Sheikh's Possession (15 page)

"Because you had just gotten done telling me that there was no place for me in your high and mighty life, and that you were going home to be the perfect prince in your own country. Excuse me if I thought that if there was no place for me, there would be no place for the baby, either!"

Philip looked stung at her accusatory words, but he rallied. "A baby changes everything. You should still have contacted me …"

"I tried," she said more quietly. "I … was so scared after I found out. I didn't want to, and I didn't even tell Cassie I was going to, but after I found out, I tried to call your number. It was disconnected, I suppose, because you had returned home. I racked my brain for a way to contact you, but everywhere I ran into palace protocols …"

Philip now looked stricken. "Those are meant to keep the public from harassing us," he said. "There are layers of security that can only be breached by my family or me giving out certain codes, certain phone numbers …"

"None of which you gave me," she said.

They sat in silence for a moment, and without thinking about it, Marnie reached for the hot coffee that was steaming away untouched in front of Philip. It was an automatic gesture, a relic of their relationship together from before. He raised an eyebrow when she did it, but he didn't protest.

"I didn't know what to do after that, but I realized that if I pushed it too hard, I was going to start setting off lots of rumors and unpleasantness. I didn't want to go through that, and at that point, I was beginning to think of myself as a mother. I didn't want to put my child through that, either."

"Was I ever to know?" he asked quietly. He sounded subdued now, and she was grateful. She couldn't imagine being in his spot, realizing that he had a daughter more than half a decade after the fact.

"I decided that I was going to play that one by ear," she said with a shrug."I can't tell the future. There might have been a place where I could have told you. Perhaps when Victoria was an adult and could make up her own mind about things, she would have wanted to seek you out."

"And where does she think her father is?" Philip asked.

Marnie sighed. "She's just a little girl right now. At this point, she knows that some families have two parents, and some families have one, and some people live with just one parent, and some people live with whole rooms full of extended families. It's good enough for her for now. She hasn't asked for more information."

Philip nodded, but she wasn't sure whether he agreed with her statements or whether he could see where she was coming from.

"She's my daughter," Philip said, and to Marnie, it was as if he were coming to terms with the idea. It was fair. His world had changed drastically over the course of the last few hours.

"She is," Marnie agreed.

"She has to come back to Navarra."

In the space of half a second, Marnie went from feeling calm and even sympathetic for Philip to towering rage. "Excuse me?" she asked, deceptively quiet.

"It's obvious. She must go to Navarra. She's a princess of the Demarier line, and—"

"No," Marnie said cuttingly, and her tone was so sharp that it made Philip look up, startled.

"Her last name is Drake. When she was born, the birth certificate lists just one parent, and that is me. She is a fine, healthy, happy girl, and she does not need to be yanked from everything that she knows to be taken across the sea to strangers."

Philip started to protest, but she stood up, eyes alight with anger. "No. You had a hand in making her, and for that, I thank you. She is a wonderful girl, and every day, I am thankful that I am her mother. However, you are not her father. I woke up every hour on the hour for the first six months she was born because she had colic. I held her when she fell and had to have her knee stitched together at the urgent care. I am her mother, and by god, I will not let you take her from me."

Marnie looked at Philip, meeting his gaze with steely resolve. "You have a choice, Philip. You can go back to Navarra and pretend this never happened. Or you can stay and get to know your daughter. But believe me when I say that it will be on my terms."

She scrawled her number down on a scrap of paper and dropped it in front of him. "You already told me that I wasn't good enough for your world. You will not get a chance to tell my daughter the same thing."

With that, she turned on her heel and strode to the entrance. Her heart was beating as if she had run all the way around the city, and she could feel a high red heat in her cheeks.

When she was in the cool of the night and heading for the subway stop, she wondered if she had made the right decision. She was a writer who was gaining some popularity, and money hadn't been an issue for years, but Philip was a prince who could leverage a great deal more power than she could.

At the end, though, shaking her head, she had to admit that she could do nothing else.

When she had known Philip, she knew that she was a writer. Things were different now. She was a writer and a mother, and she would never let her little girl be taken away from her.

***

Philip sat at the coffee shop long after Marnie had departed. He ignored the curious gazes of the people around him and picked up the scrap of paper.

"That … could have gone better," he murmured to himself. 

He also realized that it could have gone worse. Marnie had left the door open for him to come in. He had to come in on her terms, but that wasn't a surprise. In Navarra, there was a long tradition of mothers' rights, where it was the mother who set the rules regarding the children. Hers was the greater responsibility, so hers was the greater power when it came to children.

However, the massive unfairness of not being allowed to be there, to support his daughter, cut him to the quick. He could protest all he liked that he would have wanted to be a true father to Victoria, but the fact remained that he hadn't been. Through a combination of his own carelessness and the protocols surrounding his family, he had been gone, as untouchable as if he were on the moon.

As far as he could see, Marnie had raised a lovely daughter who just happened to be his own.

If he had appeared and she had had a little blond son with gray eyes, a child of another lover, he would have been happy for her. He would have been impressed that she had raised a child while she was starting her writing career, and he would have wanted to get to know the child because, after all, he was a part of a woman he had once loved very much.

Once?

That was something that Philip wasn't prepared to think about. He thought that time would have dulled his reaction to Marnie, but apparently, it had done no such thing.

Instead, when he saw her, he was taken right back to the time six years ago, when it had been hard to go an hour without thinking of her.

In another circumstance, that might have been endearing and even enjoyable. Right now, when there was Victoria between them, he couldn't take that risk.

Philip knew what his parents would have wanted him to do. They would want him to rally up with lawyers, ones that would almost certainly be able to work with paternity suits and immigration to return Victoria to her father's homeland. No matter what Marnie tried, there would have been no way for her to fight.

He couldn't do that, not to Marnie, not to anyone. Instead, he was going to fend off his parents for a little longer, and then … Well, then he was going to get to know his daughter.

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