Chapter Four
Agustin had considered his options for a doctor who could be paid to keep this enormous secret. In the end, he hadn’t trusted anyone except the man who’d been his father’s personal doctor for years leading up to his death.
Dr. Cressaro had kept his father’s heart troubles a secret from everyone—employees, the press, and family.
And he’d done what he could to keep his father going despite the challenges his condition had created.
Something Agustin had only discovered after his father’s death.
If a man could do that, he could keep Felipe’s potential secret.
The only problem was the man was nearly eighty.
Still, once Agustin tracked him down and asked for the favor, Dr. Cressaro had assured him that despite retirement he was still in good shape and could make the flight out to the island with all the necessary tools to perform an exam and paternity test.
Agustin could have tracked down Ms. Valdez in the castle and told her this, but he sent her a text instead. Despite his planned days away from the office, he still had work to attend to. He had to check his emails and messages and deal with a few work issues that required the CEO’s attention.
Surely she could balance a baby and making travel arrangements.
He told himself that for a while, but when she never texted him back, he began to get concerned that something had gone awry. So, grumbling to himself, he went in search of her.
Agustin hadn’t spent much time at the castle in his life.
His mother had often spoken fondly of it, but it had been kind of a frivolous thing.
Father had never wanted to invest much money in it, and Mother had preferred more luxurious accommodations for their holidays.
She just liked saying they had a generational estate on a tiny island her family alone owned.
After Father’s death, Agustin had made a few trips out here with Mother to approve—and in some cases refuse—her renovation plans.
Looking back, he wished he’d approved them all.
It seemed half the castle was in excellent shape, and half the castle was a drafty ruin.
Still, he’d come here thinking the countess might be charmed by a castle, even one in slight disrepair, and they would be able to speak plainly and make arrangements with the utmost privacy.
Agustin wouldn’t say he was charmed, but he couldn’t deny he liked the isolation.
While it was a bit of an imposition to be here without the staff to run the place, if he took the stress of an abandoned baby out of the equation, he rather liked the solitude and silence of it all.
Quite a difference from bustling Madrid.
From the press constantly hounding him about Felipe.
But Felipe’s memory had found him anyway, hadn’t it?
He discovered Ms. Valdez and the baby in a sitting room. Mara had a blanket spread out on the floor, and the baby was laid out on it. She had a few toys that she held out to the baby and shook until the baby made gurgling noises.
It was a very domestic scene, even if his assistant was still dressed for work in her trim knee-length skirt and silky blouse. But she’d taken off her heels and set them aside and had her legs curled up under her.
For a moment, he found himself simply watching them. The light from the tall, elegant windows filtered over the pair, giving the whole scene a kind of ethereal feeling.
But there was nothing ethereal about all that had to be done.
“Did you receive my text?”
She glanced up at him. There was glimpse of humor and warmth in her eyes quickly shuttered away. “Yes. Have you come to watch the baby so I can make the travel arrangements and contact the countess?” She smiled at him blandly, but he felt the censure all the same.
“Of course,” he replied, even though that hadn’t been his plan at all.
“Excellent.” She got to her knees and then to her feet. “Paulo is on standby, and the plane has arrived back in Madrid. It will only be a matter of getting everyone to the airport, and then the hour flight time. I’ll send the car to pick them up once we have an ETA.”
“Good.”
She picked up her shoes. “After that, I will contact the countess and push her trip back a week. I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
He nodded, looking dubiously at the baby on the blanket. She was wiggling but didn’t seem to go anywhere. Perhaps the hour would go quickly enough.
He had his doubts. He could tell Mara did, too, because she was frowning down at the baby with something like worry in her expression. It didn’t lift when her gaze met his.
“Agustin.” There was something about the way she said his name. It seemed to crawl around inside of him, a twisting tension he didn’t know what to do with. Worse when she looked at him with soft brown eyes full of worry. “If she is Felipe’s child, what will you do?”
He was a man with answers. He had to keep reminding himself of that. “We will need to track down the mother.”
