King's Baby - A Bad Boy Romance (36 page)

“Then
why are you in your office and not in a cab on your way to the Ritz?”

“I
always lock my violin in my office after a performance. You said to make it
look normal so I don’t scare him off. God, Sebastián, he ruined my life by
leaving me. I wouldn’t just . . . just . . .” The dam breaks, and I slump
against Sebastián and sob.

“I
know, shush, it’s going to be okay now.” His arms circle my shoulders, and he
pats my back.

“I
have to go, I have a car waiting,” I say, pulling away sniffling. He hands me a
handkerchief. I didn’t know men still did things like that. It’s sweet. I blow
and hold it up, scrunching my face.

“Am
I supposed to give this back?”

The
corners of his mouth curve into a small smile, and he shakes his head back and
forth. He reaches behind me for my purse and thrusts it at me.

“Now
go after him, and please, Holland don’t hate him. No one knows him better than
I do, and I can assure you that he always thought he was doing the right thing.
No matter how wrong he has been, he still loves you.”

“I’m
not going after him. I’m going after Juliette.” My voice is stone cold, and the
river of tears that were just falling dry up when Sebastián mentions King and
love in the same breath. I’ve spent three years trying to come to terms with
what King did to me. My therapist says forgiveness is important, but that I
have to want it for myself, and so far, I’ve been okay with being angry and
miserable. King broke the heart inside my heart. He abandoned me and took the
most precious thing on earth, and for that, I will never forgive him.

The
ride to the Ritz is a blur of hyperventilation and a churning stomach. I’m
trying not to let my hopes get too high. King has been keeping Juliette and
himself successfully hidden for years. He may have already left. He might have
discovered the crack in Sebastian's loyalty. Maybe he sensed something was off
during my performance tonight.

I
can’t believe he’s been watching me perform all these years. How dare he spy on
me? He has secretly been involved in my life—he never really lost me, and
he never lost Juliette at all. While I suffered alone, he had the luxury of
watching me play, knowing exactly where I was and that I was safe. It would
have been so easy for him to send a picture or a letter, but he didn’t. He
chose the cowardly way out. He hid in the shadows and watched me graduate and
become famous. He got exactly what he wanted, just like a King.

Inside
the hotel, I bypass the front desk and make a beeline to the elevators with my
head down. I don’t take time to admire the luxurious lobby or the beautiful
people wandering around. I’ve seen enough swanky hotels to last a lifetime.
I’ve grown to hate the temporary fake sense of home they try to provide. I long
for a place full of my own things. I want to step outside into my yard and hear
the locusts buzzing in the trees and children laughing and playing, not car
horns honking and pedestrians whistling for a cab. I want a home.

When
the doors slide open and the car dings, my heart is pounding, my mouth is dry,
and my stomach is flopping around like a fish out of water.

I
take a deep breath and exit left down three doors to room 211. I raise my hand
and knock on the expensive oak door and wait. Someone’s moving inside. Thank
God they’re still here. I step to the side so he can’t see me through the
peephole. That’s all I need—to get this close, only to have him lock me
out.

The
door swings open wide, and standing right in front of me, filling the doorway,
is King, shirtless in only his suit pants. For a fraction of a second, my body
betrays me and I take a shaky breath and lean forward. He is the most beautiful
man I’ve ever seen. He hasn’t changed a bit. His hair might be a little shorter
and his facial hair is cut into a goatee instead of his close-cut beard, but
other than that, he’s the same perfect, sexy, chiseled man.

“Damn,
Sebastián where did you go—”

The
color drains from his tanned face and his eyes widen when he sees me instead of
Sebastián outside his door. We stare at each other, speechless, for a long time
before his shoulders slump and he drops his head back, sighing while he looks
at the ceiling.

“I
want to see my daughter.” I have to push the words from my lips. The longer we
stand here, the angrier I get. The desire to cause him pain, any kind of pain,
physical or emotional, is overwhelming. It’s a good thing that love is my
driving force tonight and not revenge or retribution, because if I were armed,
I’d shoot him in the heart.

He
lifts his arm to block my entrance.

“Holland,
she’s sleeping. We need to talk.”

