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Or so he told himself.
“My lawyer will be in contact,” he told her coldly. Ripping his arm away, he carried his son downstairs and had two words with the bodyguard in the small apartment below.
Louisa tried to follow him, but at his orders, his bodyguard held her back as Rafael left.
When Rafael arrived at his favorite hotel ten minutes later, he felt guilt and pain threatening to bubble up inside him as he climbed out of the chauffeured limousine. He pushed the emotion away. He told himself Louisa was no decent mother, no decent woman. She’d lied like all the rest.
She didn’t deserve either Rafael—or their son.
By the time Rafael had checked into the penthouse suite at the hotel, and their part-time nanny had arrived after his assistant’s frantic call, the baby still was crying. But even after the plump, motherly Frenchwoman had come up to the suite and taken the baby tenderly in her arms, Noah wouldn’t stop crying. He cried until his little face was red.
And slowly, Rafael realized he was the liar.
Louisa had made him a liar.
Because he could not follow through with his threat. Damn her! He could not separate his son from her. No matter how she’d betrayed him, no matter if she deserved it, he could not see his son suffer without his mother.
Cursing her, cursing himself, he realized he would have to allow her access to their child. But their marriage was over, he told himself furiously. It was done. But as he reached for his phone to call Louisa, it rang in his hand.
“I never thought you could do something like this. Ever.”
He frowned. “Mamá?” he replied slowly, almost not recognizing her voice.
“Louisa called. How could you take her baby from her? How could you! You are not the man I thought you were!”
He ground his teeth. Of course Louisa had called her! “What happened between my wife and me is no concern of yours.”
“I am downstairs. I have something to tell you. Come down now.”
“Why should I?” he said stiffly.
“See me this one last time, mi hijo. One last time before I go back to Argentina.”
The phone clicked softly in his hands.
Rafael set his jaw. Fine. One short conversation would be a small price to pay to get the woman out of their lives forever. Rafael made sure his son was tucked away in the second bedroom with the French nanny, then went downstairs.
He found Agustina at the bar. He expected her to try to immediately look at him with timid love and a pleading smile, as she always had for the last twenty years.
But this time, she’d changed. She was no longer the soft, anxious woman he remembered. Her face was stern. She started speaking the instant he sat beside her at the darkened hotel bar.
“I’ve tried to protect you for all your life,” she said without preamble. “But you are a man. At a certain point, no parent can protect their child. And now that I’ve heard what you’ve just done, I fear my protecting you has done you more harm than good.” She pushed some pages toward him on the smooth polished dark wood of the bar. “Here.”
A sneer twisted his lips as he reached for the pages.
The sneer soon dropped off his mouth as he read the old faded words. His eyes widened. He turned the page. He couldn’t stop reading it. Five minutes later, he got the final stab in his throat when he read who’d signed the letter. His whole body felt cold when he finally looked up into the eyes of his mother.
“My father wrote this letter,” he whispered, then shook his head, trying to get some warmth back into his body. “You told him you were pregnant with his child. And he told you to get rid of me.”
His mother’s eyes, so much like his own, looked at him steadily. “Yes. When I wouldn’t, he sent me his gold ring. He said that was all I would ever get from him.”
“Why?” he said over the lump in his throat. “Why didn’t he want me?”
“He disliked children. And he’d never been in love with me. I found out he’d never even been faithful to me.” She took a deep breath. “I was so young. I had no way to support us. I went back to Buenos Aires and married the man my parents had wanted me to marry all along. Arturo said he would be a good father to you…but he did not follow through on that promise.”
“But, Mamá,” Rafael said slowly over the ragged, sharp pain in his throat, “why did you never tell me the truth? Why did you let me blame you for all these years? Why wouldn’t you tell me my father’s name?”
“You’d already suffered enough from having one father who didn’t love you, and all those years you never knew why—until Arturo broke his word and told you the truth as he died.” Her eyes went dark, then with a sigh, she dropped her hands into her lap and became the gentle mother he’d always known. “You were so young and so hurt. When you found out you weren’t his true son, you imagined all these wonderful things about your real father. I couldn’t let another father disappoint you. I couldn’t let your heart be broken all over again.”
