Claiming His Own

He flinched as if she’d struck him but didn’t make any attempt to interrupt her.

It only brought back more of memories of her anguish, injected more harshness into her words. “You evaded me as you would a stalker, when you knew that if you’d only confirmed that you were okay, I would have stopped calling. I did stop when your news made the confirmation for you, forcing me to believe the depth of your mistreatment. You’ve forfeited any right to my consideration. I don’t care why you left, why you ignored me, and I don’t have the least desire to know why you’re back.”

His bleakness deepened with her every word. When he was sure her barrage was over, he exhaled raggedly. “None of what you just said has any basis in truth. And while you might never sanction my true reasons for behaving as I did, they were...overwhelming to me at the time. It’s a long story.” Before she could blurt out that she wasn’t interested in hearing it, he added, almost inaudibly, “Then I was...in an accident.”

That silenced her. Outwardly. Inside, a cacophony of questions, anxiety and remorse exploded.

When? How? What happened? Was he injured? How badly?

Her eyes darted over him, feverishly inspecting him for damage. She saw nothing on his face, but maybe she was missing scars in the dimness. What about his body? That dark shroud might not obscure that he’d lost a lot of his previous bulk, but what if it was covering up something far more horrific?

Unable to bear the questions, she grabbed his forearm and dragged him across the threshold, where the better lighting of her foyer made it possible for her to check him closely.

Her heart squeezed painfully. God... He’d lost so much weight, looked so...unwell, gaunt, almost...frail.

Suddenly he groaned and dropped down. Before fright could register, he rose again, scooping her up in his arms.

It was a testament to his strength that, even in his diminished state, he could do so with seeming effortlessness, making her feel as he always had whenever he’d carried her: weightless, taken, coveted, cosseted. The blow of longing, the sense of homecoming when she’d despaired of ever seeing him again, was so overpowering it had her sagging in his hold, all tension and resistance gone.

Her head rolled over his shoulder, her hands trembled in a cold tangle over his chest as all the times he’d had her in his arms like this flooded her memory. He’d always carried her, had told her he loved the feel of her filling his arms, relinquishing her weight and will to him, so he’d contain her, take her, wherever and however he would.

He stopped at her family room. If she could have found her voice, she would have told him to keep going to her room, to not stop until they were flesh to flesh, ending the need for words, letting her lose herself in his possession, and even more, reassure herself about his every inch, check it out against what she remembered in obsessive detail, yearned for in perpetual craving.

But he was setting her down on the couch, kneeling on the ground beside her, looking down at her as she lay back, unable to muster enough power to sit up. And that was before she saw something...enormous roiling in his eyes.

Then he articulated it. “Can I see Leonid?”

Everything in her, body and spirit, stiffened with shock.

All she could say was, “Why?”

She was asking in earnest. He’d told her he wouldn’t take any personal interest or part in Leo’s life. She could find no reason why he would want to see him now.

His answer put into words what she’d just thought. “I know I said I wouldn’t have anything to do with him personally. But it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. It was because I thought I couldn’t and mustn’t.”

The memory of those excruciating moments, when she’d accepted that he’d never be part of the radical change that would forever alter her life’s course, assailed her again with the immediacy of a fresh injury.

“You said you’re not ‘a man to be trusted in such situations.’”

A spasm seized his face. “You remember.”

Instead of saying she remembered everything about him, as he claimed to about her, she exhaled. “That was kind of impossible to forget.”

“I only said that because I believed it was in your and his best interest not to have me in your lives.”

“Is the reason you believed that part of the...long story?”

“The reason is the story. But before I go into it, will you please let me see Leonid?”

God... He’d asked again. This was really happening. He was here and he wanted to see Leo. But if she let him, nothing would ever be the same again. She just knew it wouldn’t.

She groped for any excuse to stop this from spiraling any further. “He’s asleep....”

