Returning for His Unknown Son Read online

  Priya banged the table with her fist. “They’ve planned this reunion for the last decade. Her entire family’s coming—her sister from the UK and her aunt from Australia... Damn it. How do I get it into her head that I’m fine? That I don’t need a keeper?”

  “You marry me,” Christian said, swooping into the space. Blocking her agitated steps. “Look at me, Pree.”

  When she didn’t, he tilted her chin up. She had no idea what he saw in her face, but it made him take a step back. He rubbed a finger on his temple. “You trust me, don’t you?”

  The thread of barely there hurt in his voice arrested all other concerns.

  No, that wasn’t possible. Of all the upside-down things in her world, there was no way Christian could be hurt by her opinion of him. And yet, the longer she remained quiet, the more something deepened in his eyes. “Of course I trust you.” Then she laughed into the building silence because there was no way she could let him realize it was herself she didn’t trust. “I’m not the one with a billion-dollar empire tied to his brain and his name.”

  He regarded her thoughtfully, that frown still in place.

  “I see the logic in your plan,” Priya added, shoving aside her own confusion. “I’m just...”

  “What is it, Priya?”

  She rubbed a hand over her belly, recognizing the knot of fear there. “Okay, fine. We can do this...convenient-marriage thing. I’ll sign whatever prenup you want me to.”

  “Please don’t insult me and our relationship by using that as a shield. You and I both know I’d trust you with every single dollar to my name.”

  She nodded, knowing it was unfair. To them both. “At the end of it, I...” She looked into his eyes, and it felt like she was diving deep into something both terrifying and exhilarating, but she couldn’t stop. “I don’t want to lose you, Christian. As a friend, I mean. I couldn’t bear it if we...messed this up.”

  He didn’t laugh it off like she thought he would. Or mock her. Or tease her. Or tell her that she was needlessly worrying about a nonexistent issue. That there was nothing to blur the lines in their relationship.

  He simply gathered her to him—like he’d done in the hospital when she’d fallen apart after Jai had died.

  Priya buried her face in his neck and breathed in the scent of him. Instinct overrode common sense as she wrapped her arms around him. He was warm and solidly male. His body around hers was both familiar and terribly exciting.

  Because this time, it wasn’t simply solace she felt. Her belly rolled and every muscle in her urged her to get closer, to press harder against him. It was more, so much more. Something dangerously close to naked desire.

  “I promise I won’t let anything come between us,” he said, breathing the words into her hair, and before she could blink, he put her away from him.

  When he looked at her again, his expression was smooth, steady. Not an ounce of the emotion she’d heard in his voice or the need she’d imagined in the press of his arms around her. No sign of the tension she’d felt in his back and shoulders.

  He was the Christian the world knew—smooth and shallow with a ruthless edge.

  “I’ll arrange for a license as soon as possible.”

  She nodded, still chasing that emotion in his face. It was like a roar in her head—this need for what she’d found in his voice just moments before. Even when it wasn’t the quietly sensible thing she always did.

  “Just remember why we’re doing this, Pree. Your parents can go on that trip to India without feeling guilty. I can get the board off my back. And you can continue to live in the apartment. I won’t even be in your hair once we land that collaboration with the Swiss team. The infrastructure itself will take six months to get set up and needs a lot of oversight.”

  “And your girlfriends?” The question burst out of her mouth before Priya even knew she was thinking it. She could feel the heat creeping up her cheeks. “Forget I said that. None of my business.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked in a soft, silky voice that sent a prickle of heat all along her skin.

  Priya nodded, though she wasn’t sure whom she was trying to convince. There was that demand in his eyes again. As if compelling her to ask him. As if he knew. “Of course I’m sure, Christian. Your love life is none of my business.”

  For the rest of the day, Priya wondered at how it was the strangest thing a woman could say to the man who’d just asked her to marry him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Eight and a half years later

  PRIYA MIKKELSEN PAID the cab driver with a swipe of her phone and stepped out into the pouring rain. She could feel his gaze on her back, wondering if she was a little cuckoo, walking out into a downpour with nothing but a cashmere wrap for protection. He might even wonder if she was deranged since she was marching up to one of the wealthiest estates in the Pacific Northwest looking like a woman on the edge.

  She didn’t care. Tonight, she was not a mother who had to put on a smiling face for her seven-year-old son.

  She wasn’t a granddaughter-in-law who had to bandy words with an eighty-nine-year-old man who doted on her son and put all his faith in Priya.

  She wasn’t a daughter who had to reassure an overanxious, overprotective mother who’d drown her in suffocating love if she didn’t look perfectly happy at all times.

  She wasn’t the CEO of a major tech company battling with the vulture cousin of her dead husband and a board of directors who constantly tried to question her leadership.

  She was simply Priya. The woman who was so lonely that the stench of it clung to her very pores. A thirty-one-year-old woman having a ridiculously juvenile tantrum even her small son would laugh at.

  The smooth whir of the electronically manned gates after it scanned her thumbprint reassured the concerned cabbie that he wasn’t dealing with a possible criminal.

