The Consequence He Must Claim (2 page)

Liar
, Sorcha thought. Then, in a panic, wondered,
Come to what?

“He was very remorseful. Sorry he'd done it when we were so close to announcing things. Sorry, I think, that he'd made you into a conquest when he had had so much respect for you before.”

His respect was gone? Sorcha's heart stopped, ears ringing so loudly, she barely heard the rest of what Diega was saying. She had a terrible feeling her mouth was hanging open. She was really nauseous now. Bile burned the back of her throat.

“His ego got the best of him, Sorcha. You know what he's like. You were the one that looked about to get away. It's, well, it's sad, isn't it?” She cocked her head. They were friends, discussing the pitiful behavior of an incorrigible rake. “He promised he would be faithful once we were engaged and married, but he wanted me to know because you'd still be working for him.”

“I don't intend to cheat on her,” Cesar had said that day in his office, referring to Diega. Had he viewed Sorcha as his last chance to enjoy his freedom?

“He wanted to come clean because you work for him,” Diega continued. “You're not one of his passing fancies. He rightly felt he had to tell me and I admit I wasn't prepared to start our engagement with you still in the picture. I insisted he end your employment as soon as possible, not keep you on until we married. I'll have to live with the fact that I sent him away rather than letting him stay to talk things out. If he hadn't been in such a rush to secure our engagement, he wouldn't have been on the road that evening, trying to avoid that stalled truck...”

Sorcha shook her head. No. That was not what had happened. “He and I talked that day,” she said, not willing to accept this without a fight, but she stopped herself. Cesar's confidences were exactly that. She never, ever repeated the things he told her.

“About his doubts? He was a bachelor with cold feet who wanted to persuade you to sleep with him! I wouldn't give much weight to anything he said under those circumstances.”

Cold feet, yes, he'd definitely been suffering that, but there were other things. “The way you talk about your family. Our family is a business. I prefer it, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be close like that,” he'd said pensively.

His family's negotiation to merge with the Fuentes family was very big business. Those sorts of deals weren't dropped willy-nilly just so a man could sleep with his secretary, she knew that, but...

But he had asked her to stay.

“The kindest thing you could do,” Diega said, like she was offering step-by-step instructions on how a mistress should conduct herself after discovery by a wife, “would be to leave. I'll speak to Javiero, ensure you're written the best possible reference. Given Cesar's condition, none of us wants a scandal. He's facing a long, difficult recovery as it is. You don't want to set him back, do you? I believe you do care for him.”

I'm pregnant
, Sorcha thought as waves of hot and cold humiliation washed over her.

Was she really just the one that almost got away? She couldn't believe it. He'd seemed so
real
that day. Not the playboy Diega was referring to, but the man capable of reflecting on his life and deciding who and what he really was.

“He doesn't even remember it, Sorcha,” Diega said with soft compassion. “I'm grateful. I plan to forget it as completely as he has. And we will marry,” she added, as if making a resolution that would be engraved into platinum. “We all know what sort of life he leads and what sort of wife he needs.”

Sorcha stopped breathing, recalling that she had confided some of her background to Cesar that day. Had he mentioned any of that to Diega during their little heart-to-heart?

“I won't claim he doesn't value your work, but I hope you weren't thinking he was in love with you?”

Sorcha looked at her nails, manicure neglected in these past stressful weeks, cuticles chewed with anxiety.

I'm pregnant
, she thought again, but she could just imagine how that would play out: Cesar denying it was even possible, his parents thinking it was a ploy on her part to take advantage of his riches. Paternity tests. Delving into her background to discredit her.

She couldn't do that to her mother.

Revealing her pregnancy would create bitterness all around and even if she could prove she was telling the truth, then what? Did she think he would marry her? Claim his child?

At best she might see a settlement, but she and her sisters were evidence that even when rich men made babies and appeared to love them, they didn't always make provisions for them. That was the real source of her shame over her upbringing—that her father had left them with no indication they were as important to him as he'd led them to believe while he was alive. All the denigration in the village combined didn't equal the rejection she'd felt when it became obvious her father had left them nothing.

Not even the ability to hold up their heads.

Her mother had maintained that he'd loved them, which had kept her going, but Sorcha didn't even have such a declaration of love from Cesar.

He could very well have been using her. Ticking a final box.

Did she really want to put herself through all of that for a check in the mail once a month that would just make her feel like a whore? Her mother had managed without support payments and Sorcha would rather spare herself the humiliation of begging for scraps.

