It took her another long moment to realize she was shaking. That the words were blurring there before her on the page.
There was a single sticky note attached to the last page, where the line for her signature sat, blank and cruel, next to the bold dash of Dario’s name in an offensively bright blue shade of ink. The shiny yellow note contained nothing but a phone number with a New York City area code.
Dario’s, she was certain. Not that she could understand why he’d left her divorce papers and his phone number. It didn’t make any sense.
That terrible storm drew closer, the thunder growling ferociously at her as it came. She could feel the leading edge of the rain, battering at her where she stood...
Her phone began to ring in her bag, forcing her to breathe. To look away from the papers and that damned phone number. To shove back that storm as best she could. She tried to gather herself as she rummaged in her bag, and she’d at least taken a few calming breaths by the time she pulled out her smartphone to see her aunt’s number on the screen.
“Bonjour, Tante,” she murmured as she answered it, trying to sound calm. Normal. In one piece.
“Is Damian with you?” her aunt demanded in panicked French, without bothering to greet Anais at all, which could not have been more unlike her.
And Anais forgot about storms and papers and everything else.
“What? Damian? No—”
“The school just called,” her aunt told her, her voice a streak of high-pitched upset, hardly intelligible. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but he’s gone. He went out with the other children for their midmorning recess and he never came back in. They’re going to call the police, but I said I’d check with you—”
And that was when she understood. The harsh truth fell through her like a guillotine, swift and gleaming and lethal.
Dario’s change in behavior last night. The abrupt switch from antagonist to lover. His absence this morning, the divorce papers, the damned phone number.
He’d planned the whole thing.
Including and especially her sensual surrender to him in bed, not once or even twice, but three times before she’d dropped off into an exhausted, dreamless sleep in the blue light before dawn.
“No, Tante,” she managed to say. She would never know how she managed to keep herself from breaking down, right there on the phone. “Tell them not to ca
ll the police. Tell them it’s fine. I know where he is.”
“But, Anais—”
“I’ll explain everything when I get home,” she managed to grit out, and that wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Though she had no idea where she’d start.
She ended the call with her aunt and yanked the divorce papers toward her, flipping through the pages with numb fingers until she reached the signatures and that scrawled taunt of a phone number. It took her two tries to enter it correctly because her hands shook so badly and her thumbs seemed suddenly twice their previous size.
It rang. Endlessly. Anais thought she aged a thousand years before she heard the line connect and then Dario’s smooth, calm voice, as effective as a gut punch. She doubled over, right there at the counter.
“Anais.”
“Where is he?” Her voice was rough. Terrible. “What did you do?”
“He’s perfectly fine,” Dario said coolly. “He’s happily watching a movie on his tablet.”
“I told you I’d let you see him, you bastard. You didn’t have to take him during recess! The school were going to call the police until they realized you were his father!”
“Go ahead,” Dario invited her, and he didn’t sound particularly cool any longer. “My son and I will be in New York in approximately ten hours. My entire legal team looks forward to handling the issue, however you choose to address it.”
She couldn’t make her trained legal brain work the way it should. She couldn’t think.
“Dario, you can’t—”
“I can and I did.” His voice was the harshest she’d ever heard it. Worse than a stranger’s, judgmental and cruel. “You never should have hidden my child from me, Anais. You reap what you sow.”
And then, impossibly, he disconnected the call.
The smartphone fell from her hand and clattered against the hard marble, but she was already racing around the counter to pitch herself against the sunken sink and lose the contents of her stomach right there. Once. Again.