“Fuck
you, King. So now we need to talk? What was wrong with talking three years ago
before you kidnapped my daughter and left me alone to pick up the pieces? Let
me see her, now.”

“No,
not when you’re like this. She’s never met you. If you wake her up like this,
you’ll scare her.”

My
nails are cutting into my palms inside my tightly clenched fists, and my entire
body is vibrating with anger.

“And
whose fucking fault is that?”

He
reaches out to touch me, but I lean back and take advantage of the opening he
just made by moving his arm and darting past him into the large, dimly lit
suite.

“Holland,”
he yells. I scan the room quickly, trying to guess which door leads to the room
Juliette is sleeping in, but there’s no time. King just slammed the door, and I
hear his bare feet pounding behind me.

I
say a short prayer to God, asking him to point me in the right direction, and
run to the second door on my left off the living room.

“Holland,
stop, we have to talk first,
damn
it.”

I
chose the right door. He wouldn’t be so frantic if I hadn’t. I know it’s wrong
to let my emotions sweep me into her room late at night like this—he’s
right, I’ll scare her—but I can’t help it. I’m so close, and it’s been so
long.

I
burst through the door, and there, in the center of a king-sized bed, is a tiny
little raven-headed child, lovingly tucked under the duvet, fast asleep. The
room is dark except for a stream of light coming from the en-suite bathroom.
King is right behind me now. His heavy breathing blows the loose tendrils of my
hair around my neck and ears, and the heat from his body reaches out to warm my
back. I step forward, and he reaches out to take me by the arm. I look over my
shoulder and glare at his hand and then into his eyes.

“Take
your hand off of me,” I say between gritted teeth. He raises his eyebrows and
inhales sharply before he releases me.

I
approach the bed slowly. Part of me wants to wake her, and another part
wouldn’t mind staring at her while she sleeps for the rest of the night. How do
I start, what do I do?

King
is right behind me again. He’s too close, but there is nowhere else for me to
go but into the bed, so I sit down on the edge, several feet from Juliette.

“Does
she know me? Have you even shown her my picture so she knows she has a mama?”
My Texas twang naturally replaces my Yankee New York accent when I speak of
her.

“Yes,
every day. She has been surrounded by images of you her entire life. I made
sure of it.”

She
knows who I am . . . as much as I hate King, I’m grateful to him for allowing
her that.

Now
that I know I’m not a complete stranger to her, I can’t resist the urge to wake
her up so I can look into her eyes.

“Juliette
. . .” She doesn’t move. She must be a hard sleeper like King. I try again, a
smidge louder.

“Juliette.”
Nothing.

 
King’s hand is on my shoulder again. I
wish he would stop touching me.

“Holland
. . .”

“Why
isn’t she answering me?”

“Holland
. . .”

“Juliette,”
I say, loud enough to wake even the deepest of sleepers, but she doesn’t move a
muscle.

Her
shoulder rises and falls with every easy breath, but she doesn’t stir.

King
turns me in his arms and squats down until we are eye to eye.

“She
can’t hear you.” He places his hands on my shoulders and shakes his head back
and forth.

“What?”

“She’s
deaf, she can’t hear you. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. She was
born with a profound hearing deficit. She’s never been able to hear.”

“No,
she was fine when she was a baby. Nobody said there was anything wrong with her
hearing in the hospital, and they test for that.”

He
releases my shoulders and drops his arms to his sides. His face clouds with
sympathy, or maybe it’s pity. I don’t know, but I do know I want to smack the
shit out of him right now. I have no choice but to believe him. I wasn’t
allowed to be there for her. I didn’t even know my baby girl was deaf.

I
watch my hand slap King across the face as if it had a mind of its own. His
head snaps to the side, freezing thereafter the impact of my hand. His eyes are
closed, and I can’t resist the urge to have another go at it. I slap him again
and again until adrenaline has consumed me and I’m pounding my fists against
his chest.

“I
hate you, I hate you so much! I wish you were dead!” I yell while he stands
there, taking every bit of abuse without defending himself, until suddenly he
grabs my wrists firmly to stop me.

“Stop,”
he says, turning me to face the bed, where two very big eyes watch me with
horror. When King knows I’ve seen her, he lets go of me and leans over to turn
on the light next to Juliette’s bed.

