn it, Sirena, it was a perfect storm of my worst nightmares, falling for my secretary the way my father had, then being betrayed by someone I had come to rely on. I lashed out hard and fast.”

She gave a little nod as she drew the sleepy infant off her breast and shrugged her robe into place. “I understand.”

How many times had he seen that look on her face, he wondered, taking in the lowered lashes and stoic expression. He was tough to work for, he knew that. He pushed himself hard and was so overcommitted he didn’t have time for mistakes. She’d always been the first to hear about any he found.

The phrase long-suffering came to mind as he saw past her impassive expression to the self-protective tension in her body language. For the first time he heard the stark despondency in her voice. It had the same underlying incomprehension he felt when he talked about his father’s suicide. She didn’t understand. She was merely accepting what she couldn’t change.

His heart lurched. He prided himself on supporting his family and living up to his responsibilities, but he had leaned heavily on Sirena when she worked for him. Where was her pillar of support, though? Her talk last night of being scared and ill and forsaken by her family had terrified and angered him anew. He wondered why she had needed the money. She had never said, but he was damned sure it wasn’t for gambling debts or high fashion or drugs.

“Why did you steal from me, Sirena?”

She flinched at the word steal, then a kind of defeat washed over her, shutting her eyes and making her shoulders slump. “My sister needed money to pay her tuition fees.”

The words left a bang of silence like a balloon popping into jagged pieces. He hadn’t expected it, but it seemed oddly predictable after the fact.