Heir to a Dark Inheritance - By Maisey Yates Page 0,5
wasn’t something that was confirmed. She had your name, but there was no record of your death, and neither could you be found to sign away your rights. And it hadn’t been long enough for you to simply be declared absentee.”
“And then they found me.”
“Yes, they did. Lucky me.”
“I am sorry for you, Jada. I am.” He didn’t sound it at all. He sounded like a man doing a decent impression of someone who might be sorry, but he personally didn’t sound sorry at all. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Leena is my daughter. I can’t simply walk away from her.”
“Why not? Because you’re just overcome by love and a parental bond?” She didn’t believe that for a moment.
“No. Because it is the right thing to do to care for your children, your family. Leena is the only family I have.”
At another time she might have felt sorry for the man. As it was, she felt nothing.
“Caring for her would mean having her with me,” she said.
“I can understand how you might see it that way.” He looked out the window. “She does not like me. She cries when I pick her up. And frankly, I don’t have the time to be a full-time caregiver to an infant.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Because the other alternative was having nothing to do with her, and that was not a possible solution in my mind.”
“So what does that mean then? You’re just going to hire nannies?”
“That was my thought. I was wondering if you would like to take a position as Leena’s nanny.”
“You what?”
Jada couldn’t believe the man was serious. The nanny? To her own child? An employee of the man who was stealing everything from her?
Leena was her light in the darkness. She was everything to her. Being her mother had become the entirety of Jada’s identity. And her daughter had become her whole heart.
And he wanted her to be an employee. One he could fire at a moment’s notice. A termination he could delay until a later date. A date he saw fit.
“Did you just ask me to be the nanny to my own daughter?”
“As a court ruling just declared, she is not your daughter.”
“If you say that one more time so help me I will—”
“It is up to you. Hang on to your pride if you wish, but I’m offering you a chance to see your daughter. To be a part of her life still.”
“How can you do this to me?” she asked, the words scraping her throat raw. Everything in her hurt. Everything. He had come in, taken her newly repaired life and shattered it all around her again, and she didn’t know how she would reclaim it. It had taken so long to rebuild, to repurpose, to find out what she would do, who she would be.
She’d loved her husband, but he couldn’t give her children. And every time other options came up, he shut down. It was a reminder, he’d told her, of all he could not give her. Of what she would have to get from someone else. No, there would be no artificial insemination. She wouldn’t carry another man’s baby. Adoption had been something he’d said they’d consider, but he never truly had. All the brochures she brought him, all the links to websites she sent him, went ignored.
When the dust had settled after her husband’s death, it had been the thing she’d latched onto. She wasn’t a wife anymore, but she could be a mother.
And now he was ripping it from her hands. Leaving her arms empty.
“I’m not doing anything to you. Leena is my child and I am claiming her, as is the responsible and right thing to do.”
“You have a warped sense of right, Mr. Vasin.”
“Alik,” he said. “You can call me Alik. And my sense of right seems to match that of the justice system, so one might argue that it is you with a warped sense of justice.”
She blinked. “My sense of justice involves the heart, not just laws written on paper, unconnected to specific people and events.”
“And that is where we differ. Nothing I do involves the heart.” She looked at his eyes, black, soulless. Except for that moment in the courthouse when he’d been holding Leena. Then there had been emotion. Fear. Uncertainty. A man who clearly knew nothing about children.
And he wanted her to be the nanny. He wanted to assume the position as Leena’s father and demote her to staff. This man who had