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“It’s been a bad week. You should know—you were there for the worst part of it,” I say. “Excuse me for being human and needing to take the night off.”
“We all have our weaknesses.”
His voice is flat and unreadable. I have a feeling that whatever species he belongs to doesn’t have many weaknesses.
He leans back in his chair and points a finger at the chair across from him. “Sit. Read. I’ll wait. I’ve had a lot of practice with waiting this morning.”
I clench my teeth together to hold in my retort.So much for an easy day.
I settle into the leather chair and open up the folder. It’s almost impossible to focus with his eyes on me. Especially since he makes no move to avert his gaze or keep busy. He just stares at me, waiting for me to finish reading.
Luckily—or not so luckily, in this case—it’s easy to grasp the highlights of Mr. Viktorov’s case. I barely get halfway down the first page before I gasp.
“You assaulted a doctor and kidnapped a baby!”
He doesn’t respond. I keep reading in horror. Most files come with one or two “important notes” at the bottom. If a birth parent is a flight risk or if the child has severe allergies, that kind of thing. But Mr. Viktorov’s has a page and a half of them, all bolded and italicized and underlined in red several times over.
He is, in fact, allergy-free—what a relief.
On the downside, he is also suspected to belong to an organized crime syndicate.
Like every accusation of that magnitude, it’s caveated with the word “alleged” about fifty times. No one at CPS wants to get in a legal war with a violent, criminal billionaire. But I’ve been in the game long enough to know that “alleged” usually means “pretty damn certain.”
If I’d read this last night, I probably would have tried to bring a male colleague along with me for some protection. But the image of James in his sweater vests, sweating and shrinking in the shadow of this giant of a man, is almost laughable.
“Based on your pallor, I’m guessing you’ve finished the file.”
I flinch at the sound of his voice before quickly setting the folder aside and swallowing hard. “Where is the baby?”
“Not your concern.”
I frown. “The baby is entirely my concern. That’s my job.”
“Your job is to determine if I am a proper placement for the child left on my doorstep,” he replies. “The child is no factor.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job, Mr. Viktorov. The child is a very important factor in a case like this. We like to keep families together.”
He shakes his head. “That isn’t an option.”
I take a deep breath. “Let’s start at the beginning. How did the baby get here?”
“I wasn’t there for that part, but when a man and a woman—”
“How did the baby come to be on your doorstep?” I interrupt, hissing the question between my teeth. I’m sure Mr. Viktorov knows exactly how to make a baby. If he ever wipes the scowl off of his face, he can probably get as much practice as he wants, too.
His blue eyes sparkle with amusement. Good God, those things are lethal. I do my best to focus on the expanse of the desk between us. It’s safer that way. No unwanted flashbacks to my dream this morning.
“He was dropped off.”
“By whom?”
“How should I know?”
I arch a brow. “A house this big, this expensive,with a gate, and you expect me to believe you don’t have cameras?”
“They weren’t working that day.” He makes no attempt to sound believable. He doesn’t need to. He knows I have no way of getting the truth out of him.
“Fine,” I grit out. “So a stranger drops off a baby on your doorstep and then what?”
