She swayed, stunned to discover reality crowding in like dark shadows.
None of this made sense. Not his presence here or her pounding heart or the way her hands refused to unclench from his soft pullover.
Keeping his arm around her, he faced the soldiers, speaking French, which was more common than English here, after the local dialect.
“See? As I told you. She’s my wife. She came to teach English, but when the changeover happened she was unable to leave without a male relative. I’ll take her home now.”
Changeover, she thought dimly. Such a well-scrubbed euphemism for foreign military invasion. She went with it, though. She slid her arm around his lower back and leaned into his side. Her other hand stayed on his chest, tensely crushing the soft knit as she gazed up at him, searching for clues as to how he’d known where to find her. Why had he come? She’d been sure he’d forgotten she existed.
The soldiers shifted restlessly, exchanging looks of deep skepticism. “You live here? Without any male relative?” one asked her.
Aksil quickly spoke up. “My sister and Ms. Melha—”
“Mrs. Petrakis,” Leon inserted.
“Yes, of course.” Aksil nodded. “Mrs. Petrakis taught with my sister at the girls’ school before it closed. I take my sister shopping when they need food, but Kahina will come stay with my family now.” Aksil tightened his arm protectively around her.
Leon nodded as though it was all decided. He would have swept Tanja to the door, but she balked. The words what about Illi? formed on her tongue.
Even as his gaze flashed an urgent don’t test me into hers, her daughter let out the beginning of a staccato cry, the irritable one that meant she wanted to sleep, but her tummy had decided she was hungry. Tanja suspected Illi was going through a growth spurt, and desperation was turning her inside out because they were so low on formula.
The sound of Illi’s cry froze everyone into stillness.
Tanja looked to Kahina. Her friend would be welcomed at her brother’s, but his house was already full of Kahina’s nieces and nephews. Asking Kahina to take Illi would be more than an imposition. Illi would take food from the mouths of Aksil’s children.
Illi might not have come from Tanja’s body, but Tanja was her mother now. She wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter. That’s how she had come to be trapped here.
There would be no taking back the way she played the next seconds, but there was only one way she could play it. This was her chance, her one chance, to take her baby home.
“Agape mou.” She gazed imploringly up at Leon. “You must be so excited to meet your daughter.”
As outrage flared in the depths of his eyes, Leon’s expression hardened before cracking into a faint smile. “It’s all I’ve thought about,” he said in a distant voice.
“I’ll get her.” Kahina hurried into Tanja’s bedroom.
Get in. Get out. Get a divorce. That had been Leon’s straightforward plan when he had received the email from Tanja’s brother, Zach.
Tanja is trapped on Istuval. She needs a male relative to take her out. My wife is due any day or I would go myself. Dad’s on crutches and can’t travel. Since you are technically still her husband...
Technically? He was her husband, despite the five years of estrangement. Dissolving his marriage hadn’t been a priority while Leon had been rebuilding his father’s empire. Divorce papers would have invited his wife to gouge him for a settlement, jeopardizing all he was trying to regain, so he’d let that task slide.
With this rescue, Leon had seen an opportunity to end things without her trying to soak him. He’d headed to Malta where he’d bought a racing trimaran, readied the vessel, set aside bribery cash in various currencies, and stocked up on diapers and formula.
Zach’s email had said “they” were desperate for baby supplies. Leon had taken that to be a collective “they.” That Zach was advising he bring infant goods to grease palms.
Leon hadn’t been given a chance to mention the supplies or the money to his inquisitors. The moment he’d come near the harbor, he’d been boarded. He and the trimaran had been searched and the infant supplies moved onto the dock when he moored. He’d been roughed up, and accused of smuggling and trying to profiteer on the island’s black market.
He had told the truth—he was here to collect his wife. He didn’t have a marriage certificate on him, though, which had made the soldiers skeptical. The identification he did have could have got him detained for a ransom demand if they’d understood exactly who he was. He had a contingency plan in place for that, but thankfully it wasn’t needed. Yet.
He’d been put in a vehicle and driven here to see his wife.
And his baby?
Given the supplies he’d brought, the existence of a baby was almost a blessing. Almost—because this was definitely not his baby appearing in the arms of the woman who lived with Tanja. He hadn’t had any sort of contact with Tanja—intimate or otherwise—in five years.
“This is Illi.” Tanja’s voice was husky with deep, maternal love as she took the girl.
Something flickered in his mind’s eye like a flashbulb taking a photo. He absorbed her tone and the tender way she cradled the baby so protectively. His memory took a snapshot to dwell on the fine details later because right now he had to stay anchored in the tension permeating the air around them.
The baby had neither Tanja’s straight, red-gold hair, her pale complexion nor her hazel eyes. The infant’s black curls and light brown skin could pass for mixed race if Tanja had slept with a man who looked like him, though. Which she must have done.
Why that dug such a deep thorn into him, Leon couldn’t say. Their marriage had been a moment of temporary madness that he only recollected as a statement of fact. His father was dead. His age was thirty-five. His legal status was “married.”
How Tanja had conducted her life these last years was none of his business.
But where was that other man? Surely he would be as affronted to have Leon named his baby’s father as Leon was at having another man’s baby passed off as his? Leon could hardly keep his dumbfounded fury off his face.
He manufactured a smile, though, hyperaware of the scrutiny they were under and that, regardless of who this baby’s father was, the infant was completely helpless and innocent. If she was Tanja’s, for the purposes of this rescue, she was his.
“She’s beautiful.” He tried to look smitten even though he’d never really looked at a baby before. This one was whimpering as she nuzzled her face into Tanja’s chest.
“I’ll make her a bottle.” The other woman took the baby again and hurried away.