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“How did you meet the child’s mother?”
“Leena,” she bit out. “Her name is Leena.”
“What sort of name is that?”
“Hindi. She’s named for my mother.”
“She should have a Russian name. I’m Russian.”
“And I’m Indian, and she’s my daughter. And really, aren’t you some kind of arrogant, thinking you can come and just take my child away from her home, away from her mother and then, on top of it all rename her?”
His dark brows shot upward. “I will not rename her. It is not a bad name.”
“Thank you,” she said, cursing her own good manners. She shouldn’t be thanking him. She should be macing him.
“Now,” he said, straightening, his posture stiff, like he was about to start a business meeting, “how did you meet Leena’s mother?”
“Just…through an adoption agency. She told me the baby’s father was dead and that she couldn’t possibly raise the child on her own. It was a semi-open adoption. She was able to choose the person she wanted to take her. It wasn’t easy for her.” She remembered the way the other woman had looked after giving birth, when she’d handed Leena to Jada. She’d looked so tired. So sad. But also relieved. “But it was right for her.”
“And the adoption?”
“Normally they’re finalized within six months of placement. In Oregon the birth mother can’t sign the papers until after the birth, which makes it all take a bit longer. And we were held up further because…because while she listed the birth father as dead, it wasn’t something that was confirmed. She had your name, but there was no record of your death, and neither could you be found to sign away your rights. And it hadn’t been long enough for you to simply be declared absentee.”
“And then they found me.”
“Yes, they did. Lucky me.”
“I am sorry for you, Jada. I am.” He didn’t sound it at all. He sounded like a man doing a decent impression of someone who might be sorry, but he personally didn’t sound sorry at all. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Leena is my daughter. I can’t simply walk away from her.”
“Why not? Because you’re just overcome by love and a parental bond?” She didn’t believe that for a moment.
“No. Because it is the right thing to do to care for your children, your family. Leena is the only family I have.”
At another time she might have felt sorry for the man. As it was, she felt nothing.
“Caring for her would mean having her with me,” she said.
“I can understand how you might see it that way.” He looked out the window. “She does not like me. She cries when I pick her up. And frankly, I don’t have the time to be a full-time caregiver to an infant.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Because the other alternative was having nothing to do with her, and that was not a possible solution in my mind.”
“So what does that mean then? You’re just going to hire nannies?”
“That was my thought. I was wondering if you would like to take a position as Leena’s nanny.”
“You what?”
Jada couldn’t believe the man was serious. The nanny? To her own child? An employee of the man who was stealing everything from her?
Leena was her light in the darkness. She was everything to her. Being her mother had become the entirety of Jada’s identity. And her daughter had become her whole heart.
And he wanted her to be an employee. One he could fire at a moment’s notice. A termination he could delay until a later date. A date he saw fit.
“Did you just ask me to be the nanny to my own daughter?”
“As a court ruling just declared, she is not your daughter.”
“If you say that one more time so help me I will—”
“It is up to you. Hang on to your pride if you wish, but I’m offering you a chance to see your daughter. To be a part of her life still.”
“How can you do this to me?” she asked, the words scraping her throat raw. Everything in her hurt. Everything. He had come in, taken her newly repaired life and shattered it all around her again, and she didn’t know how she would reclaim it. It had taken so long to rebuild, to repurpose, to find out what she would do, who she would be.
She’d loved her husband, but he couldn’t give her children. And every time other options came up, he shut down. It was a reminder, he’d told her, of all he could not give her. Of what she would have to get from someone else. No, there would be no artificial insemination. She wouldn’t carry another man’s baby. Adoption had been something he’d said they’d consider, but he never truly had. All the brochures she brought him, all the links to websites she sent him, went ignored.
When the dust had settled after her husband’s death, it had been the thing she’d latched onto. She wasn’t a wife anymore, but she could be a mother.
And now he was ripping it from her hands. Leaving her arms empty.