“You were planning to resign,” Diega said
again.
“Do. Before his father has to hear about this.”
Because I'll tell him
, she seemed to threaten.

Sorcha's eyes burned. “I want to see him,” she said in a thin voice.

“Please, Sorcha. I've been far more civil than anyone could expect me to be. Show me you have enough remorse, enough
class
, not to make this worse.”

Class
. Ouch. Perhaps Diega did know where she came from.

I hate you
, Sorcha asserted silently as she rose and leveled her chin. Beyond the windows, the sunny brilliance of Valencia was a streaked image of blue sky and concrete gray, chrome and luxury-car black, early summer flowers blooming in a kaleidoscope of colors between.

“He has my number,” she said.

A tiny snort sounded, letting Sorcha know Cesar wouldn't be dialing it on Diega's watch. Then she veiled her triumph with good manners, standing and opening the door.

Sorcha didn't offer her hand, didn't look for Diega's. She was convinced Cesar would reach out to her, though. He had to. She wouldn't disgrace herself the way her mother had, pleading for favors from the family of her children's father only to be cast out anyway. If Cesar didn't remember how and why they'd wound up making love, he'd think she was exactly as Diega painted her: one more woman who'd fallen under his spell.

No, if he called her, she wanted it to be because he missed her. It would be better that way, she assured herself. She wouldn't be accused of trying to trap him with a baby. She'd know it was about her, not duty or obligation.

In the short term, however, that left her with one option: go home to tell her mother she'd made the same mistake she'd grown up with.

CHAPTER ONE

Present day...

S
ORCHA
ENDED
THE
call and grabbed a tissue to let the tears release. Oh, she was homesick and filled with self-pity, not that she had wanted her mum to hear it.

Mum was probably doing the same thing. They were both pretending Sorcha’s situation wasn’t a disaster and this emergency caesarian in London was the icing on the cake. Things really couldn’t get any worse.

She
so
wished she’d managed to get home before going into labor. She might have found a decent job here after quitting right after that disastrous talk with Diega, but Ireland was where her heart was. If her son wouldn’t be recognized as Spanish, like his father, she had at least wanted him born on Irish soil.

It hadn’t happened.

Her nurse, Hannah, came in with a wheelchair and a chipper offer to take her down to meet him. Finally.

That brought a smile to Sorcha’s face. She might be lonely here, but at least she had her son now. She would only be in hospital a few days, Hannah assured her, while the staff confirmed they were both healthy enough to be released. Then Sorcha could make the trek on the ferry and soon be surrounded by the people who loved her.

Her family would adore her son. Little things like being illegitimate just made him more like the rest of them.

Hannah asked how she was feeling and Sorcha started to explain that she had had every intention of delivering naturally, but had gone into labor early and the cord had been in the way, so they’d had to send her for emergency surgery. It had been quite dramatic, arriving on the heels of a tourist bus crash and at the same time as another woman needing an emergency caesarian section in the theater next to hers.

She broke off as they entered the nursery to find crying babies and the other mum from last night. Not that she’d met the stunning Italian woman. Sorcha had only caught a glimpse of a man she’d thought must have been the woman’s husband. She’d heard him speaking Italian on the phone as she was wheeled past him.

“Hello. I heard we were competing for the surgeon’s attention last night,” she greeted. “I’m Sorcha Kelly.”

Wait a minute. That wasn’t the man from last night. He looked sharper, despite his stubble of beard growth. His hair was decidedly shorter.

He offered a polite nod. “Alessandro Ferrante. My wife, Octavia, and our son, Lorenzo,” he said, then glanced at his wife. “That is the name we agreed upon, is it not?”

The other woman seemed...shell-shocked. If she felt anything like Sorcha did, Sorcha sympathized. The anesthetic had made her sluggish and every movement caused the incision across her abdomen to whimper.

Octavia exchanged a look with her husband that Sorcha might have tried to decipher, but the nurse had fetched and loosely wrapped her baby. He was crying furiously, like he’d been at it awhile, making her very sorry he’d had to wait.

“Do you mind, Mr. Ferrante?” Hannah said, pirouetting a finger in the air.

He apologized and turned with the sort of male briskness that men showed when confronted with a woman’s demand for modesty.

Sorcha couched a smile. He reminded her of Cesar. Not so much in looks, although they were both very dark and handsome, but in the way he emanated vitality and owned the room.

Cesar
, she thought, and missed him all over again. She desperately wanted to be with her family when his wedding took place this weekend, not here in the hospital, nursing melancholy along with his baby.

