A Debt Paid in Passion by Dani Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

affect the child forever.
    Blood ties hadn’t mattered at that point. He and Lucy had been linked by the prospect that she would suffer his pain—an unthinkable cruelty for an infant just starting her life. The whole time he’d been urging Sirena to pull through, he’d been mentally cataloging everything he knew about her, wanting to be Lucy’s depository of information on her mother.
    While all he’d heard in the back of his mind had been Sirena’s scathing, What makes you think you ever knew me, Raoul?
    His heart dipped. She wanted her baby. He knew that much. As he’d gleaned all the details of this pregnancy that had nearly killed her, he’d wondered about her feelings for the father. Did the lucky man even know how stalwartly determined she’d been to have his child?
    If that man was him... His abdomen tensed around a ripple of something deep and moving, something he didn’t want to acknowledge because it put him in her debt.
    The specialist swept in, taking in the charged tension with a somber look. “Good morning. I know you’ve been waiting, Raoul. Let me put you at ease. You are Lucy’s biological father.”
    Relief poured into him like blood returning after a constriction, filling him with confidence and pride in his daughter, the little scrap with such a determined life force.
    No reaction from Sirena. She kept her face averted as though he and the doctor weren’t even in the room.
    “I don’t have plans to take her from you,” Raoul blurted. The impatient words left him before he realized they were on his tongue, leaving him irritated by how she weakened him with nothing but terrified silence.
    She gave him a teary, disbelieving look that got his back up.
    The physician distracted her, asking after her incision and leaving Raoul to face a cold, stony truth: he couldn’t separate mother from daughter.
    Her accusation when she’d woken yesterday that he would have wished her dead had made him so sick he hadn’t had words. His own father’s absence had been self-inflicted—he’d left Raoul and his mother—but it didn’t make the idea of Sirena’s baby accidentally being motherless any less horrific. Raoul wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he was the instrument that divided a parent from a child.
    “When can I take her home?” he heard Sirena ask the doctor.
    An image flashed into Raoul’s mind of her collapsing the way she had at the courthouse, but without anyone to catch her or the baby in her arms.
    “You’re not taking her to your flat,” he stated bluntly, speaking on instinct from the appalled place that was very much aware of how ill and weak she was.
    Sirena’s gaze swung to his, persecuted and wild. “You just said—”
    “I said I wasn’t so low I’d steal your baby from you. But you’re more than prepared to keep Lucy from me, aren’t you?” That reality was very raw. “You’re the one who steals, Sirena, not me.”
    A humiliated blush rolled into her aghast face.
    The physician broke in with, “Let’s get you and Lucy well first, then we’ll talk about where she’s going.” It was a blatant effort to defuse their belligerent standoff.
    The doctor departed a few minutes later, leaving Sirena trying to decide which was worse: having Raoul in the room, where his presence ratcheted her tension beyond bearing, or out of the room, where she didn’t know what he was up to.
    “The contract is in effect now,” she reminded him in a mutter. “I’ll adhere to it.”
    “Will you? Because you’ve done everything possible to keep me from even knowing she’s mine.” His temper snapped. “How could you do that? I lost my father, Sirena. I know how it feels to grow up without one.”
    “And I lost my mother,” she cried, then cringed as the force of such harsh speech sliced pain across her abdomen. “Why do you think I stood up to the most pitiless man in the world?” she asked in a thick voice, clenching her eyes shut as she fought for control, so