“I’m not doing anything to you. Leena is my child and I am claiming her, as is the responsible and right thing to do.”
“You have a warped sense of right, Mr. Vasin.”
“Alik,” he said. “You can call me Alik. And my sense of right seems to match that of the justice system, so one might argue that it is you with a warped sense of justice.”
She blinked. “My sense of justice involves the heart, not just laws written on paper, unconnected to specific people and events.”
“And that is where we differ. Nothing I do involves the heart.” She looked at his eyes, black, soulless. Except for that moment in the courthouse when he’d been holding Leena. Then there had been emotion. Fear. Uncertainty. A man who clearly knew nothing about children.
And he wanted her to be the nanny. He wanted to assume the position as Leena’s father and demote her to staff. This man who had been living his life, a full complete life apart from Leena, now wanted to come and take the heart from her.
“She’s all I have,” Jada said, her voice trembling, emotion betraying her now “All I have in the world.”
“So you say no because of pride?”
“And because I am not my child’s nanny! I am her mother. The idea of simply being treated as though I’m paid to be there…” It hit at her very identity, who she was. She had been Sunil’s wife, and then she had become Leena’s mother. She couldn’t be nothing again. Not again.
“I would pay you to be there. I can hardly ask you to forfeit whatever job you might have and come be her nanny for free now, can I?”
“How can you…”
“I will of course allow you to live in whatever house I install her in. It will be simpler that way for all involved. I have a penthouse in Paris and one in Barcelona. A town house in New York, though I suspect you would find it rather too busy… .”
“And what about you? Where will you be in all of this?”
He shrugged. “I will go on as I have. But you have no need to worry about Leena. As the judge pointed out when he opened up my file—I am a wealthy man.”
“Somehow all of your wealth and power doesn’t impress me very much, not when your idea of raising a child is to install her in a house somewhere in the world while you leave her with staff!”
“Not just any staff. You. You would be very well-trusted staff.”
“You bastard!” No. She wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t allow this man who didn’t even want to live in the same home as his daughter to come in and steal everything she had built for herself. For Leena.
“No,” she said, the word broken, just like everything inside of her.
“Excuse me?”
“No. Stop the car.”
She didn’t know what she was doing. Until the moment the car pulled up to the curb and she looked at Leena, and back at Alik. She thought again of the fear in his eyes as he’d held Leena at the courthouse. Of the way Leena had struggled to escape his arms.
And she knew.
“No.” She opened the door to the car. “I am her mother. You can’t simply demand a change of job title. If you think you’re her father because of a magical blood bond then you go and you take care of her.”
Her heart was in her throat, her stomach pitching violently. But it was her hope. Her only hope. And it was all born out of some insane idea that what she’d witnessed in this hard, inscrutable man’s eyes was truly fear.
And if she was misreading him, there was every chance she would lose her child forever.
But if you don’t, he’ll always have the power. He has to know that you’re right. That he needs you.
She closed the door to the limo, the gray sky reflected in the tinted windows, obscuring Alik, obscuring Leena, from view. Panic clawed at her, tore her to shreds inside.
She turned away and closed her eyes, trying to breathe. She couldn’t. A sob caught in her chest. And then Jada started walking away. And she just prayed that Alik would follow.
CHAPTER TWO
ALIK HAD FACED DOWN terrorists hell-bent on blowing him into pieces and scattering his remains in the ocean. He’d dogged his way across enemy lines, into an enemy camp, to save the life of a friend. He’d spent hours calculating tactical strategies for nations at war, finding the smart way to get in and win the battle.
None of it had shaken him. A welcome burst of adrenaline, the rush of having survived, he got all of that from it. But never fear.
He felt it now. Staring down into the dewy eyes of his child. Her little face crumpled and she let out a wail that filled the inside of the limo.
“Don’t go yet,” he said to his driver. “Don’t go.”