Murmuring a tender greeting, she closed her arms around the delicious weight of the bundled infant.
Hers
, she thought. Not a Montero, just as she wasn’t a Shelby. “Enrique,” she added in a whisper. Cesar’s middle name. She would call him Ricky—

Wait. Something wasn’t right.

He was crying so earnestly the sound broke her heart. She instinctively wanted to do anything soothe him, but...

Distantly she heard Octavia say in a choked voice, “That’s—”

“Octavia,” her husband interrupted with an undertone of warning.

Sorcha wasn’t really tracking the other people in the room. She cocked her head, perplexed, as she tried to figure out why her feelings for this baby were protective, but not maternal.

“Just put him to the breast. He’ll latch. They know what to do,” Hannah urged.

“I don’t think—” Sorcha couldn’t even voice her thoughts, they were so bizarre. She found her gaze lifting and looked across to the baby Octavia was trying to soothe. Octavia rubbed his back and rocked him and for some weird reason, that boy’s cries went through Sorcha’s skin like rippling waves, moving things in her she couldn’t even name.

As Octavia held Sorcha’s stare in a kind of eerie transfixion, she lowered the baby so Sorcha could see his face.

Sorcha looked at the squalling infant. His brows were wrinkled in a way that she knew, like an imprint on a part of her that recognized its own kind. That frown of displeasure was all Cesar, and those miniature lips—they were a replica of the mouth she’d seen in the mirror all her life.

Horror washed over her in a clammy rush.

“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked as the other nurse blurted out something, but Sorcha wasn’t listening.

“How did you...?” she began, sharp suspicion rising. She cut herself off. It was beyond outlandish. People didn’t steal babies. They certainly didn’t sit across from you and taunt you with it. That was something from a psycho thriller film.

But her heart was pounding in terror. Confusion and certainty warred and she began to shake under the strain of it.

Baring the ankle of the baby she held, she turned the tag with a trembling hand. It read, Kelly.

But this wasn’t her baby.
That
was her baby. That woman held her baby.

Beginning to panic, Sorcha flashed her gaze to Octavia’s, not sure what she expected. An evil grin?

Octavia’s lower lip was trembling. “They wouldn’t believe me,” she said weakly.

“Believe what?” Hannah asked.

“My wife is confused,” Alessandro said, and moved between Sorcha and her baby, trying to take the infant Octavia held.

“Don’t,” Sorcha blurted, and understood the kind of irrational yet powerful instinct that drove animals to overcome self-preservation, confront dangerous predators and protect their young with every last breath in their body. “Don’t touch him.”

The baby she held was screaming her ears off and part of her wanted to comfort him, but that was her baby over there. That one.

She struggled to her feet and came across to Octavia. The other woman had tears on her cheeks.

“No one would believe me,” Octavia told her again. “I wanted to feed him, but he needs his own mama and they wouldn’t give me mine...”

They clumsily exchanged babies and the dizzying panic that had nearly overwhelmed Sorcha began to subside. Her heart continued to race and adrenaline burned up her veins.

“I believe you,” she said, smiling shakily now that her son’s sweet scent filled her nostrils. She kissed his cheek and clasped him against her chest, knowing with unequivocal certainty that this was her son. Cesar’s son. “Of course we know our own babies.”

What the hell had just happened?
What the hell?

As if reflecting the emotions Sorcha felt, Octavia nodded, eyes closing as she bent her head over the baby she obviously loved and had been aching to hold.

How long had she been sitting here holding Enrique, trying to convince them to give her the right baby? In the face of that torture, Octavia had still tried to soothe Sorcha’s son.

A funny little bond formed between them even as Sorcha seated herself and brought Enrique to her breast. Silence descended as both boys finally received the meal they’d been begging for. Still very bewildered, Sorcha exchanged a teary smile with Octavia.

And became aware of profound silence.

“What are you
doing
?” Alessandro’s gruff male voice was astounded.

“Can’t you see they mixed them up? Look at him,” Octavia said.

“It’s impossible,” Hannah said. “We have very strict protocols. They couldn’t have been switched. You shouldn’t be doing this,” she warned, rolling the tag around on Enrique’s ankle. It read, Ferrante—Boy. “You both have it wrong.”

Now that she was seated and had her baby calmed, Sorcha was shifting from disbelief to outrage. How could the hospital mess up something this important?

“
You
have it wrong,” Sorcha said firmly, brushing Hannah’s hand from her son. If she thought they were going to switch back, they had another think coming. She was ready to draw blood. Only the fact she was holding a fragile newborn kept her seated and rational. “Test them. You’ll see we’re right.”

