Cesar stared at the baby inside the dome, stirring and making noises like a fledgling bird. He flashed back again to the memory of his sister, after his mother had brought her home. He had a distinct memory of going in search of his mother to tell her “the baby is crying.”
“Yes, they do that,” she’d responded. “The nanny will take care of it.”
It. With a lifetime of observation behind him, Cesar knew how detached both his parents were from each other and their children. Their union had been a business decision, their conception of heirs a legacy project. On his mother’s side, titles and position had to be maintained. His father required sons to run the corporation while he moved into politics. Their daughter was a valuable asset they would leverage into the right position when it came along.
Cesar would swear on a stack of bibles that their dispassion hadn’t harmed him. When he’d gone to boarding school, there’d been no homesickness. He’d spoken to his parents exactly as often as he had while sleeping in his own bedroom. As an adult, there were never disagreements, only “further discussion.” There was absolutely nothing wrong with the way he’d been raised, or with his parents’ expectation that he would be equally practical in his choice of wife and life goals.
Those goals had included a type of payback to Diega’s family for stabilizing his situation when the espionage had happened. That mistake still haunted him, making him reluctant to accept he’d made another—one that would keep him from making good on a promise.
Was he a father? He found himself studying Sorcha as a mother. She awkwardly lowered herself into a rocking chair, sighing like she’d run a marathon. Her face was pale, attesting to her weakness, but she smiled as the nurse gathered up the fussing infant and brought him to her.
She greeted the boy with a sultry laugh that tightened Cesar’s abs and raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It was like hearing a song you’d first heard on a summer day, taking you back to a time when the weather was perfect and school was out and you had nothing to do for the afternoon.
“You poor thing,” she murmured, kissing her baby’s cheek, nuzzling him with the sort of affection one saw on nature shows, but that had never been present in his own childhood.
Her easy show of love affected him in a way he couldn’t even describe—not sexual, not intellectual. He was fascinated, not sad or happy, but something that teetered between the two emotions.
“Did you miss me? I missed you, too.” As her gaze came up, Cesar thought for a stunned moment she was speaking to him. “I named him Enrique,” she said, eyes bottomless, lips pink and shiny.
His middle name.
His equilibrium was further thrown off and his palms grew clammy. He wanted to clear his throat, but thought it would seem too revealing. He was suddenly aware of something his sister, the biologist, occasionally said in a dry, disparaging tone to their father. Emotions are called feelings because you feel them.
He shook his head, certain his father felt very little. His mother might show some warmth toward an old friend or pout over a favorite vase that toppled and broke, but his father never descended to sentimentality.
He was just like his father. Wasn’t he?
“Do you want to hold him?” Sorcha asked huskily.
“Don’t you have to feed him?” It was a reflexive response, a quick defense against revealing that he was suffering something he rarely experienced: a profound sense of inadequacy.
He didn’t know how to hold a baby.
When he had thought about having children, it had always been a distant goal, a step in the process, something he would largely delegate to his wife and whatever staff she hired.
To take care of it.
He might as well have slapped Sorcha. She paled and set her chin. “Would you turn around, please?” she asked stiffly.
Because she needed to bare her breast.
If they’d slept together, he’d already seen them, hadn’t he?
He turned away, rattled.
He searched his mind for a confirmation of the vision he had conjured thousands of times, when he’d snuck a lecherous peek at her chest. A picture manifested in his mind’s eye of creamy swells and taut pink nipples the same shade as her lips. Was that really what she looked like? Or was it just his same detailed fantasy?
He wanted to look, damn it! He wanted to have something, anything, some sign of hope that the lost week was coming back to him. He was a strong, healthy, powerful man who relied on himself. To have his own mind let him down... It was the most gallingly helpless feeling he’d ever experienced. And the doctors didn’t expect he’d ever retrieve those memories.
And that thought might have been tolerable if it had been an ordinary week, but no. He had fathered a child during that blackout.
The other mother, Octavia, came to her feet, faltered briefly, then faced them.
“I should tell you... My husband told me that his cousin switched the baby tags during the births. There’s...” She shrugged, distress moving over her pretty face as she looked to Sorcha before she glanced back at Cesar with apology. “Jealousy, I guess. Rivalry. The police are involved. I’m sure you’ll be asked to make statements. I’m so sorry.”
Sorcha, being Sorcha, offered an assurance that it wasn’t Octavia’s fault.
Cesar couldn’t believe what a soft touch she was. Suppose Enrique had gone home with the wrong mother? His child would have been raised by strangers.