He
crawls across the bed and sits directly in front of her and begins to sign.

She
watches intently until he stops, and then her eyes are on me again. God, I want
to hold her and caress her skin, smooth her tousled hair away from her face,
and kiss every inch of her from head to toe. But I’ve gone and messed things up
by freaking out on the only parent she’s ever known.

Chapter Thirty-Five

King

If
Sebastián weren’t my father . . . well, you know. He fucking told her. I should
have known. He’s been begging me to bring Juliette back every day since Holland
graduated from Juilliard and won the auditions for concertmaster with the New
York Philharmonic.

It
wasn’t like I didn’t want her back in our lives. I did, I do, more than
anything. I ache for her every single day. I tell Juliette how wonderful and
beautiful and talented her mommy is, we look at pictures taken by the team of
people who have kept track of her since the day I left, and we watch every one
of her performances on video. Watching her play is bittersweet. I expected
nothing less from her. I knew if we were out of the picture, she would blow the
classical music world’s mind, and she certainly has, but the hole in my heart
where she belongs grows larger every day we are apart, and the cruel irony of
having a deaf child who will never hear the beauty of her mother’s gift gnaws
at my conscience. I can’t help but think that maybe she was fine in the
hospital, and when God saw me take her from her mother, he took her hearing
away to punish me through her. I couldn’t let the past three years be for
nothing by showing up right now. She’s been out of danger for eighteen months,
ever since the dirty world of drug cartels learned that the Romero
empire
had no real heir. But her career was peaking, she was
living her dream, and I didn’t want to interrupt it.

 
I sign to Juliette that her mommy is here
to see her, but she is a little upset about something that has nothing to do
with her. She signs back that Mommy is scary and that she wants me to stay with
her until she’s gone. When she’s done using her hands to speak to me, she
crawls into my lap on her knees and wraps her little arms around my neck,
turning her face away from Holland.

I feel like the
biggest shithead in the universe when I look to see how Holland is handling
this. Her face is full of so much pain and longing that I have to look away
too.

This isn’t how I
wanted this to go. I wanted to ease them back together over the next year,
introducing them in Puerto Rico where Juliette would feel comfortable. I wanted
to tell Holland about our daughter’s disability. I’d hoped she would have an
opportunity to learn a little sign language before meeting her so she could
communicate with her right away. All of this would have been possible if
Sebastián hadn’t gotten so fucking impatient.

 
I was going to call Holland in a few more
months, but he didn’t believe me. Sebastián thought I was never going to let
Holland see Juliette again. He could never see the big picture. Nobody could.

She fulfilled her
half of our deal a million times over when she graduated from Juilliard in half
the time allotted and became the youngest person in history to ever win the
audition for concertmaster. I’ve never been more proud of anyone or anything in
my life.

I’ve also kept my
promise to get out of the drug dealing business. It was much easier when the
word spread that Arturo Romero wasn’t my real father. Fifteen months after
moving to Puerto Rico, I had millions of dollars squirreled away in offshore
accounts. Suspicions were high for an entire year until the cartels relaxed and
realized that I had no say in the matter. My connection was adamant: no true
Romero, no supply.

When Juliette is
calm, I tuck her back under the covers. I start to scoot off the bed to leave
and she grabs my wrist. I sign that everything will be okay. I tell her not to
worry, and that Mommy is a very loving person. She asks if her mommy will be
here tomorrow when she wakes up, and I tell her I’m not sure, but probably not.
Her full bottom lip slips out in a pout. I kiss her nose and leave the door
open a crack in case she needs me.

Holland isn’t in the
bedroom anymore, so I search the living room. Empty. I look in the bathroom and
the dining area before I decide that she must have felt so out of place and
unwanted that she left.

Fuck, I want to punch
my father right now. I pace the length of the living room several times and
decide there is nothing I can do right now. I can’t leave Juliette in the hotel
room alone to try and catch her downstairs. I’m going to have to wait for
Sebastián to get back to go to her apartment.

