Page 40 of The Billionaire's Accidental Legacy

That weakness was why. It was why he had to turn away from her. It was too much like his father, and if there was even a chance this flame could take all he’d made himself and forge him into that monster, he had to deny it.

But he worried. About the baby.

He didn’t know the woman. And what he did know was a concern.

The daughter of an infamous criminal.

A con artist.

And she would be raising his child. His blood. But what did blood mean?

He had seen his mother’s blood. Staining the white sheets after she bled out. His blood, too.

But worse, he had seen his father’s blood, and how it had turned following the death of his beloved.

His father had never been a particularly warm father. He had loved his wife, and that was it. She was much younger than he was, beautiful.

She’d had him, and for years after they had tried to have more children. She had been driven by her need for more children, and his father had never seemed to care one way or another whether Ewan was there or not. He was an heir. A convenience as far as passing down the family line, but that was all.

He meant nothing more.

But his mother... His mother had loved him. Being a mother had been her proudest achievement. She had put it above being a wife, and Ewan hadn’t been able to escape the truth that his father had resented him slightly for that always.

But he had also loved his wife, and lived to give her what she wished. So they had tried for more children. Baby after baby.

Lost.

Most in the very early stages.

But finally, when Ewan was eleven, she had managed to carry one to term.

They’d had the very best doctors brought in. His father hadn’t trusted that she would be safe in a hospital. He wanted total control over the environment. There had been high-tech medical equipment, and entire teams of people. But everything had gone horribly wrong, and to this day, he didn’t fully understand what or how. It had been like a scene from the past. They hadn’t been able to stop her bleeding. Not with anything, and at the same time, the baby had been in grave distress.

And she had been begging. Begging that the child be saved. And when it was clear the baby would never breathe, he was convinced that she had just chosen to slip away.

It was the moment when she had stopped fighting.

The very moment.

And then she had been gone.

And he had watched it all unfold. A frightened boy crying in the corner.

His father had railed against the medical team, and then had clung to his wife’s body, wailing.

The baby was an afterthought. Lying there still and blue.

He had filled Ewan’s vision. This boy who would have been his brother. Who had taken his mother from him. The fury and despair that had filled him with equal measure was a shattered, sharp memory. One that robbed his lungs of air even now.

He would never forget it.

He would never not be marked by that. Or all that had come after. The truth was that the poison had always been in his father’s veins.

The loss of his wife had let it flow unchecked.

All the rage his father had ever carried over Ewan taking his mother’s focus away had poured itself out on him. And the need to correct what he saw as softness in him.

And everything to do with babies and pregnancy... Ewan couldn’t fathom ever facing such a thing. Above all else, he had yet to see why a child might need a father. He had needed a mother.

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