Leena cried, louder and louder, and Alik had no idea what he was expected to do. He looked out the window, and he didn’t see Jada. She was gone. Somewhere into the shopping center they were near, he imagined, but he didn’t know where.
Unless she’d hailed a cab and simply left them both. It didn’t seem like something she would do, but he admitted, willingly, he knew nothing about emotion. About mothers who stayed with their children.
Jada wasn’t even Leena’s mother. But he was her father.
He didn’t know how to comfort a child. He didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. No one had held him. No one had sung him songs or rocked him until he stopped crying. It was very possible he had never cried.
Leena on the other hand, did. Quite well.
He had always intended to hire a nanny, and when he’d gone out into the hall he’d felt, for the first time in his memory, like he was in a situation he could not control. And when he had seen Jada slumped against the wall, crying into her hands, he knew he’d found the solution.
But then she’d left. She wanted more, and he had no idea what more it was she wanted.
Alik had given up on emotion long ago. His body had put all of that into a deep freeze, protecting him from the worst of his experiences while growing up. And by the time he hadn’t needed the protection anymore, it was far too late for anything to thaw.
He experienced things through the physical. Sex and alcohol, and, in his youth, various other stimulants, had done a good job of providing him with sensation where the frozen organ in his chest simply did not.
It was how things were for him. It was convenient too, because when he had to carry out a mission that was less than savory, whether on the battlefield, as he’d once done, or in the boardroom, as he did now, he simply went to his mind. Logic always won.
And after that, there was always a party to go to. He’d learned how to manufacture happiness from his surroundings. To pull it into the darkness that seemed to dominate his insides and light the way with it, temporarily. A night of dancing, drinking and sex. It created a flash, a spark in the oppressive dark. It burned out as quickly as it ignited, but it was a hell of a lot better than endless blackness.
Except he didn’t feel vacant now. He felt panicked, and he found it wasn’t an improvement. Without thinking, he undid Leena’s seat and pulled her into his lap. She shrieked and jerked away from him, and with that came a punch of something—emotion, pain—to his chest that nearly knocked him back.
As afraid as he was, she was just as scared. Of him.
“Mama! Mama mama mama.” The word, just sounds really, came fast and furious, over and over, intermingled with sobs.
He tried to speak. To say something. But he had no idea what to say. What did you say to a screaming baby? He’d never wanted this. Never imagined it. He truly might have turned away if not for Sayid. If not for the conversation they’d had when he’d left Brussels.
“You have to claim her, Alik. She is your responsibility. You have so many resources at your disposal, so many things you can provide her with. She is your blood, your family.”
“I have family without blood,” Alik had said, a reference to Sayid’s family, to whom he had sworn absolute allegiance.
“A family by choice. She is your family. You are bound to her. To dishonor something so strong would be a mistake.”
“No, my only mistake was coming here for the weekend instead of heading down to Paris or Barcelona to get laid.”
“Running is your specialty, Alik,” Sayid had said, his tone deathly serious. “But you can’t change what is by running. Not this time.”
His friend was right. Alik lived his whole life moving at a dead run. But he was never running from something. Nothing scared him that much. But he wasn’t really running to something, either. He was simply getting through as quickly, as loudly and recklessly, as possible.
He found it was the loud and reckless things in life that offered the most return in terms of what they made him feel. And he was hungry for feeling. For tastes of what years of existing in survival mode had denied him.
Maybe that, more than Sayid’s comments, had been the deciding factor in why he’d come. That or watching the other man’s life, watching all of the change it had brought about for Sayid to acquire a wife and children.
Either way, when he’d decided to come after his daughter, he hadn’t made the decisions hesitantly or lightly. No, there had been no instant bond between them, but he had hardly expected that. Alik had never bonded to people instantly. Sometimes he simply never did.
Sayid was the exception, and then later, Sayid’s family. But he’d been twenty-eight when he’d met his friend, who was more a brother to him than anything else, and it had been his first experience of caring for another human being.