His eclipsed eyes darkened even more. “I promise I will just look at him, won’t disturb his sleep.”

She tried again. “You won’t see much in the dark. And I can’t turn the lights on. It’s the only thing that wakes him up.”

“Even if I can’t see him well, I will...feel him. I already know what he looks like.”

Her heart lurched. Had she been right about this security report? “How do you know? Are you having us followed?”

He stared at her for a moment as if he didn’t understand. “Why would you even think that?”

Regarding him warily, she told him all her suspicions.

His frown deepened with every word. “You have every right to believe the worst of me. But I never invaded your privacy. If I ever were to have you followed, it would be for your protection, not mine. And I had no reason to fear for your safety before, since associating with me would have been the only source of danger to you, and I kept our relationship a firm secret.”

“So how do you know what Leo looks like?”

“Because I followed you.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You did? When?”

He bit his lip, words seeming to hurt as he forced them out. “On and off. Mostly on for the past three months.”

So she hadn’t been imagining it or going insane! All the times she’d felt him, he had been there!

Questions and confusions deluged her. Why had he done that? Why had he slipped away the moment she’d felt him? Why hadn’t he approached her? And why had he decided to finally do so now? Why, why, why?

She wanted to bombard him with every why and how could you, to have answers now, not a second later.

But those answers would take time. And though she might be her mother’s daughter after all, she couldn’t press him for them now. She couldn’t deny him access to his son. Even without explanations, the beseeching in his eyes told her enough. He’d waited too long already.

She nodded, tried to sit up and pressed into him when he didn’t move. His hands shot out to support her when she almost collapsed back, his eyes glazing as that electricity that always flowed between them zapped them both.

As if he were unable to stop, his hand cupped her cheek, slid around her nape, tilting her face up to his. He groaned her name as if in pain, as if warning her he’d kiss her if she didn’t say no. She didn’t. She couldn’t.

As if she’d removed a barbed leash from his neck, relief rumbled from his depths as he lowered his head, took her lips in a compulsive kiss.

She knew she shouldn’t let this happen again, that nothing had been resolved and never would be. But at the glide of his tongue against hers, the mingling of his breath with hers, she was, as always, lost.

She surrendered to his hunger as his lips and teeth plucked at her trembling flesh, as his tongue plunged into her mouth, plundering her response. Her body melted, readied itself for him, remembering his invasion, his dominance, his pleasures, weeping for it all. He pressed her back on the couch and bore down on her, restlessly moving against her, rubbing her swollen breasts and aching nipples with the hardness of his chest... Then, without warning, he suddenly wrenched his lips from hers, shot up on his knees, his eyes wide in alarm.

It took her hard-breathing moments to realize the whimper she’d heard hadn’t come from her. Leo.

It took a few more gurgles for her to remember the baby monitor. She had a unit in every room.

This time when she struggled up, Maksim helped her. She didn’t know if his hands were shaking or if hers were, or both.

He rose to his feet, helped her to hers then stood aside so she’d lead the way.

The unreality of the situation swamped her again as she approached Leo’s room, feeling Maksim’s presence flooding her apartment. The last thing she’d imagined when she’d last made that same trip was that in an hour’s time, Maksim would be here and she’d be taking him for his first contact with her... With his... With their son.

She felt his tension increase with every step until she opened the door, and it almost knocked her off her feet.

She turned to him. “Relax, okay? Leo is very sensitive to moods.” It was why he’d given her a hellish first six months. He’d been responding to her misery. She’d managed to siphon it into a grueling exercise and work schedule, and to compartmentalize her emotions so she didn’t expose him to their negative side. “If he wakes, you don’t want him seeing you for the first time with this intensity coming off you.”

She almost groaned. She’d said “the first time” as if she thought this encounter would be the first of many. When Maksim probably only wanted to see him once because... She had no idea why.

Unaware of her turmoil, grappling with his, he squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again and nodding. “I’m ready.”