Chaos ensued as the nurses tried to convince the mothers they’d made a mistake. Thankfully Octavia was as adamant as Sorcha.

Finally the surgeon, Dr. Reynolds, arrived. She was taken aback and involved the hospital administration at once, all the while assuring them the chance of a mix-up was highly unlikely. She wanted to run DNA tests, and would do a blood test now. “It won’t be conclusive, but it could certainly determine if a baby is
not
with the right pair of parents.”

A jumble of activity left Sorcha feeling like a dupe in a three-card shuffle, trying to follow what they were doing and maintain some control over the situation. While a technician took a blood sample from the baby she held, no one seemed to make note that she knew—
knew
—that Cesar’s blood type was A. She had worked for him for three years! She knew everything about him.

Eventually everyone cleared out, the men going to look at security tapes while one nurse stayed behind to give her and Octavia slings to snuggle the babies while they dozed in their rockers. Neither of them was prepared to release the infant they each held.

Sorcha tried to relax, chatted briefly with Octavia, but her mind kept tracking back to the fact she’d put Cesar’s name on her admittance form. It had been an emergency delivery. Her mother was registered as next of kin, but Sorcha had wanted Cesar identified as the baby’s father if the worst had happened.

They wouldn’t contact him without speaking to her first, would they?

* * *

Cesar Montero subtly pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting a dull headache and a desire to tell his fiancée that he didn’t give a flying rat’s behind about who sat where at their wedding reception. Social arrangements were his mother’s bailiwick. If he’d still had Sorcha, she would have handled this, freeing him up for more important things.

Actually, he’d bet any money she would challenge him with “What’s more important than your wedding?”
She’d always been quick to push a family-first agenda, teasing him for being a scientist wired for logic. She’d known when she could give him a nudge and when to back off, though, along with how to plow through minutiae so he didn’t get bored and lose patience. Most important, she had been able to make decisions on her own.

But Sorcha was gone, damn her. Without any notice or explanation. She’d left while he’d still been in the hospital, barely awake from his coma. According to his father, she’d discussed it with Cesar in the week that was missing from his memory. Given that he’d been unconscious in those first weeks after the accident, and his father had his own assistant, he could imagine she had felt redundant, but she must have known he’d be back to work eventually. His father could have found her a temporary position in the organization or simply offered her paid leave. She’d had enough vacation time stockpiled.

Jumping ship was unacceptable. If his father hadn’t already written her a glowing reference, Cesar would have been reluctant to. He could have used her more than ever in these first months back at work, as he first went into the office on crutches at his own chemical engineering plant, and had more recently begun resuming the takeover from his father on the rest of the family enterprise.

She was just an employee, he reminded himself, irritated that he was letting her absence rile him. Yes, he missed her efficiency, but he wasn’t a sentimental man. Being friendly with a colleague wasn’t the same as being friends. For all the times she’d been more blunt than he appreciated, their relationship had been a professional one. He directed, she delivered. Sulking because she hadn’t played cards with him in the hospital was not something he would stoop to.

At least she had understood simple instructions
, he thought as he glanced at the watch that had started pulsing on his wrist. Diega noticed and looked at him as if he’d kicked her Siamese cat. His mother caught on and tsked a noise of disappointment at his rudeness.

“I asked not to be interrupted,” he informed both women, making sure his new assistant heard his displeased tone as he touched the face of his smart watch.

He automatically adjusted the volume in his earpiece as his assistant said, “They claim it’s an emergency. It’s a hospital in London.”

His thoughts leaped to Sorcha, even though there was no reason to expect she would be ill or injured, but he had tracked her on social media far enough to know she was working in that city. Still, if she needed medical attention, she wouldn’t list him as a contact. She had family in Ireland. She was off the company benefits, working for someone else.

He almost refused the call, unable to think of another reason a hospital in London would want to speak to him. He had a vague thought about his siblings’ whereabouts, but neither his brother nor sister was in that city. Hell, he would wind up returning this call later if he didn’t take it now and he would go out of his skull if he didn’t accomplish something constructive with his morning.

“Un momento,”
he said, stepping away from the women. “Cesar Montero,” he stated, accepting the call.

“Cesar Montero...y Rosales?” a female voice asked.

“Sí.”
He grew more alert at the use of his full name. “Who’s calling?”

She identified herself as an official for the hospital. “Did Ms. Kelly tell you to expect my call?”

“No.” He frowned as he absorbed this
was
about Sorcha.