It still didn’t come easily to him. But swearing his alle-giance? That came as simply as seeing whose name was on the check. It always had for him. Even now that he’d moved into the business of tactical, cutthroat corporate raider, rather than tactical, cutthroat mercenary and overthrower of governments, that fact remained true.
His loyalty could be bought, and once he was purchased, he would defend those he was loyal to till death if he had to. And then, when the job was done, he would break the bonds as easily as they’d been forged.
Again, Sayid was the exception. A job gone wrong, turned into a rescue mission to save the life of the sheikh, even when everyone else had given up, had made their bond unbreakable.
He would simply choose to cultivate that bond with his child. She had bought his loyalty with her blood, a check that could never simply be cashed, could never just disappear.
That meant, no matter what, he would defend her. Fight for her, die for her.
Or pound the streets as long as it took, looking for the woman she called mama.
“I will protect you,” he said to her, looking at her red, tear-streaked face. “That is my promise.”
His daughter was unimpressed with the vow.
He pushed the door to the limo open. “Wait here,” he said to his driver.
He got out, holding Leena, who was squirming and screeching against his chest. People were staring at him, at them. He was used to being able to fly under the radar when he wanted to. Used to making a scene only when he wanted to. But he had no control over this scene.
How a tiny child could assume total control over things with the ease most people breathed astounded him. He walked down the sidewalk, cursing the rain, and the knots of kids in skinny jeans smoking cigarettes and blocking his way.
Cursing his total lack of control.
There was a clothing store, a pizza place and a coffeehouse along the main drag of the shopping center, and he was willing to bet that Jada hadn’t gone far.
He pushed open the door to the coffee place and saw her there, clutching a mug in both of her hands, looking ashen and in shock.
He crossed the coffee shop, wiggling baby attempting to impede his progress, and stopped in front of her table.
“Tell me then, Jada Patel, if you do not take the position as my nanny, what will you do?”
She looked at him, the relief that washed over her so strong it was tangible. And yet she didn’t move to take the baby from his arms. Didn’t try to relieve him.
She didn’t respond. She simply looked at him with eyes that conveyed a depth of emotion he hadn’t known was possible to feel.
“You don’t seem to have a very strong sense of self-preservation,” he said, shifting the baby in his arms. “I have offered you a chance to come and live with my daughter, to continue caring for her. You’ve as much as admitted that you have nothing here if you don’t get to keep her. You have no husband. No girlfriend or other sort of lover, obviously. They would have come to the hearing with you, offered support.”
She looked down into her coffee mug. “No. I don’t have a husband.”
“Then you have nothing to leave behind.”
She looked away, her eyes glassy, reflecting the gray sky outside the coffee shop’s window. “Leaving here isn’t the problem.” She looked back at him. “What assurance do I have that you won’t simply fire me one day? Cast me out onto the street without any warning some day five years down the road and put me in the position of losing her then? I couldn’t bear it. I can’t bear it now, so part of me wants to take the chance, but I am giving you all of my power, the power over my life if I take the position, and I don’t like it at all.”
“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t like it, either, and yet I see very little in the way of other options.”
Jada fought the panic that was rising inside her. Panicking wasn’t going to help. She had to think. Had to figure out what to do.
She wished, so desperately, that there was someone she could ask. Her friends…she could hardly stand to be around them. They just looked at her with sad eyes, touched her like they were afraid she was cracking, breaking like a piece of delicate glass. And they’d all thought her crazy when she’d decided to adopt.
Her parents had been gone for so long now. Her father when she was a teenager, her mother six years after that.
And then there was Sunil. She would have turned to him, would have asked him what to do. After he’d died, she’d felt like she was drifting. Unable to think, unable to make a decision. The only thing that had gotten her out of bed every day was the knowledge that he would have wanted her to. He would have told her that there would be something else for her. Something good. And while he hadn’t been enthusiastic about adoption during their marriage, she knew he wouldn’t have wanted her to be alone.