Mara moved toward him, holding her shoes to her chest, that worried expression deepening. “Perhaps she is in some kind of crisis. A mother doesn’t leave her baby easily. You will need to be careful. You will need—”
“We will take this one step at a time.” He could not begin thinking about people in crisis. He was in crisis. “The first step is to get Paulo and the doctor here. And put off the countess.”
Mara inhaled, then nodded. “Yes, of course.” She sighed and looked down at the baby, a small smile curving her lips. “Julia has been fed and changed. She doesn’t seem to be able to crawl yet, which is normal for this age, but she has been trying to roll. So you’ll need to watch her.”
Agustin mostly listened to the instructions, but Mara lifted her leg behind her to slide one heel onto her foot as she spoke. Then the other.
Some of the information might have gotten lost in the distraction of long, slim legs.
But then she was back to her normal uniform. Mostly. He noted a few curly strands of hair had escaped her normally tightly controlled hairstyle. It made her look…younger. More person than functional assistant that blended in with the background.
She was the oldest of six. She hated turbulence and only just barely tolerated flying. He had the strangest memory of her once refusing a pastry because she was allergic to the filling—almonds, he wanted to say.
All very disparate personal details about an employee. He didn’t need to know these things, didn’t need to file them away. She had a job, a function, and she did it well, so she was compensated well.
The end.
“If Senor Silva returns before I’m done, have a conversation with him about sleeping arrangements for everyone and meals,” she instructed. “We’ve got two more bodies coming to shelter and feed, even if only for the night.”
Meals. Right. His normal staff was not around to handle that for him. The plan had been for Ms. Valdez to handle everything for these first two days before the countess arrived.
Even he could not expect her to handle everything and a baby. Perhaps Senor Silva knew of someone who could bring in food. Surely the estate manager had enough rooms in suitable condition for rest.
One step at a time, he reminded himself.
Then he was left alone in the room with a baby.
Unease swept through him. The baby stared at him. She was making little noises. He didn’t think they were out of distress exactly. They did not sound like cries, and her expression wasn’t scrunched. She just wriggled, and little sounds escaped her mouth.
He had never been around babies. Felipe had been three years younger than him, so Agustin did not really remember him at this age.
He did not have much of a personal life outside of Sosten—if he had friends, they were more acquaintances—the kind that if they started families, their social engagements didn’t involve said offspring.
So babies were as known to him as aliens, all in all.
But he was a man who handled unknowns all the time. Mara had been seated on the floor next to the baby, so Agustin did the same.
The baby’s eyes tracked his movements.
If she is Felipe’s child, what will you do?
He did not want to weigh every option. It would be pointless, because if she was not, she would have to be returned to the mother or some…
facility of sorts. He was no monster. He would ensure that wherever she ended up would be a good place for her.
No defenseless child deserved to be discarded, and he had no doubt Ms. Valdez would be able to ensure the right place for the child.
After all, he could hardly keep a child of unknown origin.
But if she was Felipe’s… She was a Delgado. Agustin’s niece, as Mara had pointed out. His mother’s granddaughter.
He did not know what his mother would do with this news.
He did not know what the world would do with this news, but the thought of that swarm of piranhas, desperate to fan every flame of Felipe’s untimely death, surrounding this tiny little bundle…
She would need to remain a secret from the world until he had everything in place to protect her.
“You will be protected.” It was a vow.
But in this moment, he realized it was a vow he’d broken to his brother. He had not protected Felipe. He’d let him fly away. Let him crash and burn and die.
“If she is yours,” he murmured, under no illusion that his brother actually heard him from whatever great beyond he might have found, but needing to say it anyway, “I will protect her in all the ways I did not protect you, and I will endeavor to understand her in all the ways we did not understand each other.”
Mara had found a well-appointed study that looked out over the entrance of the castle and settled herself to make all the travel arrangements for the doctor and Agustin’s head of security.
If she’d tried to do it anywhere close to where Agustin and Julia were, she would have not been able to concentrate and would have been too tempted to go check on them.