Nerves jangling, she tiptoed into the room with him soundlessly following her. She hoped Leo had settled down. She really preferred this first, and probably last, sighting to happen while he was asleep. The next moment, tension drained as she found Leo snoring gently again.

Before she could sigh in relief, everything disappeared from her awareness, even Leo, as Maksim came to stand beside her. Adapting to the dark room, she stared at his profile, her heart rattling inside her chest like a coin in a box. She’d never imagined he would...would... God.

His expression, the searing emotion that emanated from him as he looked down at Leo... It stormed through her, brought tears surging from her depths to fill eyes she’d thought had dried forever.

His face was a mask of stunned, sublime...suffering, as if he were gazing down at a heart that had spilled out of his chest and taken human form. As if he were beholding a miracle.

Which Leo was. Against all odds, he’d come into being. And with all she’d suffered since she’d seen the evidence of his existence, she would never have it any other way.

“Can—can I touch him?”

The reverent whisper almost felled her.

He swung his gaze to her and she nearly cried out. His eyes! Glittering in the faint light...with tears.

Tears? Maksim? How was that even possible?

Feeling her heart in her throat, she could only nod.

After hard-breathing moments when he seemed to be bracing himself, he reached a trembling hand down to Leo’s face.

The moment his fingertips touched Leo’s averted cheek, his inhalation was so sharp, it was as if he’d been punched in the gut. It was how she felt, too, as if her lungs had emptied and wouldn’t fill again. And that was before Leo pressed his cheek into Maksim’s large hand, like a cat demanding a firmer petting.

Swaying visibly now, or maybe it was her world that was, Maksim complied, cupping Leo’s plump, downy cheek, caressing it with his thumb, over and over, his breathing erratic and audible now, as if he’d just sprinted a mile.

“Are all children this amazing?”

His ragged words were so thick, so low, and not only on account of not wanting to disturb Leo. It seemed he could barely speak. And his words weren’t an exclamation of wonder or a rhetorical question. He was asking for real. He truly had no idea. It was as if it was the first time he’d seen a child, at least the first time he’d realized how incredible it was for a human being to be so tiny yet so compact and complete, so precious and perfect. So fragile and dependent, yet so overpowering.

She considered not answering him. The lump in her throat was about to dissolve into fractured sobs at any moment. But she couldn’t ignore his question, not when his gleaming eyes beseeched her answers.

Mustering all she had so she wouldn’t break down, she whispered, “All children are. But it seems we are equipped with this affinity to our own, this bond that makes us appreciate them more than anything else in the world, that amplifies their assets, downplays their disadvantages and makes us withstand their trials and tribulations with an endurance that’s virtually unending and unreasoning.”

His expression was rapt as he listened to her, as if every word was a revelation to him. But suddenly his face shut down. The change was jarring, and that was before his rumble repeated her last word, reverberating inside her, fierce, almost scary.

“Unreasoning...”

Before she could say or think anything, he looked down at Leo for one last moment, withdrew his hand and stalked out of the room.

She followed, slowly, her mind in an uproar.

What was up with this confounding, maddening man?

What did he mean by all that? Coming here, the unprecedented show of emotions for her, that soul-shaking reaction at seeing Leo up close...and then suddenly this switch to predator-with-a-thorn-in-his-paw mode?

Was this what he’d meant when he’d said he wasn’t a man to be trusted “in such situations”? Did he suffer from some bipolar disorder that made him blow hot and cold without rhyme or reason? Did that explain his fluctuations in their last months together? His unexplained desertion and sudden return?

She caught up with him in the living room. He stood waiting for her, his face dark and remote.

She faced him, anger sizzling to the surface again. “I don’t know what your problem is, and I don’t want to know. You came here uninvited, blindsided me into a couple of kisses and wheedled your way into seeing Leo. And now you’re done. I want you to leave and I don’t want you to ever come back or I...”

“I come from a family of abusers.”