I turn off all the
lights and toss toys and books into a wicker basket that we drag along with us
everywhere when we travel. I check on Juliette one more time and find her sound
asleep exactly how I left her—with one exception. Holland is wrapped
around her little body, spooning with her face buried in her hair. It’s
impossible to tell where Holland’s wild mass of waves stops and Juliette’s
begins. Seeing them together makes me stumble, and I grab the doorframe for
support.

I don’t know how long
I stand there watching the two most beautiful people in my life take breath
after breath. It’s surreal. Mother and child reunited. It’s the third most
moving moment of my life. Number one was when I saw Holland dancing at Ecstasy
and fell in love with her at first sight, and number two happened while
watching her deliver our daughter.

When my muscles begin
to ache from standing in the same spot for so long, I leave the door open a
crack and pad into the living room to call Sebastián.

A sense of wellbeing
radiates through the suite. Knowing that Holland and Juliette are sleeping in
the next room together is so incredibly right that I’m struck with the
realization that the past three years have been more off-balance than I
thought. But how could that be? Holland is everything she ever wanted to be,
famous, world-renowned, a Juilliard graduate. She fulfilled every dream she
worked her entire life for.

Sebastián picks up
after only one ring. He was waiting for the call.

“What the hell is
wrong with you?”

I sit on the edge of
the couch with my elbows propped on my knees, caught in this tight situation
with my father.

“King, I couldn’t let
you do this again. My granddaughter needs her mother, and you need Holland.
She’s a star. Isn’t that what you wanted? It was time to give her her life
back.”

“Give her her life
back? What
I
wanted? She has the life
she dreamed of, Sebastián. I may have had my doubts at first, but when we found
out Juliette was deaf, I knew I was doing the right thing. Holland would never
have gone back to playing. She would have devoted every ounce of herself to
Juliette. She wouldn’t have gone to college, and she never would have played
all over the world in so many orchestras. It had to be this way.”

“All right, King. I
know I’ll never make you see that what you did was wrong. The past is the past,
but those two
need
to be together now, and in the
future. You were taking too long. I couldn’t watch another birthday go by
without them knowing each other.

“You don’t see what I
see. She may be famous and accomplished, but she’s hollow. The music doesn’t fill
her up like it used to. The only thing that can fill the void in her life is
Juliette, and God willing, if she can ever forgive you, she needs you too.”

I sink back into the
couch and stare out the window at the lights of the New York skyline. She will
never forgive me. I sacrificed her motherhood for her career, and it wasn’t my
choice to make. I knew she would never forgive me the moment I left our house
in Houston and got on a plane to Puerto Rico with our baby.

“Where is she now?”
he asks.

“Sleeping with
Juliette.”

“She’s still there?
How did it go?”

“It was rocky. She
rushed in before I could tell her, and Juliette woke up scared. I thought she
slipped out when I was tucking Juliette back into bed, but when I went back in,
she was curled up with her.”

“And Juliette didn’t
get upset?”

“I never heard a peep
from the bedroom, and they were both asleep when I found them, so apparently
not.”

“You got lucky, son.
Things could have been so much worse.”

“She loves her, so
much. I saw it in her eyes tonight, and it made me doubt myself. I messed up, I
was wrong. But I’ve been telling you I was going to contact her soon. You just
had to push, didn’t you?”

“Your way isn’t
always the best way, King. In fact, your way has pretty much sucked for the
last three years. Somebody had to show you that you were wrong. Guess it was
me.”

“Well, it’s done now.
There’s no going back. I don’t know what the hell is going to happen in the
morning, but you’d better be here bright and early to help if I need you.”

“I’m right
downstairs. Call me for anything.”

“I will.”

We hang up, and I toe
off my shoes and lay down on the couch. What now? I have no idea what to expect
from Holland tomorrow, or Juliette, for that matter. I get up and check on them
one more time. Holland is under the covers, and Juliette is facing her now with
her hand on Holland’s cheek; both are still sleeping.
Tears
well in my eyes for the first time in years.
They are so beautifully
meant to be together. I can’t believe I ever thought she was better off without
her daughter. The dam of guilt that’s been building for years breaks free,
flooding me with regret. I was wrong, so, so wrong. Now I have to make it
right. Somehow, I have to find a way to put Holland’s life back together.