“He couldn’t dump me.” She gave a low laugh. “He never existed.”
“What?”
“It was the only way I knew you’d let me go.” She lifted her chin and added with deliberate lightness, “I knew your weakness, even then.”
“Weakness?” he growled.
“You always said a man could be measured by his money. I knew you wouldn’t accept my just breaking up with you without explanation. So I gave you one. I told you I wanted someone richer. I knew you’d believe that.”
He stared at her. “It’s not true.”
“I’ve always been a terrible liar.” She looked sad. “But you still believed it. And immediately stopped calling me.”
Darius’s cheeks burned as he remembered how he’d felt that day. She was right.
He had loved her beyond reason, had been determined to fight for her at any cost. Until she’d told him she didn’t want him because he was poor. He’d believed it instantly. Because money made the man. No money, no man.
His throat felt tight as he looked at her, struggling not to believe she was telling the truth when every fiber of him believed her.
“And my father?” he said hoarsely. “Were you protecting him, too—getting him fired?”
“It’s true. I did have him fired. I told Dad I couldn’t bear to look at Eugenios because he reminded me of you. I did it because I was afraid my dad might ask him to invest his life savings in the bankrupt investment fund. My dad still believed he could fix everything then. I knew your father would give him his savings. He was loyal to the core.”
“Yes, he was,” he bit out. His father had always made his employer his top priority, even over his own son.
Darius couldn’t remember when his father had ever put his son first, over his job. He hadn’t attended Darius’s school events, not even his high school graduation. Being eternally at Howard Spencer’s beck and call, keeping the ten luxury cars all gleaming and ready, had been Eugenios’s total focus in life.
Oh, his father had fed and clothed him and given him a place to live in the two-bedroom apartment over the Fairholme garage that went with his job. But emotionally, they were oceans apart. The two men never talked.
Until that one awful day Darius told his father what he really thought of him...
But that memory was so white-hot with pain, he pushed it from his mind with all the force of a ball thrown from the earth to the moon.
Letty sighed beside him on the sofa. “I was trying to get your father away from Fairholme before he lost everything. But it was too late. He’d already invested his life savings years before. My dad had accepted it for his fund, even though it was such a small amount,” she said in a small voice. “As a favor.”
A small amount? His father’s life savings! The arrogance of them! Darius’s dark eyebrows lowered in fury.
“Howard Spencer is a liar and cheat,” he said harshly. “He destroyed people’s lives.”
“I know,” she whispered, looking down. She bit her full, rosy lower lip. “He never meant to.”
“He deserves to suffer.”
She looked up. “He has suffered. During his arrest and trial, I tried so hard to be strong for him. When he was in prison, I was there every visiting day. I cheered him up. Encouraged him. And all the time, I felt so scared. So alone.” She gave him a watery smile. “Sometimes the only thing I had to cling to was you.”
“Me?”
“At least I hadn’t dragged you down with me,” she whispered. “At least you were able to follow your dreams.”
Darius stared at her in shock.
Then he narrowed his eyes. She was trying to take credit for his accomplishments. To claim that if not for her sacrifice, he never would have made his fortune. She thought so little of him. Ice chilled his heart.
“And you expect me to be grateful?”
She looked startled. “I—”
“When you found out about your father’s crime,” he said tightly, “you should have come to me. I was your future husband. Instead, you lied to me. You cut me out of your life. Rather than asking for my help, you apparently believed I was so incompetent and useless, you felt you had to sacrifice yourself to save me.”
“No,” she gasped, “you’ve got it all wrong...”
“You never respected me.” He forced his voice to remain calm when his shoulders were tight with repressed fury. “Not my intelligence, my judgment or my strength.”
“Respected you?” she choked out. “I loved you. But I knew what was about to happen. I couldn’t let you drown with us. You had nothing—”
“You’re right,” he said coldly. “I had nothing. No money. No influence. You knew I couldn’t pay for lawyers or speak to politicians on your behalf. So you decided I was useless.”
“No.” She looked pale. “I just meant you had nothing to do with it—”
“You were my fiancée. I had everything to do with it. I would have tried to protect you, to comfort you. But you never gave me the chance. Because you believed I would fail.”
Her voice sounded strangled. “Darius—”
He held up his hand sharply. “But now I have made my fortune. Everything has changed. And yet you still intended to disappear and keep my child secret from me for the rest of your life.” A new, chilling thought occurred to him. “What story did you intend to tell the baby, Letty?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“What were you going to raise my child to believe? That he or she had no father? That I hadn’t wanted him?” An old childhood grief he’d thought long buried suddenly shook the ground beneath his feet, like an earthquake threatening to swallow him whole. “That I’d purposefully abandoned him?”
“I don’t know!” Letty cried. “But you said you’d take the baby from me. I had no choice but to run!”
Darius stared at the woman he’d known for most of his life. He’d loved her for such a short, sweet time. He’d hated her far longer.
He himself had been abandoned by everyone who should have loved him as a child. His whole young life he’d never felt like he really belonged anywhere.
And then there was Letty.
He’d loved her so wildly, so truly, so recklessly. She had finally destroyed what was left of his heart. That had been Darius’s final lesson.
He was determined that his child would never learn such a lesson.
Darius’s jaw tightened. His child would be surrounded by love from the beginning. His son or daughter would have a solid place in the world and never doubt their worth.
The blindfold of rage and hurt pride lifted from his eyes. He looked at Letty, and suddenly everything became crystal clear. Calm settled over him like rain.
Their child needed both of them.
For the last decade, he’d tried to forget about the Letty he’d once known. About her character. About her kind heart.
He saw now that in Letty’s mind, her hurtful lies a decade before hadn’t shown disrespect, but love. She really had been trying to protect him. As she still was trying to protect her father.
As she was trying now, in her own misguided way, to protect their child.
Letty