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“You put news of your pregnancy in an email to Tiana?” he demanded, sounding shocked and upset.
“Now you’re showing your true colors,” Emma derided. “You would have been furious if I’d gone to the press five and a half years ago. And no, I told her I needed to speak privately to her. I begged her to call me.”
“But she did not.”
“Worse.” So much worse. “She did. And I told her I was pregnant.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Then she did not believe the child was mine. My sister-in-law would have contacted me otherwise. We were friends.”
“You were friends with that vicious harpy?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Konstantin sounded so shocked, it would have been amusing if Emma wasn’t so angry. “Tiana was neither vicious, nor a harpy.”
Emma knew better. “Ever get into an argument with her?”
“She argued with you about the child being mine? I find that hard to believe. She knew we’d dated. She was the only person in my family that did.”
“You chose her as your confidante?” Emma asked, appalled.
“I do not know why you are talking about her like this. She died and we all grieved her loss.”
“Funny, but if she weren’t dead, I would have a run a mile when I saw you in the bank. So, think on that.”
“What did she say to you to cause such antipathy?”
“Besides her offer to buy my baby and my silence? Besides threaten me if I refused? Besides inform me with a very menacing demeanor that she was a queen and I was a nobody and she would get her way? Oh, really, nothing much.”
“That’s ridiculous. Tiana would never have done those things.”
“She told me you would never believe the child was yours. That her way was the best way to make sure my baby was raised in the royal environment it deserved, only I thought he deserved a mother who loved him.” Emotion choked Emma and she did her best to push it away.
She couldn’t afford to let her own pain, remembered fear or even present anger take over during this conversation. Too much was at stake.
And while she wasn’t a naive twenty-year-old any longer, she still didn’t have the resources to fight a monarchy if he chose to go as crazy as his dead sister-in-law had.
“Surely you knew you had the trump card. You carried my DNA within your body.”
“And I had the resources to force you to take a DNA test? Never mind how you could have paid someone off to give false results.”
“I would never have done something so underhand.” There he went sounding shocked again.
“Says the man who made it nearly impossible for me to get a decent job for the entire three years that restraining order based on false testimony was in place.”
“I told you before, I took out no restraining order.”
Something inside Emma just cracked open and all the anger she had been tamping down came surging up. She jumped up from her chair and pointed wrathfully at him. “You just stay there. I will be right back.”
“No restraining order,” she muttered to herself as she stomped down the hall. “He thinks he’s going to gaslight me? Make me forget the hell he put me through? I’ve got the restraining order. I’ve got evidence. I’m not the crazy one here.”
She spun the lock on the safe she kept copies of important papers in. Most had corresponding originals in her safe-deposit box at the bank. Call her paranoid, but after her trust had been betrayed by him, by her parents, by his crazy if dead sister-in-law, Emma was prepared for every eventuality she could be.
She stomped back into the living room and threw the court papers at him. “No restraining order? Then what is that? A bedtime story?”
“You’re going to wake Mikhail if you keep shouting like that.”