To say his out-of-the-blue statement flabbergasted her would be like saying that Mount Everest was a molehill.

Her mind emptied. There was just nothing possible to think—or to say—to what he’d just stated.

He went on, in that same inanimate voice. “It probably goes back to the beginnings of my lineage, but I only know for a fact that my great-grandfather was one, and that the disorder got worse with every generation, reaching its most violent level with my father. I believed it ran in my blood, that once I manifested it, I would be the worst of them all. That was why I never considered having any relationship. Until you.”

She could only stare at him, quakes starting in her very essence, spreading outward. She’d lived for a year going crazy for an explanation. Now she no longer wanted to know. Not if the explanation was worse than his seeming desertion itself.

But she couldn’t find her voice to tell him to stop. Not that he would have stopped. He seemed set on getting this out in the open once and for all.

“From that first moment,” he said, his voice a throb of melancholy, “I wanted you with a ferocity that terrified me, so when you stipulated the finite, uninvolved nature of our liaison, I was relieved. I believed it would be safe as long as our involvement was temporary, remained superficial. But things didn’t go as expected, and my worry intensified along with my hunger for you. I lived in fear of my reaction if you wanted to walk away when I wasn’t ready to let go. But instead, you became pregnant.”

She continued to stare helplessly at him, legs starting to quiver, feeling he hadn’t told her the worst of it yet.

He proved her right. “As you blossomed with Leonid, I was more certain every day I’d been right to tell you I’d withdraw from your life eventually and never enter his. I found myself inventing anxieties every second you were out of my sight, had to constantly struggle to curb my impulses so I wouldn’t smother you. I even tried to stay away from you as much as I could bear it. But I only returned even hungrier, feared it would only be a matter of time before all these unprecedented emotions snapped my control and manifested in aggression. That was why I forced myself to leave you before you had Leo. Before I ended up doing what my father did after my sister was born.”

He had a sister?

His next words provided a horrific answer to her unvoiced surprise. “He’d been getting progressively more volatile. There were no longer days when he didn’t hit my mother or me or both of us. Then one night, when Ana was about six months old, he went berserk. He put us all in the emergency room that night. It took my mother and I months to get over our injuries. Ana struggled for a week before she...succumbed.”

Three

Maksim’s words fell on Cali like an avalanche of rocks.

She stood gaping at him, buried under their enormity.

His father had killed his sister. His baby sister.

He feared he suffered from the same brutal affliction.

Was that what had overcome him back there in Leo’s room? This “unreasoning” aggression toward the helpless?

Sudden terror grabbed her by the throat.

What if he lost control now? What if— What if...

As suddenly as dread had towered, it crashed, deflated.

This man standing across her living room, looking at her with eyes that bled with despondence she recognized only too well, having suffered it for far too long, wasn’t in the grips of uncontrollable violence. But of overwhelming anguish.

He feared himself and what he considered to be his legacy. That fear seemed to have ruled his whole life. He’d just finished telling her it had dictated his every action and decision in his interactions with her. The limits he’d agreed to, the severance he’d imposed on them, had been prodded by nothing else. He’d thought he was protecting her, and Leo, from his destructive potential.

And she heard herself asking, “Did you ever hurt anyone?”

“I did.”

The bitten-off admission should have resurrected her fears. It didn’t. And not because she was seeing good where there was none, as her mother had done with her father. As his own mother must have done with his father, to remain with an abusive husband.

She only couldn’t ignore her gut feeling. It had guided her all her life, had never led her astray.

The one time she’d thought she’d made a fundamental mistake had been with him. But his explanations had reinstated the validity of her inner instincts about him.

From the first moment she’d laid eyes on Maksim, she’d felt she’d be safe with him. More. Protected, defended. At any cost to him. That nobility, that stability, that perfect control she’d felt from him—even at the height of passion—had led her to trust him without reservation from that first night onward. It all contradicted what he feared about himself.

