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“Watch me,” Tariq said, his voice vibrating with the same fury that had gripped him since Paris. He did not look at Jessa. He kept his brooding gaze fixed on the village that slid by outside the window, one elegant hand tapping out his agitation against the armrest.
“Tariq, this is madness!” Jessa cried. “My sister has adopted him! It is all quite legal, and cannot be undone!”
“You will not tell me what can and cannot be undone,” he bit out, turning his head to pierce her with his dark, imperious gaze. He was angrier than she’d ever seen him, and all of it so brutally cold, so bitter. “You, who would lie about something like this? Who would conceal a child from his own father? I have no interest in what you think I should or should not do!”
“I understand that you’re angry,” Jessa said, fighting to keep her voice level. He laughed slightly, in disbelief. She set her jaw and forged ahead anyway. “I understand that you think you’ve been betrayed.”
“That I think I have been betrayed?” he echoed, his eyes burning into her. He sat as far away from her as it was possible to sit in the enclosed space of the car, and yet she could feel him invading her space, taking her over, crowding her. “I would hate to see what you consider a real betrayal, Jessa, if this does not qualify.”
“This is not about you,” Jessa said as firmly as she could when she was trembling. “Don’t you see? This has nothing to do with me or you. This is about—”
“We are here,” he said dismissively, cutting her off as the car pulled up at Sharon’s front gate. Tariq did not wait for the driver to get out of the car, he simply threw open his door and climbed out.
Jessa threw herself out after him, her chest heaving as if she’d run a marathon. Tariq paused for a moment outside the gate, and she knew it was now or never. After everything she had sacrificed—including, though it made her want to weep, Tariq himself—she could not let him wreck it all. She had to try one last time.
She lunged forward and grabbed on to his arm, holding him when he might have walked through the gate.
“Release my arm,” he said almost tonelessly, though she did not mistake the menace underneath, nor the way he tensed his strong muscles beneath her hands.
“You have to listen to me!” she gasped. “You have to!”
“I have listened to you, and I have listened to you,” Tariq said coldly, his eyes black with his anger. “I have watched you weep and I have heard you talk about how much you regret what you had to do, what you did because of me. I did not realize you were still punishing me!”
“It was not because of you!” Jessa cried as the wind cut into her, chilling her. “It was because of me!” She dragged in a wild breath, all the tears she’d been fighting off surging forth, and she simply let them. “I am the one who was so deficient that you left me in the first place, and I am the one who failed so completely as a mother that I couldn’t keep my own baby! Me.”
She had his attention then. He stilled, his dark eyes intense on hers.
“But I did one thing right,” Jessa continued, fighting to keep the tears from her voice. “I made sure he was with people who loved him—who already loved him—who could give him the world. And he is happy here, Tariq, happier than I ever could have made him.”
“A child is happiest with his own parents,” Tariq said. Did she imagine that his voice was a trifle less cold? Was it possible?
Jessa stared at him, her fingers flexing into his arm, demanding that he hear her now if he heard her at all.
“He is with his parents,” she whispered fiercely.
Tariq made a noise that might have been a roar of anger, checked behind the muscle that worked in his jaw. He shook her hands off his arm. Jessa let them drop to her sides.
“He is my blood,” he snarled at her. “Mine!”
“His family is here,” Jessa continued because she had to. Because it was true. “Right here. And he has no idea that he ever had any parents but these.”
“Why am I not surprised that your sister would keep this secret as well?” Tariq demanded. “You are a family of liars!”
“He is a little boy who has only ever known these parents and this home!” Jessa cried. The wind whipped into her, racing down from the moors, and her hair danced between them like a copper flame. She shoved it back. “There’s no lie here! They are his parents by law, and in fact. He loves them, Tariq. He loves them!”
His hard mouth was set in an obstinate line. “He is not yet five years old. He will learn—”
