Entangled (The Accidental Billionaires #2) - J. S. Scott Page 0,23

and supportive, and he’d given his siblings all the love he had to give.

Maybe that was part of the reason why I’d fallen for him so hard when I was eighteen.

He’d made me feel safe and important, too.

I startled as Maya closed her book none too gently. “That’s the end of the chapter,” she said with a yawn. “Can we read more tomorrow? I’m kind of tired.”

“Get some rest, Princess,” Aiden advised as he sat up. “Tomorrow is a school day.”

“I wish I could just be with you,” she told him hesitantly.

Aiden grinned at his daughter. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here when you get home.”

The relief on my daughter’s face made me want to cry. Maya really was afraid that Aiden would suddenly disappear from her life as quickly as he’d entered it.

Don’t cry. I can never cry.

“I thought we could go to Disneyland next weekend,” he suggested.

Her face lit up. “That would be so cool. Mom took me when I was younger, but I’d love to go now that I’m old enough to appreciate it and do some bigger rides.”

My heart sank. Even though we were in fairly close proximity to the Disney park, I hadn’t been able to afford to take Maya there for the last several years.

“Then we’ll go,” Aiden said with a grin, looking just like a little boy himself.

Maya tilted her head. “When did you last go?”

“I’ve only been there once, a long time ago,” he confessed. “And it rained all day.”

“Bummer,” Maya commiserated. “This time will be better.”

I sat up and rose from the bed. Aiden took up a seated position beside his daughter. “It will be fantastic,” he promised.

There was silence before Maya asked hesitantly, “Can I hug you good night?”

My heart squeezed as Aiden opened his arms for her immediately. My daughter threw herself against his strong body and wrapped her arms around his neck trustingly.

The two of them stayed like that for so long that I thought Maya might fall asleep on her father’s shoulder. But Aiden eventually lowered her back onto her pillow and kissed the top of her head. “Sleep, Princess,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

He backed off so I could hug and kiss my daughter good night.

“I love you, Mom,” Maya said as she enthusiastically hugged me. “Thank you for giving me a dad.”

If I hadn’t already known how much Maya missed having a father, I realized it as I held her warm body against mine. “I love you, too, Sugar Bug,” I said as I let her go and kissed her cheek.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything more without bursting into tears.

Maya made herself comfortable, and I pulled the covers tightly around her.

By the time I went to turn off her bedside lamp, I was pretty sure she was already out cold.

She’d had a long day.

When I glanced at her for the last time before I plunged the room into darkness, I realized that my daughter had fallen asleep with a smile on her cherubic face.

It was pretty pathetic that I couldn’t even remember the last time that had happened.

CHAPTER 8

SKYE

“This was her baby picture,” I told Aiden as I pointed to one of the first photos in the album I was holding. “It was taken right after she was born.”

When Maya had gone to sleep, Aiden asked if he could look at pictures of the parts of her childhood he’d missed. He grabbed a beer, and I got a glass of wine before we sat down on the living-room couch together to look at her childhood photos.

“She’s so damn tiny,” Aiden remarked.

“She was big enough,” I informed him. “Eight pounds, eleven ounces, and she was breech. I had to have a C-section.”

“Was it painful? Who was there with you? Your ex-husband?”

“I had some pain after it was over, but I was so in love with our daughter that I didn’t notice all that much. And nobody was there. It was just me and Maya.”

“Nobody came to the hospital?” He sounded angry.

I slowly shook my head. “No. I told you that nobody really acknowledged Maya.”

“How in the fuck can anybody be that cold?”

I wasn’t about to tell him just how cold the Marino family could be. Not having them at Maya’s birth had been nothing to me. In fact, I’d been relieved.

“It didn’t really matter,” I said hastily. “I had my daughter. And things were awkward with my in-laws. They hated the fact that Marco had married a woman who was