  Priya started up the incline, her four-inch stilettos making her thighs burn with each step. The raindrops soaking through the dress and the steep pathway forced her energy and thoughts into putting one step after the other.

  If Mama was to see her now... Priya let out a bark of laughter.

  She’d wonder if her calm, coolheaded daughter had gone completely bonkers. Then she’d watch over Priya day and night, drag her to a therapist and then a matchmaker. Not that going to a therapist was wrong.

  It was just that no therapist in the world could solve Priya’s problem.

  Sharing her loneliness and its source with her mother would be nice. But Mama wouldn’t simply listen to her vent.

  No, the moment she heard Priya mention her unhappiness, she’d arrange a solution. Without exaggerating the matter, Priya knew she’d be married to within an inch of her life in no more than two months. Mama’s will was something one should never provoke or invoke—a lesson she and her dad had learned a long time ago.

  But Priya didn’t want a husband. She didn’t want a relationship and all the misery and heartache it could involve. She didn’t want a man to dictate her life any more than she wanted Mama to.

  She wanted flirting and long, heated glances. She wanted kisses and caresses and yes, sex, she admitted to herself, wiping rain from her lashes. But not the impersonal, hushed-up encounter she’d been propositioned with this evening. Definitely not the man who’d turned ugly within a minute of her retreat. She wanted to feel like a woman instead of a mother and a daughter and a great-granddaughter-in-law and the CEO who held the reins of so many people’s livelihoods in her hand.

  No, she wanted a long night of seduction and intimacy and warm, sleek male skin at her fingers and broad shoulders and hard thighs enveloping her.

  Basically she wanted one man.

  Laughing blue eyes and dark blond hair and a roguish grin. The face in her mind’s eye shouldn’t have surprised her. But it did. He’d been an astonishingly good-looking man. But more than that, Chri
stian had had a presence. A magnetism that drew people to him. An energy and verve for life that had equally amazed her and terrified her.

  It shouldn’t be a complete shock then that her mind conjured up Christian again and again. Even though he’d largely avoided her when they were married, she’d surprised herself by discovering how much she’d enjoyed being his wife. Until suddenly she wasn’t anymore.

  So that’s what she was trying to do again now—take baby steps toward feeling alive again.

  Being the face of one of the biggest tech companies in the world meant dating was even more torturous than the painful twinges in her feet as she rounded the steep hill and the house came into sight. She’d already written off sleeping with any of these dates.

  The chance of her finding a man she could trust enough to bare herself, to be that intimately vulnerable with...was very low. But God, was it too much to ask for a decent conversation for just one evening? Too much to hope that the men she met over an app didn’t turn out to be either dull or so incredibly full of themselves?

  Or did the fault lie with her?

  Maybe she had too many expectations. Maybe what she wanted was irrational and ridiculous... Maybe that’s what the universe was telling her by sending her foolish, dull-as-rocks men on these casual dates she’d tried. That she’d already had her share of good men—two in one lifetime—and there were no more to spare for her. Even if she’d lost them both.

  Laughter fell from her mouth at the crushing thought, with an edge of hysteria to it.

  Grief was a strange thing. It had ravaged her and reshaped her—not once but twice. When Christian’s plane had crashed, she’d pushed the grief into a corner of her heart, locked it tight and moved on to what had needed to be done.

  She’d inherited not just a tech empire but a grieving grandfather. And then the baby growing inside her had been born and needed her. Being a mother—a single mother at that—had been a challenge she’d never foreseen but had grown into.

  Now that grief crashed through Priya, threatening to take her down at the knees, demanding its due. Maybe it was the fact that Christian had been gone for eight years this week that was making it all raw and fresh again. Maybe it was the fact that her son was beginning to ask questions about his father. Maybe it was the fact that she’d never admitted what he’d meant to her. Not even to herself.

  She was soaking and shivering, fresh tears pouring out and being washed away by the rain when she reached the house. Motion sensor lights flickered on, illuminating the fountain and the courtyard and wide, majestic steps with giant pillars straddling them.

  Her chest burned with the exertion and she stilled to pull in a deep breath. The cold kiss of the rain was a sting against her skin. And then she saw him standing there, with the focus lights illuminating his face.

  That sharp nose with a dent in it, the dark blond eyebrows, the glittering blue of his eyes, the wet hair that gleamed like burnished gold and that sensuous, sculpted mouth partly hidden by the thick beard... But it was definitely him.

  It was Christian. Waiting for her. Staring at her.

  She felt a feverish chill in her bones that had nothing to do with her soaked skin. How far gone was she in her madness that she was seeing a man long gone standing there within touching distance?

  “Pree,” the man said, her name a soft whisper on his lips.

  He’s real, came the frantic whisper inside her head. Only he called her that.

  This Christian was not some mirage conjured up by her feverish imagination. This Christian looked as solid and real as he’d always been.

  The man moved then, stepping out of the circle of light, from under the high-ceilinged porch into the rain. He stilled on the top step while Priya looked up at him, her heart running at a thousand beats per minute now.

  Rain pelted his face, poured down that arrogant nose of his into his mouth, where it was swallowed up by his beard. His white linen shirt was soaked through to his skin, delineating a muscled chest and hard abdomen, but he didn’t seem to care.

  He stared at Priya with an energy that rivaled the storm raging around them. He stared at her as if he meant to inhale her whole. He stared at her as if...he’d walked out of a nightmare just to find her.

  Priya laughed brokenly and wiped the water from her face. No doubt she was dreaming because Christian Mikkelsen—her convenient husband of a few short months—was not the kind of man who had ever pined after a woman. Would never have stared at any woman with such acute longing in his eyes as this illusion looked at her.

  The breeze carried the scent of him to her and Priya shuddered afresh. She knew that scent well, better than she knew her own. She’d chased that warm scent of his for years since the crash, digging through rows and rows of his designer suits, walking through his closet like some kind of otherworldly specter. She’d even gone into labor while wearing one of his Armani shirts. But after a couple of years, the scent of him had vanished from those clothes. She’d lost even that part of him.

  And the memory of that longing, of how she’d hardened her heart a second time... It loathed this weak part of her that ran after illusions. It wanted only truth.

  She stretched out a hand, fear and hope making the simple movement exquisitely painful. Her palm landed on his chest—hard and defined. His head jerked, his chest rose and fell at her touch. His heartbeat matched the thunderous beat of hers.

  Her stomach felt as if she’d just fallen from a great height, was still falling. Priya spread her fingers, seeking more and more of that hard flesh. Curling her fingers, she dug her nails into his abdomen, determined to hold him in place. Up and down, she touched him, waiting with a stifled sob, waiting for him to disappear.

  A groan fell from his mouth as she raked a nail over the taut skin at his chest, bared by the V of his shirt. She wanted to do more. She wanted to bury her face in his throat, she wanted to nip that racing pulse with her teeth, she wanted to taste his skin with her tongue, and she wanted to...

  He said nothing. Did nothing. He simply stood there, letting her ravage him with her fingers, his head almost bowed in supplication. The Christian she remembered never bowed to anyone, much less her. It had to be a dream, a dream so far from reality that Priya almost laughed again.

  Raindrops clung to his lashes and his blue eyes glittered with an understanding that only made her angrier. When she’d have jerked her hand back, his fingers wrapped around her wrist, holding her hand there, over his chest. “No, Pree. Don’t pull away,” he whispered in a voice that had visited her a thousand times in her dreams.

  I’m here, Pree, that voice had said when her fiancé and best friend had died.

  Use me, Pree, that voice had said when she’d been flung this way and that by her mother’s overbearing love.

  If you want me, Pree, you’ll have to come and take me, that voice had challenged her when they’d been stranded at a remote cabin in the Alps and she’d wanted him in her bed for the first time and had no idea what to do about it.

  Her legs shook under her, her breath became shallow again, and her stomach roiled.

  She stopped fighting the beckoning darkness and indulged herself one more time as she gave in to it.

  * * *

  Priya came to consciousness to find herself flat on the ridiculously elaborate chaise longue in her study. To be precise, she was lying down on Christian’s chaise longue in what used to be Christian’s study. Which she’d appropriated because he was supposed to be dead and had stayed dead for eight long years.

  Reclining like some useless heroine from a gothic novel who fainted at the sight of a vigorous, virile man walking in from the rain was precisely who she’d been once.

  Priya Version One. Basic. Fragile. Easily breakable.

  It was exactly how Mama and Jai and Christian had always seen her. No, it had been her. While she’d had no control over her health and her heart,
she’d let them coddle her, protect her, treat her like a fragile thing. She’d always played in the margins, taken the easy options, let everyone else drive her life.

  But she wasn’t that person now, not in mind, not in body. Not in her soul.

  Now she was Priya Version Two—broken and rebuilt and patched over until she was near indestructible.

  Christian sat sideways near her legs, a bunched-up towel in his hand, and was quite uselessly mopping her face and neck while he softly whispered her name. This, more than anything, told Priya that he really was Christian. The man was singularly useless at anything else other than writing code, making millions and chasing after women. And apparently staying dead for eight years and playing games with his family and friends.

  He’s alive. He’s solid and real, a part of her brain kept shouting. The lizard brain, Priya was sure. The part that equated big, broad manly husband with security and safety and happiness.

  Of all the ridiculous reactions her body could come up with... She’d never fainted in her life before.

  This episode she knew was more about shock than physical health, but still. Pushing herself up into a sitting position, she swatted at his hand with all the force of her anger and hurt and something else she didn’t want to examine right then.

  Blue eyes met hers and held, in a silent battle of wills. His skin was tanned and weather-beaten, but he was unmistakably pale underneath it. Broad shoulders filled her field of vision, separating her from the world, from reality itself. The heat from his body stroked against hers in a welcoming wave.

  She should be shivering, her damp dress sticking to her skin. Instead all she felt was a blazing heat claiming her skin, as if a switch had been turned on inside her.

  “Move aside,” she said, cutting her gaze away.

  He stood up but continued to regard her with that tunnel focus that felt like a caress on her skin. The same focus that she’d always found incredibly unnerving when it shifted to her. She moved away from him and looked out into the storm that was still raging outside through the French doors, trying and discarding words.