She started walking toward him and he tensed. It was clear he didn’t welcome her nearness now, after he’d confessed his shame and dread to her. What must it be like for him to doubt himself on such a basic level? What had it been like for him believing he had a time bomb ticking inside him?

She had to let him know what she’d always sensed of his steadiness and trustworthiness. That it had been why it had hit her so hard when he’d left. She hadn’t been able to reconcile what she’d felt on her most essential levels with his seemingly callous actions. Thinking she’d been so wrong about him had agonized her as much as longing for him had.

But she’d been right about him. As misguided as his reasons had been, he’d only meant to protect her and Leo.

He took a couple of steps back as she approached, his eyes imploring her not to come any closer, not just yet. “Let me say this. It’s been weighing on me since I met you. But if you come near me, I’ll forget everything.”

In answer, she stopped, sank down on the couch where he’d ravished her with pleasure so recently and patted the space next to her. He reluctantly complied.

“Those you hurt were never weaker than you are.” It was a statement, not a question.

His hooded eyes simmered. “No.”

“They were equals...” her gaze darted over the daunting breadth of his shoulders “...or superior numbers.” His nod was terse, confirming her deduction. “And you never instigated violence.”

“But I didn’t only ward off attacks or defend the attacked. I was only appeased when I damaged the attackers.”

“Were those times so frequent?”

He nodded. “My father left another legacy. A tangled mess in our home city. In the motherland, some areas are far from the jurisdiction of law, or the law leaves certain disputes to be resolved by people among themselves. The use of force is the most accepted resolution. I became an expert at it.”

“So those times you hurt others, you were not only defending yourself but others. You did what had to be done.”

“I was too violent. And I relished it.”

She persisted. “Did you lose control?”

“No. I knew exactly what I was doing.”

“A lot of men are like you.... Soldiers, protectors—capable of stunning violence, of even killing, for a cause, to defend others against aggressors. But those same men are usually the gentlest men with those who depend on them for protection.”

His eyes grew more turbid. “I understood that mentally, that I had good cause. But with my family history, I feared it meant I had it in me...this potential for unprovoked violence. My passion for you was intensifying by the hour...but my fear of myself came to a head one specific night. It happened when I was waiting for you in bed and you were walking toward me in a sheer turquoise negligee.”

Her throat closed. She remembered that night. Only too well. Their last night together.

She’d woken up replete from his tender, tempestuous lovemaking to find him gone.

“I’d never seen you more beautiful. You were ripe and glowing—your belly was rounding more by the day, and you were stroking it lovingly as you approached me. What I felt at that moment, it was so ferocious, I was scared out of my wits. I’d put bullies twice your size in traction...or worse. I couldn’t risk having my passions swerve into a different direction.”

Needles pricked behind her eyes, threatening to dissolve down her cheeks at any moment. “You hid it well.”

His eyes widened in dismay. “I didn’t have to hide anything. I never felt anything anywhere near aggressive around you. But the mere possibility of losing control of my passion carried a price that was impossible to contemplate.”

He never said emotion. Did he use passion interchangeably, or was everything he felt rooted in the physical?

“You have to believe me. You don’t have to look back and feel sick thinking you’d been in danger and oblivious of it.”

She shook her head, needing to arrest his alarm. “I meant you hid that increasing passion. I never sensed that you felt a different level from what you had always showed me.”

His nod was heavy. “That I hid. And the more I tried not to show you what I felt, the more it...roiled inside me. And if I felt like this when you were still carrying my child, I couldn’t risk testing how I’d feel after you had him.”

He must have been living a nightmare, worrying he’d relive what had happened with his father, reenact it.

A vice clamped her throat. “Abusers don’t fear for their victims’ well-being, Maksim. They blame them for provoking them, make themselves out to be the wronged ones, the ones pushed beyond their endurance. They certainly don’t live in dread of what they might do. You’re nothing like your father.”

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