Her Little Secret, His Hidden Heir(9)

It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.

First, Vanessa had lied to him. The space above the bakery wasn’t used primarily for storage and as a place for her octogenarian aunt to nap when she started to feel run-down. It was actually a fully furnished and operable apartment, complete with a table and chairs, a sofa, a television…a crib in one corner and a yellow duckie blanket covered with baby toys in the middle of the floor.

Second, Vanessa had a child. She wasn’t sitting for a friend; hadn’t adopted an infant after their separation just for the thrill of it or to exert her independence. Even if she hadn’t been breast-feeding the baby in her arms when he’d walked in the room, the protective flare in her eyes and the alarm written all over her face told him everything he needed to know about her connection to the child.

Third and finally, that baby was his. He knew it as well as he knew his own name. Felt it, deep down in his bones. Vanessa would never have been so determined to keep him from discovering she was a mother if that weren’t the case—if she didn’t believe she had something momentous to hide.

Not only that, but he hadn’t become the CEO of his family’s very successful textile company by being stupid. He could do the math. The only way Vanessa could have such a young infant was if she’d either been pregnant before their divorce had become final or if she’d been cheating on him with another man. And despite the differences that had pushed them apart, infidelity had never been one of them—not by him and not by her.

“Want to tell me what’s going on here?” he asked, slipping his hands into the front pockets of his slacks.

It was safer that way. Burying his hands—now curled into tight, angry fists—in his pockets kept him from reaching out to strangle someone. Namely her.

And though his words might have been delivered in the form of a calm, unruffled question, the sharp chill of his tone let her know it was a demand. He wasn’t going anywhere until he had answers. All of them.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a blur of blue-topped motion as Aunt Helen bustled forward and tossed a blanket over Vanessa’s half exposed chest and the baby’s head. Marc didn’t know which was more disappointing—losing sight of his ex-wife’s creamy flesh…or of the child he hadn’t known existed until thirty seconds ago.

“I’ll be downstairs,” Helen murmured to her niece before turning a critical glare on him as she passed. “Yell if you need me.”

What Aunt Helen had to be annoyed about, Marc couldn’t fathom. He was the victim here. The one who had never been told he was a father, who’d had his child kept from him for so long. He didn’t know how old the baby was, exactly, but given the amount of time they’d been divorced and the nine months of her pregnancy, his guess would be about four to six months.

Vanessa and her wily Aunt Helen were the bad guys in this situation. Lying to him. Hiding pertinent facts from him for the past year.

After glancing over his shoulder to be sure they were finally alone, he took another menacing step forward.

“Well?” he prompted.

At first she didn’t respond, buying some time by rearranging the lightweight afghan so that it covered her exposed flesh, but not the baby’s face. Then with a sigh, she raised her head and met his gaze.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked softly.

Her seeming indifference had his molars grinding together and his fingers curling even tighter, until he thought his knuckles would pop through the skin.

“An explanation might be nice.” Followed by a few hours of abject groveling, he thought with no small amount of sarcasm, while outwardly he struggled not to let his true level of annoyance show.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was pregnant before the divorce became final. We weren’t exactly on speaking terms then, so I couldn’t find a way to tell you, and to be honest, I didn’t think you’d care.”

Fury bubbled inside his chest. “Not care about my own child?” he growled. “Not care that I was going to be a father?”

What kind of man did she think he was? And if she could believe he was the sort of man who wouldn’t care about his own flesh and blood, why had she bothered to marry him in the first place?

“How do you know it’s your baby?” she asked in a low voice.

Marc laughed. A sharp, humorless bark of sound at the sheer ridiculousness of that question.

“Nice try, Vanessa, but I know you too well for that. You wouldn’t have broken your vows to have some sleazy, sordid affair. And if you’d met someone you were interested in while we were still married…”

He trailed off, a sudden thought occurring to him that hadn’t before. “Is that why you asked for a divorce? Because you met someone else?”

It would be just like her. She would never have cheated on him, never been physically unfaithful. But emotional infidelity was another matter, and toward the end, he had to admit that they hadn’t been as close or connected as at the beginning of their relationship.

With his brother as second-in-command, he’d taken over the Keller Corporation and started spending longer and longer hours in the office or traveling for business. Vanessa had complained about feeling lonely and being treated like an outsider in her own home—which was something he could understand, given his mother’s less-than-warm nature and the fact that she’d never really cared for the woman he’d married. Hadn’t she made that clear from the moment he’d first brought Vanessa home for a visit and announced their engagement?