The something good she’d been waiting for was Leena. From the moment she’d seen Leena, tiny and pink, swaddled in a blanket with her hospital cap fitted snugly over her mop of brown hair, Jada had known she would give her life for her daughter.
Becoming Leena’s nanny wasn’t even close to giving up her life. But it wasn’t the thought of leaving home that frightened her. She had no home without Leena anyway. It was the fact that, at Alik’s pleasure, at his whim, he could still tear her daughter away from her at any moment.
She would have no parental rights. She would be nothing more than hired help, waiting for the ax to fall. Loss, when it came suddenly, was hideous. But living her life knowing that any day could bring it would be unbearable.
“So what you need is more security?” he asked. “Something that would feel legal and permanent?”
“Yes, something that would feel more stable, so that I wasn’t wondering if you were simply going to sweep through one day and decide I was no longer needed.”
She looked at him, into those stormy gray eyes, and a shiver ran through her body. He had a kind of easy grace, a relaxed posture that made him look like he was at ease with the world, with his surroundings.
But what she saw in his eyes just then proved that he was lying to the world. He was ice beneath the exterior.
“You are the kind of woman,” he said, “who would never sell her allegiance.” The way he said it, with a mix of wonder and admiration, surprised her. “You remind me of someone I know.”
“That’s all very well and good, but it doesn’t solve my problems.”
“And I now live to solve your problems?”
“I think we both can see that no matter how tough you play, you have no idea of what you’re doing with a child.”
“I can hire someone else.”
“And you think that would make her happy? Does she not notice when I’m gone?”
That hit him. Square in the chest. A strong, sudden burning of loss. He’d been two or three when he’d been left at an orphanage in Moscow. He didn’t remember his mother’s face. Or her voice. Or where he’d lived before then. But he remembered loss. Loss so deep, so confusing and painful.
“She would notice,” he said, because there was no lying about that. Something had to be done. He knew now he stood in a terrible position. That of abandoning his child, or tearing his child away from the only woman she’d ever known as her mother.
He was trapped.
“You need to come up with a solution we can both be satisfied with.”
Jada didn’t know how she’d kept from bursting into tears. She was on the edge of breaking completely. But she had to be strong. She had to show Alik that he wasn’t in charge. She had to take back control somehow.
This was her life. The life she was creating for herself, and he didn’t get to own it. She’d had enough of being jerked around by fate or whatever it was that had reached down and disordered everything. She was done with that. Done with feeling like a victim. Done with allowing life to make her one.
Alik looked down at Leena, his discomfort obvious, then looked back at Jada.
“What do you need?” he asked, his voice frayed, his expression that of a desperate man.
“I need security,” she said. “I need to be her mother, because no matter whether you understand it or not, that’s what I am, and that’s what a child needs. A mother, not a caregiver, not an absentee father. Someone who is there with her. Always.”
He looked at her for a moment, black eyes completely unreadable, his handsome face schooled into a mask. “You think something of permanence would be best for Leena.”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly. “I may have a solution to your problems. You don’t like the idea of my simply…how did you put it? Dumping my child off somewhere in the world with nothing but staff. You think she should have a family, a real family.”
“Everyone should.”
“Perhaps, but it is not reality. Still, if I could find a way to make that happen for her…having a family is very important, yes?”
Jada nodded, her throat tightening. “Yes.”
“I would hate to deny my child anything of importance.”
She wanted to scream at him that he was denying his child her mother, and yet she knew it would do no good. He simply didn’t seem to understand the connection she felt for Leena. He didn’t seem to understand love. And losing control wouldn’t win this battle. When he pushed, she had to push back.
“Perhaps then, I should take a wife,” he said.
Pain crashed through her. He still didn’t get it.
The thought of another woman filling her position, of another woman being the caregiver for her daughter, made her see red. And she knew that was selfish, and she didn’t care.