Heir to a Dark Inheritance - By Maisey Yates Page 0,47
it was anything but casual. Alik feeling concern for another person wasn’t usual, or casual. “I didn’t feel it was my place.”
“Of course it’s your place, Alik. You’re her father.”
He nodded slowly then lifted his arm, drew his hand over his hair and let out a sigh. “I feel like you have something with her. That you understand things I do not.”
“You aren’t the only one to feel that way.”
“You make me feel almost normal,” he said, his tone dry.
“Nobody feels like they know what they’re doing with their own kids, Alik. We just sort of hope for the best.”
“Even you?”
“Yes. Even me. Especially me. Deciding to adopt while I was single was something I struggled with. Because I always believed that a child should have a mother and father.”
“Why didn’t you and your husband have any children?”
Jada still felt protective of Sunil when it came to that subject. His family had started asking when they would start having children from the moment they’d gotten married and hadn’t let up until his death.
She’d never told them, never told anyone why in their six years of marriage they hadn’t managed to conceive. It had hit at his pride. That he could provide for her financially, but couldn’t give her something she wanted so badly had been the source of so much pain for him.
No matter what she’d said, he could never really believe that she didn’t resent it. And eventually, he hadn’t wanted to talk about it at all.
“We couldn’t,” she said. “We couldn’t have children. I mean…he couldn’t. But we were married and that made it us who couldn’t.”
“And you decided not to pursue artificial means of conception?”
Jada almost laughed. Leave it to Alik to ask the most personal, inappropriate questions and not have a clue he was being personal or inappropriate. “My husband wasn’t comfortable with the idea of me carrying another man’s baby. And frankly, he wasn’t all that interested in the adoption idea, either.”
“Even though you wanted children?”
“He did, too. But…but he hadn’t worked through the disappointment of the fact that it wouldn’t happen for us the way he’d imagined. He took it personally.”
“See what emotion gets you? Logically, he should have just made sure you could have the children you wanted regardless of how.”
“You say that, Alik, but even you were all about the blood connection.”
“I know. But I see…I see now that it’s not the blood connection that builds the strongest bond. You…you effortlessly connect with her and I struggle.”
“But you do connect. You have.”
He nodded slowly. “I turned down working with LaMont because he was covering up the fact that one of his top execs is sexually harassing female employees. And all I could think of was that if some man did that to Leena I would…I fear I would kill them, Jada, and I don’t mean that figuratively. I would. I could.”
“Alik…”
“Emotion…it is not logical. It is inconvenient. It makes it almost impossible to…live with myself.”
He let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a growl and leaned against the wall, his head tilted back. He needed something. Emotional comfort, emotional connection, and she knew he would never allow it. Would never recognize it.
She wanted to give it. Wanted to tell him everything would be okay. She wanted to…
What she wanted to do, what she really wanted, was to touch him. Because he understood the physical. He understood touch and sex. It was how he connected. She wanted to cut through the confusion and give him something familiar. And at the same time, she didn’t want to be familiar. Didn’t want to be just another body.
She wanted to reach him. To help him.
If she was really honest—really, really honest—she just wanted to touch him.
But she wasn’t going to be honest, because honesty might stop her. And she didn’t want to stop.
This could be okay. If she kept it separate from emotion, like he did. Kept it separate from marriage, then it might be okay.
She took a step toward him and put her fingertips on his chest, on the start of his tattoo, the one over his heart. The one he’d gotten before he’d risked his life to rescue his friend, the man he thought of as a brother.
His hand shot up and caught her arm, held it away from his body. “Be careful,” he bit out. “Because I swear if you touch me again, I will have you naked and in my bed before you can protest.”
“I’m not going to protest so