His Secret Heirs

Chapter Four

Sienna’s POV

Three Years Earlier

I wore a green dress I couldn't actually afford and told myself it counted as an investment, because Reyna's cousin's wedding was the first real event I'd been to since finishing my nursing program, and I deserved, for one night, to feel like more than the sum of my student loans and my double shifts.

I think about that dress more than I'd like to admit.

It's strange, the things that survive in memory once you've spent years trying to file something away as a mistake I don't dwell on. I don't remember the bride's name anymore some second cousin of Reyna's, a woman I'd met exactly twice. I don't remember most of the toasts, or the band, or what I ate. I remember the exact shade of gold the light turned as the sun went down over the vineyard where the reception was held, upstate, somewhere green and quiet and entirely unlike the Bronx.

And I remember him.

Not gradually, not the way you usually notice someone across a room, a slow accumulation of glances that eventually adds up to interest. I remember it as sudden, total, like a light switching on. He was standing near the bar in a dark suit that fit him like it had been made for exactly that body, talking to someone I didn't recognize, and he laughed at something a real laugh, unguarded and something in my chest had simply turned toward him, before I'd consciously decided to let it.

He crossed the room twenty minutes later. I'd like to say I played it cool. I did not play it cool.

"I don't know your name," he'd said, "and I find that I very much need to."

I'd laughed — actually laughed, the kind of unguarded sound I didn't make often even then — and told him, and he'd said it back to me slow, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. Sienna. I still remember the exact way he said it. I've never fully managed to forget.

I didn't sleep with strangers. That wasn't who I was, before or since. But something about that night, the wine, the warm dark, the particular freedom of being somewhere no one knew me as anyone's daughter or anyone's employee, just a woman in a green dress a man couldn't stop looking at, made every one of my careful rules feel very far away.

I woke up alone. I told myself that first morning that it was fine. That it was what it was: one perfect, reckless night, no names beyond a first one, no numbers exchanged, nothing to regret because there'd been nothing promised.

I believed that for almost six weeks, until a home pregnancy test told me otherwise.

I didn't try very hard to find him, in the end. I told myself it was pride. Some of it was pride: I wasn't going to chase down a man who'd left before I woke and beg him to be part of a life he'd made very clear, by his absence, he had no interest in. But some of it, if I'm honest, was fear. Fear that I'd find him, and he wouldn't want any of it not me, not the babies, not the mess of a life I was about to build alone. Easier, somehow, to never ask the question than to hear that answer.

So I didn't ask it. I built a life instead, out of double shifts and secondhand cribs and Reyna's spare bedroom for the first eight months, until I'd saved enough for a place of my own. I told the twins, when they were old enough to ask, a soft, careful version of the truth that their daddy wasn't in the picture, that it wasn't their fault, that they were loved plenty without him.

I believed that too. Mostly.

Present Day

Some nights, not often, not in any way I let myself examine closely, I still thought about a man in a dark suit who'd said my name like it mattered, and wondered, in the small useless hours before sleep, what might have happened if he'd stayed.

I hadn't let myself think about him in months. Not really. Not until Gio came home from that street fair talking about a tall man with a nice watch who'd looked at him funny, and something in me, some old, buried, foolish hope I thought I'd long since put away, had quietly, treacherously, sat up and taken notice.

I told myself it was nothing.

I was getting worse, lately, at